Because I want to give this book a bit of historical
context, I’m going to start by doing a brief summary of the author then give
you the outline of the plot and major characters before starting in on my
review. Now, you may not be able to find
Mandala at your local bookstore or
library, but it’s available for under $10 online, and even though my hardcover
copy is from 1970, it’s still in very good shape and worth a purchase if you
want to read.
Author Summary:
Though born in Virginia in 1892, Pearl S. Buck’s parents
were missionaries, so soon enough she was bound for China at the age of three
months. She spent the majority of her
time in China, in a town called Jingjiang (outside of Nanjing) and towns around
it until 1934, though she did attend college in the United States. Obviously, she was bilingual.
Buck lived through some extremely turbulent times in Chinese
history. Modernity was approaching
swiftly, and revolutions and civil wars rocked the nation. Often she and her family were abandoned by
Chinese friends and found that their Western compatriot had fled the country to
avoid the conflicts. However, she threw
herself into writing, hoping to document the history of rural Chinese life, and
humanitarian efforts, saving her Chinese friends from war, or helping to ease
child adoption between China and America.
As far as her literary legacy is concerned, Buck won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for her novel The
Good Earth, a book still read by many American high-schoolers. Criticized by some scholars as having a
plain-spoken, workaday style, Buck is still praised by most for helping to make
Chinese culture understandable to those with no experience in the country.
(For myself, having been to the country and having studied
Chinese language, culture and history, I love to read Buck’s novels, even
though the situations she described then are now only to be found in rural
China. She describes the emotional state
of people from all ranks of society clearly and with great sympathy.)
However, all her help to China did not make her immune to
the forces of the Cultural Revolution.
She was still branded an “imperialist” and not permitted to enter the
country when Nixon made his history making trip there in 1972. She died a year later, at the age of 80.
The Plot:
I admit that the following summary is not mine. I tend to give away a lot of plot secrets
when summarizing a book, so I’ve borrowed and edited from the dust-jacket of my
copy. The full citation for the book is
at the bottom of this entry, so you can find it and look it up if you want to
get the missing pieces:
Mandala is one of Pearl
S. Buck’s rare novels about India.
Centering her story around a modern princely family of the New India,
she explores the mysticism that pervades everyday life there. Extrasensory perception, reincarnation, and
spirits are very real concerns of the Maharana Prince Jagat and his family.
Prince Jagat is the
virile descendent of a warrior people…Political events strip him of his titles
and most of his wealth, but not of his sense of responsibility to the local
villagers. As the novel opens, he is
embarking upon a scheme to turn an opulent but ghost-ridden lake palace into a
luxury hotel for foreign tourists.
When news reaches him
that his only son, Jai, has been killed by the Chinese in a border skirmish,
his life changes even more. Convinced
that Jai’s spirit lives, Jagat’s wife, Moti, will not rest until he sets off to
find their son.
The Characters:
Warning, some mild spoilers in this section.
I’ll break this part down into two sections: the Indians and
the Americans. Since there is not a
single Chinese individual, they serve en masse merely to advance the plot and
will not be discussed here. For such a
short book, it’s surprising how varied a cast of characters Pearl Buck uses and
how she manages to give them all multifaceted, realistic personalities!
These descriptions are entirely mine.
The Indians:
Prince Jagat: Descendant of a line of Maharana, Jagat is an
active, enthusiastic man who embraces modernity but maintains sensitivity
towards the old Indian ways of thinking. Despite having lost his wealth and
most of his property, he is an active tiger hunter, attentive to the needs
(both physical and psychological) of the tenants on his property, and
participates where possible in projects to improve the lives of his countrymen.
Moti: Wife of Prince Jagat, Moti, is a woman devoted to Hindu
ideals of vegetarianism, nonviolence, and detachment. She believes, after years of being taught so
by her parents, that a wife is not to love her husband. Though she could—and often considers—loving
Jagat, her first feeling of love is given to Father Francis Paul (description
below). When her son dies, she refuses
to believe it and insists that Jagat go search for him…and this search
eventually turns into a hunt for Jai’s reincarnation.
Jai: Jagat and Moti’s son, educated abroad and well-spoken,
if somewhat immature. When China
threatens the border of India, he volunteers for duty against the wishes of his
parents in order to protect India’s sovereignty.
Veera: Jagat and Moti’s daughter, Veera is a woman on the
cusp of New India. Though she is
somewhat educated, her mother’s emotional training has her trying to find a
proper path between the romanticism sweeping from America and the West, and the
calm serenity emphasized by her mother and her Eastern traditions. Veera comes very close to having an affair
with Bert Osgood (the American contractor), even though she has been promised
in an arranged marriage.
