“Aavarana – The Veil” by SL Bhyrappa, translated (into English) by Sandeep Balakrishna, is an eye-opener and a must read for the woke intellects of our country.
Aavarana strikes the nail hard on the heads of the liberals and seculars of the country by beautifully structuring the truth through the fictional characters. The author definitely won persuading the readers with true facts from the history which are intentionally kept hidden by the group of woke intellectuals who are mostly concerned about real harmony of the people by not disseminating the truth. The courage and conviction of the author putting up such truthful facts through fictional characters is a new style that I came across for the first time. Also this is the first fiction that I’ve read in quite some time.
 |
| Aavarana - The Veil |
The story of this book revolves around Razia, who is a documentary film-maker, feminist and an active contributor of the “progressive intellects”. She abandons her father for marrying the love of her life Amir and later realizes what it takes to be converted and married into the faith of Islam. Also the love of her life Amir never misses an opportunity to reflect the orthodoxy ideologies of his faith towards his wife. Razia, who is actually Lakshmi, got triggered when she visits Hampi and all her thoughts pulls her back to few centuries before. At that time Bharath was completely covered with darkness that was caused by foreign tyrants and invaders.
At the same time, Raziya/Lakshmi gets to know about her father’s death. It was almost 28 years since she had spoken to him. She goes back to her village and was surprised by what her father did in the past. He researched a lot about the Dark Age of Bharath and his command over the subject was evident through his own notes that was fortunately available for Raziya’s reference. She decides to stay back and reads all the works of her father and in his collection.
That’s when she decides to bring out a fictional work that is based on the truthful facts. From here the author takes us through a story within the story. As she skims through the works of various authoritative authors, she finds out from the very own biographers of Islam kings how these fanatic rulers constantly attacked the people of different faith with cruel rules, taxes that general people couldn’t afford and on top of everything the destruction of temples.
Towards the end of the story of Raziya/Lakshmi, she completely understands how this network of progressive intellect works. When she tries to come out of the way and tries to bring out the truth, the intellects starts to corner her.
The author logically penned down how the progressive writers, seculars and modern historians are distorting the true history. This is not just from the book. It is what actually happening in our country. Nobody dares from the progressive thinkers are ready to accept the truth of Islamic barbarism that resulted in 1000s of temples razed to ground. This dirty propaganda game is what now resulted in too much glorifications about the barbarism and covering up the cruelty that they sowed in this divine country.
At one point in this work, the author beautifully penned down that ‘when Hindus are constantly oppressed for what their ancestors did centuries ago, why is the other faith doesn’t even dares to accept the barbarism that their forefathers rather than covering it up and glorifying it’. It also reminds one important fact that the progressive intellects are hiding behind the thick screen called the ‘artistic freedom’.
This book is an easy target of labels like short-sighted, propagates divisive ideology and majoritarianism. But only readers those who can understand what had actually happened in the past and how we should feel apologetic about it could be able to actually realize the essence and importance of this book.
This book helped me to clearly picturize the situation with logical aspects about how the whole environment of the progressive intellects penetrates its ideologies through various creative platforms, all the while they earn from the taxpayers money.
This is the first book of SL Bhyrappa that I’ve read, brilliantly translated by Shri Sandeep Balakrishna – founder and the editor of ‘The Dharma Dispatch’. Glad to have met him at one event where he spoke about his book 'Tipu Sultan - The Tyrant of Mysore'. I was amazed to go through the list of references that were used to write this fiction given as part of the story. I’m looking forward to read more of these excellent writers.
Yours East Gaterr