"Tatvamasi" - Dhruv Bhatt (Book Review)

“Tatvamasi” – you are everything. How difficult it is to tell someone this words and actually mean it. We mostly believe in “Aham Brahmasmi” – I am Bramh or I am everything. But the novel of Dhruv Bhatt have the title “Tatvamasi” and the novel can actually make us feel the same. Dhruv Bhatt is Gujarati novelist and poet. He wrote “Tatvamasi” in 1998, which won the "Sahitya Akademi Award" and it is considered as one of his notable works.

This is the first novel of Dhruv Bhatt, I’ve read. The narrator is reading the diary of one student who has come from foreign to the India, to the village near Narmada river to study the tribal people and also to develop and use their human power in different and productive way, but he ended living with those tribal people forever. Dhruv Bhatt has used very refined Gujarati language but he also shows the colloquial language of tribal people. He has great ability to portray nature very elegantly. He can capture very tiny details about everything and emotions in words, then even he also feels sometimes that language has its own limitations. It is written in the novel that for some emotions he can not find appropriate word and some emotions can not be captured by words.

We can see how paradoxically he has captured everything in words. He has something to say about everything like for water, for earth, for human, for animals, for sun, for moon, for day, for night, for happiness, for sadness, for fear, for delight, for village, for city, for rain, for fire, for deity, for witch, for birds and for sky and the starts also. Every single character (here I use ‘character’ because non – living things also has tongue) in his novel has some role to play. He is very good observer of nature.

The novel describes the hard life of tribal people but even after this hardship of life they are happy and satisfy in between nature. They don’t have any special facilities to live life then even our protagonist choose to live with them. In the very beginning we find that our protagonist has very rational thinking but as story moves we come to know that, that rational thinking is not natural but a mask which he wants to wear and with all his mind he wants to keep this mask but his heart not allowing him to do such things. We can find reason of this in novel it self that he brought up in a atmosphere where emotions are more important than anything else but as he moves to the foreign where he is not able to find such people he also tries to be like them but as soon as he get back to the surroundings of emotions he again get his original self and stick with it.

On the other hand we have character of Lucy, she is foreigner and we can see in her that she has rationality in her blood. She has ability to make other people believe her and very gracefully she mixed with all new fellows and also can take out information which she want from people’s mouth. Wherever she goes she her self becomes one of like them, enjoy every culture and their life style but as soon as time comes she becomes the one she is. She don’t regret on leaving places she do every thing for increasing her knowledge only.

Among all these things the nature and the tribal people are at the center. We can see how minutely Dhruv Bhatt has described the honesty and innocence of tribal people. Every word full with feelings, and some are also able to make your eyes wet. He also shows how their life style and culture is connected with their surroundings. They are living in forest that’s why they also consider Narmada river and teak tree as their god and deity. Here Dhruv Bhatt also describe that though they believe in religious identity but they consider their duty as their religion which they will fulfill by heart and at any coast. These people has some blind faith also and for that they can be ready to kill people also. Dhruv Bhatt very gracefully shows the pure heart of the forest fellows. With beautiful heart they have also get powerful brain. They make their weapons and home by them selves. They also have some skills related their surrounding nature and about stars. These all knowledge they get by observing the nature and from ages their forefathers have given all these knowledge.

All together the pictorial quality of Dhruv Bhatt has played vital role to take this novel at height. I also have some questions, like how can a narrator knows the things from the lost pages of dairy?, why Supriya’s mother Vinita becomes “Kalewali Maa”?, what happens to Puriya afterwards?, these all are the question which I have after complete the book. This novel is we can say is escapist novel, though the places of which this novel is talking about are not fantasy but in a way this novel shows the whole new world. Far away from city’s busy and polluted life style, and the novel takes us to the world of hardship and peace, miseries and satisfaction, and also horrifying but healing, in short it draws us to heaven on the earth. At last the novel justifies the title, for the people living over there, nature is "Tatvamasi" for them.

The Gujarati film also made from this book. Movie has some changes which also became the talk of the town when it was released. Here I'm putting trailer of the movie "Reva".