The Americans:
Bert Osgood: He begins the novel as a somewhat stereotypical
“Ugly American”. Concerned with profit
and modernization, he sometimes rides roughshod over Prince Jagat’s more
refined sensibilities. However, the
longer he remains in India, the more aware he becomes of the history of his
place and the country. Though intrigued
by the possibility of romance between himself and Veera, he eventually realizes
that neither of them will be happy in a relationship. He desires eventually to return to the same
small-town American life he sprang from, and knows Veera well enough to know
that she could never adapt to such a life.
He refuses to let his emotions or hers get in the way of their lives
ending happily; this clarity of mind allows Veera to let him—and the possibilities
he represents—go.
Brooke Westley: Though not mentioned in the plot summary,
Brooke is extremely important to the novel.
A lonely, isolated child—raised by a grandmother with some eclectic
thoughts on the idea of love—she is an heiress who drifts from place to place
without forming any emotional connections to either places or people. After landing in India and meeting Jagat by
chance, she follows him to the lake palace/hotel-in-progress, content to wait
in India to sort through her emotions and the instinctive attachment she feels
to both Jagat and the country.
The attraction is mutual for Jagat. After years of not being loved by his wife,
he feels the possibility of love and understanding from Brooke and is
intrigued. The two are plainspoken in
their decision to begin an affair, but their emotions are not shallow. Brooke—ignoring the damage to her
reputation—accompanies Jagat in his search for Jai, and eventually finds what
everyone comes to believe is his reincarnation.
Father Francis Paul: An enthusiastic missionary working
among the ethnic Bhil people, Father Francis is hungry for change and
modernization. He attached himself to
Jagat and his wife upon entering the country in order to gain their support for
his educational and technological endeavors, and became fascinated by Moti, who
is deeply spiritual though uninterested in Christianity. He becomes her tutor and confidante in
matters of the soul, despite their differing religious backgrounds, but when
she eventually confesses love for him, drifts away from the family. He is English, but I’m putting him in with
the Americans as a force of “Westernization”.
Also because I don’t want to put in a separate section for “British”.
International
Conflicts: Do NOT read this if you don’t want the plot spoiled!
The events of the plot, as well as the descriptions of the
characters, should already give you a good idea of the variety of conflicts
that arise over the course of the novel.
I’m going to limit my review to several of the most important: the Indian
past vs. American present as exemplified by Jagat and Brooke, and the Romances
(Moti and Father Francis, Veera and Bert).
Each of these conflicts integrates several different concepts and ways
to look at the possibilities that two merging cultures can create.
Indian past vs.
American present: Jagat and Brooke
“American” in this instance could also read as
“Modern”…either way, it is an ideology that leads away from the mysticism and
magic of the past, and veers away from spiritual ideas such as reincarnation…a
crucial element in the story. These two
ideologies clash frequently, creating sometimes irreconcilable differences
between characters, but more often, resulting in a fascinating hybrid between the
two.
Jagat, for example, is a modern man. Even married to a woman like Moti, still
devoted to her Indian and Hindu past, he sacrifices the remnants of his
princely past almost without regrets. He
admits that his ancestral land should return to the people who worked it, and
thinks often about the harems that his father and grandfather amassed with more
disgust than longing. However, all his
modernity is challenged on the book’s very last page; he comes across the boy
that Brooke believes is his son’s reincarnation:
A strange look came
over his face, a look half frightened but half smiling.
“Have you seen my son
before, High One?” she asked.
Believing and
unbelieving, he gave a great sigh. “I do
not know,” he said and, believing and unbelieving, he went his way. (Buck, p.
376)
On the opposite side of the coin, Brooke is a woman raised
modern but emotionally more comfortable with the Eastern traditions. In part, this is due to her grandmother, who
lead a loving life in defiance of tradition, taking lovers both her age and
younger without being married to them.
Though Brooke discovers this just before the woman’s death, it throws
her into a rootless existence as she crosses the world, searching for a sense
of belonging and love. When she arrives
at Jagat’s lake palace, she falls into a kind of stasis, content to wait until
what she feels is going to happen (a friendship or love with Jagat, she doesn’t
care which) happens.
This lack of clear purpose is far more familiar to Buddhist
or Hindu traditions than Protestant Christianity, but Brooke is not
uncomfortable with the clash of her traditions.
