‘The Spice Gate’: A fiercely political fantasy rooted in caste and food-based discrimination

Prashanth Srivatsa’s debut novel The Spice Gate is a fantasy that tells the story of spice trade built upon the backs of the spice carriers. These spice carriers – condescendingly referred to as gatecastes – are deemed untouchables. The author has rooted his novel in caste and food-based discrimination, a reality that still haunts millions of people globally. Another theme that runs through the story is the desire for freedom. Fiercely political in its characters and themes, The Spice Gate underlines the tyranny inflicted upon the generations of gatecastes who do (or are forced to do) sundry menial jobs.

Carrying spice

Amir (pronounced as Ah-mir) is a spice carrier: he carries heavy loads of spice across kingdoms through a mysterious structure called a spice gate. Before I delve into the details, let me clarify how pivotal pain, insult and trauma are to the story. This carrying business produces a three-pronged pain: the exhaustion that comes from lifting heavy sacks. Though tiring, it’s nothing compared to the excruciating pain that a carrier feels when they pass through a spice gate. To add insult to injury, the sentries who man the gates beat the carriers on the slightest of provocations, and sometimes, just to let off steam. This pain, physical and mental, reverberates throughout the story, throbbing in the back of Amir and the reader’s mind.

When Kabir, Amir’s younger brother, asks him to describe the pain of the gates, he says: “Imagine yourself being pulled and pressed at the same time, from all sides, until you can no longer feel any sensation but pain-a harsh, searing pain. Your ribs, folding. Your flesh, compressed, like a ball of tamarind to be boiled. And before the realization of that impossibility sinks in, you're on the other side, in a new land, denying that it had ever happened. Only the pain remains with you, lingering in the screaming shadows of the mind's trauma, never to be forgotten.”

The mental trauma Amir bears for being an untouchable and denied the same spices he carries on his head, suffering the lashings of the tongue and whips alike, is not in any way smaller than the white-hot pain of this passage. When a character tells him that he “bears a gift” many would “kill to possess”, he loses his temper: “You can have it! Take it from me, if such an act is possible. I didn’t ask to be able to travel through the Spice Gates…”

The story, as it begins, drops you smack in the centre of the action. The carriers, loaded with their quota of spices are lined up in front of the spice gate in Raluha. Amir is a gatecaste, but he resists with a strong rebellious streak. He plans to get a vial of Poison, an elusive substance that will enable his pregnant mother Noori and brother Kabir to pass painlessly through the gate. He has no intention to keep living a life that marks his existence as a gatecaste: an untouchable. He dreams of escaping like Illangovan, a spice carrier who now lives an outlaw life in the distant Black Coves. But his plan goes awry when he fails to acquire the Poison and comes across a dying man who trusts Amir with a medallion containing a fabled spice olum, which can convert into any other spice.

The stranger, Fylan, requests Amir to go to Illindhi. Amir is dumbfounded because he has never heard of it. There are only eight kingdoms and that would make Illindhi a ninth, which is unbelievable. This medallion is then snatched by an ever-bitter Hasmin, chief of sentries in Raluha. A threat is dished out to Amir: if he doesn’t behave, his younger brother will be thrust into the spice trade before his time.

The story then, true to its theme of “how far would you go to find home?” takes Amir on a whirlwind journey from his home in Raluha to the pyramid where all the sentries live. After pulling off a minor heist, he ends up in the mysterious ninth kingdom Illindhi. Here he discovers that his problems have just begun. Amir’s journey goes on and on as Srivatsa keeps pulling the triggers of all those Chekhov guns he had promised. From Whorl – a scary, gargantuan whirlpool where the damned are sent to die – to Outerlands where the Immortal sons reside, the author takes readers to all the names that are being thrown around in the initial pages.

In The Spice Gate, there are eight kingdoms in all, cultivating one spice each. The abovefolk are obsessed with spice in their foods. Life without spice is considered worse than death. The trade of spice between these kingdoms enables various people of authority to treat the carriers in any way they deem fit. Beat them but not so much that they are rendered useless. It is forbidden to maim or kill a carrier because “…although abovefolk did not like to admit it, spice was an obsession, and he, Amir, was the deliverer of their desires.” The maximum punishment that can be given to them is incarceration, but never death.

