Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (Cross Cultures 82)

Alternative Indias Writing, Nation and Communalism

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

82 Series Editors Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Alternative Indias Writing, Nation and Communalism

Edited by

Peter Morey and Alex Tickell

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

The cover montage includes elements from paintings of the Mughal school, Akbar period, c. 1580-90. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISBN: 90-420-1927-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

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P ETER M OREY AND A LEX T ICKELL Introduction ix A NSHUMAN A. M ONDAL The Limits of Secularism and the Construction of Composite National Identity in India

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A LEX T ICKELL The Discovery of Aryavarta: Hindu Nationalism and Early Indian Fiction in English E LLEKE B OEHMER “First Realise Your Need”: Manju Kapur’s Erotic Nation

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S HIRLEY C HEW “Cutting Across Time”: Memory, Narrative, and Identity in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies A MINA Y AQIN The Communalization and Disintegration of Urdu in Anita Desai’s In Custody

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A SHOK B ERY “Reflexive Worlds”: The Indias of A.K. Ramanujan

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P ETER M OREY Communalism, Corruption and Duty in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters

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S UJALA S INGH The Routes of National Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

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R ALPH J. C RANE Inscribing a Sikh India: An Alternative Reading of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan S HARMILA S EN No Passports, No Visas: The Line of Control Between India and Pakistan in Contemporary Bombay Cinema Afterword Contributors Index

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Gordon Collier and the editorial team at Editions Rodopi for their encouragement and advice as we completed the manuscript; the contributors for their patience during the volume’s lengthy gestation period; the Research Committee of the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of London and the F.R. Leavis Award Committee, and especially Jack Donovan, at the Modern School, University of York for their generous assistance in providing funds to allow for the completion of the project. We would also like to thank numerous colleagues in our respective institutions and, lastly, our partners Amina Yaqin and Rachel Goodyear for their forbearance, grace under pressure and living cheerfully for four years with this troll under the stairs. Very special thanks and gratitude go to Rachel Goodyear for her invaluable editorial role in preparing the manuscript for publication. Earlier versions of the following essays have appeared as follows: Alex Tickell, “Writing the Nation’s Destiny: Indian Fiction in English before 1910,” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005); Peter Morey, “Running Repairs: Corruption, Community and Duty in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38.2 (2003); Amina Yaqin, “The Communalization and Disintegration of Urdu,” Annual of Urdu Studies 19 (2004).

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I NTRODUCTION Indias of the Mind: History, Culture, Literature and Communalism

Whether or not there has ever been a single civilisation that could call itself ‘Indian’, whether or not India was, is or ever will become a cohesive cultural entity, depends on the differences and similarities in the cultures of the people who have inhabited the sub-continent for centuries […] So is India Indian? It’s a tough question. Let’s just 1 say we’re an ancient people learning to live in a recent nation.

I

N O C T O B E R 1 9 9 2 , the Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) announced that construction would start in December on a temple to the God Ram at what is considered his birthplace, Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. The only obstacle to this plan was the existence of a sixteenth-century mosque on the site, a building protected by an order of the Supreme Court of India. Nevertheless, on the 6th of December, scores of Hindu militants surged past a security cordon and began reducing the mosque to a pile of rubble. The demolition of the Babri Masjid caused protest demonstrations, a ‘victory’ parade by Hindu nationalists, and widespread communal violence that lasted well into the following January. Almost ten years later, in the spring of 2002, a train full of Hindu pilgrims was attacked at Godhra in Gujarat in circumstances that have never been fully ex-

1

Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (London, HarperCollins, 2002): 25–26.

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plained, unleashing once more a tidal wave of communal violence during which the Muslim community, whose members were blamed for the Godhra outrage, were attacked and saw their homes and businesses destroyed. Whatever the reasons behind these two explosions of Hindu–Muslim violence – which recalled the carnage of Partition in ferocity, if not in scale – they underlined two stark facts about Indian cultural and political life in the modern era: historical suspicions between Hindus and Muslims could still act as mobilizing principles leading to extreme violence and brutality; and a new militancy was abroad among some in the majority Hindu population which sought to reclaim certain sites and privileges considered to have been ceded to minorities during the years since Independence in 1947. These actions were backed up by organizational power and underpinned by a fullscale ideological programme. Such majoritarianism attempted to reshape national identity along Hindu lines, was prepared to use democratic and extra-parliamentary means to achieve its aim, and sought to create a purified Hindu culture in a purified Hindu homeland. In response to this aggressive communal vision of national identity in India, historians such as Sunil Khilnani have asserted the inadequacy of any homogeneous definition of the nation. Early in his overview of post-Independence social and political developments, The Idea of India, he observes that “over the past generation the presumption that a single shared sense of India – a unifying idea and concept – can at once define the facts that need recounting and provide the collective 2 subject for the Indian story has lost all credibility.” By the time one has reached the end of Khilnani’s volume, this prefatory remark appears to be a clarion call against a tendency which has recently gathered pace in Indian politics and which his text ably delineates: that of attempting to standardize notions of what it is to be Indian around sanctioned religious, cultural and ethnic identities. Instead, what emerges from its pages is a testament to the heterogeneity of India and the different versions and visions which, for both resident and non-resident Indians, are urgent and vivid: a contest over what India is, what it can be, and what it should become; a battle over contending political models of

2

Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997): 2.

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identity or what, in a migrant context, Salman Rushdie has termed 3 “Indias of the mind.” This book examines some of those literary and cultural texts that map the ethnic and communal lineaments of contemporary India. It seeks an understanding of the ways in which the tensions described above have evolved in the larger environment of history, and of how writers and texts have interrogated and questioned – often on the level of the individual life-worlds and interaction of their characters – an idea which has gained ground in political praxis: that India can and should be defined in and through its majority Hindu culture. Thus, among the themes explored by contributors here are the history of Hindu nationalist thought and its articulation in early texts; the way in which communalism impacts on the experiences of characters in the urban space; how regional, linguistic and gender differences problematize the project of homogenization; and the ambiguous effect of the attempt to maintain and police borders, both physical and metaphorical, in the name of national unity. There is certainly no simple correlation between the creative artists and works explored by the contributors to this volume and any direct attempts to erase the much cruder brushstrokes of the communalist vision of Indian culture. Often themes of communal antipathy are secondary to crises of personal development or family interaction. Nevertheless, in their attempts to forge imaginative worlds populated by a diversity of characters and communities, the literary and filmic visions that these essays deal with expose, at least obliquely, the inevitable diversity in a land of above a billion inhabitants and myriad ethnic, regional and religious variations. However, to grasp what is at stake in the contention between centripetal and centrifugal interpretations of Indianness it might be wisest to begin by sketching briefly the historical coordinates of the religionationalist vision that has brought us to this point.

Although the communalist ideologies of groups such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad and Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva), in their roles as affiliated, factional cadres of the Bharatiya Janata Party or B J P , have relied to 3

This well-known phrase comes from Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1992): 10.

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a large extent on assertions of primordial religious legitimacy, most political analysts examining the intellectual genealogies of these claims have emphasized their comparative modernity. Historically, the grist for Hindu majoritarianism’s particularly productive ideological mill can be found among the projections of, and prognoses for, an assertive Indian identity during the colonial era. In the face of colonial educational and administrative policies in the nineteenth century, reassertions of Indian historical legitimacy became essential to indigenous self-esteem and political mobilization. Exemplified in Bankimchandra’s famous exhortation, “We must have a history,” and further demonstrated in the growth of Indian historiography (as opposed to older 4 itihasa writings), the engagement with history can be seen as an integral component of a new political self-making in the late 1800s. Paradoxically, the structure of early nationalist historiography found sanction in larger colonial models of Indian history, which described a sequential pattern of Hindu artistic cultural achievement, followed by decline, defeat and eclipse by the Mughal invaders, after which the British appeared initially as saviours but then, in their turn, as occupiers to be displaced. This historical template, which owes much to the European classical–medieval–Renaissance pattern, is still strongly influential as the basis for current Hindu nationalist models of India’s past. As Partha Chatterjee reflects, “the materials of Hindu nationalist rhetoric current in postcolonial India were fashioned from 5 the very birth of nationalist historiography.” And, while not the direct precursors of the Hindutva movements of the 1920s and 1930s, the early equivalence of Hinduism and nationalism both in Bankim’s literary inclusion of a national motherland in the Hindu pantheon and in the sanatan dharm movement emphasizes the shared idiomatic and discursive space occupied by contemporary religious and non-religious nationalist tendencies. For writers and political leaders in Bengal at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anxious to represent their ‘national’ past as the basis for a viable political re-imagining, colonial histories of 4

The Sanskrit term ‘itihasa’ refers to texts such as the Mahabharata that blend political history with mythical or supernatural events. 5 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1993): 94. See also 95–115.

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the Rajput states and the sixteenth-century Maratha confederacy afforded a particularly important resource. Using accounts of resistance to Mughal incursion, these works provided striking allegories for the struggle for political autonomy under British colonial rule. Even in nationalist works set in Bengal, such as Bankim’s landmark novel Anandamath, both Muslims and the British are staged as the aggressors in a proto-national, sanyassi uprising. While writers and spiritual leaders contributed to the formulation of new and highly gendered configurations of nationhood, oriented around a symbolic Hindu motherland and her virile sons, the foundations of popular communalism were being laid by leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak. His resurrection in 1893 of Hindu festivals and public events such as the Mahrashtrian Ganesh Chaturti, in response to local Muslim celebrations of Muharram, was, Wolpert argues, a political strategy in which “the grass roots of Indian cultural nationalism were […] tapped for the first 6 time.” The subsequent fragmentation of the Congress into moderate and extremist wings, following the ‘Surat split’ in 1907, played a further part in welding religious iconography to the nationalist cause. The communal political consciousness wrought by Congress leaders such as Tilak had been incubated by Hindu reform organizations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, most notably Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj, or ‘Society of Nobles’. Energized by two fundamental ideas – a return to the scriptural authority of the Vedas (perceived as divine revelation) and a narrative of Hindu decline and 7 potential regeneration – the Arya Samaj also incorporated a civilizational Aryanism, drawn from contemporary European race-theory, into the emergent nationalist paradigm. In some cases these political strands combined – notably in the figure of Lala Lajpat Rai, who was an Arya Samaj member and a supporter of newer political lobby groups such as the Hindu Mahasabha (founded in 1915). The model of Hindu nationalism that informs today’s political terrain in India owes its defining contours to developments in the mid1920s, and the publication of significant writings by Swami Shrad6

Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (Oxford: Oxford U P , 5th ed. 1997): 260. 7 T.N. Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998)

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dhanand and Vinayak D. Sarvarkar. Sarvarkar’s influential work Hindutva – Who is Hindu? (1923) was especially important in the evolution of Hindu-reformist thinking into claims of civilizational, territorial legi8 timacy. For Sarvarkar, the only Indian community to fulfil the prescriptions of ‘Hindutva’ or ‘condition of Hinduness’ was one that could claim ‘Aryan’ racial descent, and could define India as both a ‘fatherland’ (pitribhu) and a ‘holyland’ (punyabhu). Other communities such as Christians, Parsis and Muslims could not be admitted to Hindutva unless they reclaimed this meshed national-communal identity. Thus, while the Arya Samaj had defined itself scripturally, as a religious reform movement, Sarvarkar’s Hindus were called upon to see themselves as the chosen cultural custodians of Indian identity. Sarvarkar’s more exclusive ‘Hindu civilizational’ conception of identity also shaped the ethos of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (national association of volunteers), a new paramilitary organization formed by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in Nagpur in 1925. Highly important as a political foundation for the later development of the Sangh Parivar, the R S S , while disavowing any direct political agenda, built on Sarvarkar’s thinking by rejecting the designation ‘Hindu’ in favour of the more expansive national-communal concept of Rashtriya. As the founder of the R S S , Keshav Baliram Hedgewar would point out, “If we use the word ‘Hindu’ it will only mean that we consider ourselves only as one of the innumerable communities in this land and that we do not realise our natural status as the nationals of 9 this country.” The R S S set out to mould its members into a new sense of physical and spiritual “self respect, unity and courage,” inaugurating a regime of callisthenics, weapons training, ideological re-education and prayers to the motherland. The physical preoccupations of Hindu nationalists such as Hedgewar and his successor, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, reflected the functionalist, somatic tenor of their politics, in which the ‘body’ of the Hindu nation had to be protected (through increasingly aggressive policies towards India’s religious minority groups), from “the danger

8

Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2001): 63. 9 See Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds, 221.

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of a cancer developing into its body politic of a state within a state.” At the same time, organizations such as the R S S largely ignored the political-economic models developed by the Congress as part of the struggle for decolonization, preferring instead to promote a vision of Indian history as a longer, primordial conflict between Hindus, “in11 digenous children of the soil,” and “alien invaders” such as Muslims. As Aditya Mukherjee points out, these claims of communal polarization acted to justify colonial power as an arbitrating, peace-keeping presence, replacing earlier imperial narratives such as the civilizing mission. Communalist interventions toward the end of the Raj were often seen to play a loyalist role because, “on the one hand they hampered any mobilisation based on secular categories like class, or nation, which cut across religious categories, and on the other hand they 12 focussed their attack on the [communal and not imperial] ‘other’.” In opposition to such narrow images of national selfhood, Jawaharlal Nehru’s secular, historically based model of Indian identity became the presiding political narrative of the new republic after 1947. Fiercely opposed to the intrusion of forms of religious identity in the workings of the postcolonial state, Nehru generally associated India’s religious traditions with backwardness and superstition. However, if we concentrate on the details of the culturally integrated, independent state in Nehru’s work, the secular character of this programme is often difficult to define. Nehru may have fashioned an eloquent and avowedly noncommunal historical narrative for the republic, but his nationalist project drew on forms of primordialist identification and depended on socio-religious categories even as it disavowed any communal bias. India’s first Prime Minister found it increasingly difficult to maintain his secularist agenda in the post-Independence period. He had to remain sensitive to the political anxieties of India’s religious minorities and considered Hindu majoritarianism a greater evil than the communalism that characterized minority claims to religious identity, and argued that: ‘honest communalism is fear, false communalism is poli10

See Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 130. Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 127. 12 Aditya Mukherjee, “Colonialism and Communalism,” in Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal (London: Zed, 1993): 169. 11

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tical reaction’. Aware of the sensitive realities of communal coexistence, the Constituent Assembly of 1946 – called to prepare India for self-government – opted for an understanding of the secular state “‘as one that is based on (equal) respect for all religions or non-discrimination on the ground of religion’ – rather than as entailing a strict separa14 tion of state and religion.” Under Nehru’s secular leadership and Gandhi’s spiritual stewardship, the Congress Party that led India to independence had strong practical as well as ideological reasons for endorsing inter-communal tolerance rather than a strongly secularist line. In order to increase national solidarity and reinforce a sense of a common anticolonial grievance, the Congress – itself a very diverse body – had maintained a strategy of absorbing the different religious communities into the Indian polity rather than demanding a uniform, secular adherence to the concept of the nation. Discussing the recent reinvigoration of forms of Hindu nationalism, the historian and novelist Mukul Kesavan has argued that the Indian elite only adopted secular politics under Nehru’s tutelage as a “common sense” measure, and as an aspect of a “hegemonic style”: Secularism as practiced by the Indian elite often had little to do with conviction or ideological principle; it was, instead, a marker of modernity and metropolitan good taste […] the failure of the State to make India economically successful eroded this claim to be progressive and modern. And because Nehru […] had twinned socialist 15 autarky and secularism, the failure of the one discredited the other.

After Independence, the legacy of Partition also played its part in legitimizing the communal expression of national politics, if only by providing a traumatic, exemplary response to claims of communal autonomy. Indeed, since 1947 the horrors of Partition have become part of a submerged collective memory. As Ashis Nandy argues, these events have become “an unwritten epic that everyone in South Asia 13

Sarvepalli Gopal, ed. Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India (London: Zed, 1993): 18. 14 Stuart Corbridge & John Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalism, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2000): 178. 15 Mukul Kesavan, Secular Common Sense (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001): 29.

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pretends does not exist but are nevertheless forced to live by” [sic]. Nandy also makes qualitative distinctions between the violence of Partition and subsequent communal conflicts. For him, Hindu nationalism can be defined less as a religious than as a political idea, designed to concentrate the power to define and delimit the nation in the hands of 17 those with particular political and economic interests. The resulting majoritarianism, which seeks to subordinate the interests of minorities to those enjoying numerical preponderance, is a pervasive force in the cultural life of contemporary India. Since the death of Nehru, the Congress Party itself has had a poor record when it comes to making a stand against aggressive communalist discourses, adopting divisive rhetoric and actions when it has been considered politically expedient. Khilnani records how it was India’s political elite, taking its cue from Indira Gandhi’s populist flirtation with communal politics in the 1970s and early 1980s, that “dragged this language of religious affiliation into the arena of national poli18 tics.” Indeed, while the leaders of the early B J P , such as Atal Behari Vajpayee, steered their party towards the political mainstream and electoral respectability – not least as part of the opposition to Indira’s anti-democratic interlude during the 1975–77 State of Emergency – the symbolic vocabulary of Congress politics took on an increasingly communal idiom, as in Indira Gandhi’s public attendance at religious shrines and temples such as the Bharatmata Mandir in Hardwar. In the 1980s, two particular moments signify a watershed in the ongoing process of the communalization of mainstream politics. The first was Indira Gandhi’s initial toleration of the terrorist activities of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in order to embarrass political opponents in Punjab, demonstrating a striking retreat from her father, Jawaharlal Nehru’s key principle of secularism. (And, of course, her military response to Sikh separatist claims to an independent Khalistan proved personally fatal and nationally disastrous, when her assassination by Sikh bodyguards in 1984 led to the massacre of over three thousand 16

Ashis Nandy, An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2001): 99. 17 Ashis Nandy, “A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods and Goddesses of South Asia,” Postcolonial Studies 4.2 (July 2001): 125–42. 18 Khilnani, The Idea of India, 54.

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Sikhs in Delhi alone.) The second instance, a year later, was the controversial Shah Bano affair, a legal case concerning alimony payments to a Muslim divorcee that pitted Muslim personal law against Indian civil law. The new premier, Rajiv Gandhi, was seen to conciliate the Muslim community when he overturned the Supreme Court ruling that had favoured the national code, thereby outraging B J P leaders, who were subsequently able to present their party’s endorsement of a uniform civil code as a sign of its progressivism. With hindsight, such developments can be seen as giving impetus to the ongoing fragmentation of the political scene, which now includes parties based on caste, class, tribe and region, as well as religious affiliation, all jostling to safeguard and advance those interests Congress has been seen to have abandoned. When reviewed in this cursory way, as a series of historical milestones in the politicizing of religious identity, the comparatively recent ascendancy of parties such as the B J P – which headed India’s coalition government from 1998 to 2004 – can be seen as a major challenge to the traditional secularism propounded by the Congress Party, putatively based on religious freedom, celebratory neutrality and reformatory justice. Moreover, mainstream attempts at reforming Hinduism and its practices, despite being designed to reassure minorities, have allowed Hindu nationalists to depict the practice of secular politics as biased, ‘communalist’ and only really ‘pseudo-secular’. Against this, they have attempted to portray their own agenda as truly secular, 19 based on rule by the majority. In a strange semantic reversal, then, the secularism propounded by Nehru, with its claim to safeguard minority rights and prevent the domination of any one group, has been appropriated by a Hindu majoritarian lobby that excuses its own fascistic propensities by recourse to the same political vocabulary of equality and fair representation. However, it is not only Hindu majoritarian voices that have been raised against India’s secular polity. In recent years a number of intellectuals have spoken out to question the values on which the Indian constitution was based, seeing secularism as a ‘myth’, or as inappropriate to Indian needs. Critics such as Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, T.N. Madan and Gyanendra Pandey are vehemently opposed to Hin19

Corbridge & Harriss, Reinventing India, 179, 193.

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dutva and its violent methods. Nevertheless, they are also highly critical of the Indian nation-state as it has developed and what they see as its shortcomings. Such critics have been termed ‘anarcho-communitarian’, highlighting their indebtedness to Gandhi’s anti-modern, agrarian vision of India as a series of village republics. They tend to value the local and the fragmentary over what they see as the intolerant powerdrives of the homogenizing modern nation-state. Perhaps the most vocal of these critics is Ashis Nandy, a self-confessed anti-secularist for whom both Hindutva and secular nationalism are intolerant of diversity. Corbridge and Harriss comment: “In Nandy’s view, the nationstate is a power container that is defined by the violence which it is bound to dispense in its quest to govern the margins of the country that 20 it claims to represent and speak for.” (One might cite the instances of Khalistani agitation in the 1980s, and the ongoing militarization of Kashmir as examples to support Nandy’s reading.) As an alternative to this impasse, he posits a distinction between a desirable ‘religion as faith’ – a syncretic, pragmatic way of life open to accommodations and variations – and ‘religion as ideology’ incorporating the standardization and uniformity of Hindu nationalism. T.N. Madan sees secularism as an alien import into India, at odds with its existing traditions, while Partha Chatterjee is critical of the failure of the state to keep religion and politics separate. He advocates minority cultural rights based on “a politics of difference that empowers minorities to say ‘we will not give 21 reasons for not being like you’.” Although these critiques are powerful, they perhaps have a tendency to take an unduly romantic view of those local communities whose claims are advanced at the expense of the nation. They rely on a highly debatable distinction between a violent state and an inclusive local community (despite the fact that such communities can be every bit as exclusive and oppressive as larger political constructs). More20

Reinventing India, 195. Corbridge & Harriss, Reinventing India, 193–96. See also Ashis Nandy, “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto,” Seminar 314 (October 1985): 14–24; T.N. Madan, “Secularism in its Place,” Journal of Asian Studies 46.4 (1987): 746–58; Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Toleration,” Economic and Political Weekly 29.28 (9 July 1994): 1768–77; Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial Northern India (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1990), all cited in Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika, 1996): 311. 21

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over, in the case of Nandy, what Corbridge and Harriss call “an uncritical attitude towards religious faith and the presumed virtues of religious communities” might even be said to hamper the formulation of a distinctive and robust rebuttal of the anti-secularist position of 22 militant Hinduism. At what point does the project of critiquing statism and searching for alternative, inclusive models of living topple over into utopian complacency? (Indeed, Aijaz Ahmad has gone as far as to suggest that secularism is an irreducible precondition for the survival of India as a democratic nation: “it is the issue of secularism […] that produces the idea of equality in general, and therefore the idea of 23 political democracy.” ) Nevertheless, it can be argued that religion and politics in the modern nation are interlinked to the extent that they are mutually constitutive: the secular needs the religious for its self-definition, and vice 24 versa. The site where these forces contend most strikingly in contemporary India is in the realm of culture. The politicization of a particular cultural mythology is commonly seen as a staple of Hindutva’s mass appeal. Thus, for example, the yatras, or processions, that became a feature of Hindu nationalist self-assertion in the late 1980s and early 1990s – in particular the rath yatra of the Hindutva ideologue L.K. Advani, which traced a pilgrimage route to Ayodhya in October 1990, 25 and which has been described as an act of “militant cartography” – came to be seen as an extension of that patriotic conflation of the modern nation with the ancient texts of Hinduism that received its most popular articulation in the television serialization of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in the late 1980s. It might be said that the ideological potential of such texts, sliding across from the realm of legend into that of history, acts as a palliative for those social ills which have a solidly material basis: myth overrides (indeed, overwrites) history. As Aijaz Ahmad puts it, “if mythic literature can be said to be history itself, and if the founding myths of the nation are already there

22

Corbridge & Harriss, Reinventing India, 197. Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages, 318. 24 Talal Asad, “Religion, Nation-State, Secularism,” in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer & Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999): 192. 25 Corbridge & Harriss, Reinventing India, 188. 23

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in the Ramayana, then the utter destitution of a third of the Indian population can be made to sink into insignificance and the rebuilding 26 of the Ram mandir can be posited as the crux of national salvation.” Writing from a Marxist perspective, and comparing contemporary India to the Italy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ahmad has suggested that the Bengal Renaissance – conventionally regarded as the crucible in which the artistic and political vision of Indian nationalism was formed – can be seen as a kind of failed cultural Risorgimento, on account of the “schizophrenic accommodation” it made between indigenist and Western compulsions. According to Ahmad, this has led to a rapprochement between an ‘institutional religion’ (Brahmanic Hinduism) and an ahistorical, almost mythic purview that overlooks the functional nature of the concept of an Indian nation, an idea that came into being in the fight against imperialism. Thus, “more than a process, ‘nation’ is a terrain of struggle which condenses all social struggles, so that every organised force in society 27 attempts to endow it with specific meanings and attributes.” Historically, this fusion of nation, religion and culture has allowed Hindu nationalists to assume the role of cultural custodians for India. M.S. Golwalkar famously distinguished between his own cultural nationalism and the merely territorial nationalism espoused by Congress when it asserted that citizens of whatever religion could be encompassed within the borders of the nation. And if the ‘real’ India is exclusively Hindu, then it behoves those ‘Others’ either to accept Hindutva and the cultural hegemony of the majority, or to get out. Inevitably, of course, such exclusivist agendas of nation-building are historically traceable and constantly call attention to their own blind-spots, lacunae and inadequacies. Addressing this point, Homi Bhabha, in Nation and Narration, has drawn on Benedict Anderson’s idea of the “cultural temporality” (the impermanence, the openness to change) of the nation, which “inscribes a much more transitional social reality” than in traditional nationalist accounts. Nation-formation as a process, as an endless negotiation, means that “The other is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between 26 27

Ahmad, Lineages, 242. Lineages, 241.

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ourselves’.” Although Bhabha is here mainly referring to the contradictions of metropolitan nation-formation and its attendant racism, his remarks also resonate in a situation where another type of purism attempts to excise a perceived Other from the body of the Indian nation. The “cracks and absences” (to borrow from Bhabha, borrowing from Rushdie) in the idea of a Hindu India emerge most visibly precisely when – as at Ayodhya in 1992 and in Gujarat in 2002 – it resorts to violence to enforce its vision. Looked at another way, the failure of the nation as an imagined community to reconcile itself to all those occupying its space effectively exposes the contradiction at the heart of calls on minorities to “assimilate or emigrate”; might it not be argued that the concept of the nation as here promoted is too narrow to cope with existing realities, rather than that minorities ‘fail’ to accommodate themselves to the dominant programme? In the realm of culture, the activities of Hindu majoritarian groups offer an example of Michel Foucault’s contention that the operations of power within modernity work as much to produce cultural formations as to censor and interdict them. For example, writing about the appeal of the Shiv Sena in Bombay, Gerard Heuze describes the ‘cultural populism’ at the core of the organization’s broad-based support; “Cultural populism arises, it seems, when culture is considered as the basis for the foundation of a nation, or of a sub-nation and when the ‘people’, 29 defined as a unified entity, is considered as the main actor of history.” Populist activism is encouraged by the Shiv Sena, through their mitra mandals (friends clubs) which operate as quasi-families wherein masculine camaraderie and competition are emphasized. Cultural life eschews secularism in favour of orchestrated Hindu festivals such as Durga Puja, Ganesh Chaturi, and Shivaji Jayanti which, as organized by the Shiv Sena, can take on the quality of military training sessions. Emphasizing the upper-caste specificity of much Hindutva ideology, Kshatriya models of masculine virility are invoked and the cult of youth that holds sway valorizes strength and violence for the cause. The mass

28 Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990): 4. 29 Gerard Heuze, “Cultural Populism: The Appeal of the Shiv Sena,” in Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1996): 216.

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demonstrations that form a key element in the Shiv Sena armoury are portrayed as an appropriation of urban space by ‘the people’, as is the 30 mass mobilization that takes place during riots. On the other hand, the organization is involved in rendering charitable assistance to sections of the Hindu community deemed deserving, while at the level of municipal popular culture the Shiv Sena sponsored a concert by Michael Jackson in Bombay/Mumbai in 1996. (This sometimes contradictory blend of traditionalism and modernity in the approach to culture itself highlights tensions between conservative and populist tendencies within Hindutva, something that has also been evident in attitudes to wider social developments such as the liberalization of India’s economy in the 1990s.) The presiding historical and political self-presentation of groups such as the Shiv Sena, and the interest that Hindu nationalist elements of the B J P coalition take in issues such as school education syllabuses, reiterates the central place of culture in the discursive formation of a Hindu national imagining. The R S S run over 20,000 Vidya Bharati primary and secondary schools across India, in which an unashamedly communalist curriculum is followed. This is part of what the B J P minister for education in the 1998–2004 government called a “war for 31 the country’s cultural freedom.” A flavour of what this ideological struggle entails can be gained from a question taken from an examination paper given in the state of Uttar Pradesh which chillingly combines raw bigotry and basic arithmetic: “If it takes four sevaks to demo32 lish one mosque, how many does it take to demolish twenty?” In particular, it is in the provision of history that the struggle has been fiercest, with B J P ideologues launching attacks on the work of acclaimed historians such as R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar, and Satish Chandra, who have for many years contributed to the school history textbook series. With their intellectual fastidiousness and commitment to objective scholarship, such figures have been traduced as “the children of Macaulay, Marx and the Madrassas,” peddling a brand of left30

Heuze, “Cultural Populism,” 217–30. See also Kalpana Sharma, “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold,” in Bombay, ed. Patel & Thorner, 266–86. 31 Delhi Historians Group, Communalisation of Education: The History Textbooks Controversy (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2001): 7. 32 Amitava Kumar, “A Nation of Converts,” Race and Class 43.4 (2002): 58.

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leaning, relativist indoctrination. Strategic excisions from their books have been insisted upon; controversial passages citing the evidence that Vedic Aryans ate beef, highlighting the difficulties of establishing any historical veracity behind the stories of Ram and Krishna, and mentioning the exploitation of the lower castes, have been expunged. In their place have come textbooks specially written by those committed to the cause from which we can learn that “Homer adapted Valmiki’s Ramayana into an epic called the Iliad; the Egyptian faith according to Plato and Pythagoras was based on Indian traditions; the cow is the mother of us all, in whose body Gods are believed to reside; and Jesus Christ roamed the Himalayas and drew his ideas from 33 Hinduism.” At the same time as a fantasy version of Indian history is being constructed, Rajeev Dhavan sees: Banning and censorship […] increasingly becoming a pernicious part of civil and political governance. The attacks on Husain’s paintings, and Deepa Mehta’s films, the civil injunction on Professor Jha’s book on beef eating in ancient India […] and many other incidents reinforce an aggressive climate of banning thoughts and 34 ideas not to the liking of fundamentalists.

Indeed, prescriptive nationalisms inevitably rely on censuring and suppressing dissident and oppositional narratives and versions, as well as creating their own. Although the cultural modes and expressions of Hindu nationalism span the full range of India’s media, from the pictorial symbols on party-political billboards to the latest Bollywood epic, South Asian literature has also, in recent years, been at the centre of debates over the legitimacy of religious constructions of self and nation. The upsurge of majoritarian nationalisms in South Asia has most famously coloured the reception of two controversial literary responses to the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992: Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja. Rushdie’s novel was temporarily banned in India at the behest of the communalist demagogue Bal Thackeray while, almost simultaneously, in Bangladesh the feminist journalist and author Nasreen suffered harassment,

33 34

Amitava Kumar, “A Nation of Converts,” 60. Delhi Historians, Communalisation, 37.

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culminating in enforced exile, for her indictment of the Muslim backlash in Bangladesh after Ayodhya. In a combative essay entitled “Transgressing Sacred Visions,” published in Ralph Crane and Radhika Mohanram’s recent edited collection of essays on diasporic South Asian writing, Debjani Ganguly recounts the experiences of Rushdie and Nasreen and their texts, but also laments the fate of those other less internationally celebrated victims of the wrath of cultural fundamentalists: writers such as the Urdu poet Mohammed Alvi, the Marathi poet Vasant Dattareya Gurjar and the Kannada dramatist H.S. Shrivprakash. Ganguly’s intervention reminds us of the straitened circumstances in which non-approved forms of literary expression can 35 find themselves on the modern subcontinent. Nonetheless, the very fact that creative writing is so often an object of such close scrutiny indicates the power of literary representation to interrogate, however obliquely, the boundaries of sanctioned identities, both personal and national. Ganguly herself celebrates the way in which, in The Moor’s Last Sigh, “Rushdie challenges precisely this political rhetoric in India which says that the experience of the majority […] is the only authentic Indian experience,” by focusing on the Christian and Jewish minorities 36 in his novel. So, too, with this volume. While it has not been our intention to elicit only contributions that deal directly with the experiences of minority communities, the essays included here nonetheless engage with issues around boundaries and borders, material and imagined, and the means by which identity and belonging are constructed. In our opinion, the eclectic range of the writers and topics treated is an indication of an ineradicable polyphony at the heart of Indian literature which, by its very nature, transgresses barriers of caste and community. We are not suggesting some simplistic correlation between literary activity – or, indeed, literary criticism – and the political. However, each writer chosen for examination has produced texts marked by, and dealing with, the impact of certain constructions of self which

35 Debjani Ganguly, “Transgressing Sacred Visions: Taslima, Rushdie and the Indian Subcontinent,” in Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Ralph J. Crane & Radhika Mohanram (Cross/ Cultures 42; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000): 102–21. 36 Ganguly, “Transgressing Sacred Visions,” 113.

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in some way come into conflict with sanctioned discourses. Whether imagining the nation, its space and parameters, laying claim to identities within the urban centres, forging cultural narratives of regional or ethnic affiliation, or testing generic and critical boundaries, the writers under consideration find themselves engaged in a series of personal, communal, territorial or linguistic negotiations.

It is also pertinent at this point to acknowledge the volume’s weighting towards critical writing conducted in, and dealing with literature written in, English. This bias lays us open to the charge of adopting a particular position in a fraught and sometimes acrimonious contemporary debate. For instance, in his polemical introductory essay to the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Amit Chaudhuri criticizes both the tendency to misread writing in English as the sole meaningful vehicle for Indian literature and the mind-forged manacles of postcolonial theory. Despite claims to the contrary, Chaudhuri’s introduction – with its welcome reassertion of the centrality of literatures in languages other than English – can be read as a riposte to Salman Rushdie’s infamous contention, in his own Vintage anthology of Indian writing, that comparatively little of value has been written in Indian 37 languages in the last fifty years or so. Clearly, this issue, of who speaks for India and how, is alive and well and has provoked vigorous exchanges. One of the more judicious interventions in this controversy comes from the distinguished critic of Indian literature, Meenakshi Mukherjee, in an essay entitled “The Anxiety of Indianness.” Citing Raja Rao’s celebrated reflections in his Foreword to the second edition of Kanthapura (1938), Mukherjee argues that while English may be part of the “intellectual make-up” of India, it is not part of its “emotional makeup”. This is partly because, since the days of colonial rule, English has been a language of power and privilege, of the elite. For Mukherjee, Indian writing in English has, for reasons of “class mobility and readership,” lately been promoted at the expense of what she describes as 37

Amit Chaudhuri, ed. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 2001): xvii–xxxi. See also Salman Rushdie & Elizabeth West, ed. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947–1987 (London: Vintage, 1997): x.

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bhasha literatures: writing produced in any of India’s regional lan38 guages. Indian-English literature – seen here as an adjunct of the academic vogue of postcolonialism and purveyed by ‘Third World Cosmopolitans’ – displays a greater tendency to homogenize Indian realities in favour of an internationally approved set of concerns, such as displacement, cultural hybridity and the legacy of the colonial encounter. This is then contrasted with the social particularity and local specificity of bhasha literatures, wherein the colonial experience has been superseded by more recent oppressions and dislocations. Mukherjee remarks that English texts of India enact “a certain flattening out of the complicated and conflicting contours, the ambiguous and shifting relations that exist between individuals and groups in a plural community.” This is inevitable as “the normal ground conditions of literary production – where a culture and its variations, a language and its dialects, centuries of oral traditions and written literature, all interact 39 to create a new text – do not exist in the case of English in India.” A new generation of writers, conditioned by “metropolitan parameters and agendas,” are under pressure to write in English, thereby partici40 pating in the “erasure of the diversity of India.” Persuasive as some of these points may at first appear, they have provoked a strong response from both critics and literary authors. Among the latter, the most vigorous objections have been articulated by the prominent novelist Vikram Chandra, who attacks what he sees as Mukherjee’s concern for the greater ‘authenticity’ of regional litera41 tures. Such rhetoric, he argues, claims a kind of better knowledge of what is actually Indian and therefore what constitutes appropriate material and forms for the Indian writer. Chandra’s response is entertaining and, it should be said, exaggerated for rhetorical effect. His summary of the criteria used by authenticity critics – whom he provocatively describes in the essay’s subtitle as “cultural commissars” – identifies the decision to write in English as a “betrayal of Indian 38 Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000): 166–86. 39 Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire, 172–73. 40 The Perishable Empire, 179, 181, 197. 41 Vikram Chandra, “The Cult of Authenticity: India’s Cultural Commissars Worship ‘Indianness’ Instead of Art,” Boston Review (February–March 2000): 42–49.

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‘realities’” by those who would court a Western audience, who receive disproportionate financial rewards for their efforts, and who often live abroad and are therefore cut off from the very “Indian realities” they would depict. Regional or bhasha writers then offer a corrective to the miasma of English’s dominance, carrying with them the fresh smell of virtue that, in the literary world, always attaches itself to neglect and 42 comparatively poor financial rewards. Polemicism notwithstanding, Chandra does make some effective forays against the promotion of regional languages as occupying a purer and non-hierarchical space suggested by Mukherjee, as when he comments: The attempt to locate Indianness in ‘regional writing’ is inevitably problematic, since – in a nation battling numerous secessionist movements – regional specificity is inevitably in conflict with generalised national traits. But ‘regional writing’ is always connected to the soil, to “Real India”. And when it’s opposed to “Indo-Anglian writing”, the term “regional writing” implies that writing in English is not regional, that it’s pan-Indian or, worse, cosmopolitan, belong43 ing to nowhere and everywhere.

Countering this binary opposition, he claims that English is “an inextricable thread” in the texture of everyday life in his home city of Bombay and in India as a whole. Used by many different people in diverse situations, it becomes a kind of lingua franca, capturing experience for the widest possible cross-section of society. Moreover, the Indian novel itself has developed from the interactions between Eastern and Western forms of narrative, and Indian writers have never insulated themselves but have drawn influences from across the entire literary world. Chandra concludes by recommending the same eclecticism to writers today, urging them to shun the “fake” “God of 44 Authenticity.” As regards the present volume, we have sought to trace, as they appear in the texts under discussion, some of the key trends and controversies characterizing the relationship of literature in English and its reception, to national and political discourses in India. This collection, 42

Chandra, “The Cult of Authenticity,”45–47. “The Cult of Authenticity,” 45. 44 “The Cult of Authenticity,” 49. 43

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which is indeed overwhelmingly from writing in the English language, is thereby inevitable partial and limited. However, the selection merely reflects the interests of a particular group of literary and cultural critics as they have responded to a suggested set of issues, and is in no way based on any dubious Rushdiean conviction that the most important writing from India is necessarily in English. Nevertheless, we consider that there are certain representative moves in the debate over authority and national identity which one can trace using Indian-English fiction as a template. Latterly, the question of who speaks for India has been viewed in some quarters in terms of the fetishized status in the West of writings from the Indian diaspora. The work of writers who have chosen to remain within the subcontinent is overlooked in favour of a privileged migrant aesthetic which casts a cold and sometimes critical eye over India’s recent past and contemporary predicament. Such arguments depend on a particular, yet broadly convincing, understanding of the process of production and dissemination of South Asian literature in the West. The argument runs that Western publishers and critics, versed in a bourgeois, discourse-oriented radicalism, are guilty of setting an agenda wherein the preoccupations of diaspora writing are inflated to occupy the whole of the available market space of writing from India. Such an argument endorses, and to a certain extent operates within, postcolonial definitions of an omnipotent Centre enjoying the privileges concomitant with the power to represent its ‘exotic’ Other, and that Other itself: in this case, India, which is once more the silent object of discourse – spoken of and spoken for – despite the provenance of the writers themselves. However, it could be argued that to interpret the centre–margin dynamic in this way alone is to ignore, or at least displace, the effects of other sorts of political inequality ‘on the ground’, so to speak, in an India increasingly shaping itself in the image of a Hindu majoritarian conception of national identity. In its understandable and necessary concern for the legacies of the European empires, postcolonial criticism and theory has been in danger of ignoring – and certainly under-theorizing – hegemonic and sometimes directly aggressive modes of fashioning national identity in the former colonial space, in both their manifestations as extensions of colonial expediencies such as ‘divide and rule’, and as more organic transformations of the contemporary body politic. In other words, the great

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centre–periphery divide usually identified in relation to the European imperial powers and their former colonies may have to be reconfigured when analysing the internal political dynamic of postcolonial nations. Those at the centre and those on the margins of such units offer very different views of postcoloniality. Of course, anxieties about the power to define and control representations of ‘Indianness’ dovetail neatly with the broader political terrain charted earlier. One example is in the manner in which the Indian state, and the political and intellectual elite, have shown a marked sensitivity about writers of the diaspora - responding with hostility, at different times, to the writing of both Naipaul and Rushdie, among others. According to Amitav Ghosh, in a measured and perceptive essay entitled “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” which moves beyond commonplace uses and abuses of the terms ‘nation’ and ‘culture’, this sensitivity is not merely a colonial hangover. Rather, in an ingenious thesis, he suggests it has to do with the adaptability which Indians have shown as they have migrated across the world, and their flexibility as they have come into contact with different cultures, an 45 attribute he describes as “the process of adaptation to heteroglossia,” surely an antidote to any pathological attachment to boundaries and notions of purity. Describing the relationship between India and its diaspora as “an epic without a text,” Ghosh concludes that “the links between India and her diaspora are lived within the imagination. It is because this relationship is so much a relationship of the imagination that the specialists of the imagination – writers – play so important a 46 part in it.” The diaspora holds up a mirror to modern India, or, in the psychoanalytic terms preferred by Vijay Mishra: “Diasporic discourse of the homeland is […] a kind of return of the repressed for the nationstate itself, its pre-symbolic (imaginary) narrative, in which one sees a 47 more primitive theorisation of the nation itself.” Of course, the question of point of view is crucial in all this: the point of view of the writer; of the reader; and of those in charge of the process of dissemination by 45

Amitav Ghosh, “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” Public Culture 2.1 (Fall 1989): 75. 46 Ghosh, “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” 76. 47 Vijay Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorising the Indian Diaspora,” Textual Practice 10.3 (1996): 424.

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which these perspectives are brought together to form, albeit contingently, the meaning of a given text. The authors of the essays in the present volume have brought a variety of approaches to bear on a number of texts articulating aspects of Indian experience in the modern era. Providing an informative historical lineage, Anshuman A. Mondal traces the concept of religious rights and freedom back to its roots in the political framework set in place by British colonialism. He suggests that those nationalists who grew up under empire – even the secularists among them, such as Nehru – accepted the confluence of religious and political interests: “the idioms of liberal constitutionalism were imbricated with those of dharma and the shastras.” What developed was an idea of homogeneous religious communities – ‘Hindu’/ ‘Muslim’ – more manageable for the nationalist programme than the messy heterogeneity of actual customs and practices. Subsequent problems stem from the state’s vacillating position both ‘above’ religion and also intervening at the level of religious communities to safeguard minority rights. Thus, what Mondal describes as “the limits of secularism” are set by the discrepancy and the strategic accommodations between the requirements of constructing a composite Indian nationalism on the one hand and, on the other, by the pull of a concept of community defined by religion. To illustrate this, he examines key texts by the early twentieth-century nationalist thinker Bipinchandra Pal, which attempt to draw together India’s different communities to create a national consciousness which could lead the way to independence, but which, in their deployment of language and metaphor, nevertheless betray their communalist and race-based coordinates. Alex Tickell’s essay also excavates the historical foundations of Indian nationalism, but does so with reference to the politics of the early novel in English. For Tickell, the formal connections that have been made between the nationalist prose-works of political leaders such as Nehru and Indian-English fictions written during the 1930s and 40s obscure the way in which, in its earlier incarnations, the Indian novel in English articulated a primordialist imagining that drew on the thinking of Hindu reformers and intellectuals such as Dayananda Saraswati and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, and was also indebted to European racetheory and imperialist discourses of degeneration. Forms of primordialist nationalism, coupled with an interest in the formation of new

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communally defined elites, were, argues Tickell, integral to the “national imaginings” of Indian novels in English published before 1910. Central to this critical analysis is an awareness of the cosmopolitan, transacted nature of Indian nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century, and the importance of alternative models of martial nationhood and pan-Asiatic alliance provided by a rapidly industrialized Japan. These issues lead to a consideration of the impact of the spectacle of imperial defeat (in conflicts such as the Russo-Japanese War) on early Indian nationalism, and prompt a reconsideration of the roots of Nehru’s historical ‘discovery’ of a secular identity for India’s masses. Train to Pakistan, by the Sikh writer Khushwant Singh, is a seminal Partition novel often praised for its objective realism. Reading against the grain, Ralph Crane finds instead a ‘religious/communal’ bias and a preoccupation with gendering which works toward the inscription of a Sikh rather than a Hindu India. The communitarian vision he uncovers challenges the idea of a homogenized post-Independence nation, even as it enacts the expulsion of the troubling Muslim element in the name of national unity. It is figured through an appropriation of colonial gender binaries whereby the Sikhs are depicted as masculine – and thereby fit to assume the mantle cast off by the departing British – while Hindu characters are weak, cowardly and, thus, feminized. In this way, a challenge is posed to the Hindu right to inherit the postcolonial nation. In Singh’s novel, characters act as symbols of their respective communities, so that the aggressive love-making by which the Sikh Juggut Singh impregnates the Muslim girl Nooran enciphers the power of one group over the other in a text organized through phallic symbolism and castration imagery. For Ashok Bery, the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, although rarely directly political, can be read as an aesthetic counterpart to models of Indian identity, especially when we realize that Ramanujan’s creative investment in cultural interaction and reflexivity involves an awareness of order and dispersal. His verse, argues Bery, “enacts an aesthetic of the fragment, while at the same time acknowledging the aspiration to unity.” Bery traces this double movement on a thematic level; in Ramanujan’s preoccupation with the chaotic relativism of history; and in terms of his use of form, which depends on dialogic linguistic collage and structures that contradict or disrupt their own order. What stands out in Bery’s attentive reading is the way Ramanujan’s poems always

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refuse easy answers about cultural, political or even creative origins, and recognize but resist the attractions of what their author, rephrasing Bakhtin, termed “the well-rounded, finalized, systematically monologic whole.” As Bery suggests, in the political context of Hindu nationalism, these aesthetic questions take on an added urgency. In Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies, the subject of Shirley Chew’s essay, the impact of communal violence and its effects is felt on a personal and familial level. Tracing the “dynamics of the acts of recall,” Chew shows how forms of autobiography and bildung in Deshpande’s novel evolve into a sophisticated meditation on the problems of remembering and, in the aftermath of trauma, recuperating the self. The trauma faced by Deshpande’s protagonist, Madhu, is the death of her son in the communal bombings that shook Bombay in the months following the destruction of the Ayodhya Babri Masjid in 1992. For Chew, Madhu’s attempt to heal herself by working on the autobiography of Savitribai Indorekar, a famous classical singer, involves her in a journey into her own past, made possible by the human interactions and cultural rituals of her new life in the town of Bhavanipur. Here, “Madhu learns to grow again into a circle of companionship” in which her own memories and beliefs are reviewed in the light of Savitribai’s memoir. Simultaneously, Bhavanipur becomes a highly symbolic space in Deshpande’s text, as a locus for Gwalior Gharana, and therefore a place of (Hindu) cultural “becoming and […] realization in multiple forms.” Juxtaposed against this symbolic artistic site is Bombay, a city irrevocably altered by communal violence, and yet also a space that resists fixity and easy retrospective interpretation. Returning from Bhavanipur, Madhu realizes that her nostalgic vision of ‘pre-communal’ Bombay is only a partial, middle-class perspective, and thus, as Chew argues, her search for meaning in the present becomes a fascinating recognition of an interconnected human investment in subjective pasts, each of which promises a radically dialogic ‘remaking’ in the face of an aggressive, exclusive communal version of history. While Shirley Chew shows how self-recovery in the aftermath of communal violence involves the reflective tracing of Madhu’s connections with other women’s memories in Deshpande’s novel, Elleke Boehmer focuses on the erotic, self-fulfilling relationships between women in Manju Kapu’s fiction, and asks whether, in these writings, “the nation has not paradoxically come into use as a refuge and site of

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sisterly, even homoerotic resistance – a resistance not only to global market forces from without but to religious fundamentalism from within?” This argument is particularly timely because it reveals the limits of postcolonial critical approaches that treat contemporary nationalism as a negative, homogenizing and largely oppressive construct, and fail to acknowledge its potential for participatory agency and positive self-representation. In her balanced reading of Difficult Daughters and A Married Woman, Boehmer argues that Kapur has shifted her focus in her latest work, identifying the erotic self-awakening of her protagonists with the national, secular values that Hindu fundamentalism proscribes. However, Boehmer also suggests that the rise of fundamentalist politics in India has exposed a ‘lack’ in the Nehruvian narrative of secular state-nationalism “with its rationalist emphases on self-determination and democratic rights.” This is a lack that Kapur’s A Married Woman addresses through an alternative, highly subversive homoerotic plot that pushes the conventional sites and figures of cultural nationalism – the home, the mother, domestic space – “beyond their convention meanings into both radical and taboo areas.” In doing so, Boehmer shows how Kapur’s novel cooperates “in unlikely ways with an edgy – sceptical yet emotive – narrative in defence of the secular nation.” Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters, examined in Peter Morey’s essay, is a novelistic analysis of the pervasiveness of personal and political corruption in the Bombay of the 1990s. Amid a landscape where communalist thugs intimidate minorities and those who resist their programme of aggressive hinduization, the Chenoy family struggle with the financial and emotional responsibility of caring for an aged and infirm relative while also attempting to maintain the long and, it is suggested, burdensome Parsi legacy for scrupulous probity in public life. Mistry’s characters are repeatedly exposed to situations where they have to make choices that may compromise their personal integrity and besmirch the minority community of which they are a part: should they use personal influence dishonestly to achieve professional advancement; is it fair to use other family members to take revenge on a stepfather one blames for the demise of a beloved mother; can it ever be right to betray the trust of employers or teachers? The choices they make are always born of necessity, yet each carries with it unforeseen consequences. The painful and sometimes tragic cost of the characters’

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actions is explored in a text concerned with cause and effect, duty and will, and one that draws on the traditions both of post-Enlightenment ethical philosophy and of the moral strictures of Zoroastrianism to make connections between the small compromises that resonate in the domestic sphere and those larger betrayals through which civic politics has become a byword for corruption and communalism. In “The Routes of National Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines,” Sujala Singh investigates the use of meta-narrative strategies and techniques of reportage that deconstruct national histories and territories in Ghosh’s novel. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between “strategic” and “tactical” forms of narrative power, Singh argues that Ghosh’s novel can be read as a tactical narrative “utilization of different temporalities to undermine the strategic spatial delimitations that ‘public’ histories of the subcontinent have instituted.” Throughout the text other forms of resistant historiography are developed in the narrator’s ironic recollection of discrepant memories, the concentration on peripheral details and the continuous challenge to the ‘naturalness’ of national-historical narratives of belonging. For Singh, Ghosh’s novel is all the more effective because it engages with the ideologically managed silences at the heart of national or communal identities: “In a text that is permeated with spatio-temporal displacements, such silences act out the demarcation of a domain of intelligibility; they articulate the boundaries of ‘non-sense’ in order to allow a space in which to articulate ‘sense’.” It is in the play of silences in Ghosh’s novel that the violent ruptures of historical events such as Partition are, for Singh, most clearly articulated. Amina Yaqin reads Anita Desai’s novel In Custody as an exploration of “the communalization and disintegration of the Urdu language in post-Partition India.” In this novel, Urdu is synonymous with a nostalgic vision of a past that was lost forever in 1947. The migration of Muslims to Pakistan, the view of Urdu as a Muslim language and the hegemony of Hindi in the postcolonial era have all contributed to its marginalization. Yaqin offers us a brief history of Urdu as a lingua franca in northern India – and as a mother tongue in Uttar Pradesh – and its longstanding rivalry with Hindi, latterly given the status of the ‘official language’ of India. In Desai’s novel, the fate of Urdu is crystallized through repeated images of breakdown, decline and death, and comes to be located in the experiences of the central protagonist,

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Deven, a downtrodden Hindi lecturer and acolyte of the venerated Urdu poet Nur. Eschewing the political radicalism of his apparent model in real life, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in Desai’s narrative Nur’s ailing body and crumbling abode enshrine the Urdu tradition’s grand aristocratic past and decaying present. Ultimately, argues Yaqin, Desai’s view concedes too much to a communal reading of language in India, and retains the notion of Urdu as wedded to “the culture of a premodern past which rejects the values of an evolving modern present.” Sharmila Sen looks at the prevalent theme of the Indo-Pakistan border in recent Bombay films by the directors J.P. Dutta, Randhir Kapoor, Maniratnam and others. Here the image of the borderline is used in terms both of topography and location and of the symbolically freighted relationships of the films’ central protagonists. Sen argues that films such as Dil Se, Henna, LOC and Fiza construct for the viewer a shifting, troubled position, recalling Amitav Ghosh’s idea of a “looking-glass border,” separating but at the same time binding together the two nations of India and Pakistan. The plots of these films focus on transgressive, cross-border love, but their often overt nationalistic loading is undercut by the fluidity of the physical and psychical borders they depict, in ways that call into question jingoistic messages about India and Pakistan as irreconcilable opposites. In fact, the films allow for the articulation of a variety of possible positions in relation to the homeland, from defender through refugee to secessionist terrorist. Sen ties this recent spate of border films to the longer tradition of Bollywood productions – especially in their re-articulation of certain gender tropes – concluding that “such nostalgic consumptions of the nation’s internal other at the borderland only serves as a reminder that the line between home and elsewhere is irreducibly built upon internal lines of difference.” Thus, it is clear that the present situation with regard to language, literature and, more generally, culture in India has grown from a series of historically specific accommodations, concessions and self-assertions. The texts under scrutiny do not merely replicate or reflect a set of political realities. Rather, they are engaged in an aesthetic dialogue with these factors as they interact with the fictive experiences of people and places. Sometimes these people and places may stand for a larger whole: community, ethnicity, gender. Yet what distinguishes them as products of the creative imagination is their ability to bring into relief,

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albeit temporarily, the many and varied life-worlds that make up any imagined community. Of course, instances such as those examined here can only ever be symptomatic. Ultimately, one’s experience of engaging with the enormous diversity of Indian fictions in English is that some acknowledgement of social and cultural heterogeneity and polyphony is inherent in all such writing – if not consciously, then at least through an inevitable process of historical accretion. Truly, no single narrative is adequate to the task of ‘writing India’, but all may contribute to the possibility of understanding this variety more fully. PETER MOREY AND ALEX TICKELL

WORKS CITED Ahmad, Aijaz. Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika, 1996). Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Bhatt, Chetan. Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2001). Chandra, Vikram. “The Cult of Authenticity: India’s Cultural Commissars Worship ‘Indianness’ Instead of Art,” Boston Review (February–March 2000): 42–49. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1993). Chatterjee, Partha. “Secularism and Toleration,” Economic and Political Weekly 29.28 (9 July 1994): 1768–77. Chaudhuri, Amit, ed. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 2001). Corbridge, Stuart, & John Harriss. Reinventing India: Liberalism, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). Crane Ralph J., & Radhika Mohanram, ed. Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent (Cross/Cultures 42; Amsterdam & Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000). Delhi Historians Group. Communalisation of Education: The History Textbooks Controversy (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2001). Ghosh, Amitav. “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” Public Culture 2.1 (Fall 1989): 73–78. Gopal, Sarvepalli, ed. Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India (London: Zed, 1993). Kesavan, Mukul. Secular Common Sense (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001). Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997).

