Book 10: What the Body Remembers
What a book! I loved it! This is a book club book, the first of the 2016 BBCE (“Best Book Club Ever”) collection. It tells the story of Sardarji Singh and his wives Satya and Roop and their lives in India during the country’s struggles for independence from Britain. Sardarji marries Roop to bear him sons when it is found that Sayta has been unable to have children.
The book starts out slowly, a little heavy on what seems to be an education of Indian culture and terminology. However, as the story unfolds, it starts to feel more natural and provides some amount of understanding to a culture that values women only as wives that can give birth to boy babies, where honour demands that women die before being dishonoured by the touch of an unrelated man. As much as Roop and Satya are subservient to their husband Sardarji, Sardarji is indentured to the British who control India, never rising higher than his position of engineer because he is Indian. And as Sikhs, they are threatened with the loss of all land, possessions and power as the impending division of India by the British leaves land only for the Muslims and the Hindus.
Part of me wants to be offended by the treatment of women in the cultures of India, and part of me wants to be offended by the extremist religious views that would lead a country to slaughter its fellow citizens merely for differences of belief. But Baldwin manages to draw out empathy and understanding for the characters, and for a country that was abandoned to its fate.
Rating: Buy it! Even if you never read it again, it should be on your shelf.