Amir’s father, a carrier too, escaped this drudgery, leaving his family behind in Raluha. Amir too wants to leave but not without his family. Amir’s relationship with his mother Noori is shown only in a few lines but it left a lasting effect on this reader: “After Appa had left them and disappeared, all Amir had wanted was for her to suffer less. He’d stayed silent while she overcame the loss in her own way. He would leave his home, dragging Kabir with him to Karim bhai’s house anytime Amma wanted to indulge in the fleshier pleasures.” This leaving the house so that the mother could have a few moments of intimacy shows maturity beyond years. Although this can be debated as a side effect of the abandonment by the father. Additionally, Amir’s mother is pregnant but we don’t hear anything about the biological father. I am presuming this is a world where not every child is supposed to have a full set of parents.

What untouchability really is

Srivatsa’s story brims with strong emotion. How does one cope when one’s very existence is meant for everyday drudgery that invites unprovoked beatings, snide comments and untouchability? Every spice carrier has a mark at their throat, which enables them to pass through the spice gate. The same mark identifies them, thrusts them to the lowest rung in the society. “They are paying for the sins of their past lives” is the reason given to an entire community that lives at the margins. Their entire identity is clubbed on the basis of what they do or where they live – the bowlers of Raluha (as they live in a structure that looks like a giant bowl), the sanders of Jhanak, the rooters of Vanasi, the easters of Halmora, the snakers of Kalanadi, the horners of Talashshukh, the oarasi of Mesht, and the reeders of Amarohi. They all form the gatecaste of the eight kingdoms.

The untouchability of gatecaste can’t be clearer than what these lines describe – “After a moment, he summoned one of the lower-caste chowkidars and ordered him to frisk Amir thoroughly. Hasmin, of course, would no sooner assume full responsibility for the failed Bashara than touch a hair on Amir's body with his own bare hands.”

Greed supersedes this discrimination. The abovefolk and the privileged people of the eight kingdoms don’t mind eating the spice carried by the very hands of these carriers. In Raluha, heeng is also the only sacrilegious spice that “the abovefolk condescended to desire from the bowl.” When Amir sneaks into the pyramid to nick the olum medallion, he bribes Hasmin with food sprinkled with heeng, calling it his grandmother’s recipe. Amir felt that, “(in) places like this, the word ‘grandmother’
held a magical allure. There was something authentic and enigmatic about anything wrung out of a grandmother's coarse, wrinkled hands. Made them appear nostalgic and valuable, as though an old woman's tears dribbled onto it to improve its texture.”

Talking about food, the book is brimming with it. It demands to be accompanied by a light snack because when you are reading about “Uthappams spiced with milagai podi, banana dalia, sundried fish-what the sanders called karuvadu by the docks – shrined with turmeric and lemon, pumpkin pastries and walnut salads dressed in maple and cinnamon”, you inevitably get up and crack the refrigerator door.

The language, that Srivatsa has so minutely woven around food, is rich and rewarding to read. Even the god here is called “Mouth”. I loved the liberal sprinkling of Hindi, Tamil and Urdu words (chaku, talvar, pulla, shamshir) – the languages spoken primarily in South Asia. What is slightly off-putting though is when food creeps into almost every line, every phrase of the book. “She smelled like night’s milk and amma’s daal” didn’t work for me. I was also left for wanting a better exploration of the romantic relationship between Amir, a carrier and Harini, a princess of Halmora. It seemd to be side-stepped in favour of the fantasy elements. Considering the length of the book, maybe a wise decision.

There is a gut-wrenching scene in the book that reminded me what untouchability really is. Early in the book, Amir sees a girl cleaning the toilets of the sentries, picking excreta with her bare hands. Since manual gutter cleaning is still a practice in India, where multiple men die every year due to asphyxiation by noxious gases when they get down a manhole, this marriage of speculative fiction with the naked reality is admirable.

BR Ambedkar, who wrote the constitution of India, has mentioned in his biography The Annihilation of Caste, that “[t]he outcaste is a bye-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.” Towards the end of the story, Srivatsa makes his protagonist determined to saw off the very shackle that has bound the generations of spice carriers. Amir decides to go for the ultimate goal, to uproot the problem of untouchability for once and all.

I enjoyed the book immensely. Although long, the author has not compromised on the pace. This is a standalone book but I wish the readers would get to read few spin-off stories in the future. Many secondary characters in the universe of The Spice Gate are too interesting to disappear behind the veil of the gates.

The Spice Gate, Prashanth Srivatsa, HarperVoyager.