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Kumar, Amitava. “A Nation of Converts,” Race and Class 43.4 (2002): 57–72. Madan, T.N. Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998). Madan, T.N. “Secularism in its Place,” Journal of Asian Studies 46.4 (1987): 746–58. Mishra, Vijay. “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorising the Indian Diaspora,” Textual Practice 10.3 (1996): 421–27. Mukherjee, Aditya. “Colonialism and Communalism,” in Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal (London: Zed, 1993). Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000). Nandy, Ashis. An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2001). Nandy, Ashis. “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto,” Seminar 314 (October 1985): 14–24. Nandy, Ashis. “A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods and Goddesses of South Asia,” Postcolonial Studies 4.2 (July 2001): 125–42. Pandey, Gyanendra. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial Northern India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1990). Patel, Sujata, & Alice Thorner, ed. Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1996). Roy, Arundhati. The Algebra of Infinite Justice (London: HarperCollins, 2002). Rushdie, Salman, & Elizabeth West, ed. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947–1987 (London: Vintage, 1997). Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1992). Veer, Peter van der, & Hartmut Lehmann, ed. Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999). Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India (Oxford: Oxford U P , 5th ed. 1997).

The Limits of Secularism and the Construction of Composite National Identity in India A NSHUMAN A. M ONDAL

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N H I S D I S C U S S I O N of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s formulation of a “new national religion” that would demonstrate the “autonomous subjectivity of the nation,” Partha Chatterjee goes on to ask a question that has recently assumed much greater urgency now that the forces of Hindutva have not only challenged the ‘secular’ Indian state but found themselves comfortably embedded at the centre of the all-India political arena. He says, “Why this new national religion had to be based on a purified ‘Hindu’ ideal is, of course, an interesting question and one that has embarrassed secular nationalists in the 20th century who have given Bankim an important place in the pantheon of nationalist heroes.”1 One might add that Bankim is not the only member of this “pantheon” to have lately found himself scrutinized over this point: Gandhi, Tilak, Aurobindo, Bipinchandra Pal, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Lajpat Rai and even Subhas Chandra Bose, to name but a few, are liable to find themselves in the dock as historians revisit the dynamics that have led to the stabilization of Hindu nationalism as a political force in India. As it has become increasingly evident that

1

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1986): 75.

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the binary opposition between nationalism (secular, good) and communalism (primordial, atavistic, bad) can no longer be sustained, so it has become progressively important to interrogate the ideological limits of nationalist discourse in India in order to identify those symptomatic points at which Indian nationalism seems to carry within it the implication that it was in effect equivalent to ‘Hindu’ nationalism. Chatterjee, however, quietly sidesteps the issue by resorting to the same assumption that has become a familiar mantra within the discourse of Hindutva ideologues: namely, that “for India as a whole, the majority of people could be said to have practised some form or other of Hinduism.” This, in itself, is not unreasonable, but he goes on to state that the national cultural project was not only to define a distinct cultural identity for the nation [...] it was also to find a viable cultural basis for the convergence of the national and the popular. In the Indian case, unlike many countries in central and southern Europe, neither language nor racial distinctiveness was a suitable criterion for defining national solidarity.2

In other words, the deployment of religion becomes an ideological necessity for the purposes of mobilization in an age of ‘mass’ politics. However, ‘mass’ politics and Indian nationalism could not seriously have been spoken of in the same breath until the rise of Gandhi so the articulation of ‘Hinduness’ as the basis for ‘popular’ identity remains at the level of representation only. Given this, it is unclear why it should be seen as an ideological necessity. Moreover, given that in India concepts of racial distinction and language did intersect with those of nationality, the question remains as to why, at the level of representation, such ideas were employed to bolster religious identities as opposed to more secular ones.3 2

Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 75. See The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1995). Though it is well-known that language became an increasingly ‘live’ issue for nationalists from the 1920s, it was nevertheless a significant dimension to nationalist debate in the late nineteenth century. The modernization of Indian vernaculars was both an indicator of and a spur to the production of 3

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Gyanendra Pandey has attempted to answer precisely this point within the framework of a general speculation about nationalist discourse per se. He suggests that nationalism has everywhere had a deeply divided relation to ‘community’ [...] On the one hand, nationalism must speak the language of rationality, of the equality of individuals [...] on the other it needs the language of blood and sacrifice, of historical necessity, of ancient (God-given) status and attributes – which is part of the discourse of community.4

For Pandey, then, it is this “deeply divided relation” within nationalism “everywhere” which is responsible for the historical equivalence of Indian nationalism with ‘Hindu’ nationalism. In turn, this dialectically produces a ‘Muslim’ nationalism, which in turn sets up the dynamics of communalism – which only becomes ‘communalism’ as such when theorized by a “refurbished nationalism” as being Indian nationalism’s irreconcilable opponent.5 At the heart of this argument lies a series of assumptions concerning the relationship between nationalism and cultural essentialism. Once again, however, this cannot in itself explain why the “discourse of community” in India took the forms it did – namely, religious forms – when the “discourse of community” in other nationalisms, which were equally essentialist, adopted more ‘cultural’ and secular idioms. Nor does it explain why ‘secular’ nationalists in India so unproblematically assumed that ‘community’ in India should be seen in terms of either ‘nation’ or ‘religion’. Overlooking the possibility that there might indeed be forms of community that are neither suggests that these ‘secular–liberal’ nationalists were themselves afflicted by the blind spot in Indian nationalist discourse that they avowedly eschewed. Even the most secular of them, Jawaharnationalist discourses. See Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and 19th Century Banaras (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1997); Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in 19th Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989). 4 Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1990): 209. 5 Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 233–61.

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lal Nehru, assumes that ‘syncretism’ in India involves the blending of religious communities. This implies ‘units’ that are distinct prior to their syncretization. These units are seen, unselfconsciously, as being religious in nature.6 In effect, the secular–liberal nationalists failed to alter the terms of reference whereby ‘community’ automatically refers to ‘religious community’, and ‘communalism’ to ‘religious politics’.7 All of this suggests that secularism and secularization, and their limitations in colonial and postcolonial India, are of determinate importance in assessing the current political situation in India. The terms themselves are ambiguous and complex and have developed specific meanings in India that differ somewhat from their connotations in Europe and America.8 Indeed, part of the ‘problem’, politically speaking, of communalism in contemporary India, and at least a portion of the difficulty in combating it, lies in the constellation of meanings through which this struggle is conducted.9 In particular, the assumption that ‘secularism’ in India refers only to the relationship of religious communities to the state has determined both the formulation of communal ideologies and the responses of their opponents. Hindu nationalists have in recent years successfully identified the supposed appeasement of minorities by the state as the basis for their ideological campaign to ‘desecularize’ 6

See his The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1946). Although in the brief section entitled “The Variety and Unity of India” he refers to regional identities, the book as a whole is structured with reference to the cultural influences upon Indian civilization by its major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. Interestingly, the trope of “unity in diversity” which Nehru employs is echoed in the writings of some of the members of the Hindu Mahasabha, a communalist organization. See John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000): 118. 7 The term has thus acquired a special sense with respect to India over and above that to which it refers in general. Generally speaking, communalism indicates any form of communal organization, identification or practice. In India, however, it has been sutured specifically to religion. 8 For a full and penetrative discussion, see Achin Vanaik, “Religion, Modernity, Secularization,” in The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity, and Secularization (London: Verso, 1997): 65–129. 9 See Secularism and its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000).

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it (and the Indian constitution) so as to reconstitute India as a ‘Hindu’ nation. Paradoxically, using the language of majoritarianism as a basis for their concept of a ‘Hindu’ India while also suggesting that this self-same majority is constantly under threat because of the actions of the state, Hindu nationalists have in the process redefined ‘secularism’ as tolerance, of which Hinduism is the supposed exemplar.10 On the other hand, the defenders of Indian secularism have themselves concentrated on “strengthening the secular nature of the state, supplemented perhaps by mass ideological campaigns in support of a secular interpretation of Indian nationalism.”11 As we shall see, this strategy is misguided, because, first, the real battle over secularism needs to be fought not with respect to the state but within civil society12 and, second, because Indian nationalism has throughout its history been either covertly or overtly associated with a ‘Hindu’ majoritarianism that is far from secular.

In the course of what follows, it will be argued that the implicit equivalence of Indian nationalism with Hindu nationalism is the consequence of what I have termed the “limits of secularism” in India. It has created an ideological cavity throughout the career of nationalism in India into which much bad blood has flowed. However, the limitations of secularism and secularization were themselves the consequence of a complex and multi-dimensional historical process encompassing Indian society’s encounter with modernity. A number of points suggest themselves immediately. First, it is clear that one of the most significant effects of colonial policy was to 10

For a detailed critique of the more intellectualist arguments of ‘anti-secularists’ who are nevertheless opposed to Hindu nationalism, see Vanaik, “Communalism, Hindutva, Anti-Secularists: The Conceptual Battleground,” in The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity, and Secularization (London: Verso, 1997): 130–233. Among the anti-secularists, Vanaik cites T.N. Madan, Bikhu Parekh, Ashis Nandy and, lately, Partha Chatterjee. 11 Vanaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism, 52. 12 The Furies of Indian Communalism, 5.

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determine the basis of political legitimacy in the subcontinent. As Judith Brown puts it, the way the British saw Indian society, particularly in assessing what were legitimate interests meriting representation, was a crucial influence on Indian responses to the imperial order [...] Imperial structures and categories not only influenced Indian responses to their rulers, but became a significant factor in Indians’ relationships with one another.13

In particular, the relationship of the post-Company colonial state to society had a decisive impact on the formulation of the parameters of political engagement. John Zavos has suggested that although Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858 established a principle of neutrality with respect to religion in India and established the right of religious freedom, this right was itself conceptualized as the legitimate basis for the representation of political interests within the field of colonial politics. He also states that “the reason for the prominence of religion can be explained through British preoccupations in the wake of the 1857 Rebellion, and through the underlying assumption that religion, degenerate though it may be, was the motor force of Indian civilization and social relations.”14 This doubleness in the colonial state’s attitude towards its relationship to religion would be reflected back by the generation of Indian politicians whose careers were moulded by the expectations it set out, so that religious interests were merged with political ones, and the idioms of liberal constitutionalism were imbricated with those of dharma and the shastras.15 Related to this was the accumulation of a considerable body of colonial knowledge, the purpose of which was to justify the assumptions of colonial discourse, and to deliver its 13

Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 1994): 151; see also Anil Seal, “Imperialism and Nationalism in India,” in Locality, Province and Nation, ed. John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson & Anil Seal (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1973): 15. 14 Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism, 36. 15 Exemplary in this respect was Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The same was true, of course, for other religions as is evidenced by the work of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.

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categories as empirical realities.16 In the process, colonial prejudices vis-à-vis what constituted ‘community’, ‘religion’, ‘caste’ and so on came to acquire the mark of finality as both sides of the colonial divide came to see these categories as ‘objective’, ‘real’, fixed and ‘immemorial’.17 The result was the ‘construction’ of ‘singular’ religious communities out of the seemingly incomprehensible mass of locally practised cults and minor religions.18 All of this contributed to ‘Hinduism’, and later ‘Islam’, acquiring something like the homogeneity that could be claimed as a legitimate basis for national unity. Moreover, it is also clear that since ‘Hindus’ took up the opportunity of Western education in much greater numbers than Muslims, their greater participation in the field of constitutional politics meant that not only would they begin to see themselves as ‘Hindus’ representing the political rights of the ‘Hindu’ community, but also that that community would come to be seen as politically the most important.19 However, all of these factors not only contributed to but also worked in relation to certain limitations in thinking about the 16

On the codification of Hindu and Muslim personal laws, for example, see Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995): 12–15. See also J.D.M. Derrett, Religion, Law and the State in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1968). 17 Pandey traces this in some detail in his Construction of Communalism. See especially the Introduction and Chapter 1, “The Colonial Construction of the Indian Past.” 18 The imposition of colonial knowledge here was by no means a straightforward process and, indeed, was fraught with difficulty and uncertainty. This was particularly true in the compilation of the census which caused colonial administrators and ethnographers severe problems, especially in relation to ‘placing’ certain tribes and castes against their ‘religion’. See Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism, 74–76, 107–11. 19 The numbers game again. Zavos has many interesting things to say about the impact of colonial policies and the census on the formulation of majoritarian idioms. For instance, “By quantifying caste and religious communities, the census inevitably placed the emphasis on numerical size as a means of assessing political importance.” And later, “Progressively in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea that numbers, demographic majorities and minorities were directly related to power in the colonial polity was becoming embedded as a feature of Hindu consciousness in the public space”; The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism, 76, 107.

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‘secular’ and the concept of secularism. As has been pointed out, in India secularism has been narrowly defined in terms of the relation of religious communities to the state. This qualification – that is, that Indian secularism is not concerned with the relation between religion and the state per se, but rather of religious communities – is important because, in India, the semantics of secularism, and of the debate that surrounds it, is deeply enmeshed with discourses of community, as opposed to forms of secularism in western Europe and America which have been articulated by liberalism. Broadly speaking, secularism in India revolves around the crucial question of whether the state should stand above India’s religious communities or should in fact represent India’s religious diversity so that the state formally embodies the nation’s plurality. In fact, it does neither because it does both. Constitutionally, the state stands above and beyond all religious communities in a position of secular neutrality; on the other hand, it has throughout its career involved itself in the active management of community relations by not only safeguarding minority communities through separate electorates, but also reserved quotas for government appointments, resource distribution and the recognition of special legal provisions for Muslims with respect to personal law. It is this ambiguity in the form and function of the state that has opened the front that Hindutva has so effectively exploited. For if secularists wish the state to operate above and beyond all religious communities, they also know it cannot do so, because national identity, and therefore the character of the state, has throughout the career of the Indian nation been articulated by the discourse of religious community. To advocate absolute state neutrality would be to remove the hand of the state as a regulatory mechanism that functions to maintain relative equality in civil society in a situation where the principle of equality is framed in terms of relations between communities and not between individual citizens. As a consequence, if the state must at least partly ‘embody’ the diversity within the nation while formally maintaining its distance, the Hindu majoritarian argument seizes on this paradox and argues instead that the state should go the whole way and abandon any pretence at neutrality; rather, state and society should coincide, resulting of course in a Hindu state.

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If it is one of the purposes of this essay to trace a genealogy of this situation back to mainstream nationalism and its supposedly secular variants, one must acknowledge that the grammar of politics in India has been communal even when its syntax has been secular. In other words, the limits of secularism in mainstream Indian politics have evolved historically in a way quite different from its development in western Europe. While it must be admitted that, even in Europe and America, secularism can be defined narrowly as the separation of church and state, this definition coexists, in the literature on secularism and secularization, with two others. The first of these locates secularism within the history of ideas, as a transformation of European thought; the second, more properly referred to as secularization, refers to a transformation in society, which involves a decline in religion as a principle of social life. Although often treated separately as a result of disciplinary exclusions, if taken together these three definitions of secularism in Europe symptomatically encompass the political, the social and the intellectual aspects of historical development in Europe, such that secularism can be seen as an experiential concept that infuses the individual subject’s existence.20 In India, however, secularism as a concept remains confined to politics, and politics alone. As Achin Vanaik has argued, while the debate about the secularization or otherwise of state is consuming the minds of political leaders, journalists and activists, not much thought has been given to the secularization of civil society and consciousness.21 Indian secularism has never separated religion from the state based upon a liberal view of religion as a matter of individual faith. Instead, it has always been communitarian and pluralist rather than individualist and liberal. Accordingly, there was no consequent separation of the “private world of ‘meaning’” – where religion may remain the dominant organizing principle – from “the public arena of ‘legitimacy’” – where it may not.22 20 A history of secularism which encompasses all of these dimensions is yet to be written. However, a notable recent contribution to the theorization of secularism is Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2003). 21 Achin Vanaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism, 54. 22 Vanaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism, 33.

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Indian secularism was thus determined by this limit. The modes of thought which perceived and categorized the world, and identified material interests, remained rooted in a concept of ‘community’ defined religiously – a state of things which, as we have seen, the British did little to change, and in fact actively encouraged. It was this kind of secularism that determined the character of Indian nationalism from its very inception. As Bipinchandra Pal said later, while discoursing on the importance of history to a nationalist, “Indian history is the record of the dealings of God with the Indian people. It is no profane or secular book.”23 Effectively a theory of popular sovereignty, this illustrates how Indian nationalism has been articulated in religious rather than secular idioms. The most profound consequence of all this has been that, even at its most tolerant, Indian nationalism articulated visions of nationhood that were implicitly communalist in structure and specifically Hindu majoritarian in emphasis. The discursive trope where this becomes most apparent is the one that is still cited by scholars as representing the polar opposite of Hindu nationalist ideology: the composite concept of nationhood.24

The origins of the ‘composite’ concept of Indian nationhood lay in the intense ideological struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘conser23

Bipinchandra Pal, The New Spirit: A Selection from the Writings and Speeches of Bipin Chandra Pal on Social, Political and Religious Subjects (Calcutta: Sarvadhikari, 1907): 95 (my emphasis). 24 This is where I differ from John Zavos’s otherwise excellent analysis of the emergence of Hindu nationalism. He says that Hindu nationalism was “an ideological formation with enough historical and political resonance amongst a certain class of Hindus to challenge the ideology of composite national identity propagated by the Indian nationalist leadership” (The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism, 2). The distinction between ‘Indian nationalism’ and ‘Hindu nationalism’ is one that I find problematic. Rather, it is perhaps better to see Hindu nationalism as having a career within Indian nationalist discourse – often within the very mainstream – that only became anathematized in the 1920s, following widespread communal rioting, the formation of the Hindu Mahasabha and R S S , and the rise of the kind of more secular nationalism espoused by young intellectuals such as Nehru.

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vative’ nationalists in the latter decades of the nineteenth century over the definition of ‘India’.25 The idea of India being composed of ‘communities’ that had a prior ontological status reflects both a compromise and a hesitancy over the idea of India itself: compromise insofar as ‘India’, as a ‘community’ that had not existed before, would have to negotiate its own niche in the scale of possible identities with others that possessed some form of existing affective force; hesitancy because this very compromise contained within itself deep uncertainties as to whether India had a prior existence as a nation, or whether it was entirely new, an identity under construction – a thoroughly modern identity. Within the parameters of this particular problematic, the idea of the composite nation began to take shape as a tessellation of various discursive alignments. From the British systems of classifications and prejudices, and Indians’ own self-perceptions as they were moulded by them, the concept drew on notions of existing ‘singular’ religious communities: Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, etc. As Pandey writes, “‘Hindu unity’, like ‘Muslim unity’ appears to be a prerequisite [...] for a larger national unity.”26 It was also comprised of a combination of political, territorial, cultural and civilizational conceptions of the nation, elements which were given different emphasis by ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’. The interest 25 Notable progressives include Surendranath Banerjea, Pherozeshah Mehta, Mahadev Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale; conservatives counted among their number Balgangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo Ghosh, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Lajpat Rai and Bipinchandra Pal. The terms ‘progressives’ and conservatives’ are used in contradistinction to the usual epithets of ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’. Both sets are heuristic constructions, but the former draws attention to the ideological distinctions within Indian nationalism as opposed to the ‘tactical’ differences. While it would be true to say that there is a rough homology between progressives/moderates and conservatives/extremists, the struggle between progressive and conservative ideologies was a contemporaneous one, whereas that between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ was, with the exception of Tilak, based upon a generational difference as younger nationalists became increasingly frustrated with the political methods of an elder generation of politicians. For a fuller explanation of these terms, see Anshuman A. Mondal, Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003). 26 Pandey, The Construction of Communalism, 224.

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of the ‘composite’ concept of Indian nationhood thus lies in its role as a signifier of deeper ideological conflicts within the nationalist movement, conflicts that have had profound effects upon the trajectory of Indian nationalism in the twentieth century. For the ‘progressives’, the dominant emphasis lay on territorial and political conceptions. For them, the nation was predominantly a political unit, and the nation’s unity was based upon a common, modern polity constructed by the British, as stated by Surendranath Banerjea: Here we stand upon a common platform – here we have agreed to bury our social and religious differences, and recognize the one common fact that being subjects of the same Sovereign and living under the same Government and the same political institutions, we have common rights and common grievances.27

This political emphasis required a corresponding emphasis upon territory, so that the nation was increasingly seen in purely geographical terms as a unity of common habitation: “But who constitute the nation? Not surely the Hindus or the Mahomedans alone, but Hindus, Mahomedans, Parsis, Sikhs, Christians – the varied races that inhabit this vast empire.”28 The nuances here are striking and worth reflecting on, particularly the slippage from a liberal and constitutionalist idiom to a communitarian one. More significantly, the communitarian idiom classifies community along religious lines and then, interestingly, conflates religion with ‘race’. The implications of such a conflation will be examined in further detail in due course, but here it is worth remarking upon the coexistence of two supposedly incommensurable idioms within the discourse of a noted ‘moderate’ and manifestly loyalist nationalist. The coexistence can be partly explained by the fact that territory and political commonality was not in itself sufficient to fashion a national identity, and never would be. An exclusive emphasis upon 27 Surendranath Banerjea, “Congress Presidential Address, Poona 1895,” in Speeches and Writings of Hon. Surendranath Banerjea, Selected by Himself (Madras: G.A. Nateson, 1920): 15. 28 Surendranath Banerjea, “An Appeal to the Mahomedan Community,” in Speeches and Writings of Hon. Surendranath Banerjea, Selected by Himself, 265.

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such a basis was constantly open to competing identities, themselves premissed upon other territorial and political units, and the national ‘Self’ could be consistently fractured. Foremost among these were ‘regional’ and ‘provincial’ identities, since the direct political experience of the vast majority of educated Indians lay in the arenas of locality and province. New groups of interests and identity arose from the creation of frameworks of political competition in these arenas.29 Alongside these, and nurtured within the same frameworks, rose cultural identities creating cleavages onto which political identities could be mapped. The linguistic ‘nationalisms’ arising out of the vernacular ‘renaissances’ of the nineteenth century tied together the bonds of ‘regional’ language, culture and tradition, and, along with a “keen appreciation of the changing nature of provincial resources,” meant that a ‘Bengali’ self, a ‘Marathi’ self, a ‘Tamil’ self, and so on, could arise in competition to the ‘Indian’ self.30 And, of course, there were the ever-present tensions caused by religious identities that had become increasingly drawn into the system of political competition. Thus territory, in and of itself, was not sufficient for ‘progressives’ wishing to elaborate an all-Indian political identity which could stand over and above these divisions. What was required was a territorial conception that could be represented as a ‘natural unity’ in which all these competing identities could be subsumed. As each piece of the territorial jigsaw that made up the colonial state in British India fell into place, and as colonial surveys produced more maps, censuses and atlases, and brought more information about the Indian ‘peninsula’ to the attention of Indian nationalists, more emphasis could be placed, with increasing coherence, upon the ‘geographical unity’ of India, which now became the precondition of any ‘cultural’ or civilizational unity.31 29

See Judith Brown, Modern India, 167–76; Anil Seal, “Imperialism and Nationalism in India.” 30 Brown, Modern India, 177. 31 This was precisely the basis of Nehru’s The Discovery of India. For a general account of the history of mapping India, see P.L. Madan, Indian Cartography: A Historical Perspective (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997); for more detail on the practice and politics of British surveys of India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical

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This would prove to be as convenient for the conservatives as it was for the progressives. Their vision of India was grounded in the primacy of its civilizational unity since antiquity, a unity that was by definition based on an ideal Hinduism. This, in effect, meant that for conservatives the nation was equivalent to Hinduism. In addition, ‘culture’ was increasingly being identified with ‘race’ as orientalist scholarship and colonial ethnography began to alter the cognitive frameworks of middle-class Indians.32 Not only were Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Christians and other religious communities excluded from this concept of the nation but, as racial emphases grew, so too were ‘Dravidians’, ‘uncivilized’ tribes such as the Santhals and the Kols or the ‘Assamese’, as well as those linguistic communities whose mother-tongues did not derive from Sanskrit. However, the conservatives were players in a political game in which division was seized upon by the British as evidence of the non-existence, indeed the impossibility, of Indian nationhood. Recognizing the potential political liabilities of their ideology, they supplemented its ‘Hindu’ base with the territorial discourse formulated by the progressives. However, the adoption of the territorial dimension was complicated in conservative ideology by definitions of Indian culture which pre-empted definitions of India’s territory. Here, race once again emerges as the most significant trope. Thus, Hindustan, the Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997). See Susan Gole, A Series of Early Printed Maps of India in Facsimile (New Delhi: Jayaprints, 1980) for a selection of maps from that period and earlier; for a glimpse of native mapping traditions, see her Indian Maps and Plans from Earliest Times to the Advent of European Surveys (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989). See also Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 247, where he suggests that this territorial aspect was advanced by the secular-liberals of the 1920s in opposition to the composite model. Yet it is clear that this territorial emphasis is not at all in opposition to the composite model but rather an integral aspect of it. 32 See The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb, especially: Indira Chowdury–Sengupta, “The Effeminate and the Masculine: Nationalism and the Concept of Race in Bengal,” 282–303; Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Idea of the Hindu Race in the Writings of Hindu Nationalist Ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s: A Concept Between Two Cultures,” 327–54; Peter Robb, “South Asia and the Concept of Race,” 1–76.

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land of the Hindus, coalesced with India or Bharat, and Aryavarta, the land of the Aryans. Yet such a conception confined ‘India’ to northern India or, more precisely, to the Indo-Gangetic plain, described by one conservative nationalist as “bounded on the north by the Himalayas; and on the south by the Vindhyan chain.”33 This effectively excluded south India, parts of the Deccan, the far northeastern stretches of Bengal and Assam, and places associated with the ‘tribals’. Moreover, if the geographical unity of India was, for the ‘progressives’, grounded upon the ‘fit’ between British India and the South Asian peninsula, the ‘conservatives’ faced a problem with the ‘misfit’ between the political geography of the Raj and their concept of the Aryavarta.34 This problem raised its head on two counts. First, because of this ‘misfit’, the majority of nationalists, ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’, lived and originated in the coastal presidencies of Bombay, Madras, and Bengal and not in the Aryavarta. Their own location in ‘India’ was thus outside the ‘India’ they posited as the ‘true’ nation. In effect, their ideology threatened to alienate them from their own nation. Second, the Aryavarta just happened to be the area where the Muslims were, if not always in a majority, the traditionally dominant group. Thus, the very location of ‘essential’ India was also the location most visibly inhabited by people who, according to the ‘conservative’ criteria, were ‘foreigners’. A concept of nationhood was thus required which could neutralize such a possibility, and the composite conception fitted the bill perfectly. Its strength as an ideological concept lay in its ability to accommodate different emphases while also complementing and filling the lacunae in the two competing paradigms. Territorially, it meant that the two geographical areas – the Presidencies and the Aryavarta – could be made to complement one another, and a full territorial conceptualization of all-India could thus emerge while retaining a cultural perspective. Here, conservative nationalists 33

Rajendralala Mitra, Indo-Aryans, vol. 2: 438–39, cited by Chowdury–Sengupta, “The Effeminate and the Masculine,” 296. According to Jaffrelot, Dayananda saw the Aryavarta as covering Punjab, the Doab, and the Ganges Basin (“The Idea of the Hindu Race,” 330). 34 The phrase is Peter Robb’s (“South Asia and the Concept of Race,” 35, fn 57).

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could draw upon a body of knowledge and assumptions to equate Aryavarta with the traditional ‘centre’ or the ‘seat’ of ‘all-India’.35 In other words, India could be seen to spread out from its Aryan (Hindu) ‘heart’ in the Ganges Basin, out towards the extremities of the east (particularly the hilly areas such as Assam, home to many of the problematic ‘tribes’) and the (Dravidian) south. Moreover, if India was now conceived of as a composite of communities, then the territory associated with problematic communities could be easily incorporated while maintaining an emphasis on ‘Hinduism’ as the majority and, therefore, foremost community of the nation. This also had the political advantage of being able to present a unified façade to their colonial opponents, since political alliances with the other communities was not precluded. The ‘composite’ nation became axiomatic within Indian nationalist discourse, surviving to this day as the paramount basis for India’s secular state. It was, however, always already determined by the limits of secularism, so that the ideological work for which it was developed was always the articulation of a ‘tolerant’ idea of India that could accommodate both secular and religious concerns within a political framework in which the two were necessarily imbricated.36 The political idiom that naturally accompanied this vision of national identity was that of majoritarian/minoritarianism. Composite nationalism is the ‘grammar’, as it were, that helps majoritarian/minoritarian politics to make sense. Its mask of tolerance underwrites a chauvinistic logic that can be witnessed in the ‘unconscious’ of Indian nationalist discourse.

A classic enunciation of composite nationalism: Bipinchandra Pal, on the anniversary of the Partition of Bengal, writes: In thy waters, Holy Mother, are mixed the two streams of Aryan and Semitic culture [...] both the Hindus and the Mahomedans have

35

Ronald Inden, Imagining India, 186–87. As suggested above, the Sangh Parivar have in effect returned to this concept of secularism as tolerance. 36

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a common inheritance in art and civilisation [...] resonant with the minstrelsy of two great world-cultures.37

On the face of it, all very inclusive, with its talk of “mixing,” “common inheritance” and “minstrelsy.” Yet it soon becomes apparent that the “two great world-cultures” retain their essential difference. The ‘Aryan’ world-culture is specifically identified, especially through the symbol of the Ganges, with the territory of India, or Aryavarta, while the ‘Semitic’ world-culture, since by definition it cannot share the same territorial origins, must of course be identified with a territory originating outside India. This difference is maintained despite the assertion of commonality, and it can never be overcome, since the two cultures can never share the same territorial foundations. The use of the term ‘Semitic’ is particularly relevant here insofar as it categorically identifies Islam with the Middle East – a ‘world culture’ but one that is ‘foreign’. A week earlier, on 10 October 1906, Pal had written: And in the organisation of this Nation-Day the peculiarities of the genius, the past history, and the ancient culture of the different communities of the Indian people must receive due care and consideration.

Again, a generous statement perhaps. But he goes on: To formulate one set of rituals for all would really be to kill the spirit of these functions [...] The Nation-Idea had a particular line of development [...] in Hindu consciousness; while it followed a different line of evolution in Muslim or Christian history or culture.38

Thus, the historical trajectories of India’s ‘communities’ remain essentially separated; at no stage do they overlap but, rather, evolve in parallel. There do not seem to be any traces of supremacism at this point; though essentially different, none of the communities seem intrinsically superior to the others. Yet the territorial exclusion illustrated 37 38

B.C. Pal, “Ganges Bath,” 16 October 1906, in The New Spirit, 10–11. B.C. Pal, “Rakhi Day,” in The New Spirit, 12.

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above is compounded throughout by a slippage of terms in which ‘Hindu’ becomes equivalent to the ‘nation’. Pal never really considers the other religions to be relevant, except in passing, which results in a cumulative excision of them out of the history of the nation, and a simultaneous colonization of the term ‘nation’ by ‘Hindu’. Thus, the civic religion of modern India cannot do without symbolism, and the functions of Rakhi-Day [...] will be bound to fail to appeal with due force to the Hindu mind [...] some day, the Rakhi Day will, we are sure, be associated among Hindus [...] with worship of the Motherland.39

And: “The one central fact of Indian history [...] is this peculiar Hindu spirit-consciousness.”40 However, it is when Pal’s discourse deploys ideologies of race that it most notably reveals its radical chauvinism and Hindu supremacism. In an essay entitled “Nation-Building,” Pal suffuses his discourse with race metaphors: Every evolution is the evolution of an Idea [...] the regulative Idea of the organism [...] the archetype [...] These regulative ideas constitute the inner principle of differentiation even in the earliest cell formations [...] As it is with individual organisms so it is with races of men [...] All evolution works upon two essential factors, heredity and environment [...] present also in social evolution; and here the two essential factors are race and environments [...] These race characteristics are innate and pre-historic [...] “There is a natural variety of men,” says M. Taine, “...and a race like the old Aryans, scattered from the Ganges as far as the Hebrides [...] manifests in its tongues, religions, literatures, and philosophies the community of blood and intellect which to this day binds its offshoots together” [...] The fundamental differences in the very cast and constitution of the great world-cultures that constitute the new Indian nation, demand that the work of nation-building must be conducted not along one single line, but along five main lines – Hindu, Parsee, Buddhist, Moslem 39 40

Pal, “Rakhi Day,” 13. B.C. Pal, “Nation Building,” in The New Spirit, 99.

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and Christian [...] The Hindu nation-builder shall not seek to superimpose his own ideals upon his Mahomedan brother, nor shall the Mahomedan, Buddhist, or the Christian seek to obliterate the essential characteristics of the Hindu culture and the Hindu race.41

The final separation is significant here, for it implies that there is a biological Hindu race which in turn produces a Hindu culture. Cultures, here realized in religious terms, are racially determined, and therefore have a biological origin. We can return profitably to the territorial exclusion of the ‘Semitic’ culture of Islam from India and note that Pal locks onto racial as well as religious cleavages which in turn operate vis-à-vis colonial ideology. For the legitimacy of the Indian (Hindu) nation is premissed upon the racial commonality between the ‘Hindu’ and the Briton. The relationship, it is suggested, is one of racial equality, and should thus be one of political equality as well. The Muslim, however, cannot claim this equal parentage and is consequently excluded from the circle of racial equality which is the basis for the legitimacy of the Indian nation; conversely, the Muslim is therefore not a legitimate or equal part of the nation. The identification of ‘Muslim’ with ‘Semitic’ also attaches itself to and addresses European antisemitic prejudices. The effect is to build up a racial hierarchy in which Englishmen, Aryans and Hindus are superior to Muslims and Jews. This implicitly deconstructs the apparent inclusiveness of the composite nation, for if Muslims are racially inferior, then genuinely to include them in the Indian nation would be to compromise the imagined parity of India and England. (But one notes a contradiction: the Aryan ‘commonality’ between the colonialist and the Hindu is offset by their religious ‘difference’ – Hinduism versus Christianity – ironically, a Semitic religion. Hence, if race, culture and religion are intrinsically associated with each other, one of these assertions must be wrong for the other to be valid. No matter; the Semite remains at the bottom of the ladder regardless.) Pal’s discourse is suffused with the term ‘race’, and though its significations are usually connoted with ‘culture’, he uses it often in a biological sense, using metaphors of ‘blood’. Here, however, the potent metaphor prefigures the concep41

“Nation Building,” 100–102 (my emphases).

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tual matrix of nation (as territory), biological race and culture/ civilization (“environments” includes both what he terms “physical environments” – territory, Bharat, mother/ fatherland – and “social environments”: i.e. culture and civilization) so typical of the extreme right-wing nationalisms of the twentieth century: Nazism, Serbian nationalism, Hindu nationalism (B J P , R S S , etc) and so on. Pal goes on: No more than we can force the colt to develop into a cub, than we can force one type of civilisation to grow into another, quite distinct from it. No more can we take the flower of the rose, the leaf of the mahogany, the white and straight trunk of the ash and the fruits of the vine, and combine them into a new vegetable organism, than we can take the best and most distinctive characteristics of the different world-cultures, and combine them all into a new culture.42

Composite nationalism, which so relentlessly polices the rigorous separation of essentially different cultures, does so partly in response to colonial critiques of Indian nationalism which chastised it for not conforming to the European ideal of homogeneity. Its ideological power lay in the manner in which it systematically excised these differences precisely in order to conform to the ideal of homogeneity within the context of the political realities of difference; the two coexist: difference is seemingly admitted while simultaneously effaced as the ‘Hindu majority’ becomes surreptitiously identified with the ‘nation’ and the minorities are quietly expelled. Thus, Pal seems to be saying that the ‘new’ Indian nation is only different from the ‘old’ insofar as it is a composite – an unavoidable historical consequence; the ‘old’ Indian nation was a homogeneous Hindu nation and, but for the passage of time, still would be. Conversely, therefore, the new Indian nation is composite because it is new; at its heart, in its soul, lies the old Indian nation, the real Indian nation which, like any European nation, was completely homogeneous; moreover, this ‘real’ Indian nation shares a common racial ancestry with the best of them. In fact, India is

42

Pal, “Nation Building,” 103.

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really the equivalent, indeed the precursor, of modern European nations, since it is so much older. The rationale of this vision of Indian nationalism is centred wholly upon the logic of exclusion which underpins it and upon which it depends for its symbolic power. Its extreme point is a supremacist language which is echoed today by the B J P and Sangh Parivar. Thus, “[The] Hindu religion tolerates all religions. Our religions say that all religions are based on truth, ‘you follow yours and I mine’” can, without apparent irony, be followed by this: they [other religions] are based on the partial truth whilst our Hindu religion is based on the whole – the Sanatan truth, and therefore it is bound to triumph in the end [...] All that is required for our glorious triumph is that we should unite [...] work hard for the final triumph [...] the time will come when instead of Christians preaching Christianity here we shall see our preachers preaching Sanatan Dharma all over the world.43

In our own day we find this irony replicated in the identification of Hinduism with ‘positive secularism’ (i.e. tolerance) by Hindu nationalists while they engage in a systematic denial of human and political rights to all minorities who do not subscribe to the ‘Hindu’ point of view.

From the vantage-point of the twenty-first century, the current political situation within India stands at one end of what might be termed the “long arc of the nationalist imagination,” a parabola whose other arm stretches back into the late nineteenth century. The ideological formulations of that first generation of nationalists have led a recalcitrant subterranean existence within the Indian political imagination, facilitating the orgies of violence that have punctuated India’s twentieth-century history. While it cannot be claimed that the pogroms in Gujarat in February and March 2002 are directly connected to the communal riots of the 1920s and 30s 43

B.G. Tilak, “The Bharata Dharma Mahamandala,” in Tilak’s Speeches (Poona, 1908): 75–78.

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and the Partition holocaust, these events do nevertheless form part of a depressingly predictable series which was only attenuated for a brief period during the immediate post-Independence years. During that period, the apex of the parabola, when secularism seemed to have a good chance of not only surviving but also taking firm root in Indian soil, it would possibly have been unimaginable that fifty years on the visceral suspicions and cultural chauvinisms of the earlier period might once again dominate the Indian political agenda. It has been argued here that such a return is, in part, a consequence of nationalism in India; not just Hindu nationalism but nationalism as such. True, some nationalists were more secular than others, but even they were limited in their modes of apprehending and exploring the ‘communal’ problem because the limits of secularism in India had deep historical roots which could not just be resolved by rhetorical sleights of hand. On the other hand, Indian nationalist discourse did deploy a number of tropes that surreptitiously encoded a Hindu majoritarian point of view, even in the most secular-seeming and tolerant formulations. Foremost among these was the idea of the composite nation. While it would do the cause of historical analysis no service whatsoever to flatten immensely complex and contradictory processes by suggesting that all nationalists were therefore the ‘same’ (which they clearly were not), it would be unwise to overlook some of the recurrent motifs that have become axiomatic in Indian politics, motifs that have been shared by ideologues across the political spectrum and that are not as benign as they might at first appear. In particular, any attempt to articulate an alternative India by appealing to some ‘pure’ or ‘uncontaminated’ secular nationalism is fraught with particular dangers. There have been visions of Indian nationhood that are more suitable for this purpose than others, but before appropriating them in the fight against Hindutva it is worth considering carefully, forensically, their precise implications.

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WORKS CITED Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2003). Banerjea, Surendranath. Speeches and Writings of Hon. Surendranath Banerjea, Selected by Himself (Madras: G.A. Nateson, 1920). Banerjee, Sumanta. The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in 19th Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989). Brown, Judith. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 1994). Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1986). Chowdury–Sengupta, Indira. “The Effeminate and the Masculine: Nationalism and the Concept of Race in Bengal,” in The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1995): 282–303. Dalmia, Vasudha. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and 19th Century Banaras (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1997). Derrett, J.D.M. Religion, Law and the State in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1968). Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997). Gole, Susan. A Series of Early Printed Maps of India in Facsimile (New Delhi: Jayaprints, 1980). Gole, Susan. Indian Maps and Plans from Earliest Times to the Advent of European Surveys (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989). Inden, Ronald. Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Jaffrelot, Christophe. “The Idea of the Hindu Race in the Writings of Hindu Nationalist Ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s: A Concept Between Two Cultures,” in The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1995): 327–54. Madan, P.L. Indian Cartography: A Historical Perspective (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997). Metcalf, Thomas. Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995). Mondal, Anshuman A. Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003). Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1946). Pal, Bipinchandra. The New Spirit: A Selection from the Writings and Speeches of Bipin Chandra Pal on Social, Political and Religious Subjects (Calcutta: Sarvadhikari, 1907). Pandey, Gyanendra. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1990). Robb, Peter, ed. The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1995).

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Seal, Anil. “Imperialism and Nationalism in India,” in Locality, Province and Nation, ed. John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson & Anil Seal (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1973): 1–27. Tilak, B.G. “The Bharata Dharma Mahamandala,” in Tilak’s Speeches (Poona: Hari Ragunath Bhagvat, 1908): 75–78. Vanaik, Achin. The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity, and Secularization (London: Verso, 1997). Zavos, John. The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000).

The Discovery of Aryavarta Hindu Nationalism and Early Indian Fiction in English

A LEX T ICKELL India is now fallen from her high estate. The ground crumbles under her feet. She was rich in the past; she is poor at the present. There has been a fall – a mighty fall! […] The writer looks far behind through the long avenue of ages and lets his memory linger for a moment on the happy years his country once passed […] His tale is, as it were, the lament of a lover.1 As I grew up and became engaged in activities which promised to lead to India’s freedom, I became obsessed with the thought of India. What is this India apart from her physical and geographical aspects? What did she represent in the past? What gave strength to her then? How did she lose that old strength? […] Does she represent anything vital now [… and] how does she fit into the modern world?2

I

N H I S M A G I S T E R I A L , historically layered vision of Indian identity, The Discovery of India (1946), the third in a “complex triptych” of works which “synthesize personal life-writing, political memoir and public history,”3 Jawaharlal Nehru describes

1 K.K. Sinha, Sanjogita, or the Princess of Aryavarta (Dinapore: Watling Printing Works, 1903): i–ii. 2 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian, 1960): 36. 3 Sunil Khilnani, “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English,” in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (London: Hurst, 2003): 148.

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Hindu nationalism as an undeniable but redundant part of the nation’s ideological maturing. It was, he stated, “a natural growth from the soil of India, but inevitably it comes in the way of the larger nationalism which rises above differences of religion or creed.”4 As Gyanendra Pandey argues, for nationalists such as Nehru, caught up in the momentous anticolonial struggle of the 1920s and 1930s, “communalism appeared as a great political threat, the most obvious source of danger for the advancing cause of nationalism.”5 The answer, for India’s future Prime Minister, was to advocate a progressive “refurbished” nationalism that focused on shared histories and ethnic syncretism, a counter-version of political identity that would become India’s grand narrative in the immediate post-Independence period. We need only refer to an earlier political memoir, the highly successful An Autobiography (1936), to realize how important it was for Nehru to distance his ‘new’ nationalism from what he saw as an earlier, less secular sense of identity. Here, Nehru’s anxieties about this political transition are dramatized in a particularly striking way in an account of a journey to Switzerland made with his ailing wife Kamala and their daughter Indira in 1926. While Kamala received treatment for T B at a Swiss sanatorium, Nehru took the opportunity to visit a number of older political radicals and exiled activists. Among these was the aged Shyamji Krishnavarma, a revolutionary nationalist, Sanskrit scholar and former member of the Hindu reform movement the Arya Samaj, who had operated a revolutionary terrorist network from London two decades earlier. Living as a semi-recluse with his wife on the top floor of a Geneva apartmenthouse, Krishnavarma is presented in An Autobiography as a senile, bookish obsessive and becomes a salutary warning of the way politics can go bad if it is divorced from the real world: The aged couple lived by themselves […] and their rooms were musty and suffocating and everything had a thick layer of dust […] [Krishnavarma] was suspicious of all comers, presuming them, until

4

Nehru, The Discovery of India, 240. Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1990): 9. 5

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the contrary was proved, to be either British agents or after his money. His pockets bulged with ancient copies of his old paper, the Indian Sociologist and he would pull them out and point with some excitement to some article he had written a dozen years previously […] the walls of his rooms were covered with shelves full of old books, dust laden and neglected, looking down sorrowfully on the intruder. Books and papers also littered the floor; they seemed to have remained so for days and weeks, and even months past. Over the whole place there hung an atmosphere of gloom, an air of decay […] with relief one came out of that flat and breathed the air outside.6

In Nehru’s account, one of Krishnavarma’s contemporaries, Madame Bhikaiji Cama, a Parsi activist who had famously unfurled the Indian flag at the Stuttgart Socialist Congress of 1907, receives the same irreverent treatment: In Paris we saw old Madame Cama, rather fierce and terrifying as she came up to you and peered into your face, and, pointing at you, asked abruptly who you were […] the answer made no difference (probably she was too deaf to hear it) for she formed her own impressions and stuck to them, despite facts to the contrary.7

Written while Nehru was a political prisoner in Almora jail, these descriptions of an earlier nationalist generation beg comparison with the nineteenth-century gothic, and one wonders if Nehru recalled Great Expectations as he worked on his memoirs and wrote letters to Indira, inquiring “Have you read much of Thackeray or Dickens? They are rather old-fashioned now but I remember how I used to enjoy them in the old days.”8 In terms of his political situation, the intertext could not have been more apt. Great Expectations, with its Satis House motif of the present arrested and imprisoned by the past, might have echoed Nehru’s fears about his own incar6

Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (London: The Bodley Head, 1989): 149. Nehru, An Autobiography, 151. 8 Jawaharlal Nehru, in Freedom’s Daughter: Letters between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1922–39, ed. Sonia Gandhi (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989): 145–46. 7

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ceration. More profoundly, Dickens’ sleight-of-hand plot, in which a long-expected inheritance is suddenly exchanged for one which reconnects Pip with his deepest fears, could have spoken to Nehru’s worries about the repressed aspects of India’s “religious attitude,” an attitude which he associated, in Krishnavarma’s gloomy apartment, with “blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.”9 In retrospect, Nehru’s evocative representation of his revolutionary predecessors alerts us to conceptual aporiae in his work, and the involved nature of his own political heritage. By the time he met Krishnavarma in the mid-1920s, communal politics seemed to be polarizing the nationalist movement as a whole (following events such as the Mapilla rebellion of 1921), and Nehru’s attempt to disassociate himself from earlier Indian nationalist groups reflects his increasing disquiet about the activities of the Hindu Right under the direction of Krishnavarma’s contemporaries such as V.D. Sarvarkar. Even so, for all Nehru’s rhetorical investment in a new or ‘refurbished’ mass nationalism, it is equally clear now that during this period the secularism of the Congress Party was more notional than Nehru’s political writings claimed. Indeed, there is persuasive historical evidence that a continued ideological investment in primordialist nationalism was maintained across the nationalist movement even as ideas of Hindu–Muslim unity were promoted by the Congress. As Chetan Bhatt points out, an overarching process of the interpellation of discovered archaic and primordial Hinduism was a major, significant and before the 1920s often a dominating strand in the national movement such that secularism itself was neither sufficiently interrogated nor adequately developed beyond an elemental, if often strong and principled, commitment to anti-communalism […] given its importance, there was an absence of detailed, elaborate and sufficient national discussion of what secularism might mean across both state and civil societies until arguably after the Nehruvian period.10

9

Nehru, An Autobiography, 374. Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism (Oxford: Berg, 2001): 9.

10

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While immediately challenging a simplistic periodizing of Indian nationalist thought, Bhatt’s insight also has important implications for our reading of the politics of contemporary Indian-English fiction, and invites us to reappraise the widely assumed connection between ‘secular’ nationalism and the emergent novel-form. Judging from his letters, Nehru’s literary tastes were decidedly conservative, and he cared little for contemporary (modernist) fiction, preferring the work of authors such as H.G. Wells and Samuel Butler. However, the stylistic impact of his own writing on the development of the Indian novel in English, during what is now seen as its formative nationalist phase, was considerable. Both Nehru’s and Gandhi’s life-writings were profoundly influential in their use of “an Indian prose committed to clarity and humanist principles”11 and recurring thematic features in their work such as the villagepastoral and the ‘image of return’ were recycled by Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand in their novels of the 1930s and 1940s. With the appearance of specialized nationalist genres like the ‘Gandhi-novel’, stylistic contiguities grew into close relationships of citation and hagiographic cross-reference, and after independence the IndianEnglish novel maintained and strengthened this investment in what Ashis Nandy has termed the “rational […] secularism [that] has dominated India’s Middle Class public consciousness.”12 We must remember, however, that the literary-historical connections between Indian mass nationalism and the Indian-English novel have always been qualified (often in a perfunctory way) in critical studies by an awareness of a substantial body of Indian writing in English stretching back to the 1860s, a largely overlooked tradition that was well-established by the turn of the century. Published decades before the Congress transformed Indian nationalism into a mass movement, these early Indian-English fictions draw their political themes from the very texts in Krishnavarma’s Geneva apartment that make up the “sorrowful,” “suffocating” political archive from which Nehru’s narrative escapes. Moreover, if we appreciate the close formal connections between Nehru’s prose and contemporary Indian-English fiction, then might not the same pro11 12

Khilnani, in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Mehrotra: 152. Ashis Nandy, Time Warps (London: Hurst, 2002): 69.

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cess of disavowal characterize the politics of the Indian novel in English? If the secular version of India’s national identity has a concealed or repressed ideological inheritance, then does the IndianEnglish novel, which has entered so decisively into an interrogation of monologic or primordialist identities in recent years, have cause for postcolonial embarrassment about its own past? My aim, in the following pages, is to consider these questions by tracing the political genealogy of Indian fiction in English back to the early 1900s. Concentrating on two popular ‘middlebrow’ romances published in London in 1909 – Sarath Kumar Ghosh’s The Prince of Destiny and S.M. Mitra’s Hindupore – and making reference to earlier historical romances such as K.K. Sinha’s Sanjogita (1903), this essay interrogates the automatic critical equation of the IndianEnglish novel with a secular or pluralist national imagining, and pays special attention to a closely interwoven fabric of political discourses, among them forms of regional nationalism, Vedic Aryanism and European theories of racial efficiency, that provide a political source-text for Indian writers and intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century. As I will argue, far from representing the political antithesis of the ‘cosmopolitan’ Indian novel in English, the rise of Hindu majoritarianism and forms of Hindu nationalism in India is, instead, prefigured in some of the earliest, most popular examples of the form.

