‘The Remnants of Rebellion’: A rare novel about troubling inheritances, shifting tides of history

“We are the sons. Everything belongs to us. The daughter’s daughter is only a distant family member.”

Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew’s debut novel, The Remnants of Rebellion, charges headlong into the question of inheritance. Aleyamma, separated from her grandfather at age eight, returns to his hometown for his funeral and finds herself at the centre of a storm involving a house he had lived in once, briefly, for a tumultuous year marked by love, loss, and violence. Appacha’s will bequeaths the house in Puthuloor, now a homestay run by his youngest son, to his “artist granddaughter”, unconcerned with the commerce of property, unmindful of the possibility of turning her bequest into a thriving business. Grieving, unmoored, carrying only the vestiges of the life she had left behind in Chennai, Aleyamma finds herself at Estate House, a sprawling, 15-room house on a hill, suddenly in charge of her life in a way she has never been before.

In re-tracing the stories of Aleyamma and her grandfather, Eesho, the narrative constructs a rich, nuanced history of the land beloved of both. Embedded within the narrative are many rebellions – political and personal. It grapples fiercely with the stronghold of caste and class in modern-day, supposedly liberal communities and signals the dangers inherent in hysterical hypernationalism. Underneath it all, it explores questions of belonging and inheritance – the inheritance of memories and grief, of histories and trauma, of love and the possibility of healing.

The house and the home

Mathew’s ability to draw the reader into the spatio-temporality of her characters is extraordinary. The narrative pulls together Eesho’s home in Niranam and Estate House in Puthuloor, across two timelines separated by a few decades. Niranam, an erstwhile port, situated at the confluence of two rivers, is perhaps closest to a global audience’s perception of Kerala. The novel describes it as “one of the cradles of Christianity in Kerala, bursting with songs and legends about St Thomas and the first Christians”.

The house that Eesho grew up in transports the reader into traditional early 20th-century Travancore architecture with its high ceilings, long verandas, and red oxide floors. Estate House, as a narrative and spatial counterpoint, is “tucked into the blood red soil of the Western Ghats”. A white man, brought to India by his father in search of gold in the hills of Wayanad, falls in love with the land, moves to Puthuloor, and sets up a rubber plantation, meant to fuel the new economy of pneumatic tyres and internal combustion engines. Puthuloor, then, becomes a site of colonial intervention and expansion and Estate House, built by a young couple in love, stands testimony to the conflicting human propensities for love and violence.

If Niranam has family and tradition encoded in its bones, Estate House (renamed Eastman House, after the cinematic innovation of Eastman colour, by its cinephile Indian buyer), is a palimpsestic construct of colonial, anti-colonial, capitalistic, and revolutionary histories. If Niranam is nostalgia, Puthuloor is subversion. Together, they become a map of the entwined lives of Aleyamma and Eesho.

The Remnants of a Rebellion writes into its script multiple micro and macro histories. It pieces together the history of Syrian Christians in India, framing Appacha’s family as a case study of the belief that the community had been converted from elite brahmins by St Thomas himself, resulting in a long tradition of caste-based oppression. In a fascinating interlude, the reader is made witness to the arrival of the Bible on the shores of Travancore and into the possession of Syrian Christians, somewhere between the ninth and the twelfth centuries.

From the ancient, Mathew’s wide narrative arc sweeps into colonial history, outlining the connectedness of the Wagon Tragedy of 1921, the Mopilla Rebellion and the Khilafat Movement. Visiting his missionary school at Quilon (now Kollam), Eesho is reminded of the crises of the Second World War, the paucity of rice after the fall of Rangoon into the hands of the Japanese, the rising force of nationalism in India, and Gandhi’s launch of the Civil Disobedience Movement on August 8, 1942. Eesho’s stint as the superintendent of the rubber plantation at Puthuloor coincides with the state’s brush with Naxalism and consequent violent repercussions.

While Aleyamma attempts to settle in at Puthuloor, her status as a single, independent woman brings her into conflict with representatives of the rising conservative Right who threaten her personal freedom and agency. Historical events across several decades are brought into sharp focus within the novel’s meticulously researched canvas.

History and controversies

Lurking under the surface of this well-sculpted narrative is the ugliness of caste. Amma, Aleyamma’s mother, is keen to maintain caste and class boundaries. She insists on separate utensils for the maids and breaks up the friendship between Aleyamma and the cook’s son, insisting on a ritual washing to rid her daughter of the “dirt” that attaches to her by association. The rest of the family does no better. People must be kept in their place, they aver over and over again.

In a radically subversive, viscerally moving scene, Appacha explodes his family’s equanimity around caste violence, forcing them into acknowledging their own complicity in the dehumanisation of people who work for them, exist around them, but go unseen and unheard. The text takes note of the Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha, an anti-caste religious and social protest movement that started in Travancore in 1909 and categorically rejected the tenets of both Christianity and Brahmanism.

In the novel, the PRDS is represented by a young Dalit woman, an artist, who delivers an impassioned speech about her family’s experience of caste oppression and stands her ground despite heckling and harassment by right-wing goons. Elsy, Appacha’s cook at Estate House, has her own narrative arc where caste segues with gender and the woman’s body is yet again turned into a site of violence. Religious reform, armed revolution, class struggle- nothing eliminates the horror of caste; the novel forces its reader to concede.

Its politics is loud but at the heart of The Remnants of Rebellion are dysfunctional relationships and an entire spectrum of love stories that run the lifespan of four generations. Eesho’s “scandalous” wooing of Kochuthresia, the saree-clad champion of the netball court, has all the makings of a swoony romance. Aleyamma comes to Puthuloor, burdened by the stultification of her own romance and the grief of losing a beloved grandparent, the anchor of her chaotic childhood. Since leaving Appacha at Niranam, she had “drifted in and out of people’s lives, never lingering long enough to call anyplace home.” At Estate House, she finally finds home again. Configuring a strange symmetry, the reader finds her replicating Eesho’s patterns of behaviour, finding a peaceful re-connection and closure.

In a gesture of evocative bookending, Aleyamma’s first response to Estate House is an echo of Eesho’s, some five decades earlier. Like her grandfather, she seeks refuge in the strangest spaces in the house. Like him, she becomes the custodian of a mango sapling, transplanted from Niranam, tangibly tying the two houses together. She was the light of his life, Appacha had told her, often, cementing eight-year-old Aleyamma’s sense of security, cushioning her in affection and comfort.

It is not written of much, this quiet, nurturing love between grandfather and granddaughter, but it is, in all its gentle strength, the keystone of the novel. This complex, compelling novel, with its intergenerational conflicts and its insistent immersion in history, tells of love and loss, troubling inheritances and destabilising rebellions. It carries within it, like Aleyamma discovers, in the childhood memory of a friend, “something sharp, something obscure, like the stories that linger in the spaces between words.”

The Remnants of Rebellion: A Novel, Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew, Aleph Book Company.