Books: Indian Trail

THE LAND AND THE WELL (243 pp.)—Hilda Wernher, with Huthi Singh—John Day ($2.75).

Ever since Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth made peasant life in China familiar to thousands of Americans, Publishers John Day (whose president, Richard J. Walsh, is Novelist Buck’s husband) have been praying for a novel that would do as much for the peasants of India. They believe that The Land and the Well is the answer to their prayer.

Like The Good Earth, The Land and the Well is virtually an encyclopedia of Hindu manners and practices, revealed through the lives of a poor Hindu family in a dry and dusty village in one of the states of Rajputana. Using the rhythmic changes of the seasons and the monotonous ups-&-downs of peasant life as her shoehorn, Author Wernher deftly eases into her book not only such basic and familiar Indian matters as Hindu segregation, the exactly graded structure of the family, but also details about lesser-known rites of Hindu worship, the involved ceremonies that accompany the simplest acts of daily life. Author Wernher, raised in India, came to the U.S. in 1943, has also published a “diary” of Indian life (My Indian Family).

The Land and the Well is written with warmth, and spiced with touches of romantic rivalry and marital passions. But its scope, as fiction, is as carefully limited as the lives of its characters—whose sole ambition is to dig and own their own well. Author Wernher eschews all flights of fancy, all personal philosophizing; her canvas has nothing of the breadth, her prose nothing of the lugubrious weight of The Good Earth. With intelligence and respect she enumerates the everyday joys and sorrows of a people who know all there is to know about the soil, nothing whatever about the British Empire or the atom bomb.