Vaishnavi Patel is the bestselling author of Kaikeyi, a retelling of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana focused on Rama’s stepmother Kaikeyi. Goddess of the River is Patel’s second novel. Rather than the Ramayana, this one reworks the Mahabharata, the second of the Sanskrit epics. Goddess of the River focuses on Ganga, the goddess of the eponymous river (the river which in English is usually rendered “Ganges”), and on her son by a mortal husband. That mortal husband is Shantanu, king of the Kuru kingdom, with its capital at Hastinapor, progenitor of the family whose dynastic squabbles were to culminate in the great clash of armies that is the Mahabharata‘s centrepiece.
When it comes to the history, mythology, and religions of the Indian subcontinent, I’m far less well read than I’d like. So I’m treating Goddess of the River solely as a novel on its own merits here, while remaining aware that it is in dialogue with an unfamiliar mythic tradition, and so its references to and any deviations from that mythic tradition are largely opaque to me.
The novel begins and ends with Ganga. It begins with her descent to earth, where she is bound by Shiva in order that her great strength not destroy the world. It ends with her freedom, and her choice to turn that strength towards love and protection. At its heart, Goddess of the River seems to me to be a story about how motherhood can change people, as well as an argument about what constitutes appropriate and moral behaviour—but I get ahead of myself.
In the beginning, Ganga is at best indifferent to humans, despising their destruction of the natural world around her. Her protective urges centre on a group of playful divine beings, the eight Vasus. Unfortunately, this protective inclination leads her—and the eight Vasus, who have played a trick on a human settlement—to be cursed by a sage who carries some of Shiva’s power. The eight Vasus are cursed to be born as mortals, only to be released to their previous existence at the end of their mortal lives, and Ganga is cursed to be mortal until she has borne the Vasus as her children.
At this point, naturally, King Shantanu shows up and demands that Ganga become his wife.
The part of the narrative where Ganga must adjust to being mortal, living among mortals, prey to mortal frailties, and dealing with mortal concerns, is to me the most compelling and affecting portion of the entire novel. Ganga has no power now but her wits and her knowledge, and she fears that a mortal life will trap the Vasus and change them in ways that will make them unrecognisable to their former selves. She fears the suffering and destruction this could lead to, and so she resolves to kill each of her Vasu-children painlessly as soon after their birth as she can manage it. And she does, too, manage it, though not without being changed herself by the experience, and living with grief at each infanticide. (This is a mythic retelling, or I would have to take exception to the portrayal of drowning as a death without pain or distress.) But with her last son, Ganga is already turning back into a river goddess. The king interrupts her, taking her son—the incarnate eighth Vasu—out of the river’s reach to raise as his heir and train up to war, killing, and the destructive exercise of mortal power.
For ten years, the restored river goddess Ganga loves and misses her son, named Devavrata by his father, meeting him only one night a month, until in the tenth year Shantanu tries to keep Devavrata away from her. He chooses to go away with Ganga instead, when she is able to offer him this option, until within a year or two the pull of duty and the familiarity of ten mortal years draws him back to Hastinapor, and away from Ganga.
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Vaishnavi Patel
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From this point on, Ganga’s first-person perspective is interspersed with the viewpoint of a man called Bhishma, whose narrative timeline is initially many years later than Ganga’s “present” (though the timelines do converge). Over time, Ganga reconciles herself to the absence of her son and the concerns of a river goddess, though her time as a mortal and a mother has changed her: She is now more interested in, and more compassionate towards, mortal concerns, and keeps some of her attention always looking for news of her son. But she does not see him, and after a while, does not even hear his name. Shantanu has married another woman and had other sons, and those sons are his heirs now.
Bhishma’s narrative concerns itself with dynastic politics and the competition between two opposing factions of cousins. He is an old man, though very hale, and these cousins are Shantanu’s descendants. The reader familiar with the Mahabharata will immediately recognise that Bhishma is the much older Devavrata, and that events are well on their way towards a cataclysmic clash of armies; the unfamiliar reader soon learns that Bhishma is now so-called because he swore an oath to stand aside from the succession and father no children, prioritising his father’s happiness and his stepmother’s wishes over his own. Had he not, he would be king, and the great rivalry of cousins perhaps averted. Did he yet break his oath, much slaughter might perhaps not happen. But he is sworn to the side that he believes less worthy of rulership, and he will not break his oath.
This latter part of the novel—political, involving multiple players in extensive and destructive family dramas and jealousies—is less unified than the first, which kept its focus on Ganga and her journey as a goddess, a person, and a mother. To my mind it’s rather less interesting: The slide down into tragedy is inevitable, and the paradox of honour in which Bhishma finds himself is a theme that has been treated many times. Perhaps my opinion would be different if the (large) cast of other characters in Bhishma’s family drama came across as individuals rather than set dressing, but there is little time or space on the page for them to do so. (One of the perils of adapting an epic.) Yet Ganga’s ongoing journey to reconcile the vastness and the values of a goddess with the intimate and personal concerns of a mother for her family, and how the Ganga of after Devavrata is different from the one of before—still a goddess, but one more connected to human concerns—remains compelling. This is particularly true when she chooses to aid someone who has been harmed by her son, or when she comes to the edges of the battlefield in the terrible war that forms the Mahabharata’s culmination, and finds herself comforting other women’s sons. Patel is a vivid prose writer, straightforward yet fluidly evocative, and her style as well as her material reminds me of Natalie Haynes’s work. I expect she may find similar success: Goddess of the River is certainly a very readable novel, and one whose endnote makes clear than Patel is a thoughtful and well-read interpreter of the myths behind her work.
Goddess of the River is published by Redhook.