The Political Purana: ‘Princely’ Fictions and the Influence of Bankim Before the development of modes of humanist social realism and new experimental narrative techniques in the 1920s and 1930s, a major formal template for Indian authors writing in English was the (historical) romance. For migrant London-based writers such as Ghosh and Mitra, the bias towards the romance must be seen partly as a commercial choice, reflecting the contemporary popularity of ‘romancers’ such as Maud Diver and Flora Annie Steel, but Indian authors also exploited the genre as a way of entering into discursive negotiation with their metropolitan and colonial audiences. Because of their awareness of a potentially hostile British readership, both Ghosh and Mitra adopt a revisionist narrative position, using the romance – or what I have called elsewhere the “informative ro-

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mance”13 – as a way of correcting colonial prejudices while simultaneously exploring variations on a conciliatory cultural-nationalist theme in their work. In striking contrast to the interest in rural settings and village life of many later nationalist novelists, these earlier romance-writers also use the ‘princely’ kingdom as the setting of their fictions; the reasons for this are partly tactical (their critical focus is, ostensibly, not ‘directly ruled’ British India) and partly because representations of Hindu dynastic leaders, who often claimed direct descent from heroes in the Puranas and epics such as the Mahabharata, could be used as a figurative link with a mythical Hindu past. Sarath Kumar Ghosh’s highly successful novel The Prince of Destiny, or the New Krishna, which appeared in colonial and domestic editions and ran to a second impression within six months of its publication in October 1909, is perhaps the most sophisticated early Indian-English presentation of the princely state as a singularly political space. Written while Ghosh was enduring an impoverished student existence in a boarding-house in north London, this heavily symbolic work tells the story of Prince Barath of Barathpore, whose role as a messianic national leader is hinted at throughout the text. A Bildungsroman on an epic scale, the narrative follows Barath’s childhood and growth to maturity as he journeys to England and Cambridge for his education, returns to inherit the throne of Barathpore, and tries, in a strikingly modern way, to reconcile his loyalty to Britain with his love of his own homeland.14 Published in London in the same year, S.M. Mitra’s less accomplished novel Hindupore: A Peep Behind the Indian Unrest, a fictional reworking of the author’s journalism, also features an idealized princely figure, Raja Ram Singh, who is a transcultural representative of Indian opinion. The Raja is not the central protagonist of the text, but the friend and confidante of the hero of the story, the aristocratic AngloIrish MP Lord Tara, who eventually marries Ram Singh’s niece, Princess Kamala, in a symbolic reconciliation of colonizer and colo13

Alex Tickell, “Terrorism and the Informative Romance: Two Early Indian Novels in English,” Kunapipi 25.1 (2003): 73–83. 14 See Meeenakshi Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000): 63.

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nized. A member of the Royal Asiatic Society, Mitra tended to defend empire in his fiction and journalism, but here we also find a call for a greater understanding and mutual cooperation between colonizer and colonized. In their tense mixing of archetypal characterization and anticolonial critique, both novels cited above are curiously fraught, and their ambivalence is more understandable when we realize that they reflect and mediate an early phase in Indian nationalism that Partha Chatterjee has termed, famously, the “moment of departure.” For Chatterjee, this is a founding point in the continuum of Indian nationalist thought, during which it becomes clear to the colonized that The West has a superior culture, but only partially; spiritually the East is superior. What is needed, now [in the late nineteenth century] is the creation of a cultural ideal in which the industries and sciences of the West can be learnt and emulated while retaining the spiritual greatness of Eastern culture. This is the national-cultural project at the moment of departure.15

Both novels condense these themes in the figure of the Indian prince and the proto-national space of the princely kingdom, and in doing so Ghosh and Mitra draw on the work of a writer whom Partha Chatterjee selects as a representative of his nationalist “departure” phase, the Bengali novelist and intellectual Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who is now remembered in literary studies for his landmark historical novel of Bengali nationalism, Anandamath (1882). As Chatterjee notes, Bankim’s model of political emancipation, “a project of national-cultural regeneration in which the intelligentsia leads and the nation follows”16 is marked by an inherent elitism, and this is repeated in the presentation of feudal (and, in Ghosh’s case, messianic) figures of proto-national leadership in The Prince of Destiny and Hindupore. More revealing, in terms of the conceptual reliance of “departure-phase” nationalism on forms of Hindu primordialism, is the way the novelists discussed here cannot conceive 15

Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed, 1986): 73. 16 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 73.

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of anticolonial resistance in anything but (Hindu) spiritual terms. In Hindupore, the major threat to British sovereignty in India comes not from “the [swadeshi] movement for ‘Hind Swaraj’”17 but from a network of politicized priests and sanyassi who form a Pan-Hindu fraternity throughout the subcontinent. As one of Mitra’s British characters argues, “Hinduism is a great religious society as well as a political organisation […] the Hindu sadhu (hermit) is sworn to do all he can to protect the religion and interests of the Indian Motherland […] we hear much of Pan-Islam, but it is not in India so important a power to us as that of Pan-Hinduism.”18 Mitra’s vision of a Pan-Hindu brotherhood pledged to the Motherland owes much to Bankim’s plot of a sanyassi rebellion in Anandamath, but both authors also mobilize Puranic narratives (especially forms of bhakti devotionalism) in their fiction. As Bhatt points out, in political prose writings such as Krsnacaritra (1886) Bankim skilfully avoids both a Western metaphysical model and the more abstract textualism of contemporary Hindu reform movements while at the same time “reconfigur[ing] […] Puranic, devotional religion such that Krishna symbolis[es] a ‘de-sexualised’, ethical, militant ideal of what humanity could become.”19 This politically ‘activated’ refashioning of Krishna is mirrored very clearly in the subtitle of The Prince of Destiny – “The New Krishna.” Indeed, throughout the novel Ghosh continually hints at the potentially mythical, redemptive identity of his hero, in “the thousand allusions, the thousand suggestions” that Barath hears “vaguely heard half-uttered […] since his childhood,”20 suggestions that finally force the “New Krishna” into a literal identity crisis, causing him to renounce his throne at the very moment he seems poised to lead India to independence.

17

See S.M. Mitra, Hindupore (London: Luzac, 1909): 142. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 220–22. 19 Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 31. 20 Sarath Kumar Ghosh, The Prince of Destiny, or the New Krishna (London: Rebman, 1909): 495. 18

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The Novel, Primordial Hinduism and Aryanism Early Indian-English novelists such as Ghosh and Mitra did not depend solely on forms of (Bengali) cultural nationalism for inspiration. Nor was their interest in the political potential of Hinduism restricted, following Bankim, to the creative use of Puranic myth. Because they both engage closely (and in Mitra’s case very ambivalently) with a spectrum of contemporary nationalist discourses, these novelists reveal the extent to which an early Indian nationalist intelligentsia excavated Hinduism’s religious prehistory, rediscovering a classical South Asian civilization already made available in orientalist scholarship. One of the most radical of these political archaeologists, and the staunchest defender of India’s lost golden age, was Dayananda Saraswati, the leader of a Hindu reform movement, the Arya Samaj (society of nobles), founded in Bombay in 1875 and Lahore in 1877. Taking its cue from older reform groups such as the Bengal Brahmo Samaj, Dayananda’s Arya Samaj was effectively a fundamentalist organization that sought to strengthen and purify the spiritual basis of Hinduism. Like Bankim, Dayananda realized that Hinduism’s political potential derived both from the way it connected the colonized with a forgotten spiritual greatness21 and also, more practically, from its broad social base as the majority faith in the subcontinent. (Although his organizational thinking, in common with Bankim, maintained the importance of elite leadership cadres.) On these terms, Hinduism could provide the discursive coherence essential for a truly subcontinental national movement. In a radical challenge to the Brahminical theocracy, the Samaj called for a return to the textual foundations of Hindu religious culture and a recognition of the Vedas as a set of revealed monotheistic truths. This was augmented, as Bhatt has shown, by claims to an ancient ‘Aryan’ heritage, an orientalist concept-term which, in Dayananda’s usage, could shift between a moral or social definition of arya as ‘nobility’ and equally strong territorial, ethnological and racial meanings.22 In Dayananda’s thinking, therefore, the reimagining of Hinduism’s primordial beginnings not only relied on 21 22

See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 75. Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 16.

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a selective exegesis of the Vedas but also drew, as the movement’s name suggests, on colonial race theory and other metropolitan concerns such as social evolutionism and degeneration. To understand how contemporary writers like Ghosh and Mitra exploited this stock of transacted ideas it is necessary to review, briefly, the wider significance of Aryanism, and its centrality in European debates about race. The theoretical location of humanity’s primeval Aryan origin in central Asia, usually in the Himalayas, had been widely accepted by European philosophers and historians, Kant among them, by the early nineteenth century. Following Friedrich Schlegel’s use of comparative philology to make claims about Indo-European racial interconnectedness, French race theorists such as Renan and Gobineau and the German Sanskritist Max Müller all ascribed to a racial anthropology which saw the Aryans as a primal race that represented the future of civilized humanity, and had made a prehistoric migration from central Asia to Europe and the subcontinent. These theories were adopted in a more general form by British scholar– administrators such as William Hunter–Wilson, who reiterated the idea of a noble Aryan race that had peopled Europe and India in his influential Annals of Rural Bengal (1868), a text which, incidentally, provided the historical plot-line of Bankim’s Anandamath in an account of a sanyassi rebellion in 1771–72.23 In the Annals, Hunter– Wilson argued that Bengal was the site of a historical intermixing between “noble” invaders of Aryan ancestry and “inferior tribes,” a theory that became paradigmatic in ethnological accounts of India and was later used to explain caste stratification in Hindu society. The ‘Aryan migration/invasion’ model was consistent, as Susan Bayly has noted, with contemporary European views that advanced societies “could survive and flourish only if they found means to protect themselves from the formation of racial ‘composites’ through the merging of people from separate racial ‘stock’ and very unequal degrees of civilisation.”24 In this model, the once great Aryan race had become gradually weakened in its journey into India as it di23

See Priya Joshi, In Another Country (New York: Columbia U P , 2002): 162. Susan Bayly, “Race in Britain and India,” in Nation and Religion, ed. Peter van der Veer & Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999): 78. 24

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luted itself through intermixture with indigenous peoples. Indeed, “racial theory, with its insistence on the purity and supremacy of Aryan races,”25 seemed, therefore, to supply a racial justification for colonial supremacy as the natural ascendancy of a purer European Aryan bloodline. However, as the British empire expanded across the globe, colonial anthropologists and race theorists had to admit the “inevitability of [European] decline as different races and cultures mixed and reproduced.”26 Increasing colonial contact with non-European cultures, and the often genocidal or pathogenic consequences of these encounters, only reinforced late nineteenth-century anxieties about racial degeneration. In these discourses, argues Rod Edmond, “a complex dialectic was at work [and the] obsession of Western observers with the death of other cultures was, in part, a displaced expression of fear of the extinction of their own.”27 We find that by the late 1880s, therefore, the comparatively fraternal model of shared ‘Aryan’ origins advanced by Sanskritists such as Max Müller, in which Indians had been described as “our brothers in language and thought,”28 gives way, as Thomas Trautmann notes, to a more aggressively empirical race science which seeks to sideline Indian Aryanism and reassert the superiority of European ‘Aryan races’ such as the Celts.29 Condemning Max Müller’s ideas out of hand, the anthropologist Isaac Taylor celebrated the new paradigm of Aryanist thinking by proclaiming in 1889 that the “tyranny of the Sanskritists is happily overpast […] hasty philological deductions [now] require to be systematically checked by the conclusions of prehistoric archaeology, craniology, anthropology, geology, and common sense.”30 However, even as a new ‘scientific’ anthropology, with its paraphernalia of anthropometric measurement and craniology, reasserted European racial superior25 Rod Edmond, “Home and Away: Degeneration in Imperialist and Modernist Discourse,” in Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality, 1890– 1940, ed. Howard Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester U P ): 40. 26 Edmond, “Home and Away,” 40. 27 “Home and Away,” 42. 28 Friedrich Max Müller, in Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: U of California P , 1997): 178. 29 Trautmann, Aryans and British India. 30 Aryans and British India, 186

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ity, the distant Indo-European racial connections plotted by the Sanskritists still left the option of a renewed race-fitness open to both colonizer and colonized. Hence, in a reversal of the degenerative trope of ‘going native’ (something that colonial fictions often dwelt on), colonial commentators found themselves facing the disagreeable possibility that Indians might reverse their evolutionary trajectory, and were “dangerously ready to recover the vigour and competitive greatness that was implanted in their [Aryan] racial heritage.”31 These ideas were of particular interest to contemporary Indian reformers and intellectuals who, as we have seen, grafted Aryanist ideas onto discourses of primordialist nationalism, but they also had an enduring impact on the political shape of the early Indian novel in English. In these fictions we encounter an intriguing cooption of metropolitan race theory which accepts the idea of racial degeneration and regeneration, but is equally attuned to crossnational allegiances and hidden cross-racial commonalities. Among literary works published at the turn of the century, K.K. Sinha’s historical romance Sanjogita or the Princess of Aryavarta (1903) exemplifies Indian hopes about the reactivation of an Aryan ancestry as the prelude to national rejuvenation. Basing his novel on the popular legend of the twelfth-century princess Sanjogita, Sinha signals his didactic intention in his preface by “remind[ing] his countrymen of the glory and greatness of their ancestors and […] [drawing] attention to the direct causes of their fall.”32 His use of a xenological Arya Samaj term for India, Aryavarta, confirms the contemporary dependence, noted earlier, of Indian nationalist thought on forms of Vedic primordialism. Indeed, Sinha goes on to make an impassioned plea for national-racial reawakening: Heroes of Aryavarta, have you passed away forever? Is there nothing to infuse life into the dead ashes? Mighty sons of Ind, where are you gone? […] Will you not be reincarnated for the advancement of our race? […] Ours is a fallen condition. We have [sic] a degraded age when the glories of our ancestors are almost forgotten 31 32

Bayly, “Race in Britain and India,” 82. K.K. Sinha, Sanjogita, or the Princess of Aryavarta, iii.

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and we are drawn away from the path they had struck out; when the dictates of duty are not carefully obeyed and the spiritual greatness of a Janak or a Vashista seems wholly beyond our mental horizon. (266–67)

As this passage shows, the ‘shared’ Indo-European Aryanism plotted by European Sanskritists and downgraded in scientific ethnology could always be replaced, in Indian-English fiction, by a selective, regional claim to Aryan ‘nobility’ that excluded European entitlement to an ‘Aryan’ heritage (such as those made by spiritualist groups like the Theosophists with their invocations to the “Himalayan masters”) and, instead, privileged the inhabitants of Aryavarta, as true Aryans.33 In the late nineteenth-century settings of The Prince of Destiny and Hindupore, the fantasy of Aryan regeneration is presented in a number of ways. In both novels, a reformed Hinduism, manifested as a primordial Vedic Aryanism or (as we saw in the previous section) a radical form of bhakti devotion, acts as a vehicle for political change and potential proto-national liberation. Like Sinha, Ghosh adopts the political vocabulary of primordial Hinduism, most obviously in the naming of his protagonist, Bharat, the legendary primal Aryan whose name constitutes the descriptive term Bharatiya, used to designate India in Sanskrit and Hindi texts.34 As Christophe Jaffrelot confirms, “these usages hark back to the conviction that Hindu culture contains within it the essence of Indian identity.”35 In a rather more circuitous way, Ghosh’s novel allegorizes a merging of the historical and the mythical in its own topography, as the narrator dwells on the palimpsest-foundations of Delhi and calls for a symbolic rebuilding of the legendary city of Indraprastha: “the prize for which the sons of the gods of Meru fought and died” (12).

33

Bhatt points out that “Whereas most Theosophists considered Americans, Europeans and Indians as ‘Aryans’, Dayananda rejected this for his view that only the inhabitants of Aryavarta (‘India’) could be so designated”; Hindu Nationalism, 19. 34 Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s (London: Hurst, 1996): 57. 35 Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 57.

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In Hindupore, the landscape of India is split, in rather clumsy national-colonial symbolism, between princely Hindu India (Hindupore) and directly ruled British India (Barrackpore). On his visit to Hindupore to stay with his new friend Raja Ram Singh, Mitra’s proIndian hero, Lord Tara, is treated to a lesson in cultural history which echoes the communal essentialism already noted in Ghosh’s novel. As he drives through the streets with the Raja’s Prime Minister, Tara is told that India has been under foreign rule now for about a thousand years. Her foreign rulers have included some iconoclasts of Central Asia. They did everything to break the faith of the Hindu in his creed, but failed – miserably failed.36

Here, Mitra’s vision of an ‘occupied’ India seems to develop the primordialist thesis along more exclusive lines than Ghosh, and in this way his novel anticipates the historical narratives of continual communal tension and conflict that would later become such a signal feature of Hindu nationalist thinking in the writings of V.D. Sarvarkar.

The Body Politic: Aryanism on the World Stage If the princely state becomes the primary imaginative site for a diachronic investigation into India’s religio-mythical and ‘racial’ origins in novels such as The Prince of Destiny, it also dramatizes the transcultural synchronic aspects of this collective bid to reclaim a national history. In a way that recalls Chatterjee’s definition of departure-phase nationalism as a difficult political rapprochement between (‘eternal’) Eastern spirituality and (‘progressive’) Western modernity, both The Prince of Destiny and Hindupore feature settings that are really platforms for continually searching comparisons and translations between India and the wider imperial world. In Ghosh’s novel, Bharat’s emissaries use imperial transport networks to gather political and technological know-how from Japan, Germany and America, in a busy itinerary of departures and arrivals 36

S.M. Mitra, Hindupore: A Peep Behind the Indian Unrest (London: Luzac, 1909): 54.

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that makes the novel’s setting seem more like a threshold or crossnational transit zone than a culturally unified homeland.37 In contrast to the renewed interest in iconic ‘Indian’ settings such as the rural village in later nationalist fictions, the hybrid energies of departure-phase fiction seems to generate this self-conscious political meditation on travel and cross-cultural comparison as a requisite stage in the development of a viable national identity. This fictional cross-border traffic finds an interesting analogue in Benedict Anderson’s most recent work, The Spectre of Comparisons, in which his earlier reading of nationalism as a form of inwardlooking, textually augmented “imagining”38 is complemented by an awareness of the global circulation of universal political ideas and theories that make up nationalism’s conceptual vocabulary. As Anderson argues, a form of “unbound [conceptual] seriality”39 stretching across and between national boundaries, developed out of new information and transport systems in the late nineteenth century, and was facilitated by the increasing speed and coverage of imperial news networks that provided the colonized with images of their own concerns in other, far-flung conflicts and national struggles. As our discussion of the early Indian-English novel suggests, along with ‘people’ and ‘nation’, ‘race’ seems to have been a unit in this transacted, ‘replicable’ currency of political terms, and could be used as part of the international self-positioning and self-validation of a new Indian intelligentsia, especially where European colonialism seemed to be failing as a global political force. The way Indian nationalism discretely remodels prevailing imperialist ideas about race in a strategic synthesis of nation, ethnicity and religion is most apparent in a close thematic engagement with the idea of racial fitness in The Prince of Destiny and Hindupore, and in the way these texts monitor and play on colonial racial anxieties. 37

For a more detailed investigation of the ‘cross-border’ affiliations of early anticolonial nationalism, see Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002). 38 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1987). 39 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998): esp. ch. 1, “Nationalism, Identity, and the Logic of Seriality,” 29–45.

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In Britain, concerns about national-racial degeneration were an increasing feature of late-Victorian public discourses, and the poor physical condition of army recruits during the Boer war exacerbated these fears, prompting government interest in public health and ‘efficiency’, and catalysing various schemes to ensure a “condition of national fitness equal to the demands of […] Empire.”40 Because they were based in London, writers such as Ghosh were wellplaced to wonder at the degradation of sections of metropolitan society41 and to draw their own conclusions about Britain’s national ‘efficiency’ compared with other nations. Thus, for Ghosh’s hero in The Prince of Destiny, an awareness of comparative German economic and military growth becomes a way of confirming more general Darwinian ideas of race-fitness: Bharat paced up and down in rising agitation. “Germany has already a vaster population, growing more rapidly that that of Britain – and she has the economic efficiency, which will mean in rapid sequence more money. Build what battleships Britain will, in a few years Germany could build more. It is the eternal law of the survival of the fittest, which is another name for efficiency.” (493)

The belief that previously ‘strong’ races might fall behind in the global competition of nations, or that European culture might be experiencing a decline has other important implications for the way contemporary South Asian novelists fashioned a sense of protonational identity. As we noted above, the global “time–space compression”42 of the modern period also makes the spectacle of imperial defeat available to the colonized. While colonial officials worried about levels of physical fitness at home, they were troubled by in40 William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994): 184. 41 Sarath Kumar Ghosh, The Prince of Destiny, 244–45. 42 This term comes from David Harvey’s work on the way modernity has been characterized by a radical redefinition of global space and time. Harvey states: “I use the word ‘compression’ because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterised by [a] speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us”; The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993): 240.

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creasing evidence that European races were failing on the world stage. Between 1890 and 1910, remarked the diplomat Alfred Lyall, “came events which materially altered the attitude of Asiatic nations towards European predominance.”43 These included the routing of the Italian army by Abyssinian forces at Adowah in 1896, and Russian defeat in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, a failure which Lyall took as “a significant and striking warning that the era of facile victories in Asia had ended.”44 For other colonial administrators like the Africanist Harry Johnstone, the Russian defeat was, simply, “the first set-back of the Caucasian since the neolithic period.”45 The racial significance given to these events by British officials like Johnstone accounts for their resonance in contemporary IndianEnglish novels, in which the potential national-racial ‘efficiency’ of South Asians balances the incipient degeneration of the West. It also informs the interesting cross-national alliances and power-blocs (almost always involving the Japanese) imagined by Ghosh and Mitra. For both authors, Hinduism, because it is a religion that predates and therefore claims Buddhism as a historical offshoot, offers the possibility of a linked counter-imperialist Asiatic empire encompassing India, China and Japan. At the same time, the great antiquity and the territorial and cultural claims of Hinduism ensure that, within an orientalist historical framework of South Asian religions, India, or Aryavarta, can be seen as a distinctive, originary space compared with its neighbours. Again, the most revealing point of this national-communal historiography is the way Hinduism is accorded an exclusive historical monopoly on Indian identity, to the extent that other major religions of the subcontinent are either ignored, as is the case with Islam, Zoroastrianism and Christianity, or incorporated as minor variants of Hinduism, as with Buddhism – a strategy that anticipates current B J P thinking about communal ‘re-conversion’ to the ‘original’ Hindu faith of India. As a Japanese character in Mitra’s 43

Lyall, in Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910): ix. Alfred Lyall, in Chirol, Indian Unrest, ix. 45 Harry Johnstone, in Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 1992): 183. 44

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Hindupore suggests, the close historical links between Vedic Hinduism and Buddhism might provide the basis for a massive shift in global power, as the balance of racial efficiency swings away from West to East: “Japan loves India for the sake of the future, as well as the past” […] said the pilgrim with a confident air […] “Without the Hindu, Japan cannot attempt the unification of a grand Asiatic empire. India, China, and Japan in one empire would be beyond the dreams of any Western Power. And such a day will come.” (291).

These politically charged discourses of racial de/regeneration, Hindu primordialism and ‘Asiatic’ anticolonial alliance converge, in the novels discussed here, in a concern with the body and collective physical ‘efficiency’. In The Prince of Destiny, Barath instigates a regimen of physical exercise, modelled on Japanese military training, as part of his reform of Barathpore. Reporting on the plan, the commanding officer of his army states decisively: “at first my main duty will be to teach our men gymnastics […] I shall begin with jiujitsu” (390). The fact that Bharatpore’s citizens are being taught a Japanese martial art reasserts Japan’s exemplary conceptual place in early Indian nationalism,46 but the emphasis on physical training in Ghosh’s novel also anticipates the regimes of ideological and paramilitary ‘man-moulding’ characteristic of later parent organizations of the Hindu Right such as the R S S or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps). Founded by K.B. Hedgewar in 1925, the R S S rejected earlier, more hybrid models of civic nationalism in favour of a concept of 46

The importance of Japan as an ‘alternative’ model for Indian nationalist aspirations also anticipates the later political sympathies and alliances of Bengali nationalist leaders such as Subas Chandra Bose. In 1943, after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, Bose created the provisional government of “Azad” (‘free’) India, and with Tojo’s consent took command of the “Indian National Army” made up of Indian P O W s in Singapore. Declaring war on Britain and America, the I N A marched for Delhi, but was defeated at Imphal in the summer of 1944. See Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (Oxford: Oxford U P , 5th ed. 1997).

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nationhood which elided race, culture and religious affiliation. Although the political philosophy of the R S S proposed a gradual (and, in their words, “non-political”) transformation to a Hindu Rashtra, it shared a great deal with contemporary Italian and German fascism and drew on German race theorists such as Johann Kaspar Bluntschli. Integral to these discourses was a functionalist somatic view of Indian society, and a political updating of the Vedic creation concept of the primal man in which ‘separatist’ Muslim minorities were seen as cancerous growths threatening the healthy cells of the Hindu national body. In a form of political metonymy, the programme of mass national-communal regeneration embarked upon by the R S S involved (and still involves) a ‘man-moulding’ focus on physical fitness, lathi drill and the disciplines of the Hindu akhara or temple-gymnasium tradition. Clearly, Ghosh’s interest in physical training predates the more sinister corporeal symbolism of the R S S but both are part of a political framework structured on narratives of redemptive ‘racial’ selffashioning, and a view of Muslim communities as marginal, if not actively detrimental, to the (Hindu-) nationalist project. This said, in The Prince of Destiny it is not so much the body as its clothed public presence that conveys the complex semiotics of anti-colonial nationalism. As Emma Tarlo has shown, clothes became a vital index of identity for later national leaders such as Gandhi, and it is apt, therefore, that in Ghosh’s writing types of sartorial disguise betray the conflicting demands of primordial identification and industrial, military advancement. In the novel’s denouement, a revolutionary army, mobilized in secret by Barath’s chief minister, confronts the Prince with the demand that he lead a national uprising against the British. Disguised as wandering Hindu holy men, Bharatpore’s revolutionary fighters signal their insurrectionary plans by throwing off their saffron robes to reveal military uniforms at the crucial moment: Then Chandra cried out passionately, “Heaven-born, I implore thee to say but the word, and I shall call up a hundred and twenty thousand men to proclaim thee!” He flung off his saffron robe, and revealed a military uniform beneath – of Japanese pattern. His companions did likewise. (588)

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Here, in The Prince of Destiny, the signifier of a spiritual link with India’s primordial Hindu past literally cloaks and stabilizes a potentially alienating transaction with European/Japanese militarism, a transaction which is also naturalized, as we have seen, through claims of pan-Asiatic racial and spiritual commonality.

The Problem of Mass Nationalism: Leadership and the Elite While novelists such as Mitra and Ghosh rely, in their writing, on a functionalist terminology of racial “vitalism, evolution, telos, palingenesis, survival and degeneration,”47 and return, repeatedly, to ancient Hindu civilization as the basis of their political aesthetics, their fiction is still distinctively ‘pre-national’ in its unwillingness to engage with the cultures of the Indian masses. Recalling the passage from Nehru’s autobiography quoted earlier, we realize that this may be another reason why India’s future premier is so vehement in his self-affirming dismissal of revolutionaries like Krishnavarma. In Nehru’s memoir, older nationalists are censured not just because of the redundancy of their political models, but because they are out of touch, “too deaf to hear,”48 and strangely textual instead of physical beings. For Nehru, they belong to an earlier culture of elite discursive negotiation that had little in common with the more clearly mass-orientated, agrarian objectives of the Congress during the 1920s and 1930s. The elitism of early Indian nationalism can be linked very clearly to the Aryanist discourses already sketched out here and is, in some ways, their natural correlative. Thus, nineteenth-century anthropological ‘invasion’ theories of a racial encounter between light-skinned Aryans and dark-skinned Dasyus in India’s prehistory map easily onto orientalist models of varna or caste polarized between light-skinned ‘twice-born’ Aryans and darker ‘untouchable’ indigenous peoples, a discursive manoeuvre that Trautmann calls “a fantastic back-projection of systems of [colonial] segregation onto early Indian history.”49 Certainly, in Hindupore one of Mitra’s secondary 47

Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 10. Nehru, An Autobiography, 151. 49 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 211. 48

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characters, a missionary named Mr Long, vouches for the durability and flawlessness of caste as a “vast hierarchical system [that is] […] firmly rooted throughout the length and breadth of the land [and is] perfect in its organisation” (25). Elsewhere in his novel, Mitra elides racial oppositions in favour of a class-based discourse of aristocratic affinity, a strategy that allows him to proscribe AngloIndian ‘half-castes’, but conclude Hindupore with the symbolic reconciliation of East and West in the inter-‘racial’ marriage of Lord Tara and Ram Singh’s niece, Rani Kamala. The elitism intrinsic in much early nationalist thought was already evident in Bankim’s call for special intellectual and moral cadres that would supervise the nation’s rebirth. As Chatterjee relates, this was not necessarily an “elitism of birth or caste or privilege or wealth, but of excellence. The leaders were leaders because through anushilan (practice) they attained an exemplary unity of knowledge and duty.”50 Similarly, while defending varna as a Vedic social formation, reformers like Dayananda Saraswati were deeply suspicious of the fixity of Brahminical versions of the caste system and argued that caste referred, ideally, “to the non-hereditary social classification of individuals based on their merits and actions, qualities and propensities.”51 Given these political concerns, it is unsurprising that the authors I have discussed here focus more closely on the nature, scope and basis of political leadership than the means by which this leadership might communicate with the wider, more diverse national community. The character of this intellectual elite is further complicated by advances in technology in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in contrast to the stress on national-physical regeneration that so pervades contemporary political thinking, we find some revolutionary nationalist groups challenging or at least attempting to circumvent the physiological claims of race theory. Describing the tellingly named Anushilan Samiti (the society of practice), a secret terrorist cell set up in Calcutta in 1902 by Aurobindo Ghose and his brother Barindrakumar, Peter Heehs points out that the brothers “first tried […] paramilitary training [with] the recruits. 50 51

Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 79. See Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 18.

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But [they] […] had no interest in martial discipline or long-term planning. Why bother to learn drill or lathi-play when you could blow up a train or a magistrate with a well-made bomb?”52 Thus, for militant nationalists like the Ghose brothers, the possibilities of terrorist violence (through technological means) suddenly made programmes of national-racial regeneration based on physical and spiritual discipline less urgent. The political potential of technological or organizational knowledge explains some of the more equivocal aspects of The Prince of Destiny, particularly Ghosh’s eccentric interest in Japanese martial arts, which, as I have argued, seems to answer a perceived need for Indian ‘racial’ regeneration but simultaneously makes a high level of ‘race-fitness’ unnecessary because, conveniently, “jiu-jitsu makes a man of the lowest wreck of humanity” (471). Similarly, during a discussion about German economic growth, Barath and his advisors talk appreciatively of the way the fear of military service (as a penalty for failed examinations) works as a spur to greater educational achievement and “makes every German [student] put forth the maximum efficiency he can attain” (493). There is a sense here, reiterated in contemporary English fiction, that national ‘efficiency’ requires the forging of a technocratic as much as a physically ‘efficient’ elite. As with the primordialist themes and the subtle inter-discursive transaction of concepts such as degeneration that inform both The Prince of Destiny and Hindupore, the striking feature of their authors’ elitism is the way their aristocratic concerns bind them closely to avant-garde non-conformist and socialist groups in the colonial centre. We find, for instance, Ghosh’s and Mitra’s literary-political elitism reflected in the contemporary ‘novel of ideas’ such as H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), which features an elite “voluntary nobility” styled, intriguingly, as “the Samurai.” Like the Knights Templar, Wells’s “Samurai” had “a purpose in common in maintaining the state and the order and the progress of the world” (195). While the idea was welcomed by prominent Fabians like Sidney Olivier and Beatrice Webb, the elitism of the Samurai, and their op52

Peter Heehs, Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998): 4.

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position to “anything in the nature of class spirit” as William Greenslade has argued, “denoted the somewhat ambiguous relationship of Wells and the Fabians to organised labour.”53 More significantly, in relation to Ghosh’s uncertainty about the kind of elite that Indian nationalism might require, we find in Wells’s writing an endorsement of the engineer as the ‘coming man’. In a prophetic short story written by Wells in 1903, the victorious soldiers of a future European war are not perfect physical specimens, but military technicians – “alert, intelligent, quiet.” Here, “technology privileges mind over body, intelligence over ‘effort’, and places the townsman at the acme of man’s evolution.”54 However, while Ghosh and Mitra touch on similar issues in their writing, neither author proposes the “negative eugenics” that make some of Wells’s fictions so disturbing. Ideas of this kind were not explored by Hindu nationalists until the advent of Sarvarkar’s xenological manifesto Hindutva in 1923, and there is no equivalent in the early Indian novel in English of Wells’s degenerate, racially expendable “People of the Abyss” – unless these are mixed-race characters such as Mitra’s villainous Eurasian policeman, Mr Hunt, who is despised because of his racial hybridity, and fortuitously dispatched before the end of the novel.

The influence of Edwardian social utopianism in novels such as The Prince of Destiny is another example of the continuity, proposed earlier, between these works and the new, secular, historicized vision of India forged by Nehru in his writings. As Nehru stated in his prison correspondence with Indira: “I have always been interested in utopias and books peeping into the future. William Morris’s News from Nowhere was an early favourite of mine. Then there is […] a fairly recent book by H.G. Wells: Men Like Gods.”55 Nehru’s political (and elitist) affinities with Fabian socialism are also welldocumented and, like the generation of intellectuals, writers and radicals that preceded him, his imaginative projections of India’s 53

Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940, 192. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940, 192. 55 Nehru, Letters from a Father to a Daughter 146. 54

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ancient past were intimately bound up with the country’s possible political future. As Khilnani points out, “The crucial point about [Nehrus’s] […] historical writing was that it was not driven primarily by a curiosity about the past, but was impelled by anxieties about the present and the future.”56 As he tries to overhaul and ‘secularize’ India’s narrative of national identity, Nehru’s historiography rehearses and improvises many of the discursive manoeuvres of earlier Indian nationalism. Thus, in The Discovery of India, mythical and racial spaces such as Indraprastha and Aryavarta, which form such a rhetorical feature of the primordialist thesis, are replaced by actual archaeological evidence of the Indus Valley civilization at Harappa and Mohenjodaro. These sites become Nehru’s way of making a prior historical claim for his own new multicultural narrative of Indian identity. For Nehru, “the Indus Valley civilization, as we find it […] was, surprisingly enough, a predominantly secular civilization, and the religious element, though present, did not dominate the scene” (58). As Anna Guttman points out in her perceptive reading of The Discovery of India, Nehru also saw a precursor to his socialist project in the grand civic buildings of Mohenjo-daro, a claim that was rather easier to defend than his unsubstantiated conviction that these civilizations were inherently secular.57 In their self-mythologizing connection between personal life and public duty, both Gandhi’s and Nehru’s life-writings seem to answer a political need for new messianic ‘grand narratives’ of Indian identity, narratives which are already foreshadowed in the novels discussed here. Throughout his memoirs Nehru hoped to show, as he said to Gandhi, that “our prozaic existence has developed something of an epic greatness in it,”58 and these “prozaic epics,” built on themes of quest, destiny and redemption, carry echoes of the Indian-English political romances written in the first years of the twentieth century. In the process of formulating and popularizing 56

Khilnani, in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Mehrotra, 148. Anna Guttman, “Compromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Multicultural Nation-State: Constructing National History in The Discovery of India,” Clio 32.3 (Spring 2003): 264. 58 Nehru in Khilnani, “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English,” in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Mehrotra, 153. 57

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his plural model of India’s national spirit, Nehru was bound by a political and cultural inheritance that he sought, in many ways, to disavow. In an account of his work during the election campaign of 1936–37, Nehru employs a surprisingly primordialist vocabulary in his public speeches as a kind of concession to the rural, uneducated audience, staging his own political aspiration in Sanskrit terms: “I spoke […] of this India of ours, of Hindustan and Bharata, the old Sanskrit name for the mythical founder of our race.”59 But these ideas have a deeper resonance than simple village rhetoric. As Guttman points out, Nehru’s interest in Sanskrit, particularly in concepts of unity in diversity that derive from his reading of the Upanishads, “suggests a significant overlap [in his thought] between the space of the nation and the space of a specifically Hindu culture. The appearance in The Discovery of India of phrases such as ‘national karma’ further reinforces this view”(268). Like Gandhi’s golden-age concept of Ram Rajya, Nehru’s rhetoric hints at the messier political realities of ‘secular’ Congress–nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Far from achieving a linear political evolution or development beyond the ‘natural growth’ of religious nationalism, Nehru’s new ‘secular’ vision of India grew alongside and became interwoven with other nationalist narratives that sustained themselves through primordialist and national-communal roots.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1987). ——. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998). Bayly, Susan. “Race in Britan and India,” in Nation and Religion, Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer & Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999): 71–95. Bhatt, Chetan. Hindu Nationalism (Oxford: Berg, 2001). Boehmer, Elleke. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002). Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed, 1986). 59

Nehru, The Discovery of India, 47 (my emphasis).

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——. The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1993). Chirol, Valentine. Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910). Edmond, Rod. “Home and Away: Degeneration in Imperialist and Modernist Discourse,” in Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality, 1890–1940, ed. Howard Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2000): 37–63. Gandhi, Indira. Freedom’s Daughter: Letters Between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1922–39, ed. Sonia Gandhi (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989). Ghosh, Sarath Kumar. The Prince of Destiny, or the New Krishna (London: Rebman, 1909). Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1994). Guttman, Anna. “Compromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Multicultural Nation-State: Constructing National History in The Discovery of India,” Clio 32.3 (Spring 2003): 263–84. Hansen, Thomas Blom, & Christophe Jaffrelot, ed. The B J P and the Compulsions of Politics in India (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 2001). Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Heehs, Peter. Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998). Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s (London: Hurst, 1996). Khilnani, Sunil. “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English,” in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (London: Hurst, 2003): 135–56. Mitra, S.M. Hindupore: A Peep Behind the Indian Unrest (London: Luzac, 1909). ——. Indian Problems (London: John Murray, 1908). Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000). Nehru, Jawaharlal. An Autobiography (London: The Bodley Head, 1989). ——. The Discovery of India (London: Meridian, 1960). Pandey, Gyanendra. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1990). Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1989). Polikov, Léon. The Aryan Myth (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Sinha, K.K. Sanjogita, or The Princess of Aryavarta (Dinapore: Watling Printing Works, 1903). Tarlo, Emma. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst, 1996). Tickell, Alex. “Terrorism and the Informative Romance: Two Early Indian Novels in English,” Kunapipi 25.1 (2003): 73–83.

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Thompson, Paul. The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London: Routledge, 2nd ed. 1992). Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997). Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India (Oxford: Oxford U P , 5th ed. (1997).

“First Realise Your Need” Manju Kapur’s Erotic Nation

E LLEKE B OEHMER

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E S P I T E T H E G L O B A L I Z A T I O N of national economies, the transnational reach of cultural influences and the widespread cross-border movement of peoples, the world today remains divided along national borderlines, as Samir Amin and Neil Lazarus among others contend.1 The nation-state continues to be an important agent in the world political order, a countervailing force to transnationalism: it retains the power to regulate the operations of capital, and, culturally, to delimit some of the more serious outrages of fundamentalism. Of course, as numbers of women critics, Sangeeta Ray, Deniz Kanyoti, and Natasha Barnes among them, have argued, the achievement of postcolonial national independence has, to this day, nowhere brought a concomitant liberation of women. Transitions from colonial and other authoritarian rule are often forged by way of “elite pacts” between men. Nationalism – to quote from Ray, and to underline an argument I, too, have made for some time – signifies an “engendered” ideology and political movement, invoking the male citizen as normative and the mother symbol as its reified, governing ideal.2 1 See, for example, Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalisation (London: Zed, 1997); Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999): 29–51. 2 Sangeeta Ray, En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Post-

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Yet it remains the case – contradictory as this may seem – that nationalism appears to hold an undying attraction for many women, especially in new or post-independence nation-states. As Djurdja Knesević writes of the Croatian context, or Mampele Ramphele of the South African, the nation encourages a sense of belonging-to; it provides channels through which women can mobilize and take part in public debate.3 Symbolically, too, albeit in a backhanded way, the nation can be seen as invoking the prominence of women’s roles in the imagining of a community in ways that postcolonial women writers at least, from Buchi Emecheta through to Carol Shields, have found enabling. Given that from the point of view of women political and cultural freedoms cannot be expected as the natural harvest of independence and must therefore be claimed, the nation continues to be for women – as for other minorities – an indispensable or irrefutable means through which to forge such claims. And if there are admittedly many instances of the nation-state failing to deliver on its promises of freedom for all classes and groups, the failures of the nightmare-ridden ‘postcolony’ must be set in the context of continuing neocolonial domination by the West (and of the overweening idealism of post-independence nations). When all is said and done, nationalism, with its defining attributes cross-hatched out of myth and historical legend, provides a new civil society with a usable past and a serviceable set of cultural identities. And if the colonial Narratives (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000); Deniz Kanyoti, “Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20.3 (1991): 429–43; Natasha Barnes, “Reluctant Matriarch: Sylvia Wynter and the Problematics of Caribbean Feminism,” Small Axe 5 (March 1999): 34–47. As regards my own work, see, for example, “Stories of Women and Mothers,” in Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: The Women’s Press, 1991): 3–23, and Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2005). 3 See Djurdja Knesević, “Affective Nationalism” and Mampele Ramphele, “Whither Feminism,” in Transitions, Environments, Translations, ed. Joan W. Scott, Cora Kaplan & Debra Keates (London & New York: Routledge, 1997): 65–71 and 334–38, respectively. See also Simon Gikandi, “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 626–58.

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nation in many cases intolerantly identifies itself in contradistinction to an Other and therefore quickly raises enemies, globalization, too, is arguably based on very similar premisses, as the current global war on terror chillingly demonstrates.4 The likelihood is, in fact, that the forces of globalization disallow diversity and sabotage claims to rights far more thoroughly than the nation ever did. If, finally, in contradistinction to the uniformities imposed by transnational capital, the modern nation channels what both Anthony Smith and Perry Anderson acknowledge as the overpowering drive within cultures to establish collective meaning, does this not offer persuasive grounds for recuperating the seeming oxymoron of the ‘women’s nation’?5 By way of the reading of Manju Kapur which follows, I will ask whether the nation has not, paradoxically, come into use for women as a refuge and site of sisterly, even homoerotic, resistance – a resistance not only to global market forces from without but to religious fundamentalism from within? Does the nation not provide a base where important cultural and libidinal solidarities for women may be recuperated?

Manju Kapur’s National Needs Manju Kapur specializes in the telling of ordinary, apparently insignificant women’s stories – stories that provide extended footnotes, pitched from a woman’s perspective, to the official narrative of Indian nationalism. Difficult Daughters (1998) and A Married Woman (2003), her two published novels, each take the tale of an individual woman’s Bildung from young adulthood through marriage, work, and motherhood as their central narrative strand. Fulfilling a principle of the petit récit, the novels’ narrative structure is in each case made up of snapshots or snatches of day-to-day life, including letters, diary entries, and first-person interjections from one or other of 4

For a critical view of the nation which targets its tendency to other, see Christine Levecq, “Nation, Race and Postmodern Gestures in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35.2–3 (Spring–Summer 2002): 281–98. 5 See Anthony Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (London: Polity, 2003), and the review by Tom Nairn, “It’s not the Economy, Stupid,” Times Literary Supplement 5223 (9 May 2003): 24.

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the main characters, often set up like monologues in a play.6 Significantly, as in the 1990s writers Yvonne Vera and Arundhati Roy, both novels concentrate on the articulation of personal emotions and feelings, in particular on erotic self-fulfilment. However, where in Difficult Daughters a personal jouissance, or women’s self-expression generally, is placed in a marginal position in relation to the authoritative narratives of the traditional family on the one hand, and the coming-into-being of the nation on the other, in A Married Woman the situation is, intriguingly, reversed. Here the narrative of erotic (specifically and subversively of homoerotic) selfawakening, is identified, even if implicitly, with the increasingly embattled narrative of secular nationalism. My concluding paragraphs will revolve around this fascinating shift of focus in Kapur, one that intriguingly interacts with the May 2004 change of fortunes for the Congress Party. For, if the taboo petit récit of a liaison between two women, a widow and a wife, is offered as a protest against communalism, what does this say about women’s revised relationship with the secularist, formerly hegemonic nation? In Difficult Daughters, set during the years preceding Partition in the cities of Amritsar and Lahore, Kapur movingly evokes the multiple frustrations encountered by the central character Virmati in her efforts to educate herself and establish a domestic space she can call home. Struggling to integrate her aspirations for learning (initially identified as a masculine terrain) and her desire for a love match, Virmati endures and survives a clandestine abortion, a socially condemned affair, self-chosen marriage, and the difficult position of second wife. Unlike her decisive, politically involved friend Swarna Lata, Virmati spends long periods of time “soft with

6 The term petit récit, derived from Jean–François Lyotard’s critique of the grand narratives of modernity, is defined as a modest, locally based, at times fragmentary or stochastic tale, opposed to the so-called grand narrative of the official, male-authored and -authorised nation. It comes to hand as a particularly appropriate way of describing the non-authoritative stories women, in particular here women writers, might tell. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1984).

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compliance,” languishing in her incapacity to assert herself, in particular vis-à-vis her domineering if well-meaning lover.7 Yet, although she is often alienated and alone, Virmati’s story is not singular, as the title Difficult Daughters itself suggests. Her narrative is woven into a lineage of three generations of daughters, extending from Kasturi, Virmati’s mother, through to Ida, Virmati’s daughter and the novel’s narrator, each one of whom grows alienated from her mother while negotiating between the poles of “education and marriage” (38, 57). By thus probing daughter–family relations, Virmati’s story refracts the divisions between mothers and daughters as correlates for the political Partition in the country at large. In this novel, unusually, daughters’ as opposed to sons’ lives parallel national history, though negatively so. Virmati, in her wrangling with tradition and authority, reflects the turmoil in the public political world, though she is also positioned, paradoxically, as peripheral to national debates. Daughterhood signals ‘difficulty’ therefore, not only insofar as it denotes rebelliousness, but because daughterhood – traditionally subordinate and dependent – itself represents a difficult or painful position. Moreover, matrilineal links, however full of potential, by no means guarantee continuity of communication across the generations (190, 203–204). After her marriage. Virmati is symbolically cast out of her mother’s house and forced to find her own way. Her punishing exile ends only when the massacres of Partition make her family’s continuing rejection untenable. It is a sign of Virmati’s marginality that events surrounding the struggle for Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan are relayed in the novel by way of external report, at times almost as an official voice-over. Harish the Professor, Virmati’s married lover and then, much later, husband, interprets the progress of the Second World War and its implications for India through occasional commentaries paternalistically intended as educative. At the end of the novel Nehru is quoted speaking with heavy, retrospective irony of a free and inclusive India (252). Other than this, we are preoccupied largely with the affairs of Virmati’s heart and her conflicted 7

Manju Kapur, Difficult Daughters (London: Faber & Faber, 1998): 236. Further page references are in the main text.

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quest for education – her mediation, central to many Third-World women’s lives, between the apparently opposed poles of tradition and modernity, one which repeatedly threatens her social position and her peace of mind. Rather than being in any sense a buildingblock of her identity, therefore, the nation at first features mainly as a subject her lover brings up in conversation. In this sense, Virmati sets to one side the male-identified nation just as much as she is set aside or excluded by it. Towards the end of Difficult Daughters, Virmati, a married woman at last, exiles herself from her marriage to continue her education in Lahore. Rather than being perverse, this balancing of options has become her preferred mode of being (33, 169). She now elects to occupy a split space–time or domestic limbo, separate from her husband. From the beginning, her dogged attempts to cope with the demands of love against independence have committed her to a series of successive confinements in intractable situations and enclosing, stifling rooms. The “small” Lahore house where she goes to work on her MA is but the latest in a succession of imprisoning spaces: her first “poky” student room, her two-room hill cottage, and the dressing-room that is the only available place to conduct her married life (232, 80, 105, 168). Faced throughout with new beginnings, degrees, teaching positions, she attempts with each new bid for escape to put the past behind her, “[blanket] everything in oblivion” (182, 125). Yet with every door she closes, a new confining room, an infinite regression of near-prisons, appears to shut her in. She thus becomes reconciled to her difficult choices only by living out a kind of modern schizophrenia, in effect a self-Partition, choosing to occupy tenuously linked locations in her unconventional role as a wife who remains a student. If Difficult Daughters is to be read as a reinscription of the maleauthored nation and the history of middle-class self-determination from which it derives, it is significant that Virmati’s story effectively undermines the structures of the Western-origin romance. In a romance plot, the narrative closure provided by marriage conventionally connotes the successful achievement of national and/or bourgeois class identities: take, for example, the ending of E.M. For-

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ster’s Howards End or, indeed, of Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat.8 By contrast, marriage merely brings Virmati a new phase of emotional agitation and discomfort, as well as professional compromise and continuing social embarrassment. Kapur’s romance plot carries an alien, even ridiculous imprint, insofar as the Oxford-educated Professor, a reader of Wordsworth, is a classic mimic man who sees Virmati as his Romantic “other soul” and, Pygmalion-like, tries to remake her in his image. In an emblematic, tragicomic scene during the final, critical stages of their courtship, Harish explains to Virmati the touching significance of a picturesque hill tomb commemorating the loyalty of a colonial wife who survived her medical officer husband by several decades. Virmati response is literal, cynical and uncompromising: “Silly woman! … Staying for thirty-eight years. Just because her husband died there” (177). For a woman, unlike for a man, she perceives, marriage and parenthood do not equate with public success, or the accession to an important national or civic role. All the same, just as she rejects the private compromises of classic romance, so, too, does she elide the public conflicts of emergent India when she is pregnant, choosing to bask in a dry swimming-pool, an anomalous island in the storm. For her, both romance and the nation signify the unwelcome surrender of self to the collective will. It is, of course, true that Virmati’s dogged attempt to survive against all odds while at the same time erasing the past can be read at one level as an extended metaphor for the fate at Partition of Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, India. Difficult Daughters itself, although a daughter’s rather than a national son’s story, would according to this reading emblematize the nation and fulfil the terms of Fredric Jameson’s hypothesis “writ small,” as Susan Andrade would put it, referring to his controversial theory that Third-World 8 Cf Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: U of California P , 1991), who contends that the progress of love in Latin American romance novels mirrors the processes of consolidating the nation-state. So, too, in key works of African fiction. As well as A Grain of Wheat, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road features a tightly knit nuclear family whose travails “write small” trouble in Nigerian society at large. At the end of Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns (1989) and of Mongane Serote’s To every birth its blood (1981), symbolic women are pictured big with child or as giving birth.

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narrative tends to produce “national allegory.”9 To support this interpretation, the social and political situation in Lahore as well as in Amritsar at times mirrors Virmati’s personal state. This is made explicit when she comments: “I fret about my petty, domestic matters at a time when the nation is on trial. I too must take a stand. I have tried adjustment and compromise, now I will try non-cooperation” (239). Simultaneously, however, Virmati feels increasingly cut off from the city, as she does from her past – as, indeed, Lahore is from the Indian nation (232). The obvious analogy is with Saleem Sinai’s amnesia over the creation of Pakistan in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Yet to see Virmati’s life as bearing the weight of the national Symbolic is to erase the tensions, contradictions and accidents from her meandering story. One of the more resonant of these tensions occurs at the very end of the novel when, overcome by the tragedy of Partition, it is Harish who refuses the name Bharati (India) for his daughter, a name Virmati suggests. Exclaiming that, rather than being born, his country has descended into atavism, he rejects the national narrative as treacherous, and in so doing decisively breaks the metaphoric link between submissive woman and emergent nation. Instead, their daughter is given the name Ida, “two letters short of India.”10 In other respects, too, the novel deliberately falls short of attempting to represent the “public turmoil” of the nation. It offers by its own admission a women’s story based on personal history and, though it concedes that women may be interpellated by the national cause, it warns that unless they have political and social power they should be wary of any such link. If Difficult Daughters steers a path around the national imaginary, although always with reference to it, A Married Woman, despite its provocative homoeroticism, is by comparison firmly committed to the success of the secular nation. Even if it at times questions its political efficacy, it takes its imperatives of social justice seriously. 9

“Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88; Susan Andrade, The Nation Writ Small (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2005). I am grateful to Susan Andrade for sending me drafts of her book chapters and for our continuing conversation on gender and the nation. 10 Pallavi Rastogi, “Manju Kapur,” in South Asian Novelists in English, ed. Jaina C. Sanga (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2003): 123.

