ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to yoke the reflections and sensibilities of a Dalit writer, the perceptive scope of a historian and the literary contributions of an English academic. Shanti Parav, the hypertext novel by Des Raj Kali takes its cue from ‘Shanti Parva’ the twelfth book of the Mahabharata epic. It introduces and analyses Kali’s novel as an experiment in writing fiction across genres. Features that are unique to Kali’s Shanti Parav the novella abound, for although it runs a slim length of eighty pages the impact it makes is far more copious. It juxtaposes two sympathetic narratives of different genres – one fictional and creative, and the other non-fictional, historical and discursive. The narratives create multiple circuits of signification in a charmed world of the ‘carnivalesque’ and the ‘polyphonic’ around the dynamics of the anti-novel, anti-aesthetic and the sub-human tapestry of the oppressed and the Dalit. Furthermore, beyond being an episodic, engaging story, the hypertext novel is more of a character study, or rather, an elaboration of a philosophical position through the depiction of certain people in a particular place and time.
The chapter ends with a stroll into the author’s mindscape, after an interview with Des Raj Kali that delves into the root sources that have furnished and guided Kali’s writing and subjects.
