The Space of Death in Nirmal Verma’s Hindi Novel Antim Araṇya (“The Last Wilderness”)

This essay investigates Nirmal Verma’s last novel Antim Araṇya (The Last Wilderness), a dreamlike vision that leaves the reader somewhere between astonishment and fear, has death as its protagonist. Although the narrative voice is that of a living person and a number of more or less dynamic characters move through the narrative, the absence of loved ones and their persistence in the lives of those who remain constitute one of the main themes of the novel. The permeability between the world of the dead and the world of the living is a leitmotif of the story, entirely interwoven with a plethora of ghostly presences that arouse vague feelings of guilt in the living people and that infuse the narrative with an abundance of mystery, though never allowing the novel to become a mere spectral obsession with cemeterial tones. The article is structured in two parts, one analyzing the nonplaces of the living dead —the village Bahadurganj and its surroundings, Tara Devi’s temple, the houses and the cemetery— and the other investigating the space of the last rites —the “Hill of the Dead” and the site of the final and extreme rest.