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Set in the sprawling suburbs of Delhi in the late 1980s and early 1990s, against the historical background of the Babri Masjid crisis in Ayodhya, the novel follows more or less the same line of development as Difficult Daughters, tracking an individual woman’s life from young adulthood into maturity. In this case, however, the emphasis, certainly at first, is on the monadic individual and the nuclear family, rather than the individual’s relations to the extended family or to tradition. Written in part while the author was abroad, on a fellowship in Britain, A Married Woman’s tale of the middleclass quest for self-improvement and self-pleasuring is recognizably informed by Western values of individualism and of personal desire as a viable site of self-realization. A related westernized focus colours the language, which is less conversational than in Difficult Daughters, less grounded in the untranslated Hindi signifiers which were a localizing feature of the earlier novel: almirah, tikki, gol gappa, samagri, and so on. Brought up on a diet of “mushy novels,” Astha, the eponymous heroine of A Married Woman (her name, ironically, means ‘faith’), is from the beginning in quest of “true love.”11 At the same time she feels drawn to the “safe and secure” – it is this tendency that will ultimately determine her decision to stick with her unsatisfactory but financially stable marriage to the businessman Hemant Vadera. After a few romantic mishaps, she finds considerable erotic satisfaction in the early days of her attachment to him, an attachment benignly choreographed by their families. Already at this early point, the central character’s development begins to diverge from, while also intertextually commenting on, that of Virmati in Difficult Daughters. There, individual choice in matters of love led to repeated emotional betrayals and deferred desire. Here, an arranged marriage brings delayed but real sexual gratification (46), and proves to have considerable holding-power, surviving the rearing of two children, life with the in-laws, work outside the home for both partners, and Hemant’s suspected one-night stands. The greatest test that the marriage faces, however, is Astha’s desire for self-fulfilment and some measure of autonomy away 11

Manju Kapur, A Married Woman (London: Faber & Faber, 2003): 8. Further pages references are in the main text.

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from the family, a goal which she conceives of in canonical Western feminist terms as being true to herself, an escape from feeling misunderstood, “throttled, and choked” (109, 167). She is “fed up with the ideal of Indian womanhood, used to trap and jail” (8). The singularity of her quest is offset by the fact that the relationship with Hemant is viewed by virtually everyone other than Astha herself as based, correctly, on wifely self-sacrifice, as against the phony marriages of mutual convenience allegedly contracted by N R I s in America (40–41). As with the woman-loving undertones of the African writers Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga,12 for example, Kapur in this novel is interested in those female potentialities that exceed the possibilities for relationship sanctioned within the confines of the traditional family and its analogue, the nation-state. Astha’s painting, her primary vehicle of self-expression since childhood, is raised to new heights of inspiration when she becomes involved in political protests against the Hindu fundamentalist movement aimed at razing the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Built by Emperor Babur on, it is said, the site of a destroyed Hindu temple, the birthplace of the god Ram, the mosque is eventually pulled down in late 1992, as the novel reports at its end, and becomes the flashpoint of serious communal tensions across India (290–91). The first step in the politicization of Astha’s art occurs when, in response to a request from an activist, Aijaz, she writes a dramatic script about the Masjid’s history for a theatre workshop (110–11). The second step comes not long after with the Muslim Aijaz’s death at the hands, it is presumed, of Hindu fundamentalists. Astha’s paintings are then sold to raise money for the Manch set up in his memory to campaign for the preservation of the mosque. Even if circumscribed by family commitments and her husband’s resistance, Astha’s agency as an artist, it becomes clear, is given direction by this political activism, and her social awareness in turn primes her to exercise a new-found autonomy as her friend Pipeelika’s lover. “[Painting] represented security, not perhaps of

12

See Elleke Boehmer, “Tropes of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38.2 (2003): 135–48.

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money, but of her own life, of a place where she could be herself” (149–50). Within the pro-secular terms laid down by the novel, it is significant that a cultural movement pitted against fundamentalism is directly responsible for drawing Aijaz’s widow Pipee and Astha together in a self-delighting, intensely physical affair. As A Married Woman itself suggests, the Babri Masjid crisis, from its beginning, denoted for Congress and other secularist nationalist parties a serious crisis of confidence in the brand of non-sectarian politics that had sustained the Indian nation since Independence. They found to their shock that they did not in fact have a sufficiently powerful purchase on the nation’s cultural capital, certainly not one powerful enough to mount an adequate countervailing force to withstand the upsurge of religious feeling that animated the fundamentalists. Astha’s throwaway line, “I don’t need religion, whatever I am,” spoken in response to her mother’s growing devoutness, is a marker of this widespread secular disaffection (85). Ayodhya demonstrated that at the level of mobilizing the spiritual and private domains of society (those areas of culture and belief conventionally presided over by women), fundamentalist nationalism had the distinct edge over secular state nationalism with its rationalist emphases on self-determination and democratic rights. It is into this lack within the Nehruvian tradition and, by extension, within the market-driven nation-state that the woman-centred passion and respect shared by Astha and Pipee is strategically allowed to flow. The novel explicitly chooses not to mobilize religious belief of any description, even though its heroine is called Astha.13 Its alternative to the strong affective hold of religion is an emotionally invested, mutual relationship, especially though not exclusively intimacy between women, the kind of relationship that is relatively unspoken in the Indian women’s novel in English. The women’s feelings (and the fact they are reciprocated) are set up in contradistinction to, on the one hand, the fullness represented by a 13

Astha’s name is offset by her lover’s unusual secularist name Pipeelika, meaning ‘ant’: with regard at least to names, their relationship signifies a juxtaposition of belief and non-belief. Pipee’s marriage to Aijaz, it is also worth noting, is cross-communal, Hindu–Muslim. Throughout, religious faith is generally represented either as atavistic or as reduced to over-mystified ritual.

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communal sensibility, for both women and men, and, on the other, the unbridled individualism represented by India’s economic neoliberalism, which is Hemant’s domain.14 To deflect the charge that her alternative domains of intimacy are merely Western and middle-class in derivation (as, of course, was Nehru’s modernizing nationalism), Kapur significantly chooses not to describe Ashta and Pipee’s relationship in terms of a conventional Western vocabulary of lesbian queer or homoerotic desire. In this way, she strategically sidesteps, if perhaps not entirely convincingly, the widespread controversy with which films like Mira Nair’s Kamasutra or Fire by Deepa Mehta (1996) were met, both of which showed graphic erotic exchanges between women.15 If anything, the novel’s language of female love is decorous, modest, even chaste. At the height of the affair there is much lingering description of the women’s (largely non-Western) clothing, of dupatta, sari and blouse tantalizingly revealing and concealing, of the delight of touching arms, breasts, fingers, the focus remaining on the upper body. Intercourse itself is conceived of in terms of an abstracted “mind-fucking,” Hemant’s sceptical term for what he believes the women in love share – literally visualized by Astha as intercourse in the head (218).16 In terms of the politics of the relationship, too, this sexual reserve or relative conservatism is corroborated: there is no significant disruption of conventional heterosexual identity-formation. Pipee insists all too soon on becoming the dominant partner, so repeating the power differential between Astha and her husband and precipitating the breakdown in their affair (233, 234). Astha never uses the words “lesbian” or “woman-loving” of herself. She is not given to looking into her sexuality to that extent. She also avoids any allusion to adultery and finds the prospect of leaving her family to set up with Pipee unthinkable (232). To Pipee’s disapproval, and eventual indifference, their love is always subsidiary to the marriage 14 On the appeal of a communal sensibility for women, see Sangeeta Ray, EnGendering India (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000), 6–7. 15 Chitralekha Basu, “A meeting of minds,” Times Literary Supplement 5212 (21 February 2003): 23. 16 To adapt from a description which is given of Astha’s poems, such samesex “mind-fucking” is like “her own experience endlessly replayed” (79).

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with Hemant. It is a diversion, not a rival to that socially established bond: “So far as her marriage was concerned, they were both women, nothing was seriously threatened” (232). For the lovers to spend time together, they must occupy, uncomfortably, the hidden, child-free spaces of Pipee’s flat. As the references to women’s domains and hidden space will have suggested, Kapur arouses the suspicion that to locate a sufficiently powerful cultural alternative to religious nationalism, she must make a move reminiscent of the masculine nationalist discourses of the past. Yet, given prevailing prejudices, she must do so in a circumscribed, perhaps even compromised, always already coopted way. As in Tagore or Bankim, she offers private, feminine space as the central locus of the cultural nation. A creative, selfrealizing love between women is set up in contrast to the selfabnegating love of the divine. But this is not all. Problematically but perhaps unavoidably, Kapur goes one step further by not only eroticizing but also homoeroticizing this love – a step that commits her to raising the stereotype of the secret, allegedly lesbian passion of the Eastern woman. Despite her precautions, she runs the risk, in other words, of basing the cultural heartland of the nation within the ne plus ultra of orientalist discourse, the colonial “phantasm.”17 The activist Aijaz, in fact, draws a direct analogy between Pipee’s love for other women and the strong ties shared by women in the zenana (129). It is a sign of the historical and moral difficulty that women’s erotic mobilization represents in A Married Woman that the narrative is committed to so many complex, contradictory conflations, which function either as tactical diversions or as a mode of selfcensorship. Astha’s is but is not a gay relationship. It is but is not conceived in westernized terms. It is within a domestic space, albeit an alien, sterile one, that her affair runs its course. It is when she is politically conscientized that Astha becomes aware of Pipee’s erotic interest in her, yet her involvement with Pipee also distracts her from the Ayodhya tragedy and eventually leads her back to the 17

See Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire (London: Leicester U P , 1996): 5–7; and also Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1994): 147.

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solitary, if politically preoccupied, activity of painting. Kapur references a whole matrix of cultural resources to which different configurations of the Indian nation have traditionally had recourse: home, the mother (Astha), the widow (Pipee), the realm of the private, the harem, the Kamasutra, symbolic art. And yet, such is her sense of crisis concerning the future of secular nationalism that she pushes these well beyond their conventional meanings into both radical and taboo areas. There is a connection here with the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, where the loving friendship between the cousins Nyasha and Tambu builds an alternative space of interactive bourgeois self-identification for women, one, however, that does not reject the story of nationalist coming-into-being.18 Indian women, Inderpal Grewal observes, have historically resisted hegemonic nationalist formations “by rearticulating [the home] as a site of struggle rather than of resolution.”19 Astha comes closest to rearticulating fundamentalist formations from the site of her subversive love affair when she and Pipee briefly join a Yatra or pilgrimage across India in the train of a religious “Leader,” organized to demonstrate belief in the united motherland (157–58, 184–86, 193, 246 ff). Although Pipee has professional reasons for her participation, and both women are happy about the opportunity of spending time together, the Yatra soon inspires in Astha a different sort of excitement, stimulated by the symbolic geography of the trip. At the beginning, for example, the lovers stand together at the southern tip of India, viewing with interest the Vivekananda Rock (256–57). Later, during time she has to herself, Astha begins to reflect on the diversity of India and what it signifies (“The Oneness underlying the Difference”). She is generally delighted to discover new areas of the country. It is as if, as she concedes to her diary, she has fallen into the rhythm of the Yatra Leader’s thoughts (258); as if, indeed, she were plotting an alternative sentimental journey away from her lover and towards the mythic nation. While taking pains to distinguish her India from the Bharat Mata worshipped by funda18

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: The Women’s Press, 1989). 19 Grewal, Home and Harem, 7.

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mentalists (who, as she recognizes, enhance their masculinity in serving the nation), she begins implicitly to position herself as the daughter of a nation intriguingly defined in masculine terms. Back in Ayodhya she has already allied herself with a network of affiliation to “Gandhiji, father of the Nation” (198, 203).20 Now she finds that the nation’s trumpeted qualities of “patience, tolerance, love and resignation” are qualities she seeks in vain in Pipee (260). Unsurprisingly, the Yatra represents both the culmination-point and the end of their relationship. As Astha’s pilgrimage suggests, in Kapur a homoerotic plot is made to cooperate, if in unlikely ways, with an edgy – sceptical yet emotive – narrative in defence of the secular nation (216). Whereas previously a concern for the propriety of the nation might have denied any such alliance, now an intense concern for its survival as a unified polity – as unity in diversity – encourages the cooperation. This is especially so, considering that the greater evil from the point of view of democratic freedom, and middle-class respectability, is fundamentalism. Nationalism, Kapur appears to suggest, is mobilized most effectively around some powerful emotion – if not religious, then erotic or homoerotic. After all, given the Kamasutra, who is to say that the homoerotic, far from being outlawed, is not central to the nation’s cultural makeup? Far from detaching sexual selfrealization from political activity, a typical move in the bourgeois novel, in A Married Woman the union of the lovers, even at its most discreet, champions values associated with the secular, national context.21 To adapt a comment made about Hinduism by one of the characters in the novel: “The [Indian nation] is wide, is deep, is 20

A Married Woman does, however, criticize the Congress Party’s concessionary handling of the build-up to Ayodhya (111). 21 There is evidence to suggest that among urban, middle-class Indians, religious affiliation is becoming itself increasingly private, individualized, ‘secularized’. At the same time, the growing sense is that women should not have to ‘de-sex’ themselves to gain access to the wider space of the nation. See, respectively, Maya Warrier, “Processes of Secularisation in Contemporary India,” Modern Asian Studies 37.1 (2003): 213–53, and Nilufer E. Barucha, “Inhabiting Enclosures and Creating Spaces: The Worlds of Women in Indian Literature in English,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 29.2 (1999): 93– 107. See also Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987).

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capable of endless interpretation. Anybody can get anything they want from it, ritual, stories, thoughts that sustain. But first you have to realise your need” (85).

WORKS CITED Amin, Samir. Capitalism in the Age of Globalisation (London: Zed, 1997). Andrade, Susan. The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958– 1988 (Durham N C : Duke U P , forthcoming 2005). ——. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987). Barnes, Natasha. “Reluctant Matriarch: Sylvia Wynter and the Problematics of Caribbean Feminism,” Small Axe 5 (March 1999): 34–47. Barucha, Nilufer E. “Inhabiting Enclosures and Creating Spaces: The Worlds of Women in Indian Literature in English,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 29.2 (1999): 93–107. Basu, Chitralekha. “A meeting of minds,” Times Literary Supplement 5212 (21 February 2003): 23. Boehmer, Elleke. “Stories of Women and Mothers,” in Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: The Women’s Press, 1991): 3–23. ——. Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2005). ——. “Tropes of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38.2 (2003): 135–48. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1994). Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions (London: The Women’s Press, 1989). Gikandi, Simon. “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (Summer 2001): 626–58. Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire (London: Leicester U P , 1996). Kanyoti, Deniz. “Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20.3 (1991): 429–43. Kapur, Manju. Difficult Daughters (London: Faber & Faber, 1998). ——. A Married Woman (London: Faber & Faber, 2003). Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999).

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Levecq, Christine. “Nation, Race and Postmodern Gestures in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35.2–3 (Spring–Summer 2002): 281–98. Lyotard, Jean–François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1984). Nairn, Tom. “It’s not the Economy, Stupid,” Times Literary Supplement 5223 (9 May 2003): 24. Rastogi, Pallavi. “Manju Kapur,” in South Asian Novelists in English, ed. Jaina C. Sanga (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2003): 123. Ray, Sangeeta. En-Gendering India (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000). Scott, Joan W., Cora Kaplan & Debra Keates, ed. Transitions, Environments, Translations (London & New York: Routledge, 1997). Smith, Anthony. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (London: Polity, 2003). Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991). Warrier, Maya. “Processes of Secularisation in Contemporary India,” Modern Asian Studies 37.1 (2003): 213–53.

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“Cutting Across Time” Memory, Narrative, and Identity in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies

S HIRLEY C HEW

The singer alone does not make a song, there has to be someone who hears: One man opens his throat to sing, the other sings in his mind. Only when waves fall on the shore do they make a harmonious sound; Only when breezes shake the woods do we hear a rustling in the leaves. Only from a marriage of two forces does music arise in the world. Where there is no love, where listeners are dumb, there never can be song.1

E

X P A T I A T I N G O N M E M O R Y as “a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual or social one,” Mieke Bal notes in particular the following points: that, “for better or worse, [cultural memory] links the past to the present and future”; that “the interaction between present and past” is “the product of collective agency” – in other words, the act of recall is “something that you

1

Rabindranath Tagore, “Broken Song,” in Tagore, Selected Poems, tr. William Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987): 55.

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actually perform,” and requires the presence of some person or persons as confirming witness; and finally, that such an exchange is location-bound, the emergent narrative being “constituted in the culture” in which the memorizing subject lives.2 In view of the vital role narrative plays in making coherent sense of a person’s remembrance of the past, of his or her identity, and meaningful functioning within the community, it stands to reason that investigations of trauma and healing should occupy to a large extent the contents of Bal’s co-edited volume.3 Traumatic memories are, in her words, “inflexible and invariable”; vividly present, they are compulsively repeated as drama by the subject and “cannot become narratives.” The result is that, lacking narrative control as well as the presence of a confirming witness, traumatic re-enactment is “tragically solitary.”4 Taking Bal’s comments as its point of departure, this essay analyses the dynamics of the acts of recall in Shashi Deshpande’s novel Small Remedies,5 the ways in which they enable the narrator’s sturdy examination of the problems of life-writing and, in turn, her endeavour to “remake a self from the scattered shards of disrupted memory.”6 It reads the novel, in particular the imagining of Bhavanipur, as exemplifying the “functioning of literature as cultural memory.”7 Finally, it probes the questions that Deshpande’s fiction of private life puts to the relationship between that life and public morality – for example, to what extent can we refrain from participating in the nation as political process and a site of struggle, and to what extent does inaction of the kind amount to colluding in a politics of identity such as the Shiv Sena represents, a politics which is

2

Mieke Bal, “Introduction” to Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe & Leo Spitzer (Hanover N H & London: U P of New England, 1999): vii–x. 3 See, for example, the essays by Susan J. Brison and Irene Kacandes. 4 Bal, “Introduction,” viii–x. 5 Shashi Deshpande, Small Remedies (New Delhi: Viking, 2000). Page references to this edition in the following are in the main text. 6 Susan J. Brison, in Acts of Memory, ed. Bal et al., 45. 7 The phrase is from Jonathan Crewe, “Reading Adamastor: Literature as Cultural Memory in ‘White’ South Africa,” in Acts of Memory, ed. Bal et al., 76.

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driven by, and battens upon, nostalgia for fabricated versions of the past, and for exclusivist, ‘alternative’ worlds? “Remember, Madhu, remember?” urges Tony, in the hope of reintegrating her into the old “circle of companionship”. But Madhu remains trapped in the repetition of grief, traumatized as she is by the death of her seventeen-year-old son Adit, a casualty of the communal violence that overtook Bombay between December 1992 and March 1993,8 and, in a manner of speaking, of parental strife. What do I tell you, Adit? That I slept with a man when I was a girl, a child really, and your father can’t take it? That your father is tearing himself apart, and me too, because of something that happened – and only once – years ago? (258)

Unable to obtain the ‘truth’ or to put a stop to his parents’ hideous quarrels, Adit flees the flat. About the same time, news begins to come in of trouble brewing, and then of the “bombs that have gone off across the city, a series of macabre bonfires lighting it up. The Stock Exchange Building … Air India …” (301). After the bitterness and anger Madhu and Som have known in recent months, the death of their son leaves behind “a frightening emptiness” (47). Looking back at those months, it is as if the “malignant force at work” in their personal lives was in like manner “working out its plans” through the mobs “running amok” (299) and all the other demonstrations of senseless violence in the streets. To get away from Som and their mutual sorrow as well as a Bombay alien in its divisiveness, Madhu accepts a commission from a small publishing firm to write the biography of Savitribai Indo8 Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial

Bombay (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2002): ch. 5, 121–59. This third outbreak of violence in the city occurred on 12 March 1993, and consisted of a series of bomb blasts arranged and executed by “a group of people, mainly Muslims affiliated with criminal networks in Bombay” (Hansen, Wages of Violence, 125). The riots previous to this erupted on 6 December 1992 following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Avodhya, and on 8 January 1993. The Muslims bore “the brunt of police brutality and ethnic rage from militant Hindus in both rounds of violence” (Hansen, Wages of Violence, 126).

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rekar, the doyenne of Hindustani music.9 In Bhavanipur to interview the singer, Madhu sees that the task she has taken on is going to be more difficult than anticipated. While she wishes to be on her own, the young couple she lodges with, Hari and Lata, is anxious to be attentive. And while she hopes to observe a degree of formality in their association, Hari turns out to be a blood relation, a nephew on her mother’s side, with a keen interest in various members of the family, in particular his great-aunt, Leela. But, undoubtedly, Madhu’s chief problem is her subject, Savitribai. Frail though she may be, the singer has lost nothing of her strong will, and knows exactly the kind of image her biography must communicate – that is, a woman whose distinction as the vocalist of classical Indian music rests entirely upon three factors: individual talent, training with her Guruji, the renowned Kashinath Burwa, and unswerving dedication to the art. As it happens, Madhu has her own, conflicting memories of Bai. Though the topic is never raised between them, they had been neighbours many years ago in Neemgaon. To the eight-year-old child that Madhu was at the time, Bai was a source of fascination. Equally so were her good-looking and gifted tabla player and, as was generally accepted, her daughter by this man. It troubles Madhu, therefore, that Bai should make no mention in their meetings of two of the significant influences in her life – the Muslim Ghulam Ahmed, who, as one of her musicians and her lover, can still be noticed in Bai’s old photographs; and Munni, the daughter, who, like Adit, was killed only recently on a bus, in one of the series

9 It is likely that Deshpande’s Savitribai is a composite figure, based broadly on such distinguished and senior artistes of Hindustani music as Gangubai Hangal (1913–) of the Kirana gharana and the late Moghubai Kurdikar (1904– 2001) of the Jaipur gharana. Some of the traits of these artistes, which can be found in Bai also, are: (1) the strict adherence to purism in singing classical music, “preferring austerity to the heaven of popularity,” hence their preference for concert performances over recordings; (2) the long and rigorous training; (3) the tendency to allude to “the old, painful memories […] kept locked away in [the] heart,” whatever these might be. See Yogesh Pawar, “Classic Revisited – Article on Gangubai Hangal,” Indian Express (21 April 1999); and Gangubai Hangal speaking to Leela Pawar.

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of bomb blasts which shook Bombay and left hundreds dead all over the city in a single day. Self-fashioning and the shaping power of memory is a theme Small Remedies shares with David Copperfield and Great Expectations,10 novels which are part of the rich allusive fabric of Deshpande’s writing, with references ranging from Sanskrit literature to devotional poetry in Kannada to Victorian and modernist texts. Within that dominant theme, one important strand of interest is the “constant struggle waged between a biographer and his [sic] subject,” which, to Leon Edel, characterizes the writing of biography.11 At each visit to Bai, Madhu is given another piece of the celebrity’s history. Yet these revelations, often snatched from memory and with little regard for chronological order, serve to add to Madhu’s doubts regarding the ‘truth’ of Bai’s construction of her life and career. And to listen to the recordings made over several weeks, Madhu discovers, is to be struck by the numerous problems she must contend with in respect to form, structure, and expression: for example, how to transcribe the often rambling material on tape; how to translate into English Bai’s idiosyncratic Marathi; and how to represent, besides the authorized image Bai insists upon, the other and sometimes unflattering selves which in her speaking she lets slip.12 A second and interlocking strand of interest is the remembering Madhu ‘performs’ in this first-person narrative, as, 10

“I am born,” declares David Copperfield in the title to the opening chapter, harking back thereby to his nativity while indicating that, as the author of his “personal history,” he is remaking his life in the act of telling it. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966): bk I, ch. 1, 49. Pip, on his part, dates the “beginning” of his life more precisely. In the split second before the fateful meeting with Magwitch, he had taken possession of his family name as inscribed on several tombstones and also distanced himself from it: the boy Philip Pirrip was also Pip, a name he had given himself, a diminutive that sounds his feelings of helplessness even as he took in his “first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things.” Great Expectations (1861; London: Oxford U P , 1978): 1. 11 Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984): 30. 12 If, in her self-conscious wrestling with these problems, Madhu gives the impression at times of being too well-read in criticism on life-writing, this no doubt is part of the earnestness of the character!

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goaded by the silence or curiosity of the other characters, she tries to make coherent sense of her own “fractured, fragmented” memories, in particular the tangled events leading up to Adit’s death. It is here that, like the Victorian novelists Madhu and her friends quote from regularly, Charlotte Brontë being one, Deshpande makes extensive use of plot complications, coincidences, and buried secrets. Given these key concerns, questions pile up in Small Remedies, each “like a grappling hook” bringing up another.13 To be troubled by Bai’s refusal to speak of Munni, and of Madhu herself as “Munni’s friend,” and “the daughter of my father, [Bai’s] doctor and her admirer,” is to be faced with other attendant perplexities: “And why haven’t I declared my identity to her either? Why haven’t I said, I’m Munni’s friend Madhu. Remember me?” (29). Speculating on the reasons for Bai’s silence, Madhu comes up with various possibilities. They include Bai’s desire to reinvent herself as both eminent artist and respectable woman, making up for all the years when she was not seldom an object of scorn, derided as “that Bai,” one of “those women”;14 her arrogant disregard of other people, so that Madhu is reduced to nothing more than “the writer from Bombay” and Hasina, her student and teaching assistant, to “that girl”; a steely indifference forged over the years in the face of her daughter’s denial, first, of Ghulam Ahmed and then of Bai herself; and finally, prosaic as it may seem, her illness, which, as her doctor remarks, has left her with “residual deficits” affecting her language and her memory (61), and, hence, portions of her narrative. As for Madhu’s own reticence, the reasons must partly lie in what she can recall of Munni and their brief friendship. Bold, mischievous and headstrong, Munni was unusual among the other children in Neemgaon. At the same time, she hankered after ‘normal’ ways and relationships; and, to be dissociated from Ghulam Ahmed, she would rehearse a particular version of her identity for anyone who cared to listen: “My name is Meenakshi,” “My father is 13

“They keep pulling things out of the past, each memory like a grappling hook bringing up a question”; Shashi Deshpande, A Matter of Time (New Delhi: Penguin, 1996): 16–17. 14 See also Attia Hosain, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, for representations of the singer/courtesan. And, of course, the Urdu classic of 1905, Umrao Jan Ada (“The Courtesan of Lucknow”) by Mirza Ruswa.

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Sadashivrao, he’s in Pune.” If Madhu was drawn to Munni from the start, it was because, motherless, with only her father and an old male servant for company, she was aware of the oddity of her own position. Did she also feel a need to be ‘normal’ and ‘respectable’? Was that why she was unable to cope with the thought that her father, as Munni put it, “goes to a woman at night” (139)? How much was it jealousy at the thought of having to share her father with another person? Madhu the adult is able to rationalize her father’s relationship with the unknown woman, even though it has not ceased to disturb her entirely. At the time, as the bearer of unpleasant news, Munni had to be cast aside. I asked Babu to tell her to go away, which he did with enormous pleasure […] But I couldn’t, I wouldn’t speak to her. Saying such horrible things about my father! In a while, she stopped coming. It is possible that there was a gap between this and their going away from Neemgaon. I don’t remember. I only remember the locked door and the absence of music next door […] All these things are there in my memory, unconnected however, to any other event. I make the connection only now, only now I think – I turned my back on Munni, I let Babu drive her away. (140–41).

Madhu’s reticence is, in part, a way of avoiding too close an examination of her sense of guilt as a parent. Perhaps criticizing Bai for her denial of Munni helps to displace her self-reproach. Perhaps it helps to keep at bay, even now, the dark secret from the past which has so unaccountably turned her life upside-down. A name, a story, a painting – out of that collision had erupted a buried memory, taking Madhu back to a day in Neemgaon when – with her parent dying in a Bombay hospital, her anticipations of loss, her chance encounter with a strange woman she understood instinctively to be her father’s mistress – the fifteen-year-old girl had reached out for comfort from a family friend and become involved in a moment of sex with him that led to his suicide. The instabilities of her narrative mirror the largely futile if also continuing struggle to find a satisfactory explanation for the occurrence; for having blotted it from memory for so long; for the acute sense of estrange-

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ment that, with the disclosure of what had happened, grew between herself and Som; and for its part in Adit’s death.

“I have come here [Bhavanipur ] to forget” (153). Instead, and the irony does not escape Madhu, Bhavanipur is both a beginning and a way back, the ground where her burden of pain is daily repeated and where, despite herself, new links with people and new feelings become possible. Some of the recognitions are the outcome of narrative memory – from Hasina, an account of the later years of Ghulam Ahmed, who turns out to be her grandfather, picking up from the point when his relationship with Bai ended and he returned to his family; from Hari’s eager questions relating to his great-aunt, recollections (as we shall see below) of Leela the “ordinary woman” and the political activist; from the casual violence of a mugging, the words that release her to some extent from her grief. Other recognitions come, apprehended at deeper levels, so that to be briefly involved in the rituals of the upanayanam family group at the temple is to see what it means to be human. In other words, as Madhu learns to grow again into a “circle of companionship” (54), so a parallel movement in the narrative is the unfolding of Bhavanipur as symbolic space, configured of historical and cultural details and images which Deshpande handles with an unerring sureness of touch and an inwardness of knowledge. Called after Bhavani, the dark stone goddess of the local temple, the name of the township incorporates bhava and bhavan, ‘being’ and ‘dwelling-place’, the state of becoming and its realization in multiple forms.15 With its schools and colleges and university, it prides itself “as a centre of learning and culture […] famous for its writers and musicians” (37). It was here that Bai’s Guruji passed the 15

The fictional Bhavanipur may have borrowed something of the ambience of Hubli, where Gangubai Hangal has lived since 1928. The town falls in “one of those friendly zones of mixed cultural and linguistic heritage which soften the chauvinistic rigidity of state borders. Lying just south of Maharashtra, the Dharwar–Hubli belt has contributed as much to Marathi culture as it has done to Kannada”; Shanta Gokhale, “Gangubai Hangal” (1999), http://www .chembur.com/anecdotes/gangubai.htm

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last years of his life, teaching and living close to the temple, his presence turning Bhavanipur into “a kind of focus for the Gwalior gharana […] [with] students coming from all parts of India to learn music from Guruji” (37). It was here, too, that Bai was finally accepted as a disciple. Since Guruji’s death and in homage to him, annual recitals have been held at the Bhavani temple. Each year the event is presided over by one of his students, beginning with the most famous of them, Rashid Mian, and attended by musicians from all over India. That Hasina has been nominated by Bai to perform at the forthcoming recital is a personal triumph for the younger woman; it is, moreover, a public acknowledgement of her dual cultural inheritance. Claiming as her gurus, first, Ghulam Ahmed, and then Savitribai, Hasina takes forward through her art the distinctive crosscurrents that have, since at least the early thirteenth century, invigorated, sustained and enriched Indian music. As an example of Deshpande’s adroit use of detail, Bai’s Guruji, we are told, belonged to the Gwalior gharana, a piece of passing information that brings to mind the historical importance of the princely state in the development of Indian music, in particular the contributions it made to the revitalizing of the Dhrupad style of singing under Raja Man Singh Tomar (1486–1518);16 and, in addition, Gwalior’s association, even today, with the great musician (singer, composer, musicologist) Miyan Tansen. “A peculiar synthesis – a Brahmin Muslim,” Tansen, “even though he was a Muslim in name and in faith […] often visited Hindu temples to pray and to chant the Vedic verses,” and, in so doing, opened the way for other Muslim musicians “to partake in, and create, Hindu religious music.”17 The recital brings to fullness an act of cultural recall, performed and enabled through collective agency. The setting is the human and otherworldly space of the temple; the vocalist, the embodiment 16

See Reginald & Jamila Massey, The Music of India (London: Kahn & Averill, rev. ed. 1993): 45–46. 17 Tansen was born to a Brahmin couple in the village of Baher near the city of Gwalior and given the name of Tanna; he was subsequently adopted by the Sufi fakir who had foretold his birth and renamed Ata Mohammad Khan; “Mian Tansen,” which means ‘he who commands an army of notes’, was the title conferred upon him by Akbar when he was invited to the imperial court. Massey, The Music of India, 50–53.

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of the cultural legacies handed down in the course of time; her repertoire, an exquisitely layered arrangement of sacred chants such as the Shankaracharya shloka in praise of Annapurna (“giver of food”), raagas such as the Malkauns, various vocal styles such as the tarana (the originator of which was Amir Khusro, the great Muslim musicologist of the thirteenth century), and the single devotional song, a vachana by Akka Mahadevi. However narrowed down Bai’s version of her life and career may be, there is no denying on this occasion the creative pull and rich twining of forces which have made her so distinguished an exponent of her art, and which manifest themselves anew in Hasina’s singing of the bhajan: “Now her student Hasina, a Muslim woman, sings this poem, composed centuries ago by a woman, a Hindu woman, whose entire life was a statement of her faith” (319). Sung in Kannada, rooted in the lived experience of the local and the everyday, it reaches out universally in its passionate affirmation: “I saw a dream.”18 Juxtaposed with the Sanskrit hymns to Annapurna, the mother goddess, it serves to call into view the legitimacy of the unorthodox spaces in which women, like the twelfth-century saint-poet, like Bai, and, like Leela, choose, in their difference, to dwell.

Bhavanipur has given Madhu some measure of control over the events of the past year and strength to contemplate a future without Adit. As the anniversary of their son’s death approaches, Som’s letter urging her to return to him meets with her consent: We need to be together, we need to mourn him together, we need to face the fact of his death and our continuing life together. Only in this is healing possible. […] between the two of us, we can recreate him, we can invoke his presence and make his existence real. And then, maybe, we can have our own ceremony, Som and I, we can wash away the darkness and ugliness, not only of Adit’s death, but of what happened before, with our own oblations of sesame seeds and water. (323) 18

See, for example, Speaking of Shiva, tr. A.K. Ramanujan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 124.

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This undertaking to seek absolution, along with reflections on memory’s “own truth,” brings Madhu’s narrative to a close. But, like Bai’s self-fashioning, it leaves as many questions as answers. Returning to Som, Madhu returns to Bombay. To what extent does the text invite us to interpret Bhavanipur and its figuring of cultural memory as an alternative to Bombay and the “savageries” of its “politics of identity”? And again, to what extent can the text be said, in this instance, to “overvalorize the monuments of the past,” to adapt Aijaz Ahmad’s words, in a nostalgic revisioning of ‘nation’?19 In other words, if the statements about the crucial role memory plays in our lives, “capricious and unreliable though it is” (324), are not rhetorical flourishes merely, what acts of recall will allow Madhu some form of understanding of the collective amnesia that had beset Bombay? It is to the discontinuities of Deshpande’s text that we must look for possible answers. Cutting back and forth across time, it resists a linear reading which moves towards “cultural invocation” and plenitude20 – after the recital it is back to looking after Bai, now in a coma, and to preparing for departure. Furthermore. the narrative requires us to read past Madhu’s silences, uncertainties, and evasions to the overriding realities of contemporary Bombay, such as the vested interests of the well-to-do, economic deprivation among a large section of the populace, and social injustice. In the following passage – It was, though we didn’t know it then, the end of an era, the city metamorphosing into something very different from the Bombay of mills, factories and workers, the Bombay of middle-class dreams and hard work that [Leela] had known and loved (198–99)

19

Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia (London: Verso, 2000): 146. Also, for “the savageries of the politics of identity” and “cultural invocation,” see Ahmad, 145, 148. 20 Compare my reading of Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day in an essay published in Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: The Women’s Press, 1991): 43–52.

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– Madhu is referring to the early 1980s, and her nostalgia for the Bombay she first encountered two decades ago is not exceptional.21 In an article published in 1993, in which comparisons are made between the city he visited in mid-February that year and the one he grew up in, Amit Chaudhuri remarks: “Bombay, in the Sixties and Seventies, had a utopian air about it: it was the only city in India in which everyone was potentially upwardly mobile […] In the Eighties, Bombay began to change.”22 The literary imagination, as Roshan Shahani argues,23 drawing her examples from a range of novelists including Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, and Shashi Deshpande, has for long been captivated by the “multifacetedness” of Bombay. And, perhaps more than any other author, Rushdie is regarded as having revivified the city in his representation of its crowds, cosmopolitan peoples, language marches, Bollywood, and so on, a city seething with energy and opportunities.24 But there are other Bombays, rendered from very dissimilar points of view, and not the least common among these is the view of the city as a hostile and estranging place. Even then, as the excerpts below from two poems from the 1970s by Nissim Ezekiel and Uttam Kolgaokar illustrate, the attitudes vary, given the different social and cultural contexts out of which the poetry is written. In Ezekiel, the self-conscious translation of urbanscape into mindscape is the strategy by which the middle-class poet distances himself from the troubling contradictions of Bombay,

21

Cf “the riots questioned clichés and axioms about what the city represented and how it functioned and, by implication, they threw into prominence the fact that Bombay had changed as a city. Over the preceding decades Bombay had become a different kind of place and the riots in their dramatic way pointed out how it was different – populous, fragmented, economically developed, antagonistic, and shorn of an encompassing consensus”; Jim Masselos, “Postmodern Bombay: Fractured Discourses,” in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson & Katherine Gibson (Cambridge M A & Oxford: Blackwell, 1995): 199. 22 Amit Chaudhuri, “Diary,” London Review of Books (10 June 1993): 29. 23 Roshan G. Shahani, “Polyphonous Voices in the City,” in Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1995): 99–111. 24 See esp. Midnight’s Children and the essay “Imaginary Homelands.”

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Unsuitable for song as well as sense the island flowers into slums and skyscrapers, reflecting precisely the growth of my mind. I am here to find my way in it

but, in Kolgaokar, no escape is conceivable from the excoriating sense of alienation to which as a Dalit he is subjected. He was born here, but didn’t belong here; […] When the people here were busy building taller and taller houses, he sat alone in the woods […] His house, made of earth, looked so puny amongst the town buildings! He went inside and shut himself up. Then he saw that the rear wall of his house had vanished and the whole sky with its thousand eyes had invaded the house.25

Amid these “polyphonous voices,” Madhu’s retrospective comments on the city must strike us as bordering on the disingenuous. First, there is the plea of ignorance, “we didn’t know it then”; second, the suggestion that Bombay has become transformed, as it 25

Nissim Ezekiel, “Island,” in Ezekiel, Hymns in Darkness (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1976): 14, and Uttam Kolgaokar, “His House” (translated from the Marathi by Vilas Sarang), in No Entry for the New Sun: Translations from Marathi Dalit Poetry, ed. Arjun Dangle (Bombay: Disha, 1992): 34. The poems in Dangle’s volume are not dated, but his introduction refers to the strengthening of the Dalit literary movement in the 1970s (x).

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were, overnight; and, finally, the curious juxtaposition of “the Bombay of mills, factories and workers” and “the Bombay of middleclass dreams and hard work,” two phrases that between them elide the many and unlike worlds within the urban scene. Which of the Bombays did Leela know and love? And which is Madhu’s Bombay? Hari, who does not have time for self-centred artists like Bai, believes Madhu would be better occupied writing the biography of Leela and such prominent aspects of her life as the part she played as a freedom-fighter, then as a teacher, her membership of the Communist Party and later of the Socialist group, her role in the trade unions, and her work among the factory workers. But, in spite of Madhu’s indebtedness to her aunt and their fondness for each other, she finds it nearly impossible to recall anything of consequence relating to Leela the public figure. Her memories are personal, tied to the Leela she knew as a friend and a surrogate mother, “the woman who made me part of her life after my father’s death and brought me out of the terrifying emptiness I faced when he died. It was because of Leela that I have never felt an orphan” (98). Nevertheless, the information Madhu retrieves about Leela’s political activities, patchy though it is, outlines a lengthy career stretching from the Quit India movement to the industrial unrest and protest marches of the 1950s and 1960s, the women’s anti-pricerise revolt of the early 1970s, the Emergency, when she was jailed for “her involvement with the striking railway workers, with their families” (46), and the beginnings of the textile-workers’ strike of 1982–1983. As noted above, the Bombay of these decades was, to many, full of promise. It was also the breeding-ground of division, conflict and communal tensions, with a rapidly expanding population which included, then as now, countless refugees and homeless people; precarious working conditions and wages; flawed urban planning; and inequalities of land and services distribution in the city. This was the Bombay that Madhu came to know in the late 1960s and early 1970s when, after leaving college, she took on the editorship of City Views, a small English-language publication. Through Leela’s connections with the mills, and tenements like Maruti Chawl and the people living in it, Madhu was able to bring to the

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magazine “the world of Bombay factories, the mills, the workers who come from all over the country and live together in chawls” (145). Another initiative was to publish every month a map of a particular area of Bombay, each map reproduced by the otherwise repugnant Dalvi “with painstaking care, working out the fine details with the skill of a miniature artist” (86), each map the textual representation of an actual place inviting scrutiny. In its literary pages, City Views carried stories, poems, articles, photographs on Bombay from people […] memories of the city, of events that took place in it. I even search out Marathi poems and articles, translating them myself with pleasure. (145)

A considerable portion of Madhu’s pleasure as a translator springs from her fluency in Marathi. “Comfortable” as she is in the language, though an immigrant to Bombay, she is constantly alert to its variety, noting from the different registers she hears that Tony’s efforts hardly rise above “gutter Marathi” (51), that Bai’s speech, “like so many women of her generation, is explicit, disdaining euphemisms, and carelessly interspersed with casual abuses” (28), and that even Hasina’s “perfect” Marathi is touched on occasions with echoes of the Urdu language she grew up with. 26 Equally, having lived in Bombay for thirty years, Madhu is proficient in several languages and, besides interviewing Bai in Marathi, is capable of negotiating in Hindi with strangers, thinking about the biography in English in which it is to be written, and picking up as much Kannada as she can with Lata’s help. Needless to say, more colourful examples exist of the “Tower of Babel syndrome” (38), as she dubs it, among them Chandru, a successful doctor who speaks a Marathi “spattered with Gujarati, English and Hindi words” (249) when he gets excited, and Lata with her insouciant if endearing habit of tumbling in and out of languages, “uncaring of hazards” (39):

26 It is possible to draw, from Madhu’s conscious delineation of the linguistic landscape, Deshpande’s implicit criticism of the “nativist agenda” which the Shiv Sena has been purusing since the mid-1960s.

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She tries her rudimentary Marathi on me, oblivious of her mistakes, of her confusion in genders. With [Hari], she slips occasionally into Hindi – a faltering, searching-for-words-Hindi, that often ends in Kannada or English. (39)

During her time as editor, Madhu succeeds in altering the image of the magazine, and taking it away from a coterie audience to “ordinary people to whom Bombay is important as well.” Her association with the magazine did not last long. When she became pregnant, it was time to move away from the window she had opened on the city and dedicate herself to motherhood. One of Deshpande’s achievements as a novelist rests upon her intimate knowledge both of the life-enhancing aspects of family relationships and of their rigid constraints – the male dictates, the conformism, the bourgeois aspirations. Marrying Som draws the solitary Madhu into the fold of “a model family” in which each member seems set upon “playing out her or his allotted role to perfection” (103). But it is only with the birth of Adit that her assimilation is complete: I really become a part of it, a full member of the society. Suddenly everyone matters to me; they’re Adit’s grandparents, his uncles and aunts, his cousins. But above all, I learn the magic of that small circle, the basic unit of family life – father, mother and child. The beginning of the world, the Gangotri of humanity. Now, at long last, I’m playing the game of “house, house,” I’m playing the mother’s role. (105)

In other words, unlike Leela and Bai, each of whom started out as “the rebel in a wholly conventional, tradition-bound family” (44) and remained an independent spirit, it is Madhu who identifies herself with the Bombay of “middle-class dreams.”27 In this she is 27

Not all the middle classes of Bombay led similarly insulated lives. The Shiv Sena had the support of “upper caste, white collar workers and professionals” as well as unemployed and underemployed people. Jayant Lele, “Saffronization of the Shiv Sena: The Political Economy of City, State and Nation,” in Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (1995; New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000): 195. And, during the riots, “To many observers in the

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not alone. Of those in her upwardly mobile and self-absorbed circle, Som gives up his hospital teaching job to start his own lucrative practice; Tony, having had a go at being a doctor, painter, and journalist, joins an advertising agency and is a celebrity; Rekha, his wife, runs a successful art gallery; and Maya and Yogi have their trendy publishing firm. Leela did not live to see the collapse of “the longest textile strike in world history”; the disintegration of the trade-union movement; the rise to power of the Shiv Sena;28 and the riots and then the bombs which tore the city apart. Nonetheless, the Bombay she worked in and knew at first-hand was already a site of struggle. It is this Bombay that, on the edge of catastrophe, Madhu begins to realize she can no longer ignore: Even we, who live in our safe middle-class apartments, way above the ground, can feel the subterranean rumblings. […] There’s a miasma, the smell of disaster in the air, but we are still free of it, still immune to it. Or so we think. (299)

Meditating on the trials of the legendary king Harishchandra in the Mahabharata, Madhu concludes: “What the story tells us is this: you can’t tell the truth, you can only live with it” (255). Nonetheless the “living with it” involves the acts of recall and the constant retelling that make up the burden of Madhu’s narrative. And in her search for the links to the past which are necessary, as Mieke Bal avers, in helping to make sense of the present and the future, we find adumbrated in Deshpande’s Small Remedies a political and cultural identity that is not constructed upon alternatives but is fostered by a deep belief in the human interconnections that make us who we are, a belief which fuels the activities and affiliations of local press, the massive involvement of the ostensibly civilized middle class in the kind of violence typically associated with the lower classes was particularly shocking and ominous”; Hansen, Wages of Violence, 123. 28 Since its launch in 1966, the Shiv Sena has relied on tactics of othering – of “South Indians” (mostly those from Tamil Nadu), communists and trade-union members, dalits, tribals, and, increasingly in the 1980s, Muslims. “With the nebulousness of the Shiv Sena’s programme […] every grievance can find its reflection in the slogans, symbols and the identifiable enemy projected by the Sena”; Lele, “Saffronization of the Shiv Sena,” 193.

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women like Leela and Bai, which forms part of Madhu’s learning process, and which must surely underpin any radical remaking of Bombay.

WORKS CITED Ahmad, Aijaz. Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia (London: Verso, 2000). Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe & Leo Spitzer, ed. Acts of Memory: Cutural Recall in the Present (Hanover N H & London: U P of New England, 1999). Chaudhuri, Amit. “Diary,” London Review of Books (10 June 1993): 29. Dangle, Arjun, ed. No Entry for the New Sun: Translations from Marathi Dalit Poetry (Bombay: Disha, 1992). Deshpande, Shashi. A Matter of Time (New Delhi: Penguin, 1996). ——. Small Remedies (New Delhi: Viking, 2000). Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield (1849–50; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). ——. Great Expectations (1861; London: Oxford U P , 1978). Edel, Leon. Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984). Ezekiel, Nissim. Hymns in Darkness (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1976).

Hansen, Thomas Blom. Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2002). Lele, Jayant. “Saffronization of the Shiv Sena: The Political Economy of City, State and Nation,” in Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (1995; New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000): 195. Masselos, Jim. “Postmodern Bombay: Fractured Discourses,” in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson & Katherine Gibson (Cambridge M A & Oxford: Blackwell, 1995): 199. Massey, Reginald, & Jamila Massey. The Music of India (London: Kahn & Averill, rev. ed. 1993). Nasta, Susheila, ed. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia (London: The Women’s Press, 1991). Ramanujan, A.K. Speaking of Shiva (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Shahani, Roshan G. “Polyphonous Voices in the City,” in Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1995): 99–111. Tagore, Rabindranath. Selected Poems, tr. William Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).

The Communalization and Disintegration of Urdu in Anita Desai’s In Custody 1 A MINA Y AQIN

Introduction

T

U R D U in India is an extremely layered one which needs to be examined historically, politically and ideologically in order to grasp the various forces which have shaped its current perception as a sectarian language adopted by Indian Muslims, marking their separation from the national collectivity. In this article I wish to explore those themes through the lens of literature, specifically an Indian-English novel about Urdu, Anita Desai’s In Custody. Writing in the early 1990s, Aijaz Ahmad was of the opinion that the teaching of English literature has created a body of English-speaking Indians who represent “the only overarching national community with a common language, able to imagine themselves across the disparate nation as a “national literary intelligentsia” with “a shared body of knowledge, shared presumptions and a shared knowledge of mutual exchange.”2 Arguably, 1

HE QUESTION OF

An earlier version of this essay was first presented as a paper at the conference, Minorities, Education and Language in 21st Century Indian Democracy – The Case of Urdu with Special Reference to Dr Zakir Husain, Late President of India held in Delhi, February 2002. 2 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London & New York: Verso, 1992): 278. See ch. 7, “‘Indian Literature’: notes toward the definition of a category,”: 243–86.

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both Desai and Ahmad belong to this “intelligentsia” through the postcolonial secular English connection but equally they are implicated in the discursive structures of cultural hegemony in civil society.3 However, it is not my intention here to re-inscribe an authentic myth of origin about Indianness through linguistic associations, but to assess the significance of Anita Desai’s intervention in a communally charged Hindi–Urdu debate. The key concerns I have in this essay are about the kind of cultural memory Desai presents in her novel, and how this depiction can be read in relation to the actual machinations of Indian politics with regard to the language question. As a successful author, writing for an international publishing market, she is invested with a certain power to represent an ‘authentic’ India. While she is not a writer who bombards us with an epic-style narrative, purporting to offer ‘the great Indian novel’, her exploration of individual identities and self-formations work in a subtle and problematic way, creating instead miniatures, and guiding the reader’s responses through a combination of omniscience, internal focalization, indirect speech and symbolic tropes. In Custody, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, can retrospectively be read as a literary account of the communalization and disintegration of Urdu in post-Partition India. The year in which it was published was, coincidentally, the year that saw the death of an Urdu literary legend, the master lyricist Faiz Ahmad Faiz, who stirred the hearts of millions with his haunting melodies and sustained hope for many with his romantic vision of a return to a beloved homeland. Radiating optimism, his poetry revived disheartened nationalists with its belief in a destination which had not yet been realized, a desire for which marked even his most pessimistic poem, “Subh-e azadi: August 1947 (Freedom’s Dawn),” with its important ideological rejection of the “pock-marked dawn” of freedom from colonial rule: The time for the liberation of heart and mind Has not come as yet 3

See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1989): 1–22; Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1992): 7–28.

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Continue your arduous journey This is not your destination4

It is ironic that Faiz, stylistically wedded to the traditional form of the ghazal, was concerned with forging themes of modernity in his poetic message, constructing a new direction for his Urdu listeners and readers, while Desai, working with a modernist narrative, takes it back toward a sensibility rooted in tradition and premodern aristocracy. Her idea of Urdu is that it is trapped in an aristocratic lineage, a theme which she also touches on in her earlier novel Clear Light of Day.5 Desai’s perception of Urdu as an artefact of Old India and its communal heritage are key features of her story. One of the narrative devices she uses is that of cultural memory, and this, in connection with the theme of Urdu, is inevitably tied to the memory of separation and Partition. Here it is important to make the distinction that, whereas Faiz is still looking for national liberation in “Subh-e azadi,” Desai is analysing Urdu as the cultural object of a lived experience in post-Partition India. Later in his career, Faiz was commissioned by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government in post-Partition Pakistan to conduct an ‘official’ search for Pakistani culture and nationalism. His findings and ruminations were subsequently collected and published in a volume entitled Pakistani kalchar aur qaumi tashakhus ki talash (Pakistani culture and the search for national character).6 In this volume, it is evident that Faiz was driven by an Arnoldian cultural sensibility looking to preserve “culture as perfection” in his search for a representative model of a future collective Pakistani national consciousness.7 Desai’s fiction, by contrast, demystifies the idea of a national collectivity and looks to the arts and the way of life of individuals for 4

In The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl: Poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, tr. Daud Kamal, ed. Khalid Hasan (London: Independent, 1988): 36. 5 Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). See Part I I , which details Raja’s attraction to Urdu poetry, his heroic character, and his admiration for his neighbour and landlord, Hyder Ali, who encourages his interest in Urdu. 6 Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Pakistani kalchar aur qaumi tashakhus ki talash (Lahore: Ferozsons, 1988). 7 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 32.

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distinctive cultural representations. Her depictions of cultural memory are marked by a nostalgia for the past and a closeness to the Romantic tradition and its “idealizing of the ‘folk’, of vital subcultures buried deep within its own society.”8 Desai’s narration of Urdu’s tragedy is mediated through the eyes of an urban dweller in New Delhi struck by the lyrical romance of Old Delhi Urdu poetry, a remnant of a pre-modern cultural tradition that rememorizes the old Mughal city of Shahjahanabad. According to Christopher Bayly, “the fate of the three great cities of the Mughal imperial triangle, Delhi, Agra and Lahore, has been most particularly the subject of romantic lament.”9 This critique ties in with Desai’s artistic sensibility and choice of subject-matter.10 In an interview with Magda Costa, Desai responded as follows to the suggestion that In Custody is a representation of the decay of Urdu literature: I was trying to portray the world of Urdu poets. Living in Delhi I was always surrounded by the sound of Urdu poetry. Nobody reads it but one goes to recitations. It was very much the voice of North India. But although there is such a reverence for Urdu poetry, the fact that most Muslims left India to go to Pakistan meant that most schools and universities of Urdu were closed. So that it’s a language I don’t think is going to survive in India. There are many Muslims and they do write in Urdu; but it has a kind of very artificial existence. People are not going to study Urdu in school and college anymore, so who are going to be their readers? Where is the audience?11 8

Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, 25. Christopher Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1983): 228. 10 There is also an inter-text with the genre of Urdu poetry known as the shahr-ashob, which is devoted to mourning the death and destruction of a city. Many shahr-ashob poems articulated the decline of Delhi in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its rendition, the genre encapsulated some of the shock felt by the poets and gave a limited reflection of reality to its readers. See Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, “Jurat’s Sahr-ashob: An Afterword,” Annual of Urdu Studies (1983): 3, and Frances Pritchett, “ ‘ The World Turned Upside Down’: Sahrashob as a Genre,” Annual of Urdu Studies (1984): 4. 11 Magda Costa, interview with Anita Desai, http://www.umiacs.umd.edu /usevs/sawweb/sawnet/books/desai_interview.html 9

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Aijaz Ahmad, tracing the history of Urdu language and literature from 1947 to 1965, describes three aspects of the break-up and redistribution of the Urdu writing community that changed the perception of Urdu after Partition. First was the migration and resettlement of religious communities across the newly drawn borders; second was the increased communalization of Urdu as a Muslim language, its implementation as a national language in Pakistan and its decreasing status as a language of ‘minority right’ and ‘Muslim interest’ in India; and finally, the Indian Parliament’s abandonment of Hindustani in favour of Hindi as the official language. In Ahmad’s estimation, the loss of Hindustani as a recognized lingua franca was a major event because it had served as a “living link between Urdu and Hindi which now became more and more distant from each other, especially in their written forms.”12 In postcolonial India – specifically Uttar Pradesh, where the mother-tongue Urdu speaker has been marginalized through a lack of representation in the linguistic federation of states – Urdu is indeed perceived as an endangered language by the minority who are literate in it. For Ahmad, the political nation and the cultural community are the two ultimate “framing realities” which dominate post-Partition Urdu literary production in India and Pakistan. With the absence of a middle-ground Hindustani, the communal perception of Urdu as a Muslim language has become stronger. This religious separatism saturates the verse of a contemporary Urdu poet, Rashid Banarsi from Varanasi: We understood a lot about the prejudices of this age Today languages too are Brahmins and Shaikhs? We don’t understand If Urdu too is under blame for being an outsider Then whose homeland is India? We don’t understand.13

12 Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika, 1996): 201–202. 13 Quoted in Christopher Lee, “‘Hit it with a stick and it won’t die’: Urdu Language and Muslim Identity and Poetry in Varanasi, India,” Annual of Urdu Studies 15.1 (2000): 338.