From the start, she shows more openness to the idea of reincarnation
than Jagat:
“About reincarnation,”
she began irrelevantly. Indeed, she had
not been thinking of that at all, and the word came out of her mouth of its own
accord, so startling that she paused.
“What about
reincarnation?” he asked.
“Simply that today
somehow I am ready to believe in it totally.
It’s the effect that India has on me.
Here I believe anything!” (Buck,
p. 268)
The Romances:
Moti and Father Francis:
Rather than do a heavy-duty analysis of their relationship,
I’d rather let this passage speak for itself.
This takes place towards the end of the novel, after Jagat has brought
Brooke to the main house to share a meal with Moti and Father Francis. The priest and the princess are left in the
room alone together when Brooke and the prince go off to admire a view:
“Let me forget that
you are a priest. May I?”
He did not reply. He looked at her half-startled, and she went
on quickly, changing before his very eyes.
Her listlessness was gone, she leaned toward him, her voice urgent.
“I have never loved
anyone before—no one, you understand?
Now I know I love you. It is not
my wish to love you. It is not my wish
to love anyone. I know, from my own
mother, that it is a misfortune to love anyone, but especially for a woman to
love a man.”
He was overwhelmed
with horror and pity.
“My dear soul, do you
not love your husband?”
“No, and never,” she
said.
“He is kind to you.”
“That is not love.”
“Does he love you?”
“How can he love me
when I do not love him?”
“Is it not your fault
then?”
She threw her fan on
the floor in a gesture of impatience.
“Can I help it?”
“You can pray that you
will be enabled to love him.”
She laughed bitterly. “How little you know about love!”
She rose impetuously,
this woman whom he had never seem impatient, and crossing the floor swiftly,
she knelt at his feet and folded her hands on his knees.
“Help me!”
For the first time in
his life he looked into a woman’s eyes and was made helpless by her love…He put his hands over
hers, trembling as he did so. “My dear,
my dear,” he murmured. “I wish I knew
how to help you…We are what we are,” he said.
“You are the wife of a great and good man, I am a priest of God. That is our destiny.” (Buck, p. 335-336)
Though a Westerner, Father Francis is a priest, and is not
allowed to understand the passionate emotions that compromise Moti’s hard-won
peace of mind. The only retreat he has
is a literal retreat; away from her and the temptations she offers.
Veera and Bert:
This plot arc gave me the most cause for concern, because it
could have turned out to be quite a cliché.
You have a young, beautiful Indian princess, “stifled” by her mother’s
restrictive ideas on the concept of love, and the young, hearty American, free
and restricted by no one’s ideas save his own.
These two could have messed up the story and had the book end in such
tragedy, but…thankfully, they didn’t.
This in no way means that their arc is boring. No. In
fact, theirs is one of the places where a sensible midway point is reached
between the divergent ideas of India and America.
Veera provides most of the confusion. Hanging on the cusp of an arranged marriage
with a man she hardly knows, she is tantalized by the forces of modernity that
hover around her; from her father’s relationship with an American woman, to the
transformation and repurposing of her ancestral home. She flirts with the idea of a relationship
with Bert, who is completely captivated by her beauty, she is the one who digs
her heels in and refuses to let him go when the two are seen dancing and
kissing on a moonlit verandah.
But Bert is a practical American. When confronted by Veera’s husband-to-be, he
thinks:
Obviously it was all
going to be too difficult. He’d better
go home as soon as possible, his commonsense told him, and yet there was
something about this beautiful Indian girl that he would never forget. Whomever he married, and however long he
might be married, he’d know romance was here in this palace. (Buck, p. 342)
But a day later, he carries out his resolution and asks
Jagat to release him from his contract:
“…I see it would be
very wrong of me to interfere with his life, for that would be to interfere
with your daughter’s life. The time has
not yet come when—certain barriers—can be removed. She would not be happy in my country, and I
would not be entirely happy to remain here.
Ours would be a floating sort of existence and I am a man who likes my
roots. I can make them for myself but I
couldn’t make them for her…” (Buck, p. 343-344)
The nuance in this conflict is interesting, and
enduring. To make a cross-cultural love
successful, the participants in it need to have a good knowledge of themselves
and their partners. Without knowing both
weaknesses and strengths—as Bert did—the relationship will crumble and leave
unhappiness on both sides, echoing down to the members of the family who let
the romance flourish.
Sources:
Buck, Pearl S. (1970). Mandala. New York: The John
Day Company.
Pearl S. Buck.
(n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_s_buck
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