ತೇರು

The story that Raghavendra Patil tells in The Chariot covers a period of more the a hundred and fifty years, beginning from the years when the Peshwa extended his rule to North Karnataka to the years after the Emergency and relates to the Belagavi region with its epicenter in an imagined but fully realised village named Dharamanatti.

The novel offers two images of Teru which in Kannada means both the chariot and the festival associated with it. The first is centered round an atrocious human sacrifice made in the name of religion by an autocratic ruler and the second, distanced in time by a century and a half mirrors, reflects the change from the feudal order to a democratic one where religious superstition and feudal practices have been replaced by scepticism and the politics of power.

The novel is remarkable for its innovative technique which handles myth and reality with equal success.