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There are interesting similarities between Desai, Ahmad and Banarsi, all speaking of Urdu but in varying tones and differing forms. Desai’s pessimistic view of Urdu’s survival in India is tied to the fact of mass Muslim migration, Ahmad sees migration as a contributory factor in the break-up of the Urdu writing community, and Banarsi articulates the frustration that comes from Urdu’s marginalized status and its perception as a migrant’s tongue, which makes him an outsider/other in his own home. The Urdu that was the “voice of North India,” as Desai remembers it, and its survival are indeed major concerns for Urdu traditionalists, and in turn those anxieties reinforce a region-specific idea of Urdu eliding its identification as a lingua franca.The limitation felt by poets such as Banarsi who cannot escape the reflected cultural memory of Urdu is recognized and re-imagined in a novel such as In Custody. If a common historical moment is to be mentioned which irrevocably changed the idea of Urdu in India, then that is the time of Partition. Sunil Khilnani, in his insightful study entitled The Idea of India, has argued that Partition is a tangible memory in the subcontinent around which the inevitable disappointments of modern politics can gather […] Partition is the unspeakable sadness at the heart of the idea of India: a memento mori that what made India possible also profoundly diminished the integral value of the idea.14

For Khilnani, the idea of India is ultimately a political one because in his view the history of India since 1947 has been marked by a continuing faith in democratic procedures, expressed through party politics; Indians have in the past been inspired by the charisma of the Congress Party, and more recently by regional, caste-based and communal political groupings. In this respect, the evolving modern nation is still disrupted by hierarchical stratifications and – in the sometimes fraught relationship between Hindu and Muslim – the memories of its ruptured birth. In the opening section of Desai’s book, the protagonist Deven, a lecturer in Hindi, applies in person for a week’s teaching leave in order to conduct an interview with the legendary Urdu poet Nur 14

Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998): 200– 202.

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Shahjahanabadi. However, his head of department, Trivedi, meets the request with a belligerent, short-tempered and communally charged reaction: “I’ll get you transferred to your beloved Urdu department. I won’t have Muslim toadies in my department, you’ll ruin my boys with your Muslim ideas, your Urdu language. I’ll complain to the Principal, I’ll warn the R S S you are a traitor.” (145)

Trivedi’s reactionary stance encapsulates the fear and paranoia that surrounds Hindi and Urdu speakers in a national culture where language is, ironically, both the carrier of religious identity and the marker of national loyalty. Trivedi’s utterance, long before the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, has an ominous ring to it. With its evocation of the R S S (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), it can retrospectively be seen to anticipate majoritarianism in India, and the monologue of his speech stays with us in the Bombay riots, the violent eruptions in Gujarat, the continuing Kashmir crisis.

The Hindi–Urdu Divide The knotty issue of national language has been a topic of much scholarly deliberation in historiographical and sociological studies of the Indian nation. Several researchers have drawn our attention to the contentious fates of Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India.15 Such linguistic differences can be read as marking an important distinction from what Benedict Anderson has theorized as an integrated “imagined community” coming together through a common language through the rise of a homogenizing print capitalism.16 These studies have re15

This is reflected in monographs such as Christopher Shackle & Rupert Snell, Hindi and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1990); Amrit Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Urdu (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1991); Paul Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1974); Christopher King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1994). 16 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991) and also Nation and Narra-

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vealed a multilingual nation which cannot comfortably assimilate its diverse linguistic groups. Urdu came to prominence in the middle-to-late eighteenth century at the same time as the ousting of Persian from the courts by the British and its replacement with the official language of government, English. Generally, in eastern and northern India, Bengali and Urdu remained in use on the lower levels of administration and judiciary, while in the northern state of Punjab, the British imposed English and Urdu “as the languages of government.”17 On an informal basis they relied on Hindustani/Urdu as a lingua franca in North India, while official recognition was accorded to the vernaculars on 4 September 1837.18 While the Muslim reformer and early modernizer Sayyid Ahmad Khan was deeply influential in instigating linguistic reform and advocating cultural change for his community, his interventions in the cause of Urdu with the colonial government suffered setbacks in Bihar in 1881 and in Uttar Pradesh in 1900 under pressure from a rising middle-class Hindu lobby.19 According to Francis Robinson, the proposed replacement of Persian script by Nagari, led by a Hindu deputation in 1900, and the British government’s favourable response to it marked a key moment in the increasing sense of separatism among Indian Muslims.20 The historical perspective of Urdu’s decline has been directly linked to Hindi’s rise by Jyotirindra Das Gupta, who charts the national movement alongside language associations in pre-Partition India.21 He claims that after 1882 the Hindi movements pressed for teaching Hindi universally in all primary and secondary schools in

tion, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990). 17 Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1998): 84–85. 18 Urdu was recognized in Bihar, the United Provinces, Avadh and the Punjab, while in the south it was patronized by the Nizams of Hyderabad. 19 Shackle & Snell, Hindi and Urdu Since 1800, 8. 20 Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims 1860–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1993): 133–74. 21 Jyotirindra Das Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India (Berkeley & London: U of California P , 1970).

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North India. It was in the North Western Provinces that the Hindi movement displayed an antagonistic stance toward Urdu. The constant refrain of the public petitions was that Urdu was an alien language. A petition signed by 500 Hindi graduates and undergraduates declared Urdu to be ‘an alien and upstart language’ while another petition described Urdu as a “hybrid production […] forced upon us by our former rulers.22

In Gupta’s view, “a large part of the language conflict in UP is influenced by the memories of past conflict transmitted to the Hindu and Muslim communities by the cultural and political leaders.”23 For Gupta, these conflictual linguistic associations can be historically linked to the shortsightedness of small elites whose community consciousness dictated their group loyalty in the transitional period from a traditional multilingual society to a modern nation. Thus in the early nationalist phase in India “leaders rarely drew a distinction between the categories of common language, national language and official language.”24 For David Lelyveld, too, sociological perspectives are paramount in examining the organic history of languages such as Hindi and Urdu, rather than an abstract theorizing which focuses on “who 22

Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development, 103. Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development, 150. While the Hindi petitions gathered strength, there was only one petition, signed by a small number of people, submitted in favour of Urdu in the North Western Provinces. As this shows, language petitions in the nineteenth century were becoming communally charged and reflected the divisive forces of language and religion on the communities. The culture of language petitions survived in post-independent India and the late Dr Zakir Husain’s act of collecting 2.25 million signatures from the Urdu-speaking people in U P supporting a petition asking the President to save Urdu under Article 347 of the Constitution in 1952 proves a case in point. For a critical comment on politicians taking on the Urdu cause in U P , see Danial Latifi, “Urdu in U P ,” Nation and the World (16 August 1999): 44–46. 24 In his view, in a traditional multilingual society the power of representation came to lie with a small elite whose community consciousness dictated their group loyalty, and in the early nationalist phase in India “leaders rarely drew a distinction between the categories of common language, national language and official language” (36). 23

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gets to speak, who is allowed to listen, which topics and settings are appropriate to which linguistic codes.”25 He suggests that in attempting to understand this linguistic code we may come closer to grasping the unique formula which delicately balances the formation of self-conscious identity against the facts of power, competition and exploitation. To put his sociological theory to the test, Lelyveld examines Gandhi’s role in nurturing an Indian national consciousness through a unified Indian language, which would both reflect the identity of Indians and bridge the linguistic diversity of its many regions. He argues: It would be debatable in 1916 to say that Hindi was Hindu and Urdu was Muslim, but there were certainly grounds and occasion for relating language and religion in this way. It was one of the central projects of Gandhi’s life, and a tenet of the Indian National Congress after 1920, that the national language must overarch this distinction, that instead of being Hindi or Urdu, it should be Hindustani.26

Historically, the Indian National Congress gave official recognition to Hindustani in its 1934 constitution. Hindustani, suggested by Gandhi as a neutral solution to the thorny Hindi–Urdu controversy, would reflect a unified national consciousness free from religious affiliations. But the stumbling-block on which the neutral solution fell apart was that of the script. In Sunil Khilnani’s view, after Independence “Nehru’s initial hope had been for India’s regional states to continue as the mixed, multi-lingual administrative units established by the Raj.”27 Nehru’s government resisted the pressure from the Hindi lobbyists for a centralizing national language, and reached a compromise with the post-Partition Indian Constitution (1950) recommending a fifteen-year use of English for official purposes, with Hindi in the Nagari script as the ‘official’ language of 25 David Lelyveld, “The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and the Project of a National Language,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carole Breckenridge & Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993): 192. 26 Lelyveld, “The Fate of Hindustani,” 192. 27 Khilnani, The Idea of India, 175.

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the Union, and also extending recognition to other regional languages. But eventually this pluralism had to be altered to accommodate the demand for decentralization and the formation of linguistic states. The Official Languages Amendment Act of 1963 gave Hindi the hegemonic status of ‘official language’ and English the secondary role of ‘associate’ or additional official language.28 The Official Languages Amendment Bill adopted in 1967 included the acceptance of a historic Three-Language-Formula which would be implemented in secondary education for language teaching. It recommends: “(a) the regional language and mother tongue when the latter is different from the regional language; (b) Hindi or, in Hindispeaking areas, another Indian language; and (c) English or any other modern European language.”29 With regard to the situation of Urdu in contemporary India, the language controversies of the past have had a detrimental effect on the status of Urdu wherever religious identity has come to inform the ideologically separatist correlation of Muslim=Urdu=Pakistan and Hindu=Hindi=India.30 According to Athar Farouqui, the situation of native Urdu speakers has deteriorated in Uttar Pradesh to such an extent that “there is not even a single primary or junior high school of Urdu medium. The only two Urdu medium schools 28 There were angry reactions to Hindi’s elevation and violence-led rejection of this move in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. In 1968 there was an Official Languages Amendment Act which strengthened the position of English as the acceptable sister alternative to Hindi “without any certain deadline”; King, One Language, Two Scripts, 4–7. 29 Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development, 243. 30 The Urdu-as-Muslim issue has been particularly volatile in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the recent bone of contention has been the alleged statistical miscounting of mother-tongue Urdu speakers. U P , once the heartland of Urdu’s urban elite, is now unable to meet the needs of its mother-tongue speakers. Political intervention on a regional scale was officially led by Dr Zakir Husain and a seven-member Urdu speakers’ deputation to the U P education minister (Sampurnanand) in 1952, registering the marginalization of Urdu in the state. In 1958 the grievances were made known at a national level to the President of India and a request was made under Article 347 of the Constitution for the recognition of Urdu in the U P , Bihar, Punjab and Delhi. In 1958 Sampurnanand, the chief minister of U P , said that Urdu could not be recognized as a regional language in U P in the Legislative Assembly.

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are run by and affiliated to Aligarh Muslim University.”31 For Farouqui, the Three-Language-Formula in Uttar Pradesh has thus far failed to serve the needs of mother-tongue speakers of minority languages. He passionately dismisses the Formula as a “whitewash” because it has failed to represent the regional Urdu community of Uttar Pradesh by recognizing Hindi as the language of the region on the basis of inaccurate data collection of linguistic speech communities. Farouqui is outraged by the North Indian chief ministers’ unilateral implementation of the Formula, which recognizes Hindi as the regional language, Sanskrit as the modern language, and English as a foreign language. To him, this signifies a sinister political manipulation of the Urdu minority in North India, particularly at the time of census-taking, which, he argues, took for granted that everyone’s mother tongue in the area was Hindi.32 In Zoya Hasan’s estimation, the Hindi–Urdu controversy in Uttar Pradesh has an explicit agenda of “political dominance and equally significant subtexts on the cultural identity of the state and alternative conceptions of political community.”33 Hasan places the blame squarely on government policy, which has treated Urdu as a minority Muslim affair breaching the stance on linguistic pluralism and the separation of language and religion. The conflation of language and religion in the sanskritized official Hindi expansion programme has also created further alienation and division among the already communalized linguistic groups.34

The Decay of Urdu in Custody In Custody tells the story of the decline and decay of Urdu in modern India. Deven, the anti-hero of the novel, is a Hindi lecturer devoted to the classical tradition of Urdu poetry, a devotion that stems 31

Athar Farouqui, “Urdu Education in India: Four Representative States,” Economic and Political Weekly (2 April 1994): 782. 32 Farouqui, “Urdu Education in India,” 783. 33 Zoya Hasan, Quest for Power: Oppositional Movements and Post-Congress Politics in Uttar Pradesh (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998): 187. 34 Hasan, Quest for Power, 187–88. Also see Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Sangh Parivar between Sanskritization and Social Engineering,” in The B J P and the Compulsions of Politics in India, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen & Christophe Jaffrelot (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998): 22–71.

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from his childhood associations with the language as a mothertongue speaker. Born in Lucknow, educated in Delhi, he is a poor widower’s son who has found employment as a university lecturer at Lala Ram Lal College in Mirpore. While his career as a language specialist is not particularly lucrative, it has been directed by a practical consideration of the market economy, which favours Hindi, the language of communication in North India. Urdu fulfils his imagination and Hindi sustains his corporeal needs. “I am – only a teacher […] and must teach to support my family. But poetry – Urdu – […] I need to serve them to show my appreciation.”35 Deven feels trapped and frustrated in the confines of his chosen home, so when the opportunity of returning to the capital presents itself through the intervention of his childhood friend, Murad, he takes an uncharacteristically risky step by agreeing to Murad’s suggestion. In taking this decision, he is temporarily freed from the constrictions of his existence in the small town of Mirpore, which had come to resemble the metaphorically “impassable desert that lay between him and the capital with its lost treasures of friendships, entertainment, attractions and opportunities” (24). The northern plain of Mirpore, situated “more than a thousand miles from the coast,” had been shaped by the presence of Muslim aristocracy, in this case a long-forgotten nawab who had fled Delhi to escape the aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny and built a mosque in Mirpore as a memorial of thanks to his Supreme Benefactor for preserving his life. The narrator tells us that the history of the mosque has been swept away in the dust which saturates the Mirpore atmosphere, and all that remains of the “marble and pink sandstone” is a decaying, filth-ridden stone structure overtaken by the debris of modernity. But the narrator reiterates its continued use as a mosque. Continuing to map the cultural traditions of Mirpore, she tells us: “The temples were more numerous but had no history at all. There was literally not a man in Mirpore who could have told one when they were built or by whom” (20). Here it can be argued that Desai’s reconstruction of the geography of Mirpore is interesting but problematic, because it links the 35

Anita Desai, In Custody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985): 43. Further page references are in the main text.

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Muslim presence in Mirpore to a pre-modern urban aristocracy and contrasts it with the timelessness of an indigenous Hindu tradition embedded in an infinite antiquity: “the same kind of antiquity that the shacks of the poor had, and the stalls of the traders – they were often wrecked, rebuilt and replaced, but their essential form remained the same” (20). While it is not my intention to suggest that Desai is articulating a communalist point of view, there is a particular historical and ideological freight on the concept of Hinduism as timeless and Islam as latecomer which the narrative inevitably duplicates. The miniature portrait of the town grafted on to the larger linguistic landscape of Urdu replicates what, to borrow a phrase from Edward Said, might be seen as a “problematic structure of attitude and reference” with respect to a whole cultural tradition.36 The narrator tells us that the Mirpore communities were mutually observant of the stratified “Muslim” and “Hindu” areas. While this separation was habitual and uneventful for the most part, police presence had to make itself felt from time to time when the ritual mourning of Moharram coincided with the festival of Holi. Despite the police, the communities clashed […] from time to time, knives flashed, batons flailed and blood ran. For a while tension was high, the newspapers – both in Hindi and Urdu – were filled with guarded reports and fulsome editorials on India’s secularity while overnight news-sheets appeared with less guarded reports laced with threats and accusations. (21)

Here, the reference to the Hindi and Urdu newspapers is highly charged and can be seen as indicative of the manipulation of ethnic differences in the regional print media. This print culture has the 36

Edward Said borrows and modifies Raymond Williams’s phrase “structure of feeling” as “structures of attitude and reference” to describe “the way in which structures of location and geographical reference appear in the cultural languages of literature, history, or ethnography, sometimes allusively and sometimes carefully plotted, across several individual works that are not otherwise connected to one another or to an official ideology of ‘empire’”; Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993): 61. I consider such structures to be inherent in all hegemonic discourses that address an ‘other’ from a position of power, as is the case with Urdu in India and the problematic place of Islam in Indian history.

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power to stoke the fires of dissent in a charged situation and intensify a separatist stance through divisive linguistic narratives. In Custody begins with an unscheduled meeting between the two childhood friends with contrasting personalities and backgrounds: Deven and Murad, his Muslim friend, “the spoilt rich boy with money in his pocket for cinema shows and cigarettes” (11). The story symbolically unfolds at the beginning of spring in the month of March, signifying the theme of birth and hope. An encounter between the two friends takes place in the college grounds of Deven’s university. Murad has traveled from Delhi to Mirpore, metaphorically tearing across the regions like the changing March wind “whirling dust and dry leaves around violently” (10) to involve Deven in his latest project and sow the seeds of Deven’s fateful journey from Mirpore to Delhi. This initial paired characterization of the two friends portrays Murad as active and Deven as passive. However, Murad’s active nature is supplanted by the darkness of his actions. He comes to embody the exploitative city with its disregard for sentiment or nostalgia. In contrast, Deven’s residual passivity makes him the unfortunate vessel of many betrayals, ultimately unable to cope with the pressures of modern living. Deven is coerced by Murad to interview the renowned Delhi poet Nur Shahjahanabadi for the “Special issue” of his Urdu journal Awaz. Nur’s nom de plume signifies the grandeur of the imperial Mughal city and Murad’s outlook on Urdu is marked by a sense of the “glorious” past, and an intention to recover the lost high cultural tradition that flourished in the pre-modern urban literary landscape from its present relegation to the nameless margins of the city. He wishes to keep alive the glorious tradition of Urdu literature. If we do not do it at whatever cost, how will it survive in this era of that – vegetarian monster, Hindi?” […] “That language of peasants,” Murad sneered, picking his teeth with a matchstick. The language that is raised on radishes and potatoes […] it flourishes, while Urdu language of the court in days of royalty – now languishes in the back lanes and gutters of the city.” (15)

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Murad feels he occupies higher moral ground because, unlike Deven, he has not surrendered to Hindi. His job as an Urdu editor displays his commitment to and lifelong struggle in the cause of “the golden tradition” despite the constant worries of diminishing subscriptions, low readership and escalating costs of production. He accuses Deven of betraying his mother tongue by selling out to the professional service of its arch-rival, Hindi, and his accusation haunts Deven throughout the book every time he enters the Urdu arena. Murad is facially disfigured by pockmarks, rather like his beloved Urdu, which no longer has the patronage of emperors and nawabs, and while his stained face marks him as a metaphor for Urdu, it can also be read as a symbol of an Urdu speaker tainted by his contempt for Hindi. However, his prejudicial attitude toward Hindi does not seem to extend to a communal rejection of Hindus, as he confers the task of Urdu’s custody on Deven. He tells Deven: “Nur will be the star of the issue. The light that blazes in the center and sends its rays to all corners of the world where his verse is known – in Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden – do you know, we have sent his name to the Nobel Prize Committee for literature once again?” “I want a full feature on Nur – Nur in his old age, the dying Nur before he is gone, like a comet into the dark. I want you to do that feature.” (17)

Here Desai’s reference to a well-known socially aware poet may be seen as an indirect nod in the direction of Faiz, the revolutionary Progressive poet who was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962. Desai’s narrative has a lyrical quality, with its use of symbolic tropes, and echoes some of the indefinable nuances of Faiz’s verse; but, unlike Faiz, she is not sending out a message for social change. Faiz’s political agenda radically charged the classical imagery – lover and beloved, the literal and metaphorical desert of their separation, the hopeful symbol of the morning breeze – with new meaning. The nation became the unattainable beloved and Faiz its devotee. In Faiz’s poems, the morning breeze was tinged with revolutionary powers of change, while the pain of separation between the beloved nation and its lovesick poet remained as agonizing as

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ever.37 For Faiz, the poets were “the warriors – / the riders of dawn” who wrote first against colonialism and then against the oppressive postcolonial state, giving hope to people where there was none.38 Nur’s celebrated persona borrows the revolutionary traits of Faiz’s poetry but remains embedded in the romantic pursuit of Shahjahanabad. In Desai’s narrative, Nur holds the key to Urdu’s revival. However, it is difficult to say whether Desai’s guiding muse in this story is Faiz, since the Nur we meet (a poet at the end of his career), contrary to the reader’s expectations, is very reluctant to part with the old metaphors and life-style of an aristocratic lineage and seems to be untouched by a Progressive outlook. Obsessed with his pigeons, his body saturated with an excess of rich foods and alcohol, he lives in a dusty, faded house with his two wives and entertains extravagantly. His poetic muse is sustained by the poetry of Byron and Shelley. This link between the melancholic Romantic English poets and nostalgic Urdu poetry is also developed as a motif in Desai’s characterization of Raja in Clear Light of Day. In the days leading up to Partition, when Raja is struck down with tuberculosis, it is said: His situation was Romantic in the extreme, Bim could see as she sponged his face and helped him […] his heavy, limp body as she lifted it as spent and sapped as a bled fish, and the city of Delhi burning down about them. He hoped, like Byron, to go to the rescue of those in peril. Instead, like Byron, he lay ill, dying. (60)

Similarly, Nur is “prepared for suffering” and his bodily ailments are a mirror of the sickened state of Urdu. But unlike Raja he is not suffering the flames of Partition; his pain is of a different kind – it is embodied in his alter ego Deven, trapped in the harsh realities of a material world but, unlike Nur and Faiz, buoyed up by a poetic

37

Gopi Chand Narang, Urdu Language and Literature: Critical Perspectives (New Delhi: Sterling, 1991). See the chapter on Faiz Ahmad Faiz which discusses in detail aspects of tradition and innovation in his poetry. 38 Khalid Hasan, ed. The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl, 7.

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spirit destined for failure, locked as it is in what Faiz called the “sufferings of the time.”39 In taking on the task of a custodian, Deven must sideline his own creative output in favour of the living poetic legend. But in fulfilling his duty as a custodian he has to overcome many obstacles, some of which are foreseen and others not. His immediate priority is to establish contact with the poet and obtain his consent to an interview. In getting close to the poet, he finds himself embroiled in the minutiae of Nur’s domestic life, an involvement which ultimately spirals out of his control. Contrary to his expectations, he finds himself at the mercy of the two wives, who appear to have charge over Nur’s life. Having had the upper hand in his domestic life, Deven is often confounded by the differing power-structures of Nur’s household and unable to cope with the idea of woman as an equal, still less as an intellectual. Through a series of coincidences, Deven is asked by Murad to fulfil his task by immortalizing the verse of Nur in an audio recording. Initially, he is dismissive of the idea, seeing it as a belittling gesture reducing the great writer’s poetry to “some song for the cinema, or radio” (91). However, Murad criticizes his small-town sensibility and convinces him that the idea of a tape recording of Nur Shahjahanabadi is “brilliant,” even though Deven has never bought or used a radio before. Sarcastically, Murad exclaims, “This is the age of electronics, haven’t you heard? Or hasn’t the news traveled to Mirpore yet?” (92). Murad continues to champion the forces of change and modernity in Deven’s life and Deven, despite suspecting his sincerity, submits to his friend’s rhetoric, only to ask himself, nearer the end of the novel, when things go disastrously wrong, if their friendship, too, might not be another meaningless symbol of a lost custom. 39 Poems by Faiz, ed. Victor Kiernan (Lahore: Vanguard, 1971): 65. This poem marks an important initial stage in Faiz’s career as a poet. It is particularly important because it changes the conception of the traditional beloved and introduces a modern self-consciousness for the lyric poet. For a critical reading of Faiz as a Progressive poet, see Carlo Coppola, “Urdu Poetry: The Progressive Episode,” doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1975. Also see Estelle Dryland, Faiz Ahmad Faiz 1911–1984: Urdu Poet of Social Realism (Lahore: Vanguard, 1993).

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Deven finds an unexpected ally in the Urdu section at Lala Ram Lal College, who assists him in acquiring college funds to purchase a tape recorder for his assigned project. Deven’s poverty as a Hindi lecturer is matched by the diminishing stature of his colleague, Abid Siddiqui, who is the head of the Urdu department. Siddiqui is described as “a small man, whose youthful face was prematurely topped with a plume of white hair as if to signify the doomed nature of his discipline” (96). Lala Ram Lal College could afford the luxury of an Urdu section because of a very large donation from the descendants of the very nawab who had fled Delhi in the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny (96). Like the dying culture he represents, Siddiqui lives in a deteriorating haveli that underscores the decay of Urdu and the peripheral position of Muslims in modern India. Desai’s references to Siddiqui’s life-style disturbingly reproduce the colonial constructions of a morally decrepit Muslim aristocracy collapsing from drink, debauchery and decay. The inevitable death of this self-indulgent aristocratic Muslim culture is symbolized by the destruction of Siddiqui’s house when the “decaying” haveli is razed to the ground by developers and is lost in the metaphorical swirling dust which absorbs Mirpore. Siddiqui has knowingly participated in the sale of his house to a Delhi businessman. “He wants to […] build a block of flats with shops on the ground floor, cinema house at the back, offices on top […] And as I need the money – you know my weakness – the offer was too good to refuse” (198). From a different angle, this depiction reinforces the idea that Siddiqui’s class can no longer be the custodians of Urdu, as they have little power to make themselves heard at the national level. The official situation and status of their language literally makes them outsiders in their own home. Deven has the potential to release the ailing language and its people, but he, too, is constantly reminded of his position as an outsider when he is around Nur and his cronies. Nur says: He has come to speak for me […] through his throat my words will flow. Listen and tell me if my poetry deserves to live, or if it should give way to – that fodder chewed by peasants, Hindi? […] Nur was inviting him to join the fray, allowing the sublime concept of time to dwindle into the mere politics of language again […] He knew he ought not to have stayed, listening to this kind of talk, he a Hindu

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and a teacher of Hindi. He had always kept away from the political angle of languages. (54–55)

In this instance, Desai connects the theme of language overtly with religion and politics. Ultimately, what the novel shows us is that, as a mother-tongue speaker of Urdu, Deven is economically disempowered by his first language, which he studied as a boy in Lucknow, where it was taught to him by his father, a teacher, a scholar, and “lover of Urdu poetry.” It does not stand him in good stead when, after his father’s death, his mother decides to move to Delhi to live: “I was sent to the nearest school, a Hindi-medium school, Sir,” says Deven when he first meets Nur Shahjahanabadi. “I took my degree in Hindi, Sir, and now I am temporary lecturer in Lala Ram Lal College at Mirpore. It is my living, Sir. You see I am a married man, a family man” (43). In post-Partition India, Deven is forced into a minority debate and he finds it increasingly difficult to maintain a secular stance. Nur openly attacks him: “Those Congress-wallahs have set up Hindi on top as our ruler. You are its slave. Perhaps a spy even if you don’t know it, sent to the universities to destroy whatever remains of Urdu, hunt it out and kill it […] It seems you have been sent here to torment me, to show me to what depths Urdu has fallen.” (42–43)

Deven remains on the fringes of Urdu culture because he does not come from an elite Muslim background and has chosen to teach a language that offers better employment prospects and economic growth than would an Urdu education. The unexpected opportunity to interview Nur temporarily frees him from his caged existence, but it is a freedom that is fraught with danger. This sense of danger is illustrated during Deven’s first bus journey to Delhi, crystallizing ominously in a teashop just after his arrival at the Inter-State Bus Terminal on Ring Road: When he had drunk to the bottom of the glass, he saw a dead fly floating in the dregs of his tea. The gasp he gave was only partly of horror at the teashop owner’s filthiness and the wretched standards of hygiene in his shop. Or even from a fear of typhoid and cholera. It was the revela-

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tion that all the omens of the day had come together and met at the bottom of the glass he held between his fingers. In it lay the struck dog, the triumphant crows, the dead fly – death, itself, nothing less. Coming together in the separate prisms of the fly’s eye, drowned but glittering in the tea, it stared back at him without blinking. (29)

This portent is mediated through an omniscient narrator who foregrounds the theme of dying through the symbolic motifs of the dog, the crows and the fly. It appears that Deven’s journey has ended before it has begun, because the language he wishes to save is already dead. Another way of reading it is through the idea of shock experienced in the alienating city; but Deven is unable to resolve the crisis that unfolds.40 His heroism is of a more romantic kind and his ideas are unsustainable in a modern environment. It is, of course, inevitable that the tape recorder purchased by Deven with Murad’s unreliable help is a second-hand one and that he does not know how to operate it and has to rely on Chiku – an adolescent technician – to help him make the recordings. The tape recorder is a symbol of modernity and thus fails to record the voice of tradition or pre-modern India. Chiku’s ineptitude with a symbol of progress is a metaphor for the continuing inequalities of language and opportunity in India. The failed recordings are symptomatic of the dysfunctionality of Urdu. “It was a fiasco. There was no other word for it. Disbelievingly, Deven had the first tape removed, the second tried and then the third and the fourth” (173). Through the poetry of Nur’s second wife, Desai now seems to offer an alternative vision – but this is rejected by Deven: he sees her as a snake, an impostor who has stolen her husband’s verse. Again, Imtiaz Begum’s character is problematic, because it wavers between the stereotyped intellectual yet predatory courtesan/poet who, as his second wife, is the chosen companion of the Progressive, pre40

See Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in which he gives a critical reading of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal, discussing at length the changing sensibility of the lyric poet in modernity; Illuminations, ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969): 152–90. There are some very interesting inter-texts with Desai, particularly with regard to this novel, where she interjects prose with poetry, thereby accentuating her lyrical style of writing.

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modern Muslim poet, and the woman who sends her manuscript to Deven for critical perusal. She cannot shed her first skin as a performer and always has to take a secondary role to Nur’s. The tone she takes with Deven in a letter to him is confrontational: The recording is no secret. Whatever your reason for concealing it from me, Nur Sahib could not conceal it from me. Was I considered incapable of understanding the need to record Nur Sahib’s voice for posterity? Was Safiya Begum considered wiser and more capable because of her greater age and her longer years with him? Dear friend, I beg to put it to you that you have insulted my intelligence by your deception […] you thought I was a prostitute who dazzled Nur Sahib’s eyes with my dance and so inveigled my way out of a house of prostitution into the house of a distinguished poet […] Kindly remember that unlike Nur Sahib and unlike your respected self, I am a woman and have had no education but what I have found and seized for myself. […] When you rose to your feet and left the mehfil while I was singing my verse, was it not because you feared I might eclipse the verse of Nur Sahib and other male poets whom you revere? Was it not intolerable to you that a woman should match their gifts and even outstrip them? (195)

Deven’s answer to her challenge is to shred her manuscript and reject her plea as a false one. It seems that Urdu cannot sustain the modernity of a female narrative, either. It can be argued that the abiding problem in Desai’s story is that there are no variants of Urdu – she does not draw upon an Urdu lineage of the present.41 Her vision of Urdu stands in stark contrast to the opinion of the renowned Urdu novelist Intizar Husain, who has argued that the cultural tradition of Urdu lies in its shifting regional locations. According to him, this language cannot be associated with a single geographical locale or culture, because it is by nature hybrid and can adapt to new regions.42 Desai’s Urdu is des-

41

I have borrowed the phrase from the title of Aijaz Ahmad’s book Lineages of the Present. 42 Intizar Husain, “Urdu ka tehzibi mizaj” [The cultural etiquette of Urdu], Annual of Urdu Studies 15.2 (2000): 372–76.

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tined to wither away in the stultifying heat of summer, unable to sustain the hopeful beginning of spring.43

Conclusion The central characters Deven, Murad and Nur are all caught in a nostalgic commemoration of Urdu and wish to restore it to its former glory. Moreover, this nostalgia is rooted in the cultural memory of a pre-modern past which rejects the values of an evolving present. Desai’s novel is ostensibly a narrative about the death of a language and raises uncomfortable questions about its demise. It interrogates the discourse of a centralized ‘singular’ Hindi which is dominated by utilitarian values marginalizing cultural traditions in its ambitious struggle for material gain.44 The novel displays a critical stance toward modernity, but this criticism is marked by ambivalence in its idea of Urdu as a ritual to be narrated rather than practised. Desai’s overall novelistic portrayal of Urdu marks an elegiac farewell to a lost institution. Her symbolism is tinged with the tropes of a communally charged present, unable to bridge the fragmentary Hindu–Hindi and Muslim–Urdu divide despite her staging the debates within the ‘secular’ Indian-English novel. Despite his many journeys, Urdu’s custodian Deven is unable to cross the metaphorical desert that separates the small regional town of Mirpore and the national capital of Delhi, because, in the words of one of Nur’s cronies, “Urdu is supposed to have died, in 1947” (56). The city of Delhi has absorbed another cultural memory.

43

Interestingly, the novel was adapted as a screenplay for a film nine years later by the Bombay-born director Ismail Merchant, the successful partner in the internationally acclaimed Merchant–Ivory production group. The script was rewritten in Urdu by Shahrukh Husain in collaboration with Anita Desai. There is a crucial shift of power dynamics in the telling of this tale from English narration about Urdu to a re-appropriation of the story of Urdu in Urdu. Merchant’s view about Urdu is completely different to Desai’s – he does not think that Urdu can die. 44 See Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural, ed. & intro. Luce Giard; tr. and with an afterword by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), ch. 8, where he discusses a centralized culture that imposes itself as a singularity and expects celebration of “culture in the singular” in the twentieth century.

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WORKS CITED Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London, New York: Verso, 1992). ——. Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika, 1996). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991). Bayly, Christopher. Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1983). Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969): 152– 90. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Bose, Sugata, & Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1998). Brass, Paul. Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1974). Certeau, Michel de. Culture in the Plural, ed. & intro. Luce Giard, tr. with an afterword by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998). Coppola, Carlo. “Urdu Poetry: The Progressive Episode” (doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1975). Costa, Magda. Interview with Anita Desai. http://www.umiacs.umd.edu /usevs/sawweb/sawnet/books/desai_interview.html. Desai, Anita. Clear Light of Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). ——. In Custody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Dryland, Estelle. Faiz Ahmad Faiz 1911–1984: Urdu Poet of Social Realism (Lahore: Vanguard, 1993). Eagleton, Terry. The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Faiz, Faiz Ahmad. Pakistani kalchar aur qaumi tashakhus ki talash (Lahore: Ferozsons, 1988). Farouqui, Athar. “Urdu Education in India: Four Representative States,” Economic and Political Weekly (2 April 1994): 782–85. Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman. “Ju’rat’s sahr-ashob: An Afterword,” Annual of Urdu Studies 3 (1983): 11–16. Gupta, Jyotirindra Das. Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India (Berkeley & London: U of California P, 1970). Hasan, Khalid, ed. The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl: Poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, tr. Daud Kamal (London: Independent, 1988). Hasan, Zoya, Quest for Power: Oppositional Movements and Post-Congress Politics in Uttar Pradesh (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998).

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Husain, Intizar. “Urdu ka tehzibi mizaj” [The cultural etiquette of Urdu], reproduced from Akhbar-e Urdu May 1998, Islamabad], Annual of Urdu Studies 15.2 (2000): 372–76. Jaffrelot, Christophe. “The Sangh Parivar between Sanskritization and Social Engineering,” in The B J P and the Compulsions of Politics in India, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen & Christophe Jaffrelot (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998): 22–71. Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). Kiernan, Victor, ed. & tr. Poems by Faiz (Lahore: Vanguard, 1971). King, Christopher. One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1994). Latifi, Danial. “Urdu in U P ,” Nation and the World (16 August 1999): 44–46. Lee, Christopher. “‘Hit it with a stick and it won’t die’: Urdu Language and Muslim Identity and Poetry in Varanasi, India,” Annual Of Urdu Studies 15.1 (2000): 337–51. Lelyveld, David. “The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and the Project of a National Language,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carole Breckenridge & Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993): 189–214. Narang, Gopi Chand. Urdu Language and Literature: Critical Perspectives (New Delhi: Sterling, 1991). Pritchett, Frances W. “‘The World Turned Upside Down’: Sahr-asob as a Genre,” Annual of Urdu Studies 4 (1984): 37–41. Rai, Amrit. A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi–Urdu (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1991). Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder. The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1992). Robinson, Francis. Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims 1860–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1993). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Shackle, Christopher, & Rupert Snell. Hindi and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1990). Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1989).

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“Reflexive Worlds” The Indias of A.K. Ramanujan

A SHOK B ERY

I

T M A Y S E E M S U R P R I S I N G to link A.K. Ramanujan to recent debates about Indian nationhood, as I propose to do here. His work as poet, scholar and translator appears tangential to such debates. His poetry rarely touches directly on political themes.1 His scholarly essays are concerned with folklore, bhakti, classical literatures and anthropologically informed approaches to Indian civilizations and cultures. His translations are mostly of south Indian religious and love poetry. Nevertheless, one can find in his work models of Indian society and culture which intersect with some of the debates over Indian nationhood which have been taking place in India in recent years. Although these debates will be familiar to many readers, I want to begin by rehearsing some of them in order to provide a context for my discussion of Ramanujan.

I The most troubling political developments in India during the last two decades have been the resurgence of Hindu nationalism, with its ideology of Hindutva, and the rise of breakaway movements in 1 According to Keith Harrison, “the day-to-day business of political events held little interest for him”: “Preface” to A.K. Ramanujan, Uncollected Poems and Prose, ed. Molly Daniels–Ramanujan & Keith Harrison (Delhi: Oxford U P , 2001): ix.

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various regions – most prominently Punjab and Kashmir. The secular, multi-ethnic version of India embodied in the Constitution and promoted by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, has been increasingly under pressure. Over the same decades, there have also been vigorous debates within academic disciplines such as history and politics about the nature of Indian nationhood. These debates have been complex, and I do not have space here to do more than select a few themes that are relevant to my discussion of Ramanujan.2 One of these themes has been the tension between what Partha Chatterjee, drawing on an essay by Gyanendra Pandey, calls “the nation and its fragments.” The former term denotes unitary visions of India, while the “fragments” are groups subordinated by the unitary views, groups marked by characteristics such as gender, caste, class, regional loyalties, and (minority) religious affiliations. The two unitary ideas of India which have been dominant since Independence are secular modernizing nationalism, particularly in the Nehru era, and, more recently, Hindutva. In Chatterjee’s account, there is a contention between the “hegemonic project of nationalist modernity” and the “numerous fragmented resistances to that normalizing project.”3 Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that this project of modernity was shared by colonialist and nationalist ideologies, but with one significant difference: the former saw all Indians as backward and as needing to be brought forward into modernity, whereas, in elite nationalist narratives, it was the subaltern classes, such as the peasantry, who occupied that position.4 Although secular nationalism appears to make room for 2

For a fuller account, see my essay “‘We Have Grown to Look at the Large World as Part of Us’: Modernity and the Nation in Two Indian Novels of the 1930s,” in The Political Subject: Essays on the Self From Art, Politics and Science, ed. Wendy Wheeler (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2000): 160–78. I have drawn on that essay here. 3 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1993): 13. 4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 6–7. Chakrabarty has recently developed the argument of this article into a book, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000).

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India’s many ethnic groupings and religions, it is an imposition of the ideology of one portion of the nation – the modernizing elite – on the whole nation. Such a perspective on “nationalist modernity” is shared by many associated with Subaltern Studies, and by other prominent commentators such as Ashis Nandy.5 As Pranab Bardhan puts it, summarizing the views of these “anarcho-communitarians,” among whom he includes Chatterjee and Nandy, A small modernist elite arrogated to itself the title to speak on behalf of the society in general and deliberately went about a state-directed programme of heavy industrialization and modernization, with a grandiose vision of progress borrowed from the Western ideas of Enlightenment and the nation-state, a vision unshared by the people at large.6

One of the aims of Subaltern Studies has been to question this process of arrogation, as Pandey makes clear when he criticizes “the dominant nationalist historiography” for its “interested use” of terms such as ‘national’ and ‘secular’, for “its privileging of the socalled ‘general’ over the particular, the larger over the smaller, the ‘mainstream’ over the ‘marginal’,” and for “its view of India, and all of South Asia, from Delhi alone.”7 In this view, the dominant historiography homogenizes the idea of the nation by incorporating it within the structures of modernity, which is marked by institutions such as industry, technology, law and education. As a result, according to Chakrabarty, to think the narrative of modernity was “to think these institutions at the apex of which sat the modern state, and to think the modern or the nation state was to think a history whose theoretical subject was 5 Nandy’s critiques of the principles of secular modernity include “An AntiSecularist Manifesto,” Seminar 314 (1985): 14–24, and “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” in Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1990): 69–93. 6 Pranab Bardhan, “The State Against Society: The Great Divide in Indian Social Science Discourse,” in Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, ed. Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1997): 186. 7 Gyanendra Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu– Muslim Riots in India Today,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 50–51.

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Europe.” Indian history thus became an “episode in the universal […] march of citizenship, of the nation state, of themes of human emancipation spelled out in the discourse of the European Enlightenment and after.”8 The way to resist this homogeneity, Pandey suggests, is to pay attention to the fragments: “The ‘fragmentary’ point of view […] resists the drive for a shallow homogenization and struggles for other, potentially richer definitions of the ‘nation’.”9 The opposition to modernity and the secular state displayed in such views is disputed by others. Sunil Khilnani, for instance, proposes a middle way between the “monochromy of the post-imperial imagination and […] of nationalist histories of a unified people,” and the “pointillism of the new Indian historians […] trawling and re-reading the archives for examples of ‘resistance’ […] to the ideas of nation and state.”10 This view makes room for the state (and hence for the institutions of modernity). Ramanujan, as I shall argue later, also allows modernity into his conception of India. The secular ideal has also been under pressure from the other powerful unitary view of India mentioned earlier, Hindu nationalism, which conceives of India as essentially and primordially Hindu, as “an organic and homogeneous whole which is threatened by ‘foreigners’ (notably Muslims and the British).”11 Although this nationalism, like the modernizing one, is primarily a product of the nineteenth century, it projects itself backward into ancient India as its source. The ideology of Hindutva which inspires Hindu nationalism is founded, in Chetan Bhatt’s words, on the notions of “terri-

8

Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” 8, 17. Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment,” 28–29. 10 Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997): 3. A recent defence of secularism against the strictures of Nandy, Chatterjee and others can be found in Stuart Corbridge & John Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2000): 196–99. Another, qualified, defence of the modernizing state is contained in Bardhan, “The State Against Society,” 190–95. A more extended critique of Nandy and Chatterjee is Achin Vanaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (London: Verso, 1997): ch. 4. 11 Corbridge & Harriss, Reinventing India, 180. 9

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tory, blood, culture and religion.”12 A quotation from V.D. Savarkar, the main ideologue of Hindutva, will give the flavour of such views: We are not only a Nation but a Jati, a born brotherhood. Nothing else counts, it is after all a question of heart. We feel that the same ancient blood that coursed through the veins of Ram and Krishna, Buddha and Mahavir, Nanak and Chaitanya, Basava and Madhva, of Rohidas and Tiruvelluvar courses throughout Hindudom from vein to vein, pulsates from heart to heart. We feel we are a JATI, a race bound together by the dearest ties of blood and therefore it must be so.13

For Savarkar, a Hindu is someone who “regards this land […] from the Indus to the Seas as his fatherland as well as his Holyland.”14 This definition includes not only Hindus, but other religions originating in India (such as Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism).15 It excludes Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands lie elsewhere. Hindu nationalism is a majoritarian view of the nation: since Hindus – broadly or narrowly defined – are the majority, India is a Hindu nation. There is, of course, widespread suspicion of such a view from a number of directions: from Muslims, because of its hostility to Islam; from lower castes and Dalits, because it is an upper-caste ideology; and from southern India, because it is largely rooted in northern and central India. Although both these versions of the nation are disputed, it is nevertheless clear that a political entity such as India, with its many religions, languages, and ethnicities needs some “idea of India.” In theory, “the pointillism of the new Indian historians” accepts this. Pandey may criticize “shallow homogenization,” but he nevertheless allows for “other, potentially richer definitions of the ‘nation’.“

12

Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2001): 85. 13 Quoted in Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 95. 14 Quoted in Corbridge & Harriss, Reinventing India, 183. 15 Quoted in Corbridge & Harriss, Reinventing India, 183. See also Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, 99.

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Both Sunil Khilnani and Partha Chatterjee offer such definitions, although there are, as indicated above, differences between them. For Khilnani, drawing on Nehru, Indian identities are “layered” and palimpsestic; India is “a space of ceaseless cultural mixing,” of “interconnected differences.”16 The Indian palimpsest includes modernity, and this implies the necessity of a central state.17 Yet Nehru also had what Khilnani describes as a “de-centred” conception of India: “Indian culture was so widespread all over India that no part of the country could be called the heart of that culture.”18 Chatterjee questions the idea of a singular national history with “ancient Hindu civilization” as its source. “What” he asks, “is the place of those inhabitants of India who are excluded from this nation?”19 He, too, proposes a decentering process so that a different kind of history can be written. In this new history, The center of Indian history would not need to remain confined to Aryavarta or, more specifically, to “the throne of Delhi.” Indeed, the very centrality of Indian history would then become largely uncertain. The question would no longer be one of “national” and “regional” histories: the very relation between parts and the whole would be open for negotiation. If there is any unity in these alternative histories, it is not national but confederal.20

II Ramanujan’s version of India is also decentred, although he approaches his conclusions from a different direction. He begins with a critique of the notion of Great and Little traditions. The idea behind this dichotomy, as Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes explain, was that “a great civilisation, such as India, evolved from local roots

16

Khilnani, The Idea of India, 153, 169, 172. The metaphor of the palimpsest comes from Nehru’s The Discovery of India, quoted by Khilnani, 169. 17 The Idea of India, 171. 18 Nehru’s Autobiography, quoted by Khilnani, The Idea of India, 170. 19 Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 113, 110. 20 The Nation and its Fragments, 115.

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in the process of urbanisation.”21 However, the concept fell out of favour: Largely because of the ill-chosen labels “great” and “little,” the concept became synonymous with division, hierarchy, and a bias in favor of written, brahmanical, Sanskrit traditions; in response, many anthropologists of India began to explore the “little” traditions. (CE, 348)

The Great/Little formulation resembles the idea of the nation and its fragments; the Great Tradition is conceived as pan-Indian (for example, Sanskritic culture, which reached into all parts of India), while the Little Traditions are multiple and fragmentary. Rejecting this model, Ramanujan develops a conception of India which emphasizes the processes of interaction between cultures. This feature is part of a wider emphasis in his work on the erosion of boundaries. Motifs such as role-reversal, dissolution of difference, liminality and mirroring appear and reappear through his essays and poems. In his essay “Men, Women and Saints,” for instance, he discusses, among other things, the crossing of gender boundaries in bhakti poets, closing the piece with his own translation of the 10th-century poet Dēvara Dāsimayya: but look, the self that hovers in between is neither man nor woman (CE, 294)

The poem “Mythologies 2” recounts the story of Narasimha, an incarnation of Vishnu, who took on a liminal form (half-man, halflion) to kill the demon Hiranyakashipu, who was invulnerable to men or animals. The poem concludes by seeing this liminality as a model for the kind of vision the speaker wishes to have: “Adjust my

21

See The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1999): 348. Further page references (with “CE”) are in the main text.

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single eye, rainbow bubble, / so I too may see all things double.”22 But perhaps the most far-reaching manifestations of the idea in Ramanujan’s work are contained in terms such as “reflexivity,” “mirroring,” “dialogue” and “intertextuality” applied to the relationship between India’s different cultural traditions. This view is most fully set out in his essay “Where Mirrors Are Windows: Towards an Anthology of Reflections”: Cultural traditions in India are indissolubly plural and often conflicting but are organised through at least two principles, (a) contextsensitivity and (b) reflexivity of various sorts, both of which constantly generate new forms out of the old ones. What we call brahmanism, bhakti traditions, Buddhism, Jainism, tantra, tribal traditions and folklore, and lastly, modernity itself, are the most prominent of these systems [on p. 9 he adds Islam and Christianity]. They are responses to previous and surrounding traditions, they invert, subvert, and convert their neighbours. Furthermore, each of these terms, like what we call India itself, is “a verbal tent with three-ring circuses” going on inside them. Further dialogic divisions are continuously in progress. (CE, 8)

He goes on to define what he means by “reflexivity”: Reflexivity takes many forms: awareness of self and other, mirroring, distorted mirroring, parody, family resemblances and rebels, dialectic, antistructure, utopias and dystopias, the many ironies connected with these responses, and so on. (CE, 8)

To make sense of India, we have to consider “a spectrum of forms, where one complements, contradicts, reflects, and refracts another” (CE, 25). Reflexivity gives these forms “a common yet creative language for dissent. Without the other, there is no language for the self” (CE, 26). In another essay, he indicates how these processes operated in his case, and in the cases of others like him:

22

The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1995): 226. Further page references (with “CP”) are in the main text.

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Sanskrit, English, and Tamil and Kannada […] stood for three different interconnected worlds. Sanskrit stood for the Indian past; English for colonial India and the West, which also served as a disruptive creative other that both alienated us from and revealed us (in its terms) to ourselves; and the mother-tongues, the most comfortable and least conscious of all, for the world of women, playmates, children and servant […] Each was an other to the others, and it became the business of a lifetime for some of us to keep the dialogues and quarrels alive among these three and to make something of them. (CE, 450)

These ideas, he suggests, are anticipated by Mikhail Bakhtin’s “dialogism,” and he frequently uses Bakhtinian terminology: Such a presence of reflexive worlds; such a dialogic response of one tradition to another; the co-presence of several of them in one space, parodying, inverting, facing and defacing each other, sharing and taking over characters, themes, motifs and other signifiers, but making them signify new and even opposite things – this is characteristic of Indian creativity. (CE, 447)

Reflexivity runs counter to monolithic notions of India: Stereotypes, foreign views, and native self-images on the part of some groups all tend to regard one part (say, the brahmanical texts or folklore) as the original, and the rest as variations, derivatives, aberrations, so we tend to get monolithic conceptions. But the civilisation, if it can be described at all, has to be described in terms of all these dynamic interrelations between different traditions, their texts, ideologies, social arrangements, and so forth. Reflexivities are crucial to the understanding of both the order and diversity, the openness and the closures, of this civilisation. One may sometimes feel that “mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.” (CE, 9)

Elsewhere, he states that his aim as a translator and folklorist has been “to diversify our notions of Indian civilization […] away from the purely Brahmanical view of Indian civilization.” The reason for this is the hierarchical and Sanskritic nature of Brahmanism. In

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contrast, the “mother tongues represent a democratic, anti-hierarchic, from-the-ground-up view of India.”23 What emerges is a decentred view of the nation. If “mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show,” there is no original, no core. These views are clearly contrary to the ideology of Hindu nationalism, with its Brahmanic bias and its emphasis on an Aryan Hindu essence as lying at the origin of India’s identity. They also oppose the dominance of modernizing elite nationalism; although, as we have seen, Ramanujan sees modernity as one of the systems within Indian culture, he also makes room for, and attaches considerable value to, subaltern forms such as folklore, bhakti, women’s tales and other modes.24

III In the final part of this essay, I want to try and relate some of the themes that have emerged above to Ramanujan’s own poetry. His poetry is notable, among other things, for its obliqueness and irony, so it is unsurprising to find that these links, too, are oblique rather than straightforward. In Ramanujan’s poems, both social and individual identities are decentred, and his aesthetic practice is based on a sense of the fragmentary nature of truth and representation. As a consequence, many of his poetic techniques themselves have a displacing effect and therefore enact a decentredness of identities. Vinay Dharwadker suggests that Ramanujan’s poems can be thought of as a “series of concentric circles, in which the outermost periphery contains representations of various environments that lie on the edge of the poet’s experience, while the innermost periphery brings together poems about the things that are closest to him.” Dharwadker distinguishes five circles radiating inward from “impersonal social poems” to the individual, “the subjective centre which gives all the concentric zones of experience their basic structure and meaning” (CP, xxx–xxxi). For simplicity, I will collapse Dharwadker’s five categories into two: the individual and the social. In each of these areas we can discern the ceaseless movement suggested by Ramanujan’s notions of “reflexivity” and mirroring. 23 24

A.K. Ramanujan, Uncollected Poems and Prose, 55. Parts I I I and I V of his Collected Essays deal with bhakti and folklore.

