The novel’s central conflict is between the natural world of the wilderness and the artificial world of modern life. Even as the woes of modernity gradually invade and ruin Sampath’s new life in his orchard, nature is portrayed as infinitely more powerful and meaningful than anything civilized life can offer. From the beginning, both Sampath and Kulfi long to escape into a simpler existence. Sampath feels claustrophobic in the busy and stifling town of Shahkot, while Kulfi longs to freely explore the exotic cooking ingredients that the wilderness could offer her. This desire for freedom is what sets the two worlds apart. Where modernity is dull, orderly, and restrictive, nature is wild, exciting, and liberating. Sampath’s meditations on simple natural phenomena are spiritually enriching, while his attempts to understand modernity only lead to confusion and apathy.
Nature and modernity both invade one another over the course of the novel, but nature ultimately emerges victorious. Shortly after Sampath escapes from modern life to live in a tree, Mr. Chawla begins bringing modern complications such as crowds and advertisements into nature. But it isn’t long before the local monkeys in Sampath’s orchard invade and make trouble in the town of Shahkot. The town’s bureaucrats utterly fail to deal with the monkey menace on their own, while Sampath and the monkeys find a mysterious way to escape from modernity once again in the final chapter. By somehow turning into a large guava himself as if by magic and having the monkeys carry him away, Sampath seems to achieve the true freedom he always craved. His escape from modern civilization’s pursuit suggests that nature is more powerful than any of humanity’s attempts to contain or control it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Nature vs. Modernity ThemeTracker
Nature vs. Modernity Quotes in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard
Above, there weren’t any stars, only the lights now and then of planes, flying on their way to who knows where. To Calcutta? Madras? Madurai? To England or America? It was a terrible thing to be awake while some people flew, carrying the world over his head, and others slept, claiming it from under his feet.
Here a person’s experience of silence and space squeezed and warped into underground forms that were forced to hide, found in only a few places that Sampath could discover. In his small lapses from duty; between the eye and the print of a newspaper held by someone who never turned a page; in a woman who stared into the distance and past the blur of knitting needles in her fingers; behind muttered prayers; once in a long while in eyes that could look past everything to discover open spaces.
He thought of Public Transport, of the Bureau of Statistics, of head massages, of socks and shoes, of interview strategies. Of never being left alone, of being unable to sleep and of his father talking and lecturing in the room below.
“No,” Sampath answered. His heart was big inside his chest. “No, I do not want an egg,” he said. “I want my freedom.”
Whenever she saw him upon his cot, saw his face peeking from between the leaves, she was reminded of the day when he was born, his birth mingling in her memory with the wildest storm she had ever witnessed, with the arrival of famine relief and the silver miracle of rain. There, in the midst of the chaos, her son’s face had contained an exquisite peace, an absorption in a world other than the one he had been born into.
The behavior of the monkeys was just another proclamation of Sampath’s authenticity. “Think of all those shams,” said Miss Jyotsna, “all those crooks posing in their saffron, those gurus who are as corrupt as politicians…”
Oh, they gloated, their Baba was not like that. He was an endless source of wonder. He had even cast his spell upon the wild beasts of the market.
No doubt, weighed by the same concern with fragility, inevitability and doom, Sampath had been driven up into the branches, away from this painful world. She remembered his face as he was going to school, how he would always try to climb up on to the roof to be alone when he came home, and she felt terrible about how she had harangued him, shouting up the stairs… Now, she felt, she too understood the dreadfulness of life, recognized the need to be by herself with sadness…
He and his father were as different as black from white, as chickens from potatoes, as peas from buckets. What did he think? Did he think he would just climb down and return to his old existence like some old fool? He had left Shahkot in order to be alone. And what had they all done? They had followed him.
He could not claim it. If only it would reach out and claim him instead. If he stayed here long enough within reach of its sights and sounds, might it not enter him in the manner landscape enters everything that lives within it? Wouldn’t the forest descend just this bit lower and swallow him into its wilderness, leaving his family, his devotees, to search fruitlessly for a path by which they might follow?
“All morning they have been calling you in,” he said, in such a way that Sampath was covered with goose bumps. “Ten relatives to cook for and you’re the girl. Their voices echo in jungle darkness, but no, don’t answer. Stay by this shore. For what do they know of fin’s fine gold rising to light in pale water?”
As it was, only those who managed to enclose themselves in their own worlds and disregard the battles going on managed to sleep at night.
How much had changed since he had first arrived in the orchard such a short time back. How quickly it was becoming more and more like all he hoped he had left behind forever. Ugly advertisements defaced the neighboring trees; a smelly garbage heap spilled down the hillside behind the tea stall and grew larger every week. The buzz of angry voices and the claustrophobia he had associated with life in the middle of town were creeping up upon him again.
Sampath stared up into the mountains, tilting his head all the way back, to look upon where there was not a trace of civilization. There, up high, as if tumbling from the sky, a waterfall cascaded down sylvan slopes, so pale, so distant he did not know if it was real or merely his imagination melding with the power of sight to produce and trick upon him. There there were no villages, no houses, no people…
Here and there in the branches near him, the season’s last guavas loomed from amidst the moonlit leaves. One, two, three of them…so ripe, so heavy, the slightest touch could make them fall from the tree.
He picked one. Perfect Buddha shape. Mulling on its insides, unconcerned with the world… Beautiful, distant fruit, growing softer as the days went by, as the nights passed on; beautiful fruit filled with an undiscovered constellation of young stars.
He held it in his hand. It was cool, uneven to his touch. The hours passed. More stars than sky. He sat unmoving in this hushed night.