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Identities in Ramanujan are in constant process, continually circulating, continually dispersing themselves.25 In the poem “Elements of Composition,” for instance, the “chattering self” is constantly disintegrating and turning into the other: even as I add, I lose, decompose into my elements, into other names and forms (CP, 123)

“Self-Portrait” uses the image of mirroring to represent this otherness of and within the self: I resemble everyone but myself, and sometimes see in shop-windows, despite the well-known laws of optics, the portrait of a stranger, date unknown, often signed in a corner by my father. (CP, 3)

Origin is at once modestly and tangentially asserted (the father’s signature – but only in the corner of the portrait) and denied (the lack of a centre to the self, the resemblance to “everyone / but myself”). “Man and Woman in Camera and Out” replaces the mirror with a camera. The woman speaker turns the process of focusing the camera into a symbol for her husband’s elusive nature: 25 This feature of Ramanujan’s work has been noted in three of the more substantial pieces of criticism of his poetry: Bruce King’s Three Indian Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes (Madras: Oxford U P , 1991), ch. 5 and 6 (eg, 70, 84, 85); Vinay Dharwadker’s introduction to the Collected Poems (eg, xxviii, xxix, xxxiv); and Jahan Ramazani, “Metaphor and Postcoloniality: A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry,” in The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001): 72–102 (eg, 93–94). Ramazani’s essay was originally published in Contemporary Literature 39. 1 (1998): 27–53.

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126 With a click of luck I married him then, married a focus, now a photograph in a frame on the table in my living room, while he himself goes in and out of sight, smooth by morning, hairy by night, growing from blur to focus and back. (CP, 59)

To adapt Bakhtin’s words, quoted by Ramanujan (CE, 26, 447), to a different context, in none of these poems is the self “a well-rounded, finalized, systematically monologic whole.” Despite this constant process within the self, there is still a place for a sense of individuality. In “Eyes, Ears, Nose, and a Thing about Touch” (CP, 77–78), sight, hearing and smell are depicted as connecting us with and dispersing us into the outside world. In the case of sight, for instance, Eyes are fog, are trees green or on fire, a man’s face quartered by the crosshairs of a gunsight.

Touch, on the other hand, the physical body, separates us from others and the world: Touch alone has untouchables, lives continent in its skin, so segregating the body even near is too far.

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The counterpoint in this poem between contained individuality and dispersal of identity has, I shall argue later, an analogue in Ramanujan’s aesthetic through his preoccupation with the attempt both to unify and fragment his poems. The idea of process also shapes his conception of social and cultural identities. In one of his best-known poems, “Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House,” a meditation on an extended family which, in Dharwadker’s words, turns into a ‘national allegory’ (CP, xxx), the house is both capacious and unstable.26 Its contents are constantly being added to and lost: Sometimes I think that nothing that ever comes into this house goes out. Things come in every day to lose themselves among other things lost long ago among other things lost long ago; (CP, 96)

And later in the poem, he says: anything that goes out will come back, processed and often with long bills attached (CP, 97)

The capaciousness in this poem is not the somewhat romanticized capaciousness of, say, Nehru’s vision of the nation. The affectionateness of the portrait here goes hand in hand with a keenly ironic sense of the chaotic nature of the house and of India: the clutter, the skeletons in the cupboard, such as the daughters who “get married to short-lived idiots” and then return, the stray cows appropriated by the household. Tragedy hovers on the fringes of the comedy, as in the conclusion of the poem, which depicts the deaths in warfare 26

For a similar view of this poem, see Sudesh Mishra, Preparing Faces: Modernism and Indian Poetry in English (Suva, Fiji & Adelaide: University of the South Pacific and The Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, Flinders University, 1995): 258: “The house […] becomes a metonymic extension of the assimilatory power of a capacious India.”

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of two male members of the family. The origins of things disappear, as with the lost objects of the two opening tristichs quoted above, or the cows which have wandered in “from nowhere.” History is malleable, Ramanujan implies in this poem. “The past,” as he asserts elsewhere, “like other cultural constructions, changes as we attend to it […] One is changed by it and the past itself is changed by one’s study of it.” (CE, 184–85). Again, such a view is opposed to that propagated by Hindu nationalists, who locate India’s essence in a fossilized Hindu past. Ramanujan explicitly rejects such revivalist ideas: The past never passes. Either the individual past or historical past or cultural past. It is with us […] [Yet] disconnection is as much an understanding of the past as making the connection. And people living in the present have to see both, because to assert continuity where there is none, where we cannot see any, is to be a revivalist.27

This view of the self, society and history as process is paralleled by an aesthetic which has some resemblance to modernism in its emphasis on the fragment and the provisionality of art and representation.28 As he says in the poem “Connect!” “my truth is in fragments” (CP, 178). A vivid illustration of this is given by Dharwadker in his introduction to the Complete Poems when he recounts how Ramanujan wrote a long poem called “Elements of Composition” and then broke it up into fourteen shorter poems, dispersing them through his second collection, Second Sight. One of the reasons for this step, according to Dharwadker, was that “the formal and thematic unity asserted by the long poem contradicted one of his central insights in it, that his own “truth is in fragments” (CP, xxxvii).

27

Rama Jha, “A Conversation with A.K. Ramanujan,” The Humanities Review 3.1 (January–June 1981): 5–13, quoted by Bruce King, Modern Indian Poetry in English (Delhi: Oxford U P , rev. ed. 2001): 214. The passage is also quoted by Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse, 85. 28 The most detailed study of Ramanujan’s work in relation to modernism can be found in Mishra, Preparing Faces, ch. 6. However, Mishra’s concern is largely with Ramanujan’s use of personae.

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While breaking up the long poem, though, he retained links between the fragments into which he divided them. All of them are composed in similar tristichs. Furthermore, many of the poems begin by picking up a word, phrase or line from a previous poem. The poem “Questions,” for instance, ends with the line “of earthly light, infected air?” while the next poem in the divided sequence, “The Watchers,” begins: “Lighter than light, blowing like air.” The poems, therefore, enact what Dharwadker calls a “double movement” between fragmentation and unity (CP, xxxvii). As I shall suggest later, this double movement forms an aesthetic counterpart to the sense of India as a series of “interconnected differences.”29 The double movement is embodied in his poetry through a number of devices. One of these is a characteristically oblique way of structuring many of his poems by returning to their themes through a series of different contexts or images, inviting us to consider them from different perspectives. A good example is “Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day” (CP, 74–75), which consists of three brief narratives involving the present and the past. The first depicts some Madras bank clerks trying to get home after work. Unable to find a seat on the crammed buses, they begin to speak of an incident in the reign of King Harsha (7th century A D ), when the King gave gifts to ten thousand monks. As a consequence of this discussion, the clerks miss another bus, the eighth, and begin to walk, for King Harsha’s monks had nothing but their own two feet.

In part two, some Indians travelling by sea to take up Fulbright scholarships stop in Egypt and “are amazed at pyramidfuls / of mummies swathed in millennia / of Calicut muslin.” In part three, set in 1935, a Professor of Sanskrit on an exchange programme in 29

It should be added that not everyone finds Ramanujan’s fragmentary procedures convincing. M.K. Naik, for instance, complains of Ramanujan’s “inability or disinclination […] to have a bold, all-out confrontation with experience, opting instead for sporadic skirmishes, minor engagements and hit and run tactics”; Naik, “A.K. Ramanujan and the Search for Roots,” in Living Indian English Poets, ed. Madhusudan Prasad (New Delhi: Sterling, 1989): 20.

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Germany, disorientated by the unfamiliarity of the place and the language, makes what appears to him a connection with something familiar, the ancient Hindu symbol of the swastika. The Professor suddenly comes home in English, gesture, and Sanskrit, assimilating the swastika on the neighbour’s arm in that roaring bus from a grey nowhere to a green.

In this poem, there is little in the way of explicit argument or statement; instead, we are given three laconic vignettes embodying different attitudes to the past. The turn to the past in the first section can be seen as an escape from the realities of modern India (the decrepit transport system); yet the thought clearly enables the clerks to take positive and independent action, as they start to walk home. This use of the past can be seen as both nostalgic and creative. The other two sections are more problematic. The “Fulbright Indians,” with “colour cameras for eyes,” are presented satirically as they stand unanalytically mesmerized by the connection they discover between ancient Egypt and India. The Professor of Sanskrit’s misreading of the swastika is more sinister, as, in his desire for orientation, he ignores, or is unaware of, the ways in which the Nazis misappropriated the symbol. His homecoming, his “assimilation” of the symbol, domesticates it back into its Hindu contexts and so misses the threatening meanings it has acquired. The triplepronged approach to India’s relationships with its past probes the subject from different perspectives, dispersing itself into an unresolved dialogue between its parts, rather than offering a consistent core of meaning. A similar structure can be seen in a poem quoted briefly above, “Drafts” (CP, 157–58), a four-part meditation on the theme of the original and its copy or representation. In the first part, a witness is helping the police to reconstruct “the well-known / but half-seen Hyde Park rapist’s face,” a wavering, uncertain process:

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now towards, now away from what one thought one always knew without the help of policemen’s drawings, a trayful of noses and cruel lips.

“A rough draft, getting rougher,” as he puts it in the poem’s opening line. The second part of the poem uses the image of the Indus valley seals with their carvings and inscriptions to make the point that “Itself a copy of lost events / the original is nowhere.” In the third part a series of different images is introduced: And we have originals, clay tigers that aboriginals drown after each smallpox ritual, or dinosaur smells, that leave no copies; and copies with displaced orginals like these words, adopted daughters researching parents through maiden names in changing languages, telephone books, and familiar grins in railway stations.

The apparent assertion of origin in the first of these lines is undermined in what follows. The clay tigers in the smallpox rituals are perhaps original in the sense that they are not re-used and a new one is employed on each occasion; yet clearly, the poem suggests, they exist in multiple copies, since the rituals are repeated. The “dinosaur smells” may be original, but the origin has vanished, and so the nature of the smell is unknowable. The line seems to suggest that copies (or representations) are our only means of knowledge. In the absence of a representation, the supposedly original object has disappeared completely from knowledge. The elusiveness of

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the original is reinforced by the image of his own words as “adopted daughters researching parents” who forever elude discovery, since they are “displaced” in two ways: through changes in maiden names as a result of marriage, and through speaking a different language. This theme of the link between forebears and descendants is continued in the final part of the poem, which focuses on the unpredictability of genetic inheritance: The D N A leaves copies in me and mine of grandfather’s violins, and programmes of much older music; the epilepsies go to an uncle to fill him with hymns and twitches, bypassing me for now; mother’s migraines translate, I guess, into allergies, a fear of black cats, and a daughter’s passion for bitter gourd and Dostoevsky; mother’s almond eyes mix with my wife’s ancestral hazel to give my son green flecks in a painter’s eye, but the troubled look is all his own.

Even the lines of inheritance involve a “guess” – a hypothesis, a reconstruction, a verbalization; in short, a provisional, uncertain representation. The end of the poem leaves us with an image of originality, something unique (“the troubled look is all his own”), but an originality that exists, as it were, in the margins of what we inherit, just as what we call “originality” in our discussions of art or literature exists within a framework of intertextuality.30 This kind of 30 In his afterword to Poems of Love and War, Ramanujan discusses the relationship of originality and intertextuality as manifested in classical Tamil poetry; Poems of Love and War sel. & tr. A.K. Ramanujan (New York: Columbia U P , 1985): 280–86.

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structuring produces an effect similar to that which Ramanujan attributes to the use of insets or implicit comparisons in classical Tamil poetry: Unlike metaphor and simile, it [an inset] often leaves out all the points of comparison and all explicit markers of comparison (eg, “like,” “as”); such an omission increases manyfold the power of the figure. As we have seen in the poems, image intensifies image, associations flow into each other. These “montage” and “dissolve” effects are aided by the flowing syntax of the language.31

“Flow,” “montage” and “dissolve” are precisely the kinds of terms one might use to describe the effect of the structure of poems such as “Drafts” or “Some Indian Use of History on a Rainy Day”: in both poems, scene dissolves into scene, context into context, image into image. Ramanujan’s reference to syntax is suggestive, a dissolving, fragmenting syntax being characteristic of his own poetry. In order to illustrate and explore this, I will need to quote at some length from one of his poems, “Love Poem for a Wife, 2,” since the syntactical feature in question takes a considerable time to unfold itself (several lines are omitted after the first two quoted below, but these are interpolations rather than being grammatically essential): After a night of rage that lasted days, […] my wife’s always changing syriac face, chosen of all faces, a pouting difficult child’s changing in the chameleon emerald wilderness of Kerala, small cousin to tall

31

Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War, 246.

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134 mythic men, rubberplant and peppervine, frocks with print patterns copied locally from the dotted butterfly, grandmother wearing white day and night in a village full of the colour schemes of kraits and gartersnakes; adolescent in Aden among stabbing Arabs, betrayed and whipped yet happy among ships in harbour, and the evacuees, the borrowed earth under the borrowed trees; taught dry and wet, hot and cold by the monsoons then, by the siroccos now on copper dustcones, the crater townships in the volcanoes of Aden: I dreamed one day That face my own yet hers (CP, 83–84)

The subject of this poem, “my wife’s always/changing syriac face,” is another example of that instability of identity to which I have drawn attention earlier. The poem embodies this changeability partly through the dissolution of image into image, scene into scene, place into place: “chameleon,” for instance, is followed by “emerald” and then, among other things, by the patterns on the frocks, by the “dotted/butterfly,” the “colour schemes/of kraits

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and gartersnakes.” These images resemble the inset technique referred to earlier not only in the way they flow into one another, but also in another respect, which Ramanujan describes in the following terms: Poetry for the Tamils does not unify a multiverse but expresses a universe from within, speaking through any of its parts. The man belongs to the scene, the scene represents the man […] This kind of “metonymous metaphor,” based on an entire formal scheme, is a special feature of classical Tamil forms.32

The frocks, the butterfly, the grandmother, the kraits and gartersnakes, for instance, are not used as similes or metaphors for the wife’s changing face. They are components of the Keralan scene which, in themselves, and in their rapid displacement of each other, become metonyms for her changeability. The dissolving effects are heightened by Ramanujan’s radical line-breaks here, as throughout his poetry. “Chameleon,” positioned at the end of a line, starts one train of thought, but this is then rerouted somewhat by “emerald” at the beginning of the next line. Other examples of this effect, created by the separation of the adjective from the noun it is qualifying, include: “tall/mythic men,” “dotted/butterfly,” and “copper/dustcones.” It is, however, the syntax of this poem that I especially want to draw attention to here. The poem consists of one (grammatically incomplete) sentence, divided in two by the colon after “the volcanoes/of Aden.” The logic of the syntax is elusive. Trying to grasp the main movement of thought, we start with a subordinate clause beginning “After a night of rage”; the arrival of the apparent subject of the sentence “my wife”s always/changing syriac face” is, however, delayed for a number of lines. Furthermore, this subject of the potential main clause of the sentence is not in fact completed by a verb. Instead, the poem moves on to a different grammatical subject, “I”: “I dreamed one day.” As a result, the wife’s face and identity disperse themselves among the various details in the quotation given above. The elusiveness of the syntax, I would suggest, re32

Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War, 247.

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plicates this elusiveness of the wife’s face. A comment Ramanujan makes about his practice as a translator is relevant here: Many of my devices (eg, indentation, spacing) and compromises are made in order to mimic closely the syntactic suspense of the original, without, I hope, estranging the English. Frequently the poems unify their rich and diverse patterns by using a single, long, marvelously managed sentence. I try to make my translation imitate a similar management, even in the relatively simple examples cited here. (CE, 223)

“Love Poem for a Wife, 2” does indeed consist of “a single, long, marvelously managed sentence” and it also maintains syntactic suspense through devices such as lineation and the grammatical elusiveness discussed above. Another example of “syntactic suspense” is “Astronomer,” a poem about Ramanujan’s father – specifically the way in which he moved between worlds represented by astronomy and astrology, Western scientific attitudes and Indian (specifically Hindu) belief. The young Ramanujan found this disturbing: I had just been converted by Russell to the “scientific attitude.” I (and my generation) was troubled by his holding together in one brain both astronomy and astrology; I looked for consistency in him, a consistency he didn’t seem to care about, or even think about. When I asked him what the discovery of Pluto and Neptune did to his archaic nine-planet astrology, he said, “You make the necessary corrections, that’s all.” Or, in answer to how he could read the Gītā religiously having bathed and painted on his forehead the red and white feet of Vishnu, and later talk appreciatively about Bertrand Russell and even Ingersoll, he said, “The Gītā is part of one’s hygiene. Besides, don’t you know, the brain has two lobes?” (CE, 36)

“Astronomer,” too, consists of one long sentence – in this case, spread out across nine tristichs. The unifying potential of this, however, is countered by the syntax: Skyman in a manhole with astronomy for dream,

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astrology for nightmare; fat man full of proverbs, the language of lean years, living in square after almanac square prefiguring the day of windfall and landslide through a calculus of good hours. (CP, 134)

Two features of this poem leave it without a sense of closure: its lack of a main clause and its additive nature. After the opening apostrophe “Skyman in a manhole,” one might expect, perhaps, a statement addressed to the father. This expectation is not fulfilled, however, and the poem instead proceeds by piling on details and images without completing a grammatical sentence. The father’s suspension between worlds is re-enacted by the suspended syntax. In a statement quoted earlier, Ramanujan said that the appropriate relationship to the past was to see both the connections and the disconnections between present and past. This oscillation between connection and disconnection, between unifying and fragmenting motions is characteristic of many of his poems and is enacted through the kinds of structural and syntactical devices discussed earlier. In “Love Poem for a Wife, 2,” or “Astronomer,” the one long sentence binds the poem together but the proliferating images and the elusive syntax are constantly fragmenting the poem, pulling it apart, unravelling it. As Dharwadker says, Ramanujan’s poems work by “stitching and unstitching,” building and dismantling, or constructing wholes and producing fragments” (CP, xxxvii). At the beginning of this section, I suggested that the links between Ramanujan’s poems and the versions of India outlined earlier would be oblique rather than immediate. I want to conclude this essay by briefly spelling out some of these links. Ramanujan’s model of Indian cultures highlights the processes of dialogue, mir-

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roring and reflexivity which take place amongst them. They are simultaneously in communion and separate, related to, but also pulling away from, or refracting, each other. His own poetry, as I have been arguing, enacts an aesthetic of the fragment, while at the same time acknowledging the aspiration to unity. This double movement could be said to form a kind of aesthetic counterpart to the tensions between unity and fragmentation I emphasized while discussing models of Indian identity. Ramanujan’s aesthetic theory and practice, as well as his explicitly articulated views on India’s cultures, are opposed to any monolithic conceptions of India, such as those embodied in the very different ideologies of Hindutva and a modernity which sees itself as the only model for India rather than as one element in the mosaic of the nation.

WORKS CITED Bardhan, Pranab. “The State Against Society: The Great Divide in Indian Social Science Discourse,” in Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, ed. Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1997): 184–95. Bery, Ashok. “‘We Have Grown to Look at the Large World as Part of Us’: Modernity and the Nation in Two Indian Novels of the 1930s,” in The Political Subject: Essays on the Self from Art, Politics and Science, ed. Wendy Wheeler (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2000): 160–78. Bhatt, Chetan. Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2001). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 1–26. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000). Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1993). Corbridge, Stuart, & John Harriss. Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). Jha, Rama. “A Conversation with A.K. Ramanujan,” The Humanities Review 3.1 (January–June 1981): 5–13. Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997). King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English (Delhi: Oxford U P , rev. ed. 2001).

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——. Three Indian Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes (Madras: Oxford U P , 1991) Mishra, Sudesh. Preparing Faces: Modernism and Indian Poetry in English (Suva, Fiji & Adelaide: The University of the South Pacific and The Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, Flinders University, 1995). Naik, M.K. “A.K. Ramanujan and the Search for Roots,” in Living Indian English Poets, ed. Madhusudan Prasad (New Delhi: Sterling, 1989): 13–23. Nandy, Ashis. “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto,” Seminar 314 (1985): 14–24. ——. “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” in Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1990): 69–93. Pandey, Gyanendra. “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu– Muslim Riots in India Today,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 27–55. Ramanujan, A.K. The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1999). ——. The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1995). ——. Uncollected Poems and Prose, ed. Molly Daniels–Ramanujan & Keith Harrison (Delhi: Oxford U P , 2001). ——, ed. & tr. Poems of Love and War (New York: Columbia U P , 1985). Ramazani, Jahan. “Metaphor and Postcoloniality: A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 39.1 (1998): 27–53; repr. in The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001): 72–102. Vanaik, Achin. The Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (London: Verso, 1997).

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Communalism, Corruption and Duty in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters P ETER M OREY

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D E C E M B E R 1992, the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed by a large crowd of Hindu militants, claiming the site on which it stood as the birthplace of the god Ram and therefore sacred to their religion. In its place they proposed the construction of a Ram temple. Within hours of the news reaching Bombay, angry Muslims had taken to the street in protest. But they soon found themselves confronted by highly organized groups of Hindu activists celebrating the ‘victory’ at Ayodhya. The horrific violence that ensued continued sporadically throughout December and January. By the time it came to an end almost eight hundred people were dead and many more had been made homeless. In a few short weeks Bombay’s reputation as a haven of tolerance and communal eclecticism lay in tatters.1 The Maharashtrian state elections of 1995 took place against a background of anti-Muslim sentiment resulting from the civil unrest which had followed the destruction of the Babri Mosque two and a half years earlier. At the polls, the Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva), depicting itself as the “defender of Hindus,” won enough support to form a coalition government with the B J P (Bharatiya Janata 1

N 6T H

For details, see Kalpana Sharma, “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold,” in Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1996): 268–86.

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Party). This success represented the culmination of thirty years of activism by the Shiv Sena in Bombay, fuelled by its charismatic and ruthless leader, the Senapati, Bal Thackeray, which had seen the organization develop from a cadre concerned with employment opportunities for Maharashtrian speakers to a major player in the Hindu nationalist movement on the metropolitan, and hence national, stage.2 Drawing on its appeal to a broad spectrum of the Bombay population, and raising the banner of Hindu majoritarianism or Hindutva, the Shiv Sena exploited the inevitable consequences, in terms of inequality, fostered by capitalist development in the city. It employed flexible tactics and a posse of young, vigorous activists trained to see political work as part of a larger struggle sometimes requiring unscrupulous methods and direct physical violence, and was involved in such nefarious activities as protection rackets, illegal land deals, and drugs and contraband smuggling. The movement of the Shiv Sena from fringe player to main actor in the unfolding drama of Bombay politics both indicates, and is a symptom of, what Novy Kapadia has described as the “criminalisation of politics and the politicisation of crime, so rampant in India in the last decade of the twentieth century.”3 It is against this backdrop of communalist politics and corruption that the action of Rohinton Mistry’s third novel, Family Matters, takes place. Ostensibly the story of the pressures faced by one down-at-heel Parsi family in their attempts to care for an aged and infirm patriarch, the novel also offers a consideration of how, despite all efforts to keep them separate, the public world impinges on the private space, and how the taint of corruption can mark even the most insular and apparently upright of communities. Characters are caught in a complex web of actions and reactions in their dealings with each other and with the wider world they inhabit. Physical corruption and the inevitable change and loss accompanying mortality are linked with the social and political corruption 2

Bal Thackeray is memorably lampooned as the Mainduck, Raman Fielding, leader of the Mumbai Axis in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). 3 Novy Kapadia, “The Politics of Survival and Domination in A Fine Balance,” in The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry: Critical Studies, ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya (London: Sangam, 1998): 132. See also Sharma, “Chronicle,” 274.

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characteristic of modern Bombay, and with the moral corruption of characters who, often for laudable reasons, perpetrate deceits and engage in subterfuge. For example, Yezad Chenoy uses his family’s precious housekeeping money to gamble on the illegal lottery, the Matka, making losses they can ill afford. Yet he does so in the hope of meeting the increased expense caused by the arrival of his fatherin-law, who, despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease, has been ousted from his home by the devious machinations of an embittered stepdaughter at her wit’s end. Similarly, in a move connected to the endemic municipal and national corruption that sees politicians and criminals in league, his son Jehangir is tempted to betray his role as school homework monitor and take money for overlooking his classmates’ mistakes. In particular, Yezad’s attempts to influence his ecumenical employer to stand for election on an anticommunalist, anti-corruption ticket – prompted less by concern for Bombay than for the promotion he anticipates for himself as a result – backfire in tragic fashion. The cost of such actions is investigated as part of the novel’s interest in moral ambiguity and causality, means and ends, which often centres on the distinction between duty and free will. In this it recalls the strictures of Kantian ethical philosophy, and, emphasizing the text’s hybridity, the Zoroastrian injunction to “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.”4 The question of how to identify the good course of action in a world seemingly devoid of moral absolutes casts a shadow over the best intentions. Mistry explores the inevitable fragmentation of such ideals in practice and the overlapping, and sometimes contradictory, compulsions of duty to family, to community, and to the Zoroastrian faith. What is revealed is a Parsi community whose response to its glorious past and attenuated status in postcolonial India is fundamentally split between an urge for physical and imaginative escape

4

Rohinton Mistry studied literature and philosophy at the University of Toronto, and throughout his oeuvre one can see post-Enlightenment philosophical questions and references finding their way into a fictional world whose moral parameters are often Zoroastrian. The Parsi legacy has bestowed on Mistry an inheritance that includes European ideas as well as South Asian and Persian ones. Reflected in the form of his narratives, too, this hybrid inheritance is intrinsic to everything he writes.

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and a hidebound orthodoxy that, ironically, echoes the purist agendas of the very Hindu nationalism that threatens it. Family in the novel comes to have both positive and negative connotations. The Chenoy–Vakeel–Contractor family unit is already fractured by loss: Coomy and Jal Contractor’s own father dies young and they are unwillingly swept into a new domestic arrangement when their mother seeks the security of a marriage to Nariman Vakeel, who, in turn, carries with him the whiff of scandal and divided loyalties owing to his liaison with a non-Parsi, Lucy Braganza. When his father refuses to countenance his exogamous intentions, Nariman reluctantly yields to the marriage with Yasmin Contractor. Nariman soon adds a daughter of his own, Roxana, to his newly acquired stepchildren, leading to longstanding jealousies and resentment about favouritism. As these almost ad-hoc arrangements indicate, families develop, change and some branches die out while others are propagated and flourish. Beyond this, there are affiliations independent of blood ties that come to take on the supportive qualities of the family ideal: the letter-writer and bookstore owner Vilas Rane seems part of a multitude of “ready-made families” as he preserves the link between illiterate workers forced to leave their birthplaces and come to the city for work and those they have left behind; “writing and reading the ongoing drama of family matters.”5 Families can be protective spaces, but they can also stifle with a blanket of over-protectiveness: Yezad’s older sisters fiercely resent anyone vying for a share of their brother’s affections; and even the well-meaning Roxana fusses over her sons, Jehangir and Murad, worrying at the slightest sign of the inevitable childhood coughs or stomach upsets. Yet, sinister examples of parental control are at work, too, not only in Mr Vakeel’s interdiction against Nariman marrying for love, but also toward the end of the novel when Yezad, tossed by events back to a literal and racially based understanding of Parsi uniqueness, effectively reenacts the same prejudicial injunctions when dealing with his eldest son’s first serious relationship.

5

Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (London: Faber & Faber, 2002): 136. Further page references are in the main text.

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Nariman’s Parkinson’s disease is linked to osteoporosis. He breaks his leg when out for a walk, leading to the regime of bed rest which tests Coomy, with whom he lives at first in the inappropriately named Chateau Felicity, to her limit. Eventually, the plaster on Nariman’s leg gives Coomy the idea of dislodging that other plaster, on the ceiling of their apartment, in order to keep her stepfather at the Chenoy’s flat where he has been recuperating. Parkinson’s and osteoporosis are only two of the many examples of what one might call bodily corruption that mark Family Matters. Characters are furnished with a full complement of ailments: Coomy’s brother Jal is partially deaf and wrestles with a malfunctioning hearing aid; the increasingly choleric Yezad develops angina; and Jehangir has a delicate digestive system, upset by ill-prepared food and the pangs of conscience. Even the mechanical cricket-bat-wielding Santa, erected by Yezad’s employer, Mr Kapur, in his sports-goods shop to celebrate Christmas and represent his inclusive view of Bombay and its communities, creaks rheumatically and shudders in its down-swing as if it too has Parkinson’s. Issues of mobility versus immobility, decay and mortality are explored through Nariman’s fate. From a life lived fully through the body, he comes to exist solely in the life of the mind. As he thinks back on his blighted love for Lucy, Nariman becomes, in Yeats’s terms, “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.”6 His struggles to perform the simplest tasks become the most acute manifestation of the Sisyphian labours of other characters, such as Roxana and Yezad, struggling every day to make ends meet, or Coomy fighting vainly to hold back the tide of bitterness she feels for the old man she blames for her mother’s untimely death. Coomy and her brother-in-law Yezad actually share several psychologically significant traits, despite being at loggerheads over who should look after Nariman. They both baulk at the unpleasant physical realities of caring for a prostrate, paralyzed relative: Coomy is sickened by his bodily effluvia, and Yezad refuses to touch the bedpan on which Nariman is now reliant. Their revulsion is of a piece with their obsessive desire to exercise control over their 6

W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” in Yeats, Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Pan/Macmillan, 1974): lines 21–22.

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environments and, by extension, their destinies. Yet, in different ways, this urge is every bit as damaging for these two figures as it was for the warring women, Lucy and Yasmin, whose battle for control of Nariman sends them over the edge: literally, as, locked in struggle, they plunge to their deaths from the roof of Chateau Felicity. Thus, the corruption and breakdown of family life is inextricably linked to the physical. Yet it is also connected to that other corruption infesting the social space and political institutions of Bombay, adding urgency to what Adam Mars–Jones, in his Observer review of Family Matters, sees as one of the text’s central questions: “Do families reflect society at large, or do they act as barricades against it?”7 On coming to power in the 1995 elections, the Shiv Sena/B J P administration oversaw a number of measures designed to consolidate its power and advance the cause of Hindutva, including abolishing the Minorities Commission, disbanding the Srikrishna Commission into the Bombay riots (which threatened to expose the active involvement of the Sena in orchestrating the violence), and withdrawing incitement charges against Bal Thackeray in relation to the same events.8 One of the most high-profile initiatives involved the renaming of Bombay as Mumbai, seen as the first blow in a battle to expunge all “non-Hindu” place-names from a “purified” Hindu homeland.9 This last development impinges on the world of Family Matters, as it is Mr Kapur’s refusal to change the name of his shop from Bombay to Mumbai Sporting Goods that attracts the attention of the murderous Shiv Sena goondas. Indeed, 7

Adam Mars–Jones, “It’s all a bit of a mystery,” Observer Review (21 April 2002): 17. 8 See Thomas Blom Hansen, “B J P and the Politics of Hindutva in Maharashtra,” in The B J P and the Compulsions of Politics in India, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen & Christophe Jaffrelot (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998): 121–60. See also Jayant Lele, “Saffronisation of the Shiv Sena: The Political Economy of City, State and Nation,” in Bombay, ed. Thorner & Patel, 185–213. For Hindutva’s impact in the realm of culture, see Debjani Ganguly, “Transgressing Sacred Visions: Taslima, Rushdie and the Indian Subcontinent,” in Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Ralph Crane & Radhika Mohanram (Cross/Cultures 42; Amsterdam & Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000): 102–22. 9 Hansen, “B J P ,” 148–50.

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the tentacular Shiv Sena has provided the ‘enforcers’ for many of these developments. In Mistry’s novel they are also shown to have a finger in the Matka pie. The underground lottery helps to fund the Shiv Sena machinery. It also finances the organized crime that has infected the city and its institutions, causing the sagacious Vilas Rane to observe: “Matka is Bombay and Bombay is Matka” (200). In addition to its ties with gangsters, the Shiv Sena has implemented a cultural censorship programme, much to Yezad’s exasperation, and opposes a bizarre diversity of events and activities it deems corrupting to the culturally homogeneous and “pure” nation it envisages; targets have included certain artworks, Valentine’s day, men’s magazines, and women working in bars.10 Top of the list, as always, are those ubiquitous “national enemies,” Muslims. Yezad shakes his head: “What a joke of a government. Clowns and crooks. Or clownish crooks” (265). Yet there is real danger in crossing them. Not only is it suggested that the Shiv Sena was implicated in the murder, during the Bombay riots, of the family of Husain, Mr Kapur’s Muslim peon at the shop, but Mr Kapur himself falls victim to those representatives of the forces of sectarianism he had briefly resolved to oppose. They also beat up the radical journalist/ actor Gautam for writing an article on the “politician–criminal– police nexus” (199). Nowadays the enemies and “defenders” of the state are identical and funded from the same illegal sources. This sorry state of affairs provokes a discussion between Gautam and his fellow thespian, Bhaskar, over a central ethical question confronting the modern Bombayite: how does one act when faced with injustice in a situation where law and order has either broken down or is itself complicit with the wrong-doers? (A telling example of this is played out when, despite being an eyewitness to the murder of Mr Kapur, Husain is angrily advised by the police to stop making “wild accusations” about Shiv Sena involvement in his employer’s death.) The actors muse:

10 It has also included suppression of one of the most stinging indictments of its ruthless style of government, Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, which was temporarily banned in India at the behest of the communalist kingpin, Bal Thackeray. See Ganguly, “Transgressing,” 107–15.

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“Isolated incidents, they call them,” said Gautam. “Exactly,” said Bhaskar. “They say that our nation has made so much progress – satellite T V , they say, Internet, e-mail, best software designers in the world.” Gautam chuckled. “Hamaara Bharat Mahaan, they repeat like that government slogan, and they laughed […] ‘What to do? People are afraid to accept the truth. As T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’.” (202–203)

Even cricket, that watchword for probity and fair play, is now crooked, as Vilas remarks, referring to the match-fixing scandals that rocked the sport in South Asia in the mid-to-late 1990s. The moral taint that everywhere affects Bombay life also increasingly makes its presence felt in the lives of Nariman’s family. The most glaring example of this is Coomy’s devious plan to foist her stepfather on the already financially constrained Chenoy wing of the family, and the even more underhand measures she takes to keep him there. Yet, other, less overt instances of dishonesty also typify characters’ dealings with each other and, sometimes, with themselves. Jehangir’s capitulation to his classmates’ entreaties to turn a blind eye to their mistakes, and so earn a few much-needed extra rupees for the family’s essential purchases, betrays that faith placed in him as homework monitor by his teacher, the lovely Miss Alvarez. He wholeheartedly embraces the teacher’s exhortations at the beginning of the year, that moral choices made now can be carried on into adult life, and that her pupils can help to purify the befouled air of civic affairs. As for the schoolmaster Herbert Pembroke in E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey, who observes that “School is the world in miniature,” so here Jehangir’s classroom takes on a metonymic relationship to society and nation.11 Although he wants to help Miss Alvarez fight corruption in his own, small way, Jehangir is eventually compromised and becomes part of it. Likewise, Yezad succumbs to temptation and removes money from the worn but neatly labelled envelopes containing savings for staple

11

E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey (1907; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988): 157.

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items such as “Milk and Tea,” “Water and Electricity,” to place bets on the Matka. Both Yezad and Jehangir, in their different ways, violate Yezad’s father’s example of that scrupulous Parsi honesty for which the community is celebrated. This example was set when Mr Chenoy ensured the safe delivery of a large consignment of money to the bank for which he worked, despite the surrounding chaos and panic caused by wartime explosions. “In gratitude for an exemplary display of courage and honesty in the course of duty” (FM, 224), he was presented with a commemorative clock, which Yezad continues to cherish and refuses to allow Murad to wind, long after he himself has compromised the values it represents. After relating the tale of his father’s heroism, Yezad, somewhat ironically, warns his sons: “Remember, people can take everything away from you, but they cannot rob you of your decency […] You alone can do that, by your actions.” However, Yezad, and the generation that comes after him, are, in a sense, victims as well as inheritors of standards set in other times, and in other contexts. The myth of Parsi honesty and integrity is an ambiguous one, both inspiration and burden. As Vilas Rane comments, such myths can become outdated and “make misfits of men” (205). The complicating factor, and what prevents Family Matters from being simply a text lamenting moral decline, is that both Yezad and his son act as they do for the best of reasons: to secure extra funds to cover the increased cost of looking after Nariman with his expensive medicines. In fact, moral ambiguity in motivation is at the heart of the novel. Family Matters repeatedly returns to questions of means and ends, and the negative outcome of the well-intended act. A number of situations lend themselves to a kind of double construction, according to the discrepancy between what characters think their actions will achieve and what the end-result actually turns out to be: Roxana innocently suggests employing the incompetent handyman Edul Munshi to fix Coomy’s ceiling, thus setting in train events that will lead to both their deaths; the scam to frighten Mr Kapur into running in the forthcoming municipal election is suggested by the eminently sympathetic Vilas; while Yezad suggests that real Shiv Sena goondas may be better equipped for the task than Vilas’s verbose actor friends. Most intractable of all, perhaps – and the se-

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quence of events that appears to initiate all the Chenoy family’s subsequent troubles – is Nariman’s inability to give up his relationship with Lucy Braganza, even after his marriage to Yasmin. Lucy follows him to his new family home, takes a job as an ayah with a neighbour in order to be near him, and repeatedly threatens suicide. Time and again Nariman follows her up to the roof of Chateau Felicity and dissuades her from jumping. Despite his efforts to calm his former lover, Nariman finds himself yielding to the promptings of old emotions as well as the concern he feels for Lucy in her distressed obsession. At one point he allows himself to wonder whether Lucy’s perseverance is the result of undying love or a desire for retaliation. Likewise, as readers we are aware that, by giving way to her entreaties – albeit out of sympathy – he is hurting his wife and stepchildren: in which respect his actions can be seen as selfish rather than benevolent. Such moral complexity gives a new twist to Mistry’s perennial concern with the idea of goodness as understood in Zoroastrianism. Each of Mistry’s works contains a reference to the prime requirements of the Zoroastrian faith, “munashni, gavashni, kunashni”: “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Characters orient themselves, and to an extent are judged, according to this triple injunction. Family Matters, however, complicates the picture by raising the question of what exactly these good thoughts, words and deeds might consist of. How does one recognize them in a situation where everything and everyone is, to some extent, compromised? According to Zoroastrianism, good and evil are completely separate: the former being a positive quality emanating from Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, and the latter being the result of the intrusion of the Zoroastrian Devil, Ahriman, into the Ahuric realm.12 Yet in the world inhabited by Yezad and his family, the notion of good is adulterated and evil is immanent in humankind. Good and bad permeate one another, partly through those ageless human proclivities vengeance, pride and intolerance. Hence characters’ motives are often grey. Coomy behaves badly towards Nariman and offloads him onto the Chenoys partly because she fears the distur12

Peter Clark, Zoroastrianism: An Introduction to an Ancient Faith (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998): 126.

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bance of her carefully ordered existence and the introduction of dirt and decay, partly because she doubts her ability to cope, and partly as a belated and perhaps subconscious act of revenge for the way Nariman treated her mother. Coomy’s unhealthy resentment may have festered for years, but she does have a legitimate grievance. (Hence, the father/”daughters” situation here is never as morally clear-cut as in those other dramatic tales of filial disloyalty, King Lear and Père Goriot, which provide models for Mistry’s investigations.) Coomy feels guilty about what she has done, as does the younger Nariman when confronted with the proof of what his continued infatuation with Lucy is doing to his family, and Yezad spends much of the second half of the novel tortured by guilt over his covert activities until he finds that religion can conveniently be made to bear the burden of a multitude of sins. The great question of the novel, which permeates everything yet remains unasked until Jehangir’s epilogue at the end, is who is to blame for Lucy and Yasmin’s fatal fall? Visiting old Dr Fitter, Jehangir learns for the first time his grandmother’s dying words, only half-heard by horrified bystanders, which have echoed down the years and tarred Nariman and his kin with the indelible mark of scandal: “… all the confusion was due to one word in her sentence: did she say ‘he’ or ‘we’?” “What do you think she said?” I inquire meekly. “Oh, I know what she said. She said, ‘What did we do!’ But there were other people gathered around. Some of them heard, ‘What did he do!’ and they claimed it incriminated Nariman.” (477)

This is significant less as some sinister plot-twist than as a point about how actions have consequences which reverberate down the years, but which people – often reading backwards from their own point in time and circumstance – can interpret as they wish. Certainly, Coomy has chosen to interpret her mother’s unhappy marriage and death in a certain way, as her lonely life, blighted by bitterness and an unforgiving attitude towards Nariman, makes abundantly clear.

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Thus, characters in Family Matters are seen largely to choose their own fates. Yet they do not do so arbitrarily. Each is burdened by an acute sense of duty: to family, to employer or to the city as a whole. When hearing of Mr Kapur’s intention to run in the forthcoming municipal election, Yezad initially counsels that his duty lies in looking after his shop, before recognizing the opportunity for an increment for himself that would accrue from the increased responsibilities. He invokes the Bhagavad Gita in urging the pre-eminent claims of duty. Ironically, it is the secular-leaning Hindu, Mr Kapur, who counters this when, having decided not to run after all, he echoes Kant in justifying the decision to put family above civic duty: “Think about it – pure duty is unconcerned with outcome. Even if I become a municipal councillor, fight the good fight, what do I have at the end? The satisfaction of knowing I’ve done my duty. As far as Bombay is concerned, nothing changes. Nobody can turn back the clock.” (294)

As the pre-eminent philosopher of ethics, Kant famously proposed that the moral worth of any given action could be determined not by considering its outcome, but by identifying the intention behind it. Specifically, only actions performed in accordance with duty have genuine moral worth.13 Although there are obvious difficulties in trying to identify whether others are acting primarily out of a sense of duty, Kant proposed some guiding principles by which the individual should orientate his or her actions. The most famous of these is his “categorical imperative”: “I should never act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”14 As Roger Scruton, among others, has noted, this first formulation of the categorical imperative provides “the philosophical basis of the famous golden rule, that we should do as we would be done by.”15 One behaves well, according to rules one would expect everyone else to observe also, for the mutual 13

Immanuel Kant, “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Ethical Philosophy, tr. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis I N : Hackett, 2nd ed. 1994): 11. 14 Kant, “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals,” 14. 15 Scruton, Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2001): 86.

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benefit of all parties. In one respect, those of Yezad’s actions which seem most questionable – taking the household savings for gambling, temporarily pocketing the protection money, setting the fake Shiv Sena thugs to frighten Mr Kapur – are all motivated by a notion of duty: the long-term duty to provide for his family. However, there is a sense in which the various duties that hem him in – to Mr Kapur as his employer as well as to his family – come into conflict with each other. Likewise, Coomy is forced to choose between the duty to look after her incapacitated stepfather and her sense of duty to the memory of her biological mother, for whose death she holds him responsible. She decides to prioritize the latter, and lies that her ceiling has collapsed in order to absolve herself of her duties to Nariman. In neither case, however, could Yezad or Coomy wish that others would behave towards them with the same kind of deception and evasiveness as they themselves have employed. Commenting on the responsibilities imposed by Kant’s categorical imperative, Warner A. Wick offers the examples of lying and gangsterism: both particularly apposite for the familial and urban politics of Family Matters: to seek credibility by lying is not a point that can be universally adopted! No rational agent can will that maxim as a universal law, for in its universal form it is self-contradictory. A lie can work only if enough people tell the truth to make truthfulness the normal expectation, just as the gangster can only succeed if most people are law-abiding. These miscreants act unfairly in that their maxims require that other people act differently.16

Extrapolating from his initial principle, Kant proposed a second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.”17 In other words, one should treat others always as selfdetermining agents, and not just as an instrument to be used to achieve one’s own aims. Once more, Yezad and Coomy can be seen 16

Wick, “Introduction: Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Kant, Ethical Philosophy,”xviii–xix. 17 Kant, Ethical Philosophy, 36.

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to fall short of this ideal: Yezad treats Mr Kapur and his genuine civic concern as a means to promotion; Coomy uses Nariman’s illness as a way to exact revenge on him for his treatment of her mother. The point here is not to measure these characters against some impossible benchmark of good behaviour, nor to show how they fail to meet the Zoroastrian requirement of good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Rather, it is to give an indication of how the tussle between duty and inclination provides the motor that drives the action of the novel and its moral choices. In short, Family Matters is concerned with causes and effects – both intended and inadvertent – and how one interprets and accounts for connections between past and present. If one cannot arrest time, as the evocative old photographs of Bombay that Mr Kapur shows Yezad briefly offer to do, can one at least exercise some mitigating power over its apparently random dispensations? Formally, the concern for past–present connections is played out through repetitions: Yezad comes to repeat Nariman’s father’s inflexible religious dogma; Murad’s non-Parsi girlfriend threatens a repeat of the parental estrangement of the earlier generation; and, at one point, Yezad unfairly accuses Roxana of neglecting the rest of her family in favour of her father, paralleling Yasmin’s earlier complaints as Nariman abandons her and the children to run after Lucy. Against these examples of family breakdown the reader can set the many types of repair attempted in Family Matters, only some of which are successful. Edul Munshi, the disastrous handyman, tries to repair the ceiling Coomy has vandalized, bringing down a supporting beam that kills them both. Dr Tavancore and the bonesetter at the hospital do their best to patch up Nariman’s brittle body after his fall. Vilas’s letter-writing repairs families torn apart by migration. Yezad is “touched by his employer’s gentleness as he went about mending the cracks in Husain’s broken life” (144). Finally, Dr Fitter and the father-and-son police combination of Superintendent and Inspector Masalavala scurry out to fix the death certificates and help tidy up after the two fatal accidents which threaten the Parsi community with scandal, viewing it as one of the “good deeds” required of them. A number of explanatory options are available to the Chenoys and others as they attempt to piece together the chain of events by

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which their family affairs have moved from initial domestic harmony to tension and hostility. In their besetting concern to find an explanation for phenomena, they sometimes resemble the characters in another of Mistry’s fictional templates, Voltaire’s satire Candide, who deliberate “on the contingent or non-contingent events of this world […] on causes and effects, on moral and physical evil, on free will and necessity.”18 In Family Matters, as in Candide, events are interpreted, variously, as the product of coincidence, free will, destiny, or God’s will. On the way to offer his condolences to Mrs Kapur after the murder of her husband, Yezad reflects on the coincidence by which Mr Kapur was visited by real Shiv Sena thugs, after the actors he had engaged to frighten his employer by playing the role of Shiv Sena goondas had departed: “That was the problem, everyone dismissing the possibility of coincidence” (393). Later, when his new-found religiosity has taken hold and he suggests as a coincidence the fact that Nariman develops bed sores as soon as his new ayah arrives, Roxana reminds him: “You say there’s no such thing as coincidence […] You call it another word for the Hand of God” (482). The delivery of Nariman into the Chenoys’ care, and the accidental death of Coomy, is ascribed to destiny in Yezad’s now-fatalistic outlook. Roxana reflects on the tragedy of the shattered love-match of Edul Munshi and his wife by asking “What is this absurd force called destiny?” – to which the increasingly devout Yezad replies: “Man proposes, God disposes” (398). As characters with strong religious convictions, Roxana and, later, Yezad read causality in a particular way. They tend to assume that the operations of cause and effect are regulated by a pre-existing entity they know as God, or Ahura Mazda. In effect, they hold what Kant, and indeed Voltaire, would describe as an a-priori understanding of cause and effect. Apriori truths are those deemed to exist independently of experience, and a-priori knowledge is that which is not based in empirically 18

Voltaire, Candide and Other Tales, tr. Tobias Smollett (tr. 1761; London: J.M. Dent, 1937): 201. Early in Family Matters, Nariman meets a hospital porter who reminds him of Voltaire. Although we never meet this minor character again, the seeds of those philosophical questions raised by the philosopher’s work are sown in the attentive reader’s mind.

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verifiable experience. Roger Scruton gives some examples of the a priori: the following propositions seem to be true a priori: “Every event has a cause”; “The world consists of enduring objects which exist independently of me”; “All discoverable objects are in space and time.” These propositions cannot be established through experience, since their truth is presupposed in the interpretation of experience.19

Thus, Scruton quotes Kant to show that the notion of God itself can be seen as an a-priori regulative force: “‘the ideal of a supreme being is nothing but a regulative principle of reason, which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all-sufficient and necessary cause’.”20 Voltaire’s Candide famously sends up Pangloss’s unquestioning a-priori justification of things as they are and the complacent optimism encompassed by his conviction that, regardless of how bad things appear, this is “the best of all possible worlds.”21 Likewise, in Mistry’s novel, Roxana allows herself the luxury of a Panglossian retrospective interpretation of events working out for the best, attributing this to God’s will; “when she looked back over the events that had led them to this evening, it was almost proof of divine power in the universe, with Pappa’s broken ankle the start of everything” (435). Doubtless, she would concur with Pangloss that “free will is consistent with absolute necessity”:22 an outlook which can reconcile Coomy’s desire to attribute the collapse of her ceiling to an act of God with the fact that she herself encouraged her brother to take a hammer to it. The religious components of identity are particularly important for the Parsi characters, especially in the context of the creeping Hindu majoritarianism that surrounds them. However, the main concern for this vulnerable community in Family Matters centres on issues of numerical decline and the merits or otherwise of traditional notions of ethnic purity. Luhrmann records how “Until 1941 the Parsi population was slowly but steadily on the rise in India. 19

Scruton, Kant, 30. Scruton, Kant, 69. 21 Voltaire, Candide, 108. 22 Candide, 120. 20

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But in 1961 they were down to over 100,000; in 1971, over 90,000; in 1991 there were 76,000 Parsis in India, with around 50,000 in Greater Bombay.”23 Near the end of the book, Dr Fitter and Inspector Masalavala discuss the shrinking Parsi community and what should be done to halt the diminution. They enumerate the main features accounting for decreasing numbers: a dwindling birth-rate, marrying outside the community, and migration to the West. Westernization and Western ideas, once seen as the lifeline of the community, are now identified as part of the problem. Inspector Masalavala’s cranky suggestions to shore up the community include tying educational opportunities to an undertaking to bear a certain number of children. The more stoical prescription of Dr Fitter is for a Parsi time-capsule, containing items representative of the culture, to be buried for future generations to unearth when the community has died out. That sense of loss indicative of contemporary Parsi culture in India is articulated by the inspector: “To think that we Parsis were the ones who built this beautiful city and made it prosper. And in a few more years there won’t be any of us left to tell the tale” (404). For Yezad, the issue is one of purity. He comes to view “the purity of this unique and ancient Persian community” (127) as being under threat from miscegenation, and ponders on the ritual gestures of the dastur at the fire-temple, valuing “the cumulative grace of generations and centuries […] encoded in blood and bone” (333). The psychological importance to the orthodox of the unique, untainted Persian blood, which is felt to distinguish Parsis from the surrounding community, should not be underestimated. The orthodox are against the mingling of this blood with any other. In this view, biology supersedes social morality as a guarantor of worth, with a corresponding shift in that notion of the good (thought, word, or deed) fundamental to Zoroastrian ethics. As Luhrmann has noted, “The central cosmological struggle of good against evil is described as an effort to achieve purity – that which is evil is impure, that which is impure is evil.” However, for the orthodox, a “transformation took place with the concept of purity […] which 23

Tania Luhrmann, The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1996): 168.

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was refigured from holiness into racial superiority.”24 The continuously burning fire at the temple offers that elusive past–present connection Yezad craves, and, in a way, the fire-temple replaces the family home as a sanctuary from the outside world. As he feels increasingly disempowered by events, he falls back more and more on his reawakened faith, recoiling from the mongrelization and mixing inherent in urban life, to a space of ‘purity’ that is, of course, at the same time one of fantasy. In his new dogmatic ultra-orthodoxy, he becomes a kind of Zoroastrian fundamentalist, imposing his racial and cultural obsessions on everyone around him. He is an active member of an orthodox Zoroastrian association, attempts to inflict draconian menstruation laws on his wife, and rails against Murad’s non-Parsi girlfriend. Nor does it occur to Yezad that his Parsi purism is of a piece with the exclusionary compartmentalizing of those Hindu nationalist forces he has previously despised. Mistry understands the psychological and nostalgic impulses behind social and cultural conservatism as well as any other contemporary writer. But his sympathies for the consoling qualities of religion and tradition evaporate when, as so often, they become a stick with which to beat others. For him, ritual and dogma are of less consequence than social morality. In a comment that sums up the choices confronting so many of his characters, Mistry has remarked: I’m not a practising Parsi but the ceremonies are quite beautiful. As a child I observed [them] carefully in the same way as I did my homework, but it had no profound meaning for me. Zoroastrianism is about the opposition of good and evil. For the triumph of good, we have to make a choice.25

It might be said that, in his reversion to a defensive, insular form of Zoroastrianism, Yezad succumbs to what Kant calls the “fanaticism, indeed the impiety, of abandoning the guidance of a morally legislative reason in the right conduct of our lives, in order to derive guidance from the idea of the Supreme Being.”26 24

Luhrmann, The Good Parsi, 101. Angela Lambert, “Touched with Fire,” Guardian (27 April 2002): 7. 26 Scruton, Kant, 96. 25

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The question “Are you happy?” insistently asked of her husband and sons by the concerned Roxana, becomes almost a refrain in Family Matters. Characters have sought happiness, or at least stability, by following the dictates of duty as far as possible, but, as this essay has shown, they often find that duty comes into conflict with personal inclination or immediate need. According to Kant, there is no point in proclaiming happiness, in the sense of the fulfilment of one’s desires, as the ultimate goal in life, because it cannot be elevated to the level of that kind of universal law his maxims demand. In fact, to try to do so would be disastrous. This is because each person’s interests, hence definition of happiness, would be in some way different, and would actually lead to conflict: “while everyone’s interests are the same in name (happiness), they differ in fact; and this difference is almost without limit, because the specific content of happiness varies with the temperaments, circumstances, and histories of each individual.”27 In Family Matters, Yezad’s desires for orthodoxy and order clash with Murad’s definition of happiness, which includes the right to go out with whomever he wants. Thus, ‘goodness’ and happiness are not necessarily synonymous – the one is not automatically to be found in the other – so the answer to Roxana’s anxious question, repeated at the novel’s end, remains, at best, hesitant and provisional.

WORKS CITED Clark, Peter Zoroastrianism: An Introduction to an Ancient Faith (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1998). Forster, E.M. The Longest Journey (1907; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). Ganguly, Debjani. “Transgressing Sacred Visions: Taslima, Rushdie and the Indian Subcontinent,” in Shifting Continents / Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Ralph Crane & Radhika Mohanram (Cross/Cultures 42; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2000): 102–22. Hansen, Thomas Blom. “BJP and the Politics of Hindutva in Maharashtra,” in The B J P and the Compulsions of Politics in India, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen & Christophe Jaffrelot (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998): 121–60. 27

Wick, “Introduction: Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Kant, Ethical Philosophy, xxviii.

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Kant, Immanuel. Ethical Philosophy, tr. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis I N : Hackett, 2nd ed. 1994). Kapadia, Novy. “The Politics of Survival and Domination in A Fine Balance,” in The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry: Critical Studies, ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya (London: Sangam, 1998): 127–34. Lambert, Angela. “Touched with Fire,” Guardian (27 April 2002): 7. Lele, Jayant. “Saffronisation of the Shiv Sena: The Political Economy of City, State and Nation,” in Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1996): 185–213. Luhrmann, Tania. The Good Parsi: the Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1996). Mars–Jones, Adam. “It’s all a bit of a mystery,” Observer Review (21 April 2002): 17. Mistry, Rohinton. Family Matters (London: Faber & Faber 2002). Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). Scruton, Roger. Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2001). Sharma, Kalpana. “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold,” in Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1996): 268–86. Voltaire. Candide and Other Tales, tr. Tobias Smollett (tr. 1761; London: J.M. Dent, 1937). Yeats, W.B. Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Pan/Macmillan, 1974).

The Routes of National Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines S UJALA S INGH

Once you start moving you never stop. That’s what I told my sons when they took the trains. I said: I don’t believe in this IndiaShindia. It’s all very well, you’re going away now, but suppose when you get there they decide to draw another line somewhere? What will you do then? Where will you move to? No one will have you anywhere. As for me, I was born here, and I’ll die here.1

L

“J E T H A M O S H A I ” in the quotation above, several of the characters in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines undertake journeys across countries. The text also conveys an ongoing sense of flux as not only people but borders, too, are set in motion. It is against this background of the relative movement of individuals and boundaries that the invariants of community and identity take on disturbing and violent dimensions. The conviction of the rootedness of identities and nations is voiced above by a senile old Hindu man who refuses to leave Dhaka to accompany his relatives, who have come to restore him to the nation where he is supposed to belong, “India-Shindia.” For although he has carried on living in the same house, the borders have moved relative to him 1

IKE THE

Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New York: Penguin, 1964): 211. Further page references are in the main text.

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and have (in the eyes of his family) banished him from his true home. It is because the old man’s religious identity and geographical location are presumed not to match that his relatives remove him from the material rootedness of his house and attempt to reinstate him within the embrace of the nation. In the process, he is violently killed during a Hindu–Muslim riot – “The old man’s head had been hacked off,” we are informed on the penultimate page of the novel (245). The event that caused the Jethamoshai’s sons to leave Pakistan was the Partition of India in 1947, and the old man’s death seventeen years later (in 1964) is a gruesome retracing of earlier journeys. The riot in which the old man was killed (in Dhaka in East Pakistan) was sparked off by incidents in far-off Kashmir (in India), its geographical remoteness emphasized by the temporal proximity of these events.2 The violent assertions of communal identity as manifest in these riots (which occur almost instantaneously across widely separated spaces) are fashioned in The Shadow Lines into a parable on the consequences of partitioned relationships within the Indian subcontinent. The Jethamoshai who is killed in the riot is the uncle of the narrator’s grandmother. In this essay, I trace the uncanny links between disjunct temporal and spatial spheres and discuss how these are mapped onto a narrative of private–public interaction, an interaction that is far from straightforward. The violent ways in which public histories invade private lives is woven into a narrative that builds up the story of a family as sifted through and reported by the unnamed narrator. Divided into two parts, the novel highlights the two inextricably linked processes of history-making – the movements of “going away” and “coming home.” The first movement, “going away,” looks out on the world, collecting and classifying, mapping, conceiving of geographies, which the unnamed narrator records through an obsessive will to remember. This is an individuated spatiality, organized by the structure of a private re-collection. 2 This refers to the 1964 riots in East Pakistan and India (in cities like Khulna and Calcutta) which were sparked off in response to the disappearance of the hair of the Prophet from the Hazratbal Mosque in Kashmir. Interestingly, Kashmir itself remained relatively peaceful.

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It is deeply influenced by the tales of far-off lands that his uncle Tridib tells him, allowing his imagination to traverse space and time far removed from the reality of his bourgeois existence in Gole Park or Southern Avenue (in Calcutta). In the second movement, “coming home,” this conceptualization of his private memory is contextualized within public histories, and punctuated by the calendar dates of singular events. The sweep of his early vision gets marked up for divisions of war, religion and gender, and he has to grow up to face the responsibilities imposed by stories that refuse to let his outlook transcend them. His cousin Ila’s version of the world, with restrooms standing out as markers, signifies the unwelcome intrusions of the soiling quotidian. Tridib himself appears from a fragment of a newspaper article from a long time ago, cut down by the horrors of the religious lines drawn across maps and between people. In my reading of The Shadow Lines, I want to make the connection between fiction and history, not merely by outlining the novel’s historical references, but by exploring the means through which the building of the story becomes a commentary on the ways in which histories get constructed. The essay will be organized in the following way. I begin with identifying and discussing narrative techniques such as syncopated temporalities, and the adherence to reportage as well as its telling slippages. As every hint of meta-narration is apparently grounded in reportage, what does the deliberate reporting of sources imply about the collation and streamlining of accepted historical accounts? As communal histories catastrophically intervene in the lives of the narrator and his family, he is led to think obsessively about the consequences of postcolonial borders. I discuss the motifs of belonging and identity through the narrative’s ruminations on space, especially on the invisible etchings between India and East Pakistan that unleash violent riots within the subcontinent. I conclude with a discussion of the gaps and silences that emerge from these story-lines and discuss their implications for the construction of national selfhood. How does one read the self-conscious chasms of silence that the narrative stages to highlight its own inability to narrate, drawing lines between speech and silence?

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I Set up as a compendium of family tales, the narrative line of The Shadow Lines is a reconfiguration of ‘given’ materials. The narrator self-consciously and painstakingly jigsaws together reported events which are cited from various sources and carefully shuffled, whether over the limited space of a paragraph or a page or even several pages. Here, I will discuss two examples that highlight the deliberate narrative ploys of inconsistent reportage, confusing as they do the role of citation in the re-collecting of personal histories that are so crucial to the development of the story. As it erases the specificity of voices by doing away with quotation marks, the narrative voice slips seamlessly in and out of others’ voices, memories and idiosyncrasies, and the linear perception of time is chopped up. The reader has to confront not only the disruptive, disjointed time sequence and the multiple spaces rapidly spliced together, but also the uncertainty of who is reporting, from where, and to whom. Here is an example of the narrator remembering the crystallization of Justice Chaudhury’s table from a cloud of dust: Yes, she cried in triumph, pointing to a vast, sheet-covered mound. It is still here. Help me pull of the sheet, come on. I caught hold of one end of the sheet and she of another. We tugged, but instead of coming off, the sheet seemed to atomise in our hands, and for a moment everything vanished into a cyclone of dust. I can still see it, taking shape slowly within that cloud of dust. Like a magician’s rabbit, laughed Ila. Nothing as simple as that, said Robi wryly. No, at least a castle on a misty mountain top. But in my memory I see it emerging out of that storm of dust like a plateau in a desert. (47)

The straightforward narration of a few pages is suddenly interrupted, broken by voices providing nostalgic interpretations. While “I can still see it” indicates a shift in time, the move is almost imperceptible until one wonders about the narrator’s cousin Robi’s nostalgia for an event in which he did not participate. A paragraph later, the narrative moves to another arena, another time-frame,

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another perspective. This time May, the visitor from London, is the spectator: on seeing the huge, expensive table, imported from England and then packed away in disuse, she blurts out her outrage at this sign of colonial collusion and class politics, “Why did he bring this back for heaven’s sake? Why this worthless piece of England; why something so utterly useless?” (48). Her politically correct exclamation undermines the magical reconstruction that the others indulge in, even as adults. Thus, while Ila and Robi’s interjections serve as comments on a story line, they are immediately contextualized within the parameters of another kind of response, thus raising the question of responsibility for one’s own nostalgia. If the narrative trajectory in the above example lays itself bare and invites the reader to participate in the process of story-building, there are also points in the novel when the narrative seems to give all of its sources the slip, sliding into an assumed omnipresence, usually when describing scenes in which Tridib is present. In contrast to the painstaking adherence to principles of reportage – where every source is provided, every witness located – in the passages that provide descriptions of scenes in wartime London, one gets a bird’s-eye view of the proceedings in the kind of detail that raises the question of how the narrator could have access to them. This omnipresence is the most tellingly evident in the reporting of Tridib’s pornographic letter to May. In contrast to the example of the table, the narrative lapses into a linear, straightforward, thirdperson narration as it breathlessly and voyeuristically recounts “his” sexual fantasies over a number of pages without any interruptions or interpretations. In a text that is otherwise so carefully cited, and where all the stories seem to stem from individual experience that have been recounted to the narrator, this slippage into a panoptic, overseeing narration is significant. Twenty-seven pages later, almost as a casual aside, we are informed that it was May who, while sitting in a sandwich bar in London, told him (the narrator) “about his [Tridib’s] letter, the letter about ruins” (171). But the sexually charged language of the narration could hardly have come from May, nor the voyeuristic details of the sexual encounter between a uniformed man and an older woman in a bombed-out cinema hall that were contained in the letter. The narrator’s construction of story-lines almost always builds upon the careful demarca-

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tion of reference and referents, of reporter and reported. Here, however, he dissolves these demarcations in his slide into meta-narrativity, and this rides on his identification with Tridib. He mediates this transcendence within the space of desire, and intercepts Tridib’s desire for May. At the end of the novel, upon the resolution of the mystery of Tridib’s death, this desire is finally consummated. After May provides the narrator with the details of Tridib’s last living moments, the novel ends with the narrator and May lying “in each other’s arms quietly, in the night” (246). The process of storytelling in the above examples highlights the role of point of view and desire in the construction of narratives. One technique consistently used is the splicing together of nonsuccessive time-sequences which draws attention to the temporal development of the story-line. Even as the narrative attempts to erase the specificity of voices, the identity of the speaker is carefully acknowledged throughout the novel. However, the technique of pinning down events via reportage vies with breaches into metanarration and eases open spaces within the woven text of the story. These are also the moments that point to the investment of desire in the construction of narratives.

II In this section, I discuss how narrative ploys affect a commentary on historical meta-narratives as private and public events intersect. Michel de Certeau’s analyses of the power relationships within which narratives are enunciated, their grammar inherited and organized, is a useful means by which to explore the assessment of hierarchized histories in The Shadow Lines. Central to de Certeau’s exposition is the distinction he draws between “strategies” and “tactics.” A strategy is the rationalization of the mechanisms of control exercised by an agency with power – “a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution.” As in management, every “strategic” rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its “own” place, that is, the place of its own power and will, from an “environment.” A Cartesian attitude, if you wish: it is an effort to delimit one’s own place in a world bewitched by the

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invisible powers of the Other. It is also the typical attitude of modern science, politics, and military strategy.3

Also, he emphasizes that these strategies of establishing and holding on to power reflect on the “power of knowledge” as the “ability to transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces.” However, it takes an institution already possessing the power to establish these narratives to render this “knowledge possible and at the same time determines its characteristics” (36). A tactic, on the other hand, is a non-localized activity with no set demarcation of the other’s territory. In fact, “the space of a tactic is the space of the other” (37). These narrative devices attain their efficacy by the very different ways in which they are structured in space and in time. Strategies operate by establishing a central locus of power, and also a theoretical framework wherein physical spaces are situated and narrated, and where the mechanisms of control are set into effect within these spatial frames. Thus, according to de Certeau, strategies attempt to reduce temporal relations to spatial ones through the combinatory organization of the movements specific to units or groups of units. (38)

Tactics, on the other hand, rely on the opportunities thrown up by the particular moment to ensure the efficacy of their “guileful ruses” – tactics utilize time. Let us look at some of the narrative ploys that work within, and undermine, strategic outlines in The Shadow Lines. The circumstances around Tridib and May’s relationship and Tridib’s death prompt the narrator to stage a ‘tactical’ utilization of different temporalities to undermine the strategic spatial delimitations that ‘public’ histories of the subcontinent have instituted. The public and private spheres get agonizingly intertwined as he begins to uncover the events which set the stage for Tridib’s death. History ceases to be a distant date provided in a book, as he is confronted with the 3

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Stephen Rendall (L'invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P , 1984): 36. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text.

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process of history making, where singular events get organized, edited and catalogued in official documentation and in public memory. While his friends remember the 1962 war with China and the 1965 war with Pakistan, and ask him “What were the riots of 1964?” (220), the narrator is called upon to search for an official record to corroborate the Calcutta riots of 1964 imprinted in his memory. Seated in the safe space of a library, where the fire and frenzy of riots have been catalogued and organized within the “readable spaces”4 of its cool, air-conditioned interior, he rummages through old newspapers to find his haunting memories ratified in newsprint. When the jubilant narrator and his friend Malik, aided by a piece of cricket trivia, manage to find an entry, “Twenty-nine killed in riots,” the latter points out: Didn’t you say the riots happened in Calcutta? […] That’s strange, he said, tapping the open newspaper. Because these riots here happened in Khulna, in East Pakistan, across the border from Calcutta. (219)

Not only does the narrator’s triumph appear misplaced, the curious displacement of the reported event from the site of his memory induces a sense of infringement of spatial regulation, an uncanny telekinesis. This writerly ploy, of juxtaposing after the event the memory of a Calcutta riot with a newspaper report of the Khulna riots, is a ‘tactic’ – “the space of the tactic is the space of the other.”5 The dividing line between India and Pakistan was drawn along religious lines attempting a dissociation of self from the other. The association of the memory of one conflict uncited in the records of the state, with the reports of another in the site of the other’s territory serves to unsettle the established strategies of management that seek visibly to cordon off a space: They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from 4 5

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 36. The Practice of Everyday Life, 36.

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each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gondwanaland. (228)

A persistent memory seen to be situated in ‘enemy’ territory undermines the demarcation of self-othering divides that were central to the establishment of the identities of the two nations. Such a “guileful ruse” “poaches” on the “surveillance of the proprietary powers.”6 The compression into a narrow time-slot of symmetrical events, mirroring each other across the border, is a ploy utilized in the narrative to indicate how any carving-out of a notion of a communal or national identity is haunted by the spectre, the reflection, of the constitutive Other. This is exemplified in yet another tactical implementation of the ruses of memory in the novel. In Robi’s recurring dream-sequence of the death of Tridib, he is haunted by the image of vacant, deserted streets, even though, at the time of Tridib’s death, rioting crowds flocked the streets of Dhaka. Deserted streets, on the other hand, featured in the schoolboy narrator’s recollection of riot-hit Calcutta. It is in dreams and memory, and in the particular arrangement of their narratives, that the silences in the discourses of the public spheres are prised open by the juxtaposing of spaces and the freezing of time, in parody of the ways in which the newspapers seek to do the same. It is this symmetrical alignment of parallel events that invokes the plethora of mirror-metaphors in the text, emphasizing the beguiling links across spaces that the expressions of communal belonging and alienation forge. For example, when the narrator considers the destructive eruptions of communal feeling that render familiar spaces fearful, he characterizes the people of the subcontinent as possessing “the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror” (200). Elsewhere, he describes Calcutta and Dhaka, cultural centres of Bengali culture, one in predominantly Hindu India, the other in Muslim Pakistan:

6

The Practice of Everyday Life, 37.

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each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free – our looking glass border. (228)

The recurrent memory of the geographical space of East Pakistan/ Bangladesh is in evidence in much of Ghosh’s work. Here, too, the imposition of a memory is deployed in a key ‘tactical’ manoeuvre. The signs and effects of religious and national identity are shown to spill over the constraints imposed by the agencies of power that endeavour to cordon off a space as its own. Such an undermining of the strategies by which territories are marked up for control (in the mode of strategic management as spatial) is achieved by the specificities of historical events. Instead of reading from the map a demarcation of separation, the so-called Radcliffe Award,7 the narrator is struck by a curious irony: the irony that killed Tridib: the simple fact that there had never been a moment in the 4000-year-old history of that map when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines…. (228)

There is a key temporal moment here captured in the figure of narratorial irony – Tridib’s fate emerges through the invocation of a four-thousand-year-old history that frames this singular confluence; the rupture of that history manifests itself as an enforced intimacy. This is posited so that the past frames and legitimizes the singular present, and the divisions of the present provide a suitable foil for the invocation of a mythic past. According to Paul de Man, Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic.8

7

The specification of the border between Indian and (East) Pakistani territory was decided on 12 August 1947 by the Bengal Boundary Commission, appointed by the Governor-General, and is called the “Radcliffe Award” after the chairman of the Commission, Sir Cyril Radcliffe. 8 Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Allegories of Reading (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1979): 211.

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Elsewhere in Ghosh’s work, the categories of space and time that fashion historical experience and reflection can be traced explicitly in In An Antique Land, where he writes about the removal of documents stored in the Geniza, in Cairo, by orientalist scholars who took them to countries which would have destroyed the Geniza had it been part of their own history: It was as though the borders that were to divide Palestine several decades later had already been drawn, through time rather than territory, to allocate a choice of Histories. (95)

It is a conceptualization of both the temporal and the spatial frameworks that are intended to manage people’s lives that we are led to regard as susceptible to rupture and “harassed forever” by the “inauthentic.”9 It is the act of partitioning identities that forever imbues the polity with the potential for the violent eruption of sectarian claims of belonging. In de Certeau’s categories, the subversive power that ‘tactics’ wielded was acquired from the temporal possibilities that had the potential of undermining a spatial, strategic regimentation. The narrator’s claim of an irony in Tridib’s death suggests the underpinnings of the logic of temporality in the narrative, destabilizing the institutions of history that have strategically marked out their spaces and their borders. The narrator’s invocation of a mythic past to bring out the irony of Tridib’s death is framed within the proliferation of mirror metaphors in the text. These emphasize the parity of the religiously divided worlds in the subcontinent. It is tempting to apply the mirror instead to the formal characterization of the temporal organization that the irony relies upon in narrative. Paul de Man has characterized irony and allegory as sharing a common “temporal predicament,” the temporal structure of irony being the mirror image of allegory, which is the tendency of language towards narrative, the spreading out along the axis of an imaginary time in order to give duration to what is simultaneous with the subject.10 9 10

Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 225.

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The setting-up of Tridib’s death, a crucially significant event not only in the narrator’s life but also in the organization of the entire novel, thus invites us to read off an allegory of sectarian nationalist identity in post-Partition India. Ghosh’s text repeatedly veers towards the organization of times and spaces in its narrative. In this context, extensive ruminations on what constitutes a national subject, on a sense of space as home at any given moment, and on that outpouring of signifiers adopted by the discourses of communal belonging, all lead us to ask one key question. Along with the narrator/author of In an Antique Land, we are drawn to ask whether the time–space manoeuvres to which narrative resorts time and again may be read as “the sly allegory on the intercourse between power and the writing of history” (82)? It is in these spatio-temporal frameworks that the narrative in The Shadow Lines essays a commentary on the modes of organization that are central to historiography. It is also at the margins of such frameworks that the violence of foreclosure of such narratives is latent.

III The metaphors of space – whether utilized in the discourse of self and Other, in the demarcation of a centre for strategic purposes, or in the domestic or global modes of describing and living in particular habitats – are key elements of the narrative in The Shadow Lines. The trajectories of the stories that are woven together in the text traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.11

In The Shadow Lines, the narrator highlights the interlocking ways in which urban spaces and social lives are connected. He recounts how his mentor Tridib had told him a story about the sloping roofs of his aunt Queen Victoria’s bungalow. Tridib had directed him to the awareness of how a sloping roof could change familiar patterns of his life – “no place to fly kites, nowhere to hide when one wanted to sulk, nowhere to shout across to one’s friends” (29). 11

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 115.

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The concrete spatial categories that frame the urban landscapes not only affect rituals of play for individuals; the narrator also highlights how they regulate class divisions. During a visit to some distant relatives in a far-off neighbourhood at the extended margins of the accretionary metropolis of Calcutta, he accidentally sees the unseeable – the social peripherals made invisible. From the balcony of the house he visits, he notices among the piled garbage-heaps the barely discernible figures of those who collect potential recyclables from among the refuse of the city. These are the margins that must remain unnamed, unnoticed, and he is reprimanded for even seeing them, and pulled away from the balcony. “I went willingly: I was already well-schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility” (131). What the narrator as child exposes, or is exposed to, are both the hierarchies of class structures and the bourgeois mechanism of suppressing them, rendering them invisible. Conscious of his “own small puritanical world, in which children were sent to school to learn how to cling to their gentility by proving themselves in the examination hall,” (23), he muses on the apparatuses of educational systems. These are the lessons that he must learn in order to claim the bolster of class that the classroom promises: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was the sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy. (132)

The association of “jungle-craft” and “fine edge of frenzy” with “gentility” brings to the fore the violence underlying the complicitous silencing – even his poor relative does not want him to see the signs of class hierarchies. The spaces of the educational apparatus not only demarcate the safety of class-drawn enclosures, but in the novel they are also contrasted with the dangers of communally charged violent spaces in the description of the riots in Calcutta. The narration describes the police protection accorded to the school premises amidst the swirl of riot, and the passage to and from school through the tensionladen streets. The demarcation of spaces to designate the confines of

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community is reflected in the utilization of the metaphors of mobilization and separation filtered through the palpable ambiance of violence as the schoolchildren are driven home in a schoolbus through the deserted streets. A rickshaw left at an awkward angle across the mouth of a lane rivets their attention. It reads as a portentous divide: “had it been put there to keep Muslims in or Hindus out?” (199). On the same day in Dhaka, and in a different place in the novel, another rickshaw is shown to carry the horrors of communal discord. The character with whom I began this essay, the Jethamoshai, rides on a rickshaw operated by his Muslim caretaker, after being convinced by his rescuers to uproot himself and effect a passage to a Hindu space. In that attempted movement, the literal vehicle for an impossible transition becomes a metaphor for the violence of communal riot. Michel de Certeau has noted that in modern Athens, modes of transport are called metaphorai. Here, the figure of the rickshaw enacts the dual mechanisms of delineating a space – in the first place, by demarcating its borders, and secondly, in its mobility opening up metaphors of communication and exchange that bind a coherent space: Social space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, including the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of material things and information.”12

Both of these mechanisms emerge in their violent element. Yet again, we find the narrative ruse of using symmetrical frames in the spaces divided by the claims to religious identity. The self-othering lines that are drawn are imbued with a tangible violence, as is the possibility of border crossings. The description of a bus-ride through the riot-hit streets of Calcutta also touches on the key spatial markers of demographic demarcation. The passage through Park Circus and the potentiality of violence become significant in the light of the knowledge of a large Muslim population in that locality. Even the safe interior of the bus is not without the awareness of dangers, of the otherness of one’s friends. Montu, a young Muslim boy, is the narrator’s best friend, 12

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991): 77.

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but in this context even the genealogy of his name takes on a particular significance: His name wasn’t really Montu. It was Mansoor and he was from Lucknow […] when they’d moved to Gole Park from Park Circus, someone had shortened his name to Montu. (115)

Mansoor is an obviously Urdu, hence Muslim name, but the Bengali nickname Montu does not pinpoint a particular religious identity. While Park Circus has a large Muslim population, Gole Park, by contrast, is predominantly Hindu. Montu’s religion had seemed irrelevant to the narrative until that morning in the schoolbus when the narrator hopes that he wouldn’t show up to take the bus to school. Montu’s absence unleashes the rituals of cleansing – emptying out the water bottles poisoned by the rumour of contamination – “they had poured poison into Tala tank [...] the whole of Calcutta’s water supply was poisoned” (195). Unspecified and unnamed, the identity of who “they” were is still tacitly understood. In a moment pregnant with claims to a sense of belonging that is shared by a busload of young schoolchildren, the quiet movement of communal consensuality emerges in the narrative.

IV The tacit acceptance of a narrative as having an intrinsic “of-courseness” or “naturalness” is what characterizes “common sense as a cultural system” according to Clifford Geertz: Common sense seems left over when [the] more articulated sort of symbol systems have exhausted their tasks, […] it lies so artlessly before our eyes that it is almost impossible to see.13

In his analysis of the mechanisms of the construction and reproduction of a social order, Pierre Bourdieu states that a crucial precondition for this perpetuation to be feasible is a belief in the “naturalness” of that order, rendering it self-evident by establishing patterns

13

92.

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975):

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of “correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization”: Because the subjective necessity and self-evidence of the commonsense world are validated by the objective consensus on the sense of the world, what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying… 14

It is in these divisions between the seen and the unseeable, between that which is articulated and that which is not, that the narrative (of comings and goings) chalks out the key centres of identity-formation and patterns of communal belonging as entrenched in the common sense of a common identity. After Tridib’s death, the narrator’s father made him promise that he would not mention Tridib’s death to anybody, that he had died in an “accident” in Dhaka. Years later, when he discovers that Tridib must have left for Dhaka the day before communal violence erupted in East Pakistan, he wonders why his father, a “practical,” “cautious” man, did not prevent him from leaving. Looking through the newspapers immediately before the day of the riots, he finds no trace of the forthcoming tragedy in the Calcutta papers, even though he remembers his father saying that he was glad they had gone away from Calcutta, for there was “going to be trouble” there (189). When he asked his father about the nature of the “trouble,” My mother gave him a frown and a quick shake of the head, so he turned me around, pointed at the plane and said: Nothing. Nothing that you would understand. (189)

Poring over the newspapers, he finds that “the stirrings of the silence” that his father had known have been censored from their pages, that beyond the descriptions of the events of the riots there is no mention either before or after the event. It is only the “other events, party splits and party congresses and elections,” that newspaper columns speak of, and as for the narratives of “trouble,” they, like the narrator of Tridib’s death, “do not have the words to give it 14

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1977): 164, 167.

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meaning” (223). Why does the narrator highlight the centrality of silence that overpowers his narration, his desire to create stories? “Every word that I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence” (213). Are we to juxtapose, to read against each other, alongside each other, the outlining of the operations of silencing and the workings of silent, tacit reinforcement of meanings that can locate “them” and thereby produce “us”? Why does the narrative stumble on and stage the stumbling on the rock of silence? And, most significantly, as the narrative insistently asks, what must be allowed to escape articulation in order to be allowed free and tacit circulation? In trying to overcome the barriers of the silence that marks Tridib’s death, the narrator takes recourse to narration “in a second hand manner,” a manner portrayed, with great deliberation, to be of significance, to be significantly different. In a novel that is almost entirely crafted out of the reports of others, grounded on reportage, such a “second hand manner” would not be out of place. Why do the newspaper reports of the events in Kashmir, East Pakistan and West Bengal that narrate the communal tensions leading up to Tridib’s death necessarily get labelled as significantly different, as if their “second handedness” made them inadequate descriptions of events? As public and private histories intermingle in the novel, do we then read his narrative tactics of highlighting reportage configured in non-sequential, yet fluent narration as indicative of the ways in which national histories adapt, retell and reconstruct situated political events? The silences that are articulated in Ghosh’s text are the conduits through which a notion of a community gets mobilized, whether in terms of ideologies of class-position or of religion. Whether through the agonized puzzlement at the newspapers’ silent treatment of the “stirrings” and unrest that must have been apparent in Calcutta over the events in Kashmir, or in his recollection of his father’s insistence on his complicity in keeping the circumstances around Tridib’s death cloaked under the normalcy of an “accident,” the narrator brings to light the desire that forces silences to emerge. According to Bourdieu, the most successful ideological effects are “those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence” (188). The correlation between communal identities

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and nationalisms in the Indian subcontinent indicates the centrality to Ghosh’s text of the silences that form the kernel of a conception of nation. In his reflections on Georges Bataille’s “general economy,” Jacques Derrida writes about the possibility of reaching beyond the closure of meaning within discourse, of that which must be relegated to the silence of the margins, into non-meaning, in order to constitute the body of meaning, and of the possibility of staging that silence: If the word silence “among all words” is “the most perverse and the most poetic,” it is because in pretending to silence meaning, it says nonmeaning, it slides and erases itself, does not maintain itself, silences itself, not as silence, but as speech. This sliding simultaneously betrays discourse and nondiscourse.15

In The Shadow Lines, the production and circulation of silence works its way not only in demarcating social relations but also in the newspapers, the agencies of “print-capitalism” that were significant in Benedict Anderson’s conception of the modern nation’s formation.16 According to Anderson, the collating of diverse “national” events on the face of the printed page branded by a fixed moment in time, the calendar-date, served to generate the coherence of a national formation. In Ghosh’s construction of the narrative of The Shadow Lines, what is emphasized is that the enforced silences in the text induce the sense of spatial–national cohesion of an “imagined community.” More significantly, the narrative insists that these silences circulate to generate and consolidate a sense both of communal belonging and of alienation that are not accounted for in the strategic model of a national community, but which are in fact at the root of everyday living. In the wake of a growing communalization of contemporary Indian politics, Amitav Ghosh’s novels have returned to the centrality of the question of nationalism. In The Shadow Lines, the narrative 15

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1978):

262. 16

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

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wanders on an elaborate excursion ruminating on the permeability of the borders on the map that are supposed to contain the nation. Just as the narrator muses on silence as it interrupts the symmetrical, binary relationships of sense and non-sense, he locates between the nations split along religious lines an ambivalent relationship between friendship and war: I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border there existed another reality. The only relationship my vocabulary permitted between those separate realities was war or friendship. There was no room in it for this other thing. And things which did not fit my vocabulary were merely pushed over the edge into the chasm of that silence. (214)

Just as the painful events of his mentor’s death torment him, making any reporting of the incidents leading to his death seem “second-hand” to him, there is “no room” in speech of the “other thing,” which eludes the narrator’s sense of the space of articulation. Just as he cannot find a way of coming to terms with this “another reality” between nations, the reality of the other, nor can he fathom the expressions of communal belonging and othering that resulted in Tridib’s murder. In either case, he has to let silence stand in the place of the articulation of this other reality.

V The narrative in The Shadow Lines meanders in and out of family tales, professing a need to invent and fashion narratives and meanings across a diverse set of locales and moments. However, the inspiration guiding the detailed nature of his re-creations seems to be extinguished at his discovery of the circumstances surrounding the death of the narrator’s mentor, Tridib. But, even as the narrative energy is seemingly sapped, there is an emergence in the text of a staged silence – not a silence that emerges as the unsaid, but one that is volubly expressed as the unspeakable. In a text that is permeated with spatio-temporal displacements, such silences act out the demarcation of a domain of intelligibility; they articulate the boundaries of “non-sense” in order to allow a space in which to articulate “sense.” The extensive usage of spatial metaphors

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grounds this delimitation in diverse ways, all of which ultimately engage with the nature of national and communal identity and the ways in which they are assumed, mobilized and ‘managed’. The determination and management of the unsymbolizable limits of symbolic activity breaks in the narrative, this rupture indicative of how the domain of tacit consensus is constitutive of a national or communal identity. These ruptures are manifest in the unspeakable violence that has marked the Partition of India and in contemporary politics of the subcontinent. The novel sets up a parallel between the elusiveness of locating silences within language and the noncontainment of a nation within a boundary strategically inscribed into the text of a map.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1977). Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Stephen Rendall (L'invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire, 1980; Berkeley: U of California P , 1984). Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1978). Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975). Ghosh, Amitav. The Circle of Reason (London: Granta, 1986). ——. In an Antique Land (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1992). ——. The Shadow Lines (New York: Penguin, 1988). Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Man, Paul de. “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Allegories of Reading (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1979).

Inscribing a Sikh India An Alternative Reading of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan 1

R ALPH J. C RANE

I

N T H E M O R E T H A N F I F T Y Y E A R S since the end of the British Raj in India and the birth of two independent nations, India and Pakistan, a small but significant body of Partition fiction has been published by Indian and, more recently, Pakistani writers. Important among these are Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Chaman Nahal’s Azadi (1975), Bapsi Sidhwa’s IceCandy-Man (1988), and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999). Of these, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan remains, over fifty years on, the seminal Partition novel. In particular, the novel rewrites the railway, once a symbol of imperial power, as a leitmotif for Partition violence and the communal nationalism that followed the political homogenization of India and Indians during the independence struggle. Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) is set in the small Punjabi village of Mano Majra close to the border between India and Pakistan. During the course of the story, the village, which has a predominantly Sikh and Muslim population, is drawn into the brutal conflict which marked the Partition of the subcontinent. Initially,

1

I am grateful to Anjali Gera Roy for her useful comments on a draft of this essay.

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the peace of the village – an unsustainable image of national harmony – is disturbed by the robbery and murder of the Hindu money-lender Lala Ram Lal by Malli and his band of dacoits. Iqbal, a communist agitator, recently arrived in the village, and Juggut Singh, a local budmash, are both arrested for the killing. The life of the village is then further shattered by the arrival from Pakistan of a trainload of corpses – a defining image of Partition fiction. When a second trainload of bodies pulls into Mano Majra the Sikh inhabitants are persuaded by outsiders to take their revenge on a train carrying Mano Majra Muslims to safety in Pakistan. The magistrate, Hukum Chand, unable to control the worsening situation, releases both Iqbal and Juggut Singh from prison in the hope that one of them will be able to prevent the train being attacked. Juggut does save the train, but at the cost of his own life. The apparently straightforward, historical-realist plot is complicated by Juggut Singh’s affair with a Muslim girl from the village and Hukum Chand’s liaison with a young Muslim prostitute. The treatment of Muslim women thus becomes a means of measuring Sikh and Hindu communal nationalism. To date, most critics2 have approached Train to Pakistan as a realist historical novel, though opinions about the success or otherwise of the novel in those terms differ widely. While critics like M. Tarinayya praise the novel for its “extraordinary detachment,”3 others, like K.C. Belliappa, see Train to Pakistan as “at best a successful recreation of the event of Partition in terms of the evocation of atmosphere, the historical details and the authenticity of the locale.”4 When Belliappa describes the book as a “work of superior journalism,”5 he is being kinder than C. Paul Verghese, who believes it does not “rise far above the standard of sensational journalism.”6 2

Myself included; see Ralph J. Crane, Inventing India: A History of India in English-Language Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1992): 143–51. 3 M. Tarinayya, “Two Novels: Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers!” Indian Literature 13.1 (1970): 113. 4 K.C. Belliappa, “The Elusive Classic: Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi,” The Literary Criterion 15.2 (1980): 66. 5 Belliappa, “The Elusive Classic,” 66–67. 6 C. Paul Verghese, Problems of the Indian Creative Writer in English (Bombay: Somaiya, 1971): 119.

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While it is certainly appropriate to treat the novel as a (realist) historical novel about the horrors of Partition, it may also be instructive to consider the possibility of other, more overtly political agendas in Train to Pakistan. What happens if we critique the novel in terms of religious/communal bias and the apparent preoccupation with gendering in the text? In this essay I would like to look at the way Khushwant Singh’s text appears to inscribe a distinctly Sikh-centred India.7 It does this primarily through the overtly sexual symbolism which Singh employs to re-inscribe a well-worn binary opposition. Thus not only does Singh portray the horror of Partition in a realist historical mode, but his text simultaneously promotes the image of the Sikhs as the dominant community. Rather than searching for national harmony within the already fractured nation of post-Partition India, the novel instead appears to subscribe to a form of the successful divide-and-rule or communalism philosophy of the British colonial power which is employed to further a distinct agenda. As Peter Morey observes, “after the demise of colonial power ‘on the ground’, the drive to control the body in space becomes an issue of establishing and defending national borders, a project often requiring the kind of direct physical intervention previously associated with the former ruler.”8 The borders Khushwant Singh sets out to establish and defend in Train to Pakistan are, as I will show, communitarian, and as a result the novel can be read as a challenge to any notion of a homogenized post-Independence Indian nation. Prior to Independence, the Indian subcontinent was a colonized construct known as the British Empire in India or British India – labels which accurately (though unintentionally) demonstrate the binary opposition that is inevitably a condition of colonization. British India was a geopolitical construct in which the colonizing power occupied a clearly defined male or dominant position of power, 7

This agenda is quite distinct from Sikh demands for Khalistan. Singh’s agenda depends on the presence of a binary opposition between Sikhs and Hindus, which would not be possible in Sikh Khalistan, which, as Faisal Fatehali Devji points out, is “a synonym for Muslim Pakistan (they both mean ‘Land of the Pure’)”; “Hindu/Muslim/Indian,” Public Culture 5.1 (1992): 1. 8 Peter Morey, Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000): 163.

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while the colonized people – the homogenized Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs – collectively occupied a female or subaltern position. Independence and the withdrawal of the British left the dominant position in that binary opposition untenanted. What I want to argue here is that in the India of Train to Pakistan Khushwant Singh shifts the Sikhs into the position of power vacated by the colonizers, a position which he clearly presents as bound up with virility. One only has to look at any number of Anglo-Indian adventure novels, such as those written by John Masters, to see this at work; the masculine traits previously applied to the British – in Bhowani Junction (1954), for example, where Rodney Savage rather than Patrick Taylor or Ranjit Singh Kasel is the dominant male – are now employed in the service of the Sikhs. The Hindus, on the other hand, are unequivocally located in a subaltern or female position, as they had consistently been by the British, too (as in any number of Rudyard Kipling’s stories, for example). However, while in the British colonial image of India Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs together made up the subaltern group in the binary opposition, within the constrictions of that position the Muslims and Sikhs were also perceived as “martial races”9 and frequently occupied a position that, while inferior to the position occupied by the British, was nevertheless superior to that occupied by the Hindus. This ‘elevation’ of the Muslims and Sikhs was, of course, part of a larger design to aggrandize the colonizers by valorizing, to a carefully controlled degree, their ‘rivals’. Following this pattern, Singh places the Muslims in Train to Pakistan in a position that, while below that of the Sikhs, is above that of the Hindus. The effect of this, as I shall demonstrate later, can be read as promoting a Sikh hegemony. Symbolism in this novel is extraordinarily important, particularly if the text is read as a Sikh-centred narrative. Beyond the level of realism the novel also functions on an entirely symbolic level, where characters like Juggut Singh become symbols of their communities, and moments such as Juggut’s liaison with the Muslim girl Nooran10 or the slaughter by Muslims of a bus-load of Sikhs 9

This is also reflected in the Hindu imaginary, where Muslims were seen as cruel, while Sikhs were seen as protectors of the Hindus. 10 Juggut’s love for Nooran highlights a recurrent theme in Punjabi/Hindi

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and Hindus, take on a symbolic importance far beyond their significance in the furthering of the actual plot of the realist historical novel. The sexual, predominantly masculine, symbolism Singh uses to locate the three Indian communities in the novel is redolent of the theory examined by George Mosse in Nationalism and Sexuality – that only men, masculinity, and heterosexuality can coexist with a nation.11 I want to suggest that by emasculating the Hindus in Train to Pakistan, Singh effectively contests their right, both as individuals and as a religious/cultural group, to inherit the nation of India, and in doing so challenges the notion of an exclusively Hindu India. Although Hindus are the majority community in India, their role in this novel is a peripheral one (even allowing for the fact that the Punjab was largely dominated by Muslims and Sikhs, not Hindus). From the beginning of Train to Pakistan, Singh sets out to emasculate the few Hindu characters who appear in the novel, symbolically feminizing and thus marginalizing all Hindus. In effect, Singh goes some way towards creating a negative stereotype of Hindus by presenting his Hindu characters in situations where they are forced to act in a ‘typically Hindu’ way. This is perhaps a significant step in tandem with the essentialized, stereotypical portrait of the Hindu as an effeminate vegetarian, or as a ‘babu’ which had been (and still is) common in much Anglo-Indian fiction, notably in Kipling’s Kim (where, unusually, the stereotype is also subverted, as Hurree Chunder Mookerjee repeatedly demonstrates his courage even as he performs to the stereotype). In other words, Singh is relying on and endorsing the colonial model, while also interacting with the Punjabi representation of the Brahmin or Banya. By presenting the Hindus as incapable of any authority, moral or otherwise, he represents them as a people who need to be ruled.

fictional narratives, including films such as Randhir Kapoor’s Henna (1991) and Anil Sharma’s Gadar (2001), where the Muslim girl is the object of desire for the Sikh/Hindu male. Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man, of course, reverses this attraction, as does Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi novel Pinjar (1970; which Khushwant Singh later translated into English), where the Hindu female is the love interest. 11 See, in particular, the chapters on “Manliness and Homosexuality” (23–47) and “Fascism and Sexuality” (153–80).

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In what is almost the opening scene of the novel, the Hindu moneylender, Lala Ram Lal, is seen attempting to hide behind the two women in his house when Malli and his gang of dacoits come to rob him. “Open you son of fornication, or we will kill the lot of you,” he shouted. A woman’s voice answered. “Who is it who calls at this hour? Lalaji has gone to the city.” “Open the door and we will tell you who we are or we will smash the door,” the leader said. “I tell you Lalaji is not in. He has taken the keys with him. We have nothing in the house.” The men put their shoulders to the door, pressed, pulled back and butted into it like battering-rams. The wooden bolt on the other side cracked and the doors flew open. One of the men with a gun waited at the door; the other four went in. In one corner of the room two women sat crouching.12

And although, after he is found hiding under a charpoy in an upstairs room, he dies without handing over the keys to his safe, the impression the novel creates in the minds of its readers is of a man who hides behind a sari, a man who is unable to protect himself or the women in his house. This short scene has gone a long way towards re-creating the Punjabi stereotype of the Hindu banya, which also appears in much Anglo-Indian fiction. What obstinacy Lala Ram Lal has shown by refusing to hand over his keys appears to be motivated by greed rather than bravery or even a desire to protect his family.13 The magistrate and deputy commissioner of the district, Hukum Chand, who is presented as crafty and conniving, the opposite of Punjabi Sikh honesty, also conforms to this negative stereotype of 12

Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (1955; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988): 16–17. Further page references are in the main text. 13 Moreover, the scene embodies the caste divisions, hierarchies and frictions where the trader caste is held in contempt by Punjabis. Iqbal, as a symbol of the educated class, is held in contempt by the working classes in a manner similar to the attitude towards the Brahmin in the Punjabi imaginary.

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the Hindu. He too is presented as impotent in the face of violence. On a literal level he is unable to consummate his liaison with the Muslim girl prostitute, Haseena, which in turn reflects his inability to do anything to stop the train carrying Mano Majra Muslims to Pakistan from being attacked. Instead of acting decisively himself he evades responsibility by releasing Juggut Singh (a Sikh) and Iqbal (probably a Sikh) from prison in the hope that one of them will be able to prevent the impending massacre he is powerless to prevent himself. And while it can be argued that Hukum Chand’s strategy does work – that the liberated Juggut Singh saves the passengers on the train – his indecision emphasizes the point that, like Lala Ram Lal, he hides behind others. The only other Hindu male of any consequence in the novel is Mansa Ram, the husband of Sundari, the daughter of Hukum Chand’s orderly. His story or, more particularly, the nature of his death is recalled by Hukum Chand towards the end of the novel: [Sundari] stopped daydreaming as the bus pulled up. There were large stones on the road. Then hundreds of people surrounded them. Everyone was ordered off the bus. Sikhs were just hacked to death. The clean-shaven were stripped. Those that were circumcised were forgiven. Those that were not, were circumcised. Not just the foreskin: the whole thing was cut off. She who had not really had a good look at Mansa Ram was shown her husband completely naked. They held him by the arms and legs and one man cut off his penis and gave it to her. The mob made love to her. (203)

Leaving aside the ironic euphemism of the final sentence, it is clear that this passage is designed to show the inhumanity of mob violence. But, significantly, it can also be read as part of a carefully constructed Sikh–Hindu binary opposition. Whereas Sikhs are “just hacked to death,” Hindus are once again emasculated. In other words, the Sikhs are allowed to die like martyrs, as Khalsas, with their masculinity intact, while the Hindus are first feminized, with all the attendant loss of power that this entails. In his lecture on “Femininity,” Freud discusses at some length the nature of what he calls the castration complex, which in girls manifests itself as penis envy, while in boys it appears as fear of

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castration. The substance of his argument is that women are imperfect because they are created already castrated. Freud’s lecture, with its focus on the penis, is apposite to this binary opposition and the presentation of India as “the home of phallic worship” (58): there is one object that all Mano Majrans – even Lala Ram Lal – venerate. This is the three-foot slab of sandstone that stands upright under a keekar tree beside the pond. It is the local deity, the deo to which all the villagers – Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or pseudo-Christian – repair secretly whenever they are in special need of blessing. (10–11)

This sandstone lingam or phallus, worshipped by Hindus as a symbol of Shiva, also operates in the novel as a straightforward symbol of power. Freud’s ideas about the fear of castration help explain Singh’s use of phallic symbolism, particularly his use of the castration and circumcision metaphors in the text. In effect, Singh has (either literally or symbolically) castrated the three Hindu men in this novel, thus rendering them, and by extension all Hindus, imperfect and powerless. Moreover, the horror of the treatment meted out to Mansa Ram and Sundari (whose body is inscribed with the power of the mob) is suffused with a sense that it is the essential weakness of the Hindus that has allowed this indignity to be carried out. Ironically, what amounts to the Muslim racism (in a polemical sense) played out here on the Hindu body is not far removed from that which Singh employs on behalf of the Sikhs in the novel as a whole. With the Hindus thus castrated and located in the female or subaltern position, the way is almost clear for Singh to complete the equation and establish the Sikhs in the male or dominant position in his new, age-old binary opposition. First, though, he must position the Muslims. As I indicated earlier, Singh’s treatment of the Muslims in this novel is more complex than his straightforward consignment of the Hindus to the margins of both text and society. Whereas the Hindu community has been simply feminized by Singh, in line with Punjabi stereotypes, the Muslims, while being at least partly feminized, must maintain enough masculine traits to function as worthy rivals to the Sikhs. This, of course, is largely due to the circumstances of

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Partition, which pitted Sikhs against Muslims. But it also serves the novel’s Sikh agenda to present the conflict between the Sikhs and Muslims as one between two masculine forces each striving to dominate the other. One reason for this is that the dominant position of the Sikhs has more meaning if ‘worthy opponents’ have been overcome. In other words, Singh’s apparently objective treatment of the Muslims is designed to enhance his portrayal of the Sikhs. So, while the central conflict of the realist historical agenda of Singh’s novel is played out between the Sikhs and Muslims, the Muslims actually play only a very minor role in the Sikh-focused agenda of Train to Pakistan. In a sense, the circumstances of Partition, which see the Mano Majra Muslims leaving for Pakistan, effectively locate them outside the present Sikh–Hindu equation. However, the realist historical treatment of Partition – indeed, the very fact of Partition – also functions as a reminder of the failure of Indian nationalism. As Faisal Fatehali Devji asserts, in the history that the Indian state obsessively re-enacts, the Muslim separatist is nothing more than the original sign of its failure. The Muslim, in other words, represents a fundamental anxiety of nationalism itself: of the nation as something unachieved.14

Singh uses this failure of Indian nationalism as an opportunity to promote what amounts to a form of Sikh nationalism based on communalism. While all the Hindus in the novel appear to conform to the negative stereotype outlined above, Singh’s presentation of his Sikh characters is not so one-dimensional. Some Sikh characters, like Meet Singh, the bhai of the gurdwara (Sikh temple), have little appetite for battle, but a degree of strength is seen in their humanity. Others, like the outside agitators who persuade the Mano Majra Sikhs to attack the train – and whose behaviour may conform to certain codes of masculinity – attract little sympathy. But none of Singh’s Sikh characters is ever emasculated in the manner of his Hindu characters.

14

Faisal Fatehali Devji, “Hindu/Muslim/Indian,” Public Culture 5.1 (1992): 1.

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Central to Singh’s presentation of the Sikhs is the character of Juggut Singh, a budmash, who is used as the symbol of Sikhism through which Singh locates the Sikhs in the dominant position of the binary opposition he creates.15 Early in the novel we see an attempt to emasculate Juggut Singh when one of Malli’s dacoits throws a package of glass bangles over the wall into Jugga’s courtyard: “O Juggia,” he called in a falsetto voice. “Juggia!” He winked at his companions. “Wear these bangles, Juggia. Wear these bangles and put henna on your palms.” “Or give them to the weaver’s daughter,” one of the gunmen yelled. “Hai,” the others shouted. They smacked their lips, making the sound of long, lecherous kisses. “Hai! Hai!” (19–20)

Here the direct challenge to Jugga’s authority is made on two fronts. First, Malli and his gang have challenged Juggut Singh’s authority by robbing and murdering in his village. As Juggut explains to the police when he is accused of the murder, he was out of the village at the time, “otherwise do you think anyone would have dared to rob and kill in Mano Majra?” (91). Secondly, Juggut is challenged directly by the taunts with the bangles, which seek to render him feminine and declare his lost power, or, in the Freudian terms I have been discussing, to castrate him. We also see Juggut’s clear fear of castration when he is threatened by the police after his arrest: Jugga winced. He knew what the sub-inspector meant. He had been through it – once. Hands and feet pinned under legs of charpoys with half a dozen policemen sitting on them. Testicles twisted and

15

While it is important to see Juggut Singh as a symbol of Sikhism for the purpose of this reading of the novel, it is also true that as a peasant (Jatt) or dacoit he can be appropriated as a hero by all Punjabi communities. His name echoes that of Bhagat Singh, a symbol of active resistance to the British, whereas Hukum Chand symbolizes passive resistance and the exploitation of leaders of the active resistance by leaders of the passive resistance movement.

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squeezed till one became senseless with pain. […] The memory shook him. (91–92)

Here the fear of torture, of pain, is apparent. But it is significant that out of the repertory of tortures used by the Indian police, Singh specifically chooses to highlight damage to the testicles, which can be read as a threat of emasculation/castration, as part of Jugga’s fear. These attempts to emasculate Juggut Singh are not destined to succeed. Their purpose is to emphasize his masculinity, specifically his potency. Indeed, early in the novel he is described as a “very big fellow. He is the tallest man in this area. He must be six foot four – and broad. He is like a stud bull” (33). The reference to the stud bull is again relevant to Singh’s use of phallic imagery. A stud bull specifically signals both strength and potency. This potency is further emphasized in his relationship with Nooran, whose father is the mullah of the local mosque. As the daughter of the mullah, Nooran functions as a symbol of the Muslim community. The obvious power Juggut has over Nooran is seen in an early description of one of their liaisons: Juggut Singh crossed his arms behind the girl’s back and crushed her till she could not talk or breathe. Every time she started to speak he tightened his arms round her and her words got stuck in her throat. […] She was defenceless. […] The girl continued to wriggle and protest. “No! No! No! Please. May Allah’s curse fall on you. Let go my hand. I will never meet you again if you behave like this.” Juggut Singh’s searching hand found one end of the cord of her trousers. He pulled it with a jerk. (22–23)

Although this incident may or may not amount to rape, enough force is used to emphasize the conquest of the female by the male, vis-à-vis the colonial conquest of one race by another, or, as in this case, the conquest of one community by another. Devji suggests that the presentation of Muslim women as sexually desirable “is by

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no means benign; indeed it frequently elicits pleasure in the shape of rape fantasy.”16 Thus the seductive power of the Muslim woman is broken by an act of aggression; it is not Nooran’s sexual attractiveness that stays in our minds, but Juggut’s (masculine) power, the power of the Sikhs over the Muslims, the power to rape if he chose. There is a deliberate contrast here between Juggut’s successful conquest of Nooran and Hukum Chand’s unsuccessful attempt to consummate his liaison with the Muslim prostitute Haseena, a girl young enough to be his daughter. (And, of course, the possibility of incest is introduced to further denigrate the Hindus.) It is pertinent that the only proof of potency in the novel is the fact that when Nooran leaves Mano Majra she is carrying Juggut Singh’s child. This testimony to Jugga’s potency also betokens the power of the Sikhs over their rivals for the dominant position in the binary opposition, insinuating a means of displacing the Muslims, who have been ‘contaminated’. When Nooran has her child (or Juggut’s child, to continue with the language of the novel’s discourse) it will be seen as a Sikh child, as she herself recognizes (152). When Juggut Singh cuts the rope stretched across the bridge and over the railway line, and in so doing saves the train from derailment and attack, it is not necessarily to save Nooran or the child she is carrying; his potency has already been proved by the very fact that Nooran is pregnant. Rather, this is another, final, symbolic act to show Juggut’s power and potency, the power of life and death he has over the Muslims who are fleeing to Pakistan, a moment which expels the Muslims even as it saves them. And within the framework of George Mosse’s thesis this makes him, and the Sikh community he symbolizes, ideally suited to coexist with a nation, India. Further, in defending the railway in this way, Khushwant Singh moves Juggut once more into the position abandoned by the imperial power, the builders of the railways which were used to control India. Khushwant Singh’s realist historical novel, frequently praised for its objectivity and detachment, incorporates a symbolic sub-text which inscribes the Sikhs as inheritors of the hegemonic position quit by the British when they left India. 16

Devji, “Hindu/Muslim/Indian,” 9.

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In this (re-)reading of Train to Pakistan I set out to highlight the way Khushwant Singh locates the Sikh community in relation to the Hindu and Muslim communities, thereby underscoring and maintaining (racialized) purity. To achieve this, Singh consistently genders his characters along communal lines, and while the specific issue of gendering was not my primary concern I nevertheless want to draw my essay to a close by considering a broader question about Partition fiction: Why is Partition seen as analogous with gender difference? It seems significant that the preoccupation with gendering which can be traced through Train to Pakistan occurs in other Partition novels as well, notably in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man (published as Cracking India in the U S A ) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers. Both writers employ all the familiar leitmotifs of Partition fiction – a trainload of butchered corpses, and so on; and both writers, like Khushwant Singh, are concerned with gendering the religious/communal groups in their work. Sidhwa’s novel is interesting not least because it is a Pakistani novel written by a Parsee author who must contend with the problem of how to locate her own community within the new nationstate of Pakistan. As Ambreen Hai explains, at the centre of IceCandy-Man is the Hindu Ayah (named only once in the novel) “who is abducted, gang-raped, and forced into prostitution by an erstwhile Muslim admirer, and who becomes the sole representative figure of female violation in this text,” and who by the end of the novel “becomes the ground upon which the text can forge a Parsee–Muslim alliance.”17 Ayah, like other characters in the novel, comes to be defined by her community. As Lenny explains, It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves – and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah – she is also a token. A Hindu.18

17

Ambreen Hai, “Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism and the Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.2 (2000): 390, 391. 18 Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-Man (1988; New Delhi: Penguin India, 1989): 93.

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It is the Hindu woman, Ayah, whom we see violated, the Hindu men who are emasculated – like Hari, who is figuratively emasculated by the attempt to pull off his lungi, or the Hindu banya who is literally emasculated when he is ripped apart between two jeeps: The processionists are milling about two jeeps pushed back to back. They come to a halt: the men in front of the procession pulling ahead and the mob behind banked close up. There is a quickening in the activity about the jeeps. My eyes focus on an emaciated Banya wearing a white Gandhi cap. The man is knocked down. His lips are drawn away from rotting, paan-stained teeth in a scream. The men move back and in a small clearing I see his legs sticking out of his dhoti right up to the groin – each thin, brown leg tied to a jeep. Ayah, holding her hands over my eyes, collapses on the floor pulling me down with her. There is the roar of a hundred throats: “Allah-o-Akbar!” and beneath it the growl of revving motors. (135)

In such a critical reading of the text, the Muslims are clearly established as the dominant culture, while the Hindus are gendered and sacrificed by Sidhwa in order to locate the endangered Parsee community alongside the Muslims within the nation of Pakistan. The great set piece of violence in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers is not a public moment, but the intimate, almost surreal story Major Jeevan Singh tells his sister Roop, of his discovery of his wife’s body when he returns to the village of Pari Darvaza in search of his family: A simple white-clad mound lay at his feet in the centre of the room. […] He lifted the corner of the sheet closest to him. […] A woman’s body lay beneath, each limb severed at the joint. This body was sliced into six parts, then arranged to look as if she were whole again. […] This woman’s body – he began to disbelieve his eyes, it could not be Kusum – was also cut just below the ribs. […] He received the message. Kusum’s womb, the same from which his three sons came, had been delivered. Ripped out. And the message, “We will stamp your kind, your very species from existence. This is no longer merely about izzat or land. This is a war against your quom, for all time. Leave. We take the womb so

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there can be no Sikhs from it, we take the womb, leave you its shell.19

The mutilation of Kusum’s body carries a message similar to that inscribed on Mansa Ram’s body in Train to Pakistan. But the hatred of the Muslims is not the only story Kusum’s body tells. It also conveys what (Sikh) women have suffered at the hands of their own menfolk, who, like Kusum’s father-in-law, believe that, “for a good-good women, death should be preferable to dishonour” (458); before the Muslims desecrated her body, Papaji had killed her for izzat. Kusum’s body is a powerful metaphor for the relationship of women with their fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, and between gender and the nation-state. In the same way, in Train to Pakistan the bodies of Juggut Singh, Nooran, and Sundari and her husband Mansa Ram act as potent metaphors for the position of the various communities in the new nation-state.

WORKS CITED Baldwin, Shauna Singh. What the Body Remembers (London: Doubleday, 1999). Belliappa, K.C. “The Elusive Classic: Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi,” The Literary Criterion 15.2 (1980): 62–73. Crane, Ralph J. Inventing India: A History of India in English-Language Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1992). Devji, Faisal Fatehali. “Hindu/Muslim/Indian,” Public Culture 5.1 (1992): 1– 18. Freud, Sigmund. “Lecture XXXIII, Femininity,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 22 (1932–36) New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1964): 112–35. Hai, Ambreen. “Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism and the Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India,” Modern Fiction Studies 46.2 (2000): 379–426.

19

Shauna Singh Baldwin, What the Body Remembers (1988; London: Doubleday, 1989): 449–59.

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Morey, Peter. Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000). Mosse, George. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985). Sidhwa, Bapsi. Ice-Candy-Man (1988; New Delhi: Penguin India, 1989). Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan (1955; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988). Tarinayya, M. “Two Novels: Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers!” Indian Literature 13.1 (1970): 113–21. Verghese, C. Paul. Problems of the Indian Creative Writer in English (Bombay: Somaiya Publications, 1971).

No Passports, No Visas The Line of Control Between India and Pakistan in Contemporary Bombay Cinema

S HARMILA S EN

Hamara Bharat Mahan/Long Live Pakistan

I

in Dhaka a few years ago, I asked a group of Bangladeshi academics what the English word ‘border’ signifies to them at the present time. We spent some time arguing over the border between India and Bangladesh, between East and West Bengal, between East and West Pakistan, between the Jumma tribes of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and ethnic Bengalis. Then, Shamsad Mortuza, a professor of English literature, said with some exasperation, “Border, Sharmila, is a film.” Indeed, my interlocutor was absolutely correct in more than one sense. Border (J.P. Dutta, 1997) is a recent Bombay film about the 1971 India–Pakistan War. Moreover, the borderland between India and Pakistan, as depicted in the recent spate of Bollywood border films, persistently refers to its own filmi-ness.1 The borderland is an N A POSTCOLONIAL THEORY WORKSHOP

1 Filmi, literally ‘film-like’ in Indian slang. In Cinema India (London: Reaktion, 2002): 30, Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel suggest that the term ‘filmi’ carries connotations of something “derogatory, something cheap and trashy.” I would add, however, that in recent years, ‘filminess’ might be understood as an aesthetic that is neither cheap nor trashy. Events such as the auctioning of Bollywood posters in India, or the Bollywood exhibitions at such high-brow Western museums as the Tate Modern (“Century City,” Spring 2001) or the V&A

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uncanny space: it is representative of “us” and yet is also not quite “us.” In recent times, the Bollywood borderland has come to represent the nation and its commodified others. This essay focuses on representations of the border between India and Pakistan in contemporary Bombay cinema. During the last decade of the twentieth century, Bollywood filmmakers increasingly turned to the border – or, more specifically, to the borderland – that is the Radcliffe Boundary Commission’s notorious legacy to the Indian subcontinent. This discussion of Bollywood borders considers the following popular films: Henna (Randhir Kapoor, 1991), Border (J.P. Dutta, 1997), Dil Se/From the Heart (Maniratnam, 1997), Refugee (J.P. Dutta, 2000), Fiza/Air (Khalid Mohammed, 2000), Mission Kashmir (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2000), Gadar: Ek Prem Katha/ Traitor: A Love Story (Anil Sharma, 2001), Pinjar/The Cage (Chandraprakash Dwivedi, 2003), and LOC: Kargil (J.P. Dutta, 2003). These films fall into roughly two generic categories: the historical drama and the contemporary terrorist film. Border, Refugee, LOC, Gadar, and Pinjar, for instance, focus on events such as the India–Pakistan war of 1971 or 1999 or the Partition of 1947. Dil Se, Fiza, and Mission Kashmir are thematically concerned with the making (or unmaking) of terrorists. As a love story, albeit one with a self-contradictory message of India–Pakistan/Hindu–Muslim peace, Henna is the only film in this group that belongs to an earlier genre of romantic films shot in Kashmir. In border films, the borderland is not only an important location within the structure of the cinematic plot, but it also functions as the central trope that cuts across multiple registers of the diegetic and extra-diegetic narratives. While this analysis is largely focused on the filmic representation of the borderland between Indian and Pakistani territory, the borderland under discussion is never convincingly relegated to the margins of the nation. As the recent crop of terrorism and Partition-related films evince, the LOC (line of control) at the edges of the nation can never clearly be demarcated (“Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood,” Summer 2002) suggest that the ‘filmi’ is indeed gaining some cultural capital these days, albeit with attendant complications such as latent nostalgia or commodification of an ‘exotic minority’ culture.

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from the LOC at the heart of the nation. The line between India and Pakistan at Wagah–Attari, then, re-appears on the Bollywood cinema screen as the line between a Hindu–Muslim couple (Henna), as the line between a Kashmiri Muslim inspector and his terrorist foster-son (Mission Kashmir), as the line between a Hindi-speaking radio-programme officer and his terrorist ajnabi/maashuq (stranger/ beloved) from the embattled northeast (Dil Se). Concomitantly, the signs – the Kashmiri picturesque, the Rajasthani exotic, and the Sufi mystic – used by filmmakers to denote one side as “ours” and the other side as “theirs” are also the secret sharers of national hegemonic culture. That this analysis considers mainly Hindi films does not imply that these films are the sole representatives of Indian popular culture. Although the Tamil film industry provides the Hindi film industry with stiff competition in terms of sheer volume of output, Hindi films continue to be most widely circulated in India and its diaspora. Even Hollywood productions, which are usually successful in capturing global markets elsewhere, cannot provide serious competition for Hindi films in India.2 Bollywood productions have come to occupy the status of ‘national’ films at the expense of a large number of so-called regional language productions. While Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, or Telegu films are regularly grouped under the rubric of regional films, Hindi productions are supposed to supersede regional specificity and constitute the ‘national’ normative. Yet, as Ravi S. Vasudevan reminds us, “the opposition between hegemonic national cultures and resistant – or at least divergent – local languages and cultures [is] hardly straightforward.”3 In fact, local/regional media in India often relies on dubbing Hindi T V serials, while Bollywood has since its early days been well-known for producing ‘remakes’ of hit Tamil, Telegu, or Bengali films. In border films, moreover, there is a crucial negotiation between the ‘national normative’ (North Indian, Hindu, upper caste) and the attendant ‘local/regional’ minority – the borderland

2

Ravi S. Vasudevan, “National pasts and futures: Indian cinema,” Screen 41:1 (Spring 2000): 123. 3 Vasudevan, “National pasts and futures,” 122.

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figure who both represents the subject and is consumed by the subject as its Other. Just as importantly, Bollywood border films are themselves consummate border-crossers. In Pakistan, for instance, Hindi films have been officially banned from cinema halls since the second India–Pakistan war. Yet satellite cable channels and technically illegal (and often pirated) V H S and D V D copies continue to supply eager Pakistani audiences with their Bollywood extravaganzas. Increasingly, Indian audiences are also becoming familiar with Lollywood (Lahori film industry) stars. The April 2004 edition of the Bollywood fanzine Moviemag, for instance, features a gushing article on the arrival of Pakistani actress Reema (dubbed Pakistan’s Aishwariya Rai) in Mumbai. In a related piece titled “The Hug Bug,” popular Bombay actors weigh in on the potential of crossborder filmmaking. While Bombay actors seem to relish their celebrity status across the border, “The Hug Bug” goes on to reveal, they are also aware of potentially alienating Pakistani audiences with egregiously anti-Pakistan rhetoric, as spouted in some recent films.4 In parts of the South Asian diaspora, Hindi films are consumed without so many conflicting feelings of patriotism and treachery. In Trinidad and Guyana, for instance, Bombay films have been screened with much success since the 1930s. These films, and their distribution networks, are arguably some of the earliest and most consistent border-crossers within the South Asian diaspora. Although the reception history of Bollywood border films in all the South Asian nations and their diasporas is beyond the scope of this essay, it is crucial to abandon from the start any preconceptions about a monolithic, nationally circumscribed audience for Bollywood films. This essay is more concerned with how a certain viewing position, regardless of the actual location of the viewer, is 4 See Moviemag (April 2004, North American edition): 45–51. At least one Pakistani scholar, Ayesha Jalal, noted in a private conversation that outlandish demonization of Pakistan in some Bollywood films, in fact, make them more palatable for Pakistani audiences. Bollywood seems to get it so wrong, she suggests, that its portrayal of Pakistan can no longer be seen as a remotely realistic one. In this way, some Pakistanis can actually laugh off Indian popular cinema’s extreme jingoism and continue to enjoy the films from across the border without too much discomfort.

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reinforced by the filmic representation of the border. In fact, as we shall see, border scenes almost always push the viewer a little out of place. At this writing, the Wagah–Attari checkpoint in Punjab is the only place where one can legally cross the India–Pakistan border by foot. Wagah (in Pakistan) and Attari (in India) are two villages that stand at the limits of their nations. They are also surprisingly close to the important urban centres of the region known as Punjab on both sides of the border. From the centre of Lahore it takes about half an hour by car to get to Wagah. After crossing the checkpoint, another half an hour by car takes one from the village of Attari to Amritsar. Tourists from both countries crowd into Wagah and Attari, especially on Sundays, to watch the polite ceremony of flaglowering.5 The Indian and the Pakistani flags are lowered exactly at the same time, something oddly reminiscent of the synchronized swimming event at the Olympics. A cheer rises from the crowd if the wind unfurls one flag a bit more impressively than the other one. Families with children buy snacks and enjoy an outing; teachers escort schoolchildren on fieldtrips; few pass up the photoop at the pillar marking no-man’s-land. On most Sundays, the area resembles a park, or a fairground. Of course, neither Indian nor Pakistani citizens are normally allowed to cross the border at this checkpoint. So, people come to gaze not only upon “their” flags, and the military personnel guarding “their” land, but also upon those other people across the line that cannot be crossed. Standing at the Wagah–Attari checkpoint at these moments, it seems as though the people across the border were indeed a nation of starers. The gaze is symmetrically reflected from both sides. Bodies crush each other as hundreds of eyes lock into hundreds of other eyes. What do see when we look across the border? What do we see, that is, other than the faces of those who are looking at us? Improbable gates stand amidst the divided fields of Punjab at the Wagah–Attari border. If one stands on the Pakistani side, this is 5 For more on tourism at the Wagah-Attari checkpoint, see Virinder S. Kalra & Navtej K. Purewal, “The Strut of the Peacocks: Partition, Travel and the India–Pakistan Border,” in Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics, ed. Raminder Kaur & John Hutnyk (London: Zed, 1999): 54–67.

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what meets the eye: The Pakistani gate reads (in nastaliq) “Pakistan Paindabad” (May Pakistan Live Forever). Framed through this gate, a little distance ahead, we can see the Indian gate that proclaims (in roman) “Swagatam” (Welcome). From the Indian side, the messages are slightly different. Standing here, one sees the other side of the Indian gate (the one facing India, as it were) that bears a sign (in devnagari) “Hamara Bharat Mahan” (Our India is Great). Further ahead, we can see through to the Pakistani side. The other side of the Pakistani gate, the side facing India, reads (in roman) “Long Live Pakistan.” A mixed message in nastaliq and roman, or in devnagari and roman, awaits us at the Wagah–Attari border. Bending to the regime of the built environment, the jingoistic borderland proclamation of India’s greatness is necessarily coupled with an announcement of the ‘enemy’ nation’s endurance.

The Looking-Glass Border In a recent essay on political borders, the French political philosopher Étienne Balibar writes that the term ‘border’ is profoundly changing in meaning. The borders of new politicoeconomic entities, in which an attempt is being made to preserve the functions of the sovereignty of the state, are no longer at all situated at the outer limit of territories: they are dispersed a little everywhere, wherever the movement of information, people, and things is happening and is controlled – for example, in cosmopolitan cities […] the zones called peripheral are in fact the ground upon which citizenship is formed […] border areas – zones, countries, and cities – are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather are at the center.6

Here Balibar rightly relocates the border at the heart of nationalist discourse and simultaneously shifts the cosmopolitan city to the limit of the nation. According to a new generation of border scholars, mathematically informed terms such as ‘limit’ or ‘boundary’ might productively re-shape the discussion of borders, borderlands, 6

Étienne Balibar, “World Borders, Political Borders,” P M L A 117.1 (January 2002): 71–72.

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and border art.7 Sir Cyril Radcliffe might have been sent from England to draw lines on the map of Punjab in 1947. But, unlike the fixity of that line in an Indian schoolchild’s geography text, the idea of the borderland in popular Bollywood cinema resembles something closer to a function as it approaches its limit. In addition to interrogating the fixity of borderlands, the putative divisiveness of borders requires further attention. In recent years, one of the more powerful critiques of national borders has not focused on the power of borders to divide – you from me, Muslim from Hindu, the self from the Other, India from its neighbors. Instead, that critique has turned our attention to the power of borders to join two sides in a mutual embrace of violence. Here is that critique as articulated by the unnamed narrator in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988). In this passage, the narrator meditates on the borders that bind Calcutta and Dhaka across the India–Pakistan border during the 1960s: there had really been a time, not so long ago, when people, sensible people, of good intention, had thought that all maps were the same, that there was a special enchantment in lines […] They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other […] What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony … there had never been a moment in the four-thousand-year-old history of that map, when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines – so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by that line that was to set us free – our looking-glass border.8

The border between India and Pakistan continues to bind the two countries in a mutual embrace of symmetrical violence. That Cyril 7

Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelsen & David E. Johnson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997). 8 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988): 233.

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Radcliffe’s legacy is not only of Partition but also of new – and equally violent – affiliations should not be forgotten in any quick, fashionable condemnation of borders. As Bollywood shows us, the porousness and the impermeability of the line of control are both equally problematic. The cartographic line between India and Pakistan, then, is truly endowed with cleaving properties: it can bind and divide the two nations.

Border Love On the Indian movie screen, the borderland is frequently a locus amoenus. If Bollywood border films were Hollywood teen movies, then the borderland would be a lover’s lane, a makeout point, or a moonlit beach during spring break. Cross-border violence may be depicted as avoidable; but cross-border love is a Bollywood inevitability. While the anti-communal, progressive political rhetoric of South Asia has always been based on a notion of filial love (whether employed at the time of Indo-China conflict, or during Partition, or even in the context of Kashmir), filmic representations of the national border repeatedly turn on erotic, transgressive love. No doubt the erotic desire for the stranger is a popular trope in many other sub-genres of Bollywood cinema. Yet Maniratnam’s treatment of the figure of the erotic stranger in Dil Se offers some important insights into the conflation of the romantic plot and the nationalist narrative of border security. The opening sequence of Dil Se is a self-conscious re-enactment of Bombay cinema’s penchant for love before first sight. On a melodramatically stormy night, while Amar (Shah Rukh Khan), a programme officer for All India Radio, is waiting on a railway platform, he spots a figure huddled at the far end of the station. He mistakes the figure for a man, until a helpful gust of wind uncovers the heroine, Meghna (Manisha Koirala), under the shawl. Amar, like a moth drawn to a flame (a shamma to a parwana), almost has no option but to fall in love with the stranger. Carrying this borrowed trope (from Urdu poetry) to its logical conclusion, Dil Se eventually leads Amar into Meghna’s bomb-strapped body to end the film with a conflagration. From his first encounter with the ajnabi lover, Amar is aware of himself as a Bombay cliché. He offers to conquer a fortress for his damsel, but Meghna settles for a cup of tea. He re-

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turns with the tea, only to find her train pulling out of the station. “This must be the world’s shortest love story,” a rain-soaked Amar comments to himself as the train moves away. Distance between the two would-be lovers – physical, linguistic, ideological – forms the subject of the film. In a later sequence, Amar tells Meghna what he likes least about her: “Yeh doori” (this distance). And then, as he goes on to list what he likes best about her, he says: “Yeh doori.” “This distance,” Amar-as-the-Indian-state whispers to Meghnaas-the-secessionist-terrorist, “gives me the excuse for coming closer to you.” In Dil Se, this doori, or distance, between the two – the state and the terrorist, Amar and Meghna – is eliminated in the final explosive embrace between the suicide-bomber and her lover. Border-crossing, in this sense, is a deadly act. Dil Se asks us to look at the national border through the prism of a stalker/love story.9 The film, however, does not align its audience with one clear line of sympathy. Do we support Amar in his pursuit of Meghna? Can Meghna, borrowing from Faiz Ahmed Faiz, claim the revolution as her new beloved? Don’t ask me for that love again … There are other sorrows in this world comforts other than love.10

The doori between the Indian nationalist and the secessionist is a necessary precondition of both their existences. Furthermore, as the film warns, if that doori were erased solely on the insistence and terms of the nationalist (Amar), then the result would be the death of Amar, Meghna, and the narrative itself. Meghna and her group attempt to carve out their own independent state in the northeast from the hegemonic Indian state. In a 9

It would be informative to see Shah Rukh Khan’s role as a lovelorn stalker in such films as Darr/Fear or Anjaam/Consequence as an inter-text to Dil Se. While border films were rising in popularity in the 1990s, so were stalker films. Stalker films often featured a famous star associated with the figure of a romantic hero in, to use Bollywood parlance, a “negative character.” 10 Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “Mujhse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob nah mang” (“Don’t Ask Me for that Love Again”), in The Rebel’s Silhouette, tr. Agha Shahid Ali (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1991): 5.

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clever revision of the standard nationalist narrative of the maternal nation-state and its errant children (Mother India and her troublesome secessionist minorities), the character that wants to add another national border to the map of India is a woman. Furthermore, a love-struck male stalker, not a nurturing mother, represents the nation in Maniratnam’s film. Can the stalker-state bring the object of its obsession effectively within its own boundaries? If Amar-as-the-state lives in incomplete pieces (according to one of the songs of the film),11 then the forceful filmic unification of the pieces, of the northeastern secessionist and the North Indian nationalist, results only in further carnage as unseen body parts fly in the final frame of the film. Of all the 1990s films that focus on border love, Dil Se is perhaps the most complex and sophisticated. It displays an awareness of the limits of the genre while still exploring the powerful erotic pull of borders, and of doori. Even as Dil Se offers an important revision of the love story between the nation and its internal others, it continues the tradition of gendering the (desirable) other as feminine. Indian and Pakistani popular cinema’s predilection for producing border love as a romance between “our” men and “their” women may be historicized in at least a couple of different ways. There are at least two separate historical events that inform Amar’s pursuit of Meghna. The repatriation of abducted women in the months following the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 is an event that casts its shadow on Amar’s relentless pursuit of the errant Meghna. The rape, mutilation, murder, and abduction of women from so-called rival communities marked the unprecedented exchange of population in 1947. The newly independent nation-states, India and Pakistan, were deeply invested in the re-patriation of women as a means of consolidating the power and honour of the patriarchal state. 11 Amar recounts his first encounter with Meghna on his radio programme as he plays a song, “E Ajnabi” (“O Stranger”). The refrain of the song goes something like this: “O stranger, please respond to me. I am living here in pieces. And you too are living somewhere in pieces.” The song itself is further chopped into pieces as it re-appears in the background in subsequent sequences. I am grateful to Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s insights into this part of Dil Se in an unpublished essay, “A Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Allegories of Democracy and its Discontents in Dil Se.”

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Amar’s pursuit of Meghna, then, may be also seen as the male state’s pursuit of the ‘lost’ woman across the border. The second historical inter-text to Amar and Meghna’s story is a somewhat older, though no less important, Indian national myth. In the song, “E Ajnabi” (“Oh Stranger”), the pieces (tukro) that are symbolic of Amar’s fragmented self might also be the pieces of the once unified India (akhand Bharat), sundered by the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan. Dil Se revises the Indian National Congress’s depiction of Partition as secession from the imagined whole (the idea of eternal India fused with the colonial structure of the Union of India)12 into a romantic plot involving an errant lover. The dialectical tension between these two historical allusions lies precisely in the positioning of the woman in a heterosexual love story. Does the male state rescue the lost female citizen across the border? Or, does the female state claim her prodigal son? To put it another way, who pulls whom across which border? In Maniratnam’s film, from the opening railway-station scene until the final bomb-blast, any answer to this question remains necessarily ambivalent. Although Dil Se confounds the question of border-crossing by presenting the viewer with multiple, partially overlapping borders, a number of Bollywood and Lollywood productions explored cross-border romance in the decades immediately following Partition in more straightforward ways. The plot of many of these films, as expected, turned on the event of Partition, the largest exchange of population in peacetime in recorded history. Manmohan Desai’s Chhalia (1960), for instance, follows the story of a woman who crosses the border after Partition in 1947 to reunite with her Hindu family. More recently, Randhir Kapoor’s Henna (1991) re-introduced the India–Pakistan love story to Bollywood only to leave the eponymous Pakistani heroine dead at border. Henna is an important precursor to Bollywood’s turn to the borderland following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992 and the 12

Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1999): 188. Bose and Jalal make the point that the Indian National Congress represented the formation of Pakistan as an “opting out” of the imagined whole that is the Union of India. Thus, 1947 did not see the transformation of India into Hindustan and Pakistan, but into India and Pakistan.

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subsequent communal riots of 1992–93. The location of the film in Kashmir, the transgressive border-crossings, the focus on a Hindu– Muslim romance, and the self-sacrificing Muslim character who secures a peaceful conclusion to the narrative are all important elements in later border films. Henna-as-Pakistan, according to the logic of the film, must sacrifice her desires – indeed, her life – in order to save Chander-as-India. In the final sequence, Henna’s dead body marks not only the line between India and Pakistan but also the line between the pacifist rhetoric of a transnational family romance and an erotic, transgressive love for the Other. Henna dies at the border between India and Pakistan, echoing perhaps the famous literary death of Toba Tek Singh in Sadaat Hasan Manto’s Urdu short story of the same name.13 Yet the conclusion to Henna has another important inter-text, perhaps less familiar to an Indian audience (but not to a Pakistani audience) – the earlier Lahori film Lakhon mein Ek/One in Thousands, which concludes with the death of its Hindu heroine, Shakuntala, at the border. A closer look at this Pakistani film, which is largely ignored in South Asian film scholarship, reveals the eerily symmetrical construction of the nation-as-woman and the national-border-as-female-body in both Pakistani and Indian popular cinema. Lakhon mein Ek posits a Hindu woman as a symbol of the Indian nation. But the effects of such symbolic investment are quite different from the outcome of Henna. Raza Mir’s post-Independence film begins in Azaad Kashmir and follows the lives of two friends, one Hindu and one Muslim. After a hasty escape to India, and a misplacement of children due to chaotic conditions, the Hindu girl, Shakuntala, is left behind in Pakistan in the care of her father’s Muslim friend. Young Shakuntala is raised as a Hindu and uses a language spiked with Hindu religious vocabulary in a wholly Muslim community. She is allowed to visit temples and her foster father zealously guards her from Muslim lovers. The message is clear: different religious communities may live together peacefully but never marry each other. Turning the rhetoric of Hindu–Muslim filial love on its head, Shakuntala falls in love with her foster-brother, Mehmood. In the upheaval that 13

For “Toba Tek Singh” and other Partition-related short stories by Manto, see Kingdom’s End and Other Stories, tr. Khalid Hasan (London: Verso, 1987).

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follows, her biological father returns from India and carries her back across the border, where conniving Brahmins await. Much of the plot after this point is only too familiar. From the reports of the rehabilitation committees set up in the years following Partition to more recent commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the historic events of 1947, there have been numerous accounts of Hindu girls returned from Muslim communities and refused by their orthodox kin as polluted.14 Shakuntala’s tale is, no doubt, somewhat unique because her stay in Pakistan is entirely voluntary. Shakuntala’s father, while denouncing Hindustan as narak (hell), continues to believe that it is still the most appropriate place for them. Shakuntala, by contrast, wants to return to Pakistan, her true home. She prefers the kind Muslim community over the treacherous, corrupt Hindu one. On the diegetic level of Lakhon mein Ek, good Hindus prefer to live in Pakistan. On the extra-diegetic level, however, there is no place for them beyond the borders of Hindustan. While attempting to flee from India, Shakuntala dies at the border, her white sari torn by the barbed-wire fence erected between two countries. This is a scene repeated years later in Randhir Kapoor’s Henna. The female protagonist, Henna, is shot dead at the line of control and dies a dramatic death replete with multiple high-key-lit close-ups. As she lies dangerously close to Hindustan, her dying words affirm her religious alliance: there is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger. The salient political point of Lakhon mein Ek is the unviability of Hindustan. According to this film, the lecherous, corrupt Hindus will eventually drive the good women of their own community to deaths such as Shakuntala’s. According to the film, then, Muslim men best protect Hindu women’s chastity. In this peculiar denial of sexual violence perpetrated upon Hindu women by Muslim men during Partition, Lakhon mein Ek both appropriates responsibility for a Hindu woman and kills her at the border. If Shakuntala is a symbol of India, at least of the better side of it, then to destroy her is a significant cinematic move indeed. The torn white sari fluttering upon the barbed wire is a contradictory image 14

See, for instance, Urvashi Butalia’s excellent study in The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000).

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of violence done to woman, of an aborted peace between two nations, and of a failed India. Henna, too, invests a woman with nationhood and leaves her dead at the end of the narrative. In this 1991 Indian film, the dead Pakistani woman sacrifices her body as a symbol of her unrequited love for a Hindu man, Chander. At the conclusion of the film, Chander stands over Henna’s corpse and delivers a didactic lecture typical of R.K. Studio’s films: he asks whose bullet killed Henna and questions the basis of a militarized society. Significantly, the film refuses to ask why a Pakistani woman’s body and not an Indian man’s body lies dead in no-man’s-land. Much like Lakhon mein Ek, this film assumes a superficially liberal tone that allows for the possibility of a transnational alliance, romantic or otherwise. In both films, however, the woman from across the border who has transgressed religious and national lines and come to woo “our” man is killed off before the curtain falls: national borders are hermetically sealed over the corpses of the female Other in both Lakhon mein Ek and Henna. In fact, the sexual (un)availability of these women constitutes the definitive contours of Indian and Pakistani nationhood. Thirteen years after the release of Henna, another Bollywood character, Puro, re-named Hameeda by her Muslim abductor, will refuse to die on the ‘right’ side of the border. Based on Amrita Pritam’s novel of the same name, Pinjar was Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s first directorial venture. The film, though focused on Hindu– Muslim conflicts during the late 1940s, manages to avoid exaggerating the cultural and linguistic differences among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in pre- and post-Partition Punjab. The film resists the temptation of either demonizing or exoticizing the other. Of course, one could argue that the story would have unfolded quite differently if Puro (Urmila Matondkar) was Muslim and her abductor Rashid (Manoj Bajpai) was Hindu: could a Hindu community accept an abducted Muslim woman into its fold in the same manner? Nonetheless, it is a significant moment for Bollywood cinema when Puro does not return to Ramchand (Sanjay Suri), her Hindu fiancé, and chooses to stay with her Muslim husband in newly formed Pakistan. The overt allusions to the Ramayana, in this case, do not predetermine the conclusion. What if Sita, Pinjar asks us to

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consider, chose to remain in Lanka with Ravana? Are the ideas of home (Ayodhya) and exile (Lanka) ever interchangeable? At the end of the film, as the main characters gather at a refugee camp in Lahore, women of various religious communities are in the process of being ‘restored’ to their ‘correct’ nations. This is the borderland scene par excellence not simply because of Lahore’s proximity to the border but because of the liminal status accorded to the women who are being identified, classified, and ultimately repatriated according the new logic of nationhood in an independent subcontinent. Within this context, Amrita Pritam’s narrative choice is powerful indeed. In the final scene, Puro-as-Sita says to Rashid-asRavana “You are my truth now.” As the trucks carrying Hindus and Sikhs to India pull away from the camp, Ramchand-as-Ram says, “Don’t make her homeless twice.” The final line of the film is Puro’s voiceover: “Whenever a woman, Hindu or Muslim, returns home, know that Puro’s soul is at peace.” This seemingly anodyne sentiment hides within it a riddle. How do we know which home is the correct one for which woman? Pinjar manages to revise one of the most powerful epic narratives of home, exile, and female chastity in a manner that does not leave the female protagonist dead at the border between nations, between home and exile, between Ayodhya and Lanka, between the human and divine. The eponymous pinjar, or the cage, is ultimately not solely the fate of the abducted, but also the fate of the abductor. Yet, the cage is not immutable. Borders might shift and transform exile into home, India into Pakistan, cage into truth. While Pinjar allows its female protagonists to survive the making of a new border in the subcontinent, other contemporary Bollywood films re-enact Henna’s death through the death of soldiers in Border, of a terrorist in Fiza, and of a suicide bomber in Dil Se. All these figures die at the border, though in some cases that border is pushed from the edges of the nation in Rajasthan or Kashmir into the heart of Bombay or Delhi. Although Chander, the Hindu Indian male protagonist in Henna, can cross (albeit unintentionally) into Pakistan, the Muslim Pakistani female protagonist cannot enter India. These days, border patrolling is hardly so precise. Who can cross the border? Who regulates movement across the border? How is the borderland represented in the codes of popular Bombay

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cinema? And, as importantly, how is a nation created at its limits at the turn of the century?

No Passports, No Visas Salman Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai might have been “handcuffed to history” due to the accident of his birth at precisely the hour when India became independent.15 But, when another midnight birth takes place on the Bollywood screen in the new millennium, it is difficult to ascertain if the baby can claim any history at all. If Rushdie can be accused of lacking subtlety in his handling of allegory in Midnight’s Children, J.P. Dutta nearly converts the midnight birth into outright parody in Refugee. Dutta’s Refugee is a follow-up to his 1997 jingoistic tribute to the Indian armed forces in Border. The second installment, self-proclaimed as a "human story,” returns to India’s western border in Rajasthan. The film opens with a shot of a map of the subcontinent upon which a moving red line indicates the migrant family’s journey from Bihar to East Pakistan to Rajasthan. The story proper begins near the border in western Rajasthan. It also ends at this border when the heroine, Naaz (Kareena Kapoor), gives birth to a son precisely at the midnight between August 14 and August 15. The father of Naaz’s son is the eponymous Refugee (Abhishek Bachchan), a mysterious orphan who helps migrants from India and Pakistan cross the desert border illegally. The birth of their child near a Sufi shrine, exactly at midnight while both India and Pakistan celebrate their independence, is a symbolic resolution of the conflict between the two countries. The two military representatives, the Pakistani Ashraf (Sunil Shetty) and the Indian Raghubir (Jackie Shroff) indulge in a bit of good-natured ribbing as they discuss the citizenship of the newborn child. Can the child claim Pakistani citizenship by invoking matrilineal descent? Or, can the power of patriarchy claim him as an Indian citizen? The matter is left unsettled. The two military officers, both involved in patrolling the border, uncharacteristically abandon this question of citizenship in order to proclaim him a citizen “of everywhere and nowhere.” He will have “no passports, no visas.” Refugee, like its predecessor Border, is deeply con15

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991): 3.

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cerned with questions of infiltration, border smuggling, and cross border terrorism. While the first part of the film works to manipulate the viewer’s sympathy for border-crossers and implicitly calls for a more porous border, the second half partly reverses that structure. Despite its valorization of the transgressive Refugee, the film reinforces the Indian state’s right to regulate the mobility of people, goods, and ideas across national borders. The midnight baby’s father, Refugee, is an illegal border-crosser par excellence. Yet, by the end of the film, he enlists with the Indian B S F in order to secure the border against Pakistani terrorists. Refugee, though claiming to have no parentage, no religious or national identity, is implicitly (in the first part) and explicitly (in the second part) an Indian Hindu. When the villainous Pakistani Ranger Tauseef insults “his Hindustani blood,” Refugee responds with a surprising show of nationalistic vigour. Pakistani and/or Muslim identity operates only in its difference from the normative that is Indian and/or Hindu. To formulate this another way, Indian citizens can always lay claim to a larger subcontinental civilizational identity. But, the Pakistani citizen must be monitored closely if he or she attempts the same. The ideal border, in Dutta’s film, operates much like a safety valve that allows only one-way flow. While the child of an Indo-Pakistani union requires no passports or visas in Border, a similar child faces a much different fate in Anil Sharma’s superhit film Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. Gadar offers a number of parallels to Dutta’s film. Tara Singh (Sunny Deol) and Sakina (Amisha Patel) are old acquaintances who are thrown into each other’s company following a Partition-related massacre. They cross class and religious barriers to marry each other and have a son, Jeet. Unlike Naaz’s son, Sakina’s son has unambiguous religious and national affiliations. His unshorn hair marks him as Sikh. Furthermore, for this young Indian national, Pakistanis clearly represent the Other. The ‘rescue’ of the ‘re-patriated’ Sakina by her husband and son constitutes the more egregiously jingoistic section of the film. If Randhir Kapoor’s Henna concluded with the consolidation of the Indian family (Chander’s) through the death of the Muslim heroine at the border, then Anil Sharma’s melodrama concludes with the consolidation of the Indian family (Tara Singh’s) through the return

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of the Muslim woman from across the Pakistani border. Once again, the ethical need of the Indian protagonist to cross the India– Pakistan border in order to claim his bride takes precedence over the immigration laws of the border zone. To borrow Ghosh’s formulation in The Shadow Lines, Gadar and Lakhon mein Ek are joined in a symmetrical embrace across the looking-glass border between Bollywood and Lollywood. Sakina and Shakuntala are both women left behind in the ‘wrong’ nation by migrating families. Their subsequent re-patriation, however, proves unsuccessful as the viability of the new homeland across the border is brought into question. Gadar, as it turns out, spurred the making of the Pakistani film Chudiyan, a cross-border twin which neatly reversed the Indian film’s structure in order to ‘rescue’ a Hindu woman back into Pakistan. If one considers both halves of Refugee, the final line – “No passports, no visas” – remains ominously ambiguous. Does it augur a future time of free movement across the national borders in South Asia? Or does it, instead, echo the official voice of high commissions, consulates and embassies denying the petition for a passport or visa? Is the child of Refugee also doomed to be a refugee, an udvastu?16 If this debate about citizenship – and even the birth of a citizen – is located at the border, then the national border between India and Pakistan not only demarcates the nation but also produces it. This generative vision of the border is drawn out quite explicitly in Dutta’s final installment of the borderland trilogy, LOC. In this war film, the 1999 India–Pakistan war in Kargil is so exaggeratedly partisan that Pakistanis are barely shown on screen or even named (they are generally referred to as rats). The Indian armed forces are painstakingly represented as a true microcosm of India in all its diversity. Furthermore, much like Border, LOC also participates in a discourse that genders the nation as female. That is, the relative absence of actual women (the wives, mothers, and girlfriends of the Indian soldiers appear mainly in a couple of musical interludes) is only reiterated by the larger-than-life symbolic nation-as-mother. Is 16

In north Indian languages such as Hindi and Bengali, ‘udvastu’ is roughly equivalent to ‘refugee’ or ‘homeless migrant’.

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the feminized face of the nation a symbol of national strength or does it render the nation vulnerable within a patriarchal discourse of nationalism? And what role does the line of control play in protecting the feminized nation? Indeed, while the diegetic content asserts the importance of the line of control in maintaining the integrity of the nation, the extra-diegetic content tell us something else entirely. The title of the film makes use of a graphic image that repeats the ambivalence that operates at the heart of films such as these. The “O” of LOC first appears on the D V D menu as a circle of barbed wire on mountainous terrain with a bloody “L” and “C” appearing on either side of it. This barbed wire “O” is then replicated into a shifting circular target for an unseen rifle. The circle of barbed wire is a visual clue signalling the apparent ambiguity of lines drawn across and around nations – does the enclosed circle free us from all that is outside or does it imprison us? Moreover, as the title graphics mutate on the screen, we are presented with yet another scenario: the barbed wire, a symbol of the line of control, protects national integrity, and simultaneously renders the nation more vulnerable by turning it into a target of violence.

Border Patrol, Border Tourist Who patrols such a productive, fertile borderland? The bordercrossing sequences in Refugee and Mission Kashmir, for instance, both place the viewer as border patrol. Refugee’s border-crossing sequences are often filmed using long shots. After panning across the dunes, the camera focuses on his moving body across the undulating stretches of sand. This gaze aligns the viewer with gaze of patrolling B S F and Rangers’s binoculars. We strain to look for the moving figure, dressed in white to blend in with the environment. Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s film also temporarily positions the viewer as border patrol during the crucial border-crossing sequence. In Mission Kashmir, Altaaf (Hrithik Roshan), the prodigal foster-son of a police officer, disappears across the border and then returns to India as a terrorist bent on personal revenge. Altaaf runs away from home after discovering that his foster-father had been the officer who massacred his biological family in a police raid. After an aborted attempt to shoot his father, the young Altaaf disappears into the darkness through an open bedroom door. The camera

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follows the gaze of the devastated foster parents. We say goodbye to the child Altaaf through the parent’s eyes. We encounter the adult Altaaf through a different gaze. The sequence in which Altaaf returns to Indian Kashmir forms a bridge between the two parts of the narrative. His return is the only sequence in which the India–Pakistan border is depicted. This brief sequence, however, plays a crucial role in the narrative. The border that Altaaf crosses is not only the border between India and Pakistan, it is also the symbolic border between his past and his present, between a Kashmiri and a terrorist, between an edenic Kashmir and a valley of violence, and between an older type of Bollywood film and the newer border film. In the border-crossing sequence, the gaze of the camera, at first, aligns us with a swiftly moving figure. We seem to be crossing the India–Pakistan border ourselves. This mode is soon abandoned, as a small running figure covered in a shawl appears. The camera captures large vistas somewhat unsteadily. The mysterious figure (soon to be revealed as Altaaf) seems to be running nearly out of each frame. After sweeping across green valleys and hills, we finally rest our gaze upon a small road. The borderland in Mission Kashmir is a dense green hilly landscape. Nature is uninterrupted by the built environment. We are not, however, in the valley of love, where countless filmsongs have been shot. The respite from the built environment that in past movies allowed Bollywood lovers an imagined escape from societal strictures now becomes an uninhabited terrain where terrorists break a very different set of laws. From transgressive border-crossers, to ever-vigilant border patrol guards, to touristic sightseers, the border scene in Mission Kashmir allows us to try on a variety of viewing positions. Starting with its title-sequence, Mission Kashmir addresses Bollywood audience’s historical relationship to the image of Kashmir. Kashmir, for popular Indian cinema, has long been the provider of picturesque landscapes, of shikaras (houseboats) gliding on Dal Lake, of bejeweled Kashmiri beauties. Yet, that Technicolor Kashmir now only exists on the cinema screen, or, as the late Kashmiri– American poet Agha Shahid Ali would say, on the postcard in our mailbox.

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The first frame of Mission Kashmir includes the quintessential shikara floating on tranquil waters. The boat explodes as the title sequence begins. The accompanying song, “Dhua dhua” (Smoke, smoke everywhere), is a postlapsarian dirge lamenting the end of paradise. To whom does the voice of mourning belong? To Kashmir? To popular film? To honeymooners? This song reappears later in the film, functioning as a chorus commenting on events as they unfold. After Altaaf returns to Indian Kashmir from across the border, his childhood sweetheart Sufiya (Preity Zinta) takes him on a shikara. In the subsequent song, Sufiya asks a traumatized Altaaf to look at the landscape through her eyes (mere aakhon se dekho zara). As Altaaf “looks through Sufiya’s eyes,” we the viewers look through the eyes of a ghostly genre. The shikara sequence leads to a fantasy sequence that is pure old-school Bollywood. Sufiya and Altaaf sing and dance against backdrops that make no attempt to hide the artifice of a Mumbai film studio. The perky girlfriend flirting with the traumatized terrorist might equally be an older Bollywood genre pleading with the narrative gaze of Mission Kashmir. Altaaf’s border-crossing, then, must be placed alongside this filmsong and the opening sequence – all sequences that explicitly invoke the visual pleasure afforded by the Kashmiri picturesque even as it withholds that pleasure in order to present a narrative of national integration. The borderland which Altaaf is seen crossing, thus, can also be seen as the borderland between Bollywood’s Kashmiri romance and Kashmiri terrorism.

Uncanny Border If the Wagah–Attari checkpoint is an uncanny space where “Hamara Bharat Mahan” and “Long Live Pakistan” are coextensive with each other, then the borderland also produces what Ranabir Samaddar eloquently terms “pangs of proximity”: [We] know them so much, they also know us. We know our mutual betrayal, hopes, despair. Thousands of people cross the border and ferry news from here to there, there to here. Our rivers, ecoagricultural regions, transportation networks, clan ties, affinal linkages, remain spread across the entire land. Above all, we know what they write, what they think, how they think, they too know of

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us. To deceive ourselves of the pangs of proximity, we have changed categories into opposites: migration is infiltration, border trade is smuggling, empathy is interference, policy prescription is area studies, neighbourhood is ‘near abroad’.17

In Bombay border films, the borderland is near-abroad, the borderland figure almost foreign. The idea of the uncanny borderland is clearly brought to light in a film such as Fiza. In his first directorial venture, the film critic Khalid Mohammed abandons the romantic plot in order to explore the relationship between a brother and a sister that is ruptured by the communal riots of 1992–93. Fiza (Karisma Kapoor) searches for her brother, Amaan (Hrithik Roshan), who has been missing since the riots during the first half of the film. After learning through a website that someone who resembles her brother has been seen with some terrorist group operating near the India–Pakistan border, Fiza travels from Mumbai to rural Rajasthan. The subsequent border sequence fits awkwardly with the rest of the film. While the lowermiddle-class Fiza wears shalwar-kameezes in all the Mumbai sequences, she adopts the dress of a Lonely Planet tourist as she travels through small Rajasthani towns and villages. Her jeans, sneakers, and backpack seem more in keeping with an upper-class, westernized, urban aesthetic. Even her ‘ethnic’ Indian shawl is reminiscent of a tourist’s trophy scoured from any one of thousands of shops catering to foreign visitors all over urban India. Fiza’s costume only serves to further highlight the difference between urban India and its rural limit. The Mumbai resident is a foreigner to the Rajasthani borderland. The difference between her Hindi and the language of the locals (a Bollywood version of Rajasthani Hindi) only heightens the difference between India and its internal Others. If we are asked to look on the borderland through Fiza’s gaze as a tourist, then the song “Mehboob mere mehboob” that is an integral part of the border sequence further heightens our position as consumers of a spectacle. 17

Ranabir Samaddar, “The History that Partition Creates,” in Reflections on Partition in the East, ed. Ranabir Samaddar (Calcutta: Calcutta Research Group, 1997): 23.

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It is an irony of subcontinental geography that part of the India– Pakistan border runs through two regions most hyped as touristic destinations for both Indians and foreigners alike: Rajasthan and Kashmir. The romance of Rajasthan and Kashmir is at the root of Bollywood’s inevitably uncanny border. Since Independence, Indian tourism discourse has focused on these regions incessantly as popular destinations for foreign visitors. For foreign tourists, what, other than the Taj Mahal and elephants, can be more evocative of India than the Rajasthani villager in his colorful tie-and-dye turban or folk dancers in bright ghagra-cholis? Yet let us not forget that these images are also used to lure Indians to be tourists in their in own country, to ‘discover India’, as it were. Mission Kashmir and Fiza reiterate popular Indian ideas about certain regions. Rajasthan is the land of Rajputs, sand dunes, camels, palaces, and legends.18 Kashmir is a paradisiacal valley, a land of shikaras and Kashmiri beauties in ornate headdresses. These are the visual and cultural stereotypes exploited by Bollywood in order to valorize “our” land on “our” side of the border. In a filmsong such as “Mehboob mere mehboob” (“Beloved, my beloved”), shot in the Rajasthani desert, the camera’s gaze situates us, viewers in India and its diasporas, as vicarious tourists. “Mehboob mere mehboob” begs the following question: can the eroticized figure of the Rajasthani dancer, in turn, function as an uncomplicated symbol of Indianness? Fiza follows the female protagonist’s rediscovery of her missing brother, Amaan, in the aftermath of the 1992–93 riots, and the eventual death of the brother in the hands of his sister. The film is overdetermined in its structure. The conclusion, a flashback to the first scene, reiterates the circular structure of the film. Repetition with difference, Fiza implies, is all one can expect of communal conflict 18

In a public lecture titled “Rajasthan in the Indian Imagination” held at the Harvard South Asia Humanities Seminar on 8 February 2002, the literary critic Meenakshi Mukherjee argued that Bengali writers in the nineteenth century often made use of quasi-historical accounts of Rajasthan as a way of inventing a tradition of resistance to colonial and/or Muslim political aggression. Moreover, Bengali writers often used colonial British chronicles of Rajasthan as their source material. Doubly refracted through the British colonial lens and the Bengali literary imagination, figures such as the beautiful queen Padmini or the valiant Rajput warriors became symbols of a past and future “Indian” glory.

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in India. The film’s border sequence, as we shall see, is part of that structure of repetition. The intermission that stands between the two halves of the standard three-hour Bollywood film is a sort of an internal border within the filmic narrative. As Lalitha Gopalan astutely reminds us, the Bollywood intermission allows for at least two moments of beginning in a standard three-hour film. Rather than dismiss the intermission as a vestige of an earlier, more primitive, cinema of attractions, Gopalan alerts us to its function as a powerful interrupter of narrative. The intermission, like the filmsong, ruptures traditional filmic narrative. Most filmmakers attempt to arrive at some sort of narrative climax before freezing the frame for the requisite break. The intermission itself in an Indian movie theatre, when the lights are back on and popcorn and soft-drink vendors descend among the audience, is a sort of borderland, a checkpoint between one part of the narrative and another. In Fiza, the intermission sign is superimposed on the image of the heroine uncovering her brother’s face. This configuration of the two figures facing each other will be repeated towards the end of the film when Fiza and Amaan stand face to face with a rifle bridging the distance between the two. Both of these scenes refer to other famous Bollywood scenes. The unveiling of the shrouded male face echoes numerous such unveilings of female faces by male characters in Hindi films. This is the over-used wedding-night (suhaag raat) trope, a marker of male sexual aggression. The concluding scene, quite obviously, is a reference to the ending of Mehboob Khan’s 1957 classic, Mother India. That film ends with the mother (Nargis) shooting her renegade son (Sunil Dutt) – Mother India kills her errant son to safeguard the nation. In Fiza, the mother, Nishat Bi (Jaya Bachchan), commits suicide when she realizes that her son has become a murderer. Fiza is decidedly not a confrontation between a nation (figured as mother) and its citizen (figured as her son). It is now a confrontation between the citizendaughter and the citizen-son. Unlike Dil Se, Henna, or Gadar, the conflict between national integration and secessionist movements is not narrated through a cross-border romance. The terrorist and the loyal citizen share a filial bond. But how do we understand the unveiling of Amaan by Fiza, a scene that foreshadows the film’s final allusion to the Mehboob

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Khan classic? To understand Amaan’s unveiling in its extra-diegetic context, we must first see Fiza’s action as a continuation of a series of unveilings that take place in the “Mehboob mere mehboob” song sequence. After all, we catch glimpses of Amaan partly hidden behind a black shawl while a dance spectacle unfolds in the borderland. It is at the end of the dance sequence that Fiza finally discovers her missing brother. Fiza and Amaan’s confrontation is, in fact, triangulated by the fleeting presence of a third character, the dancer played by Sushmita Sen. If Amaan, the terrorist, does not quite represent alterity in the film, it does not follow that all differences are somehow evacuated from the film. In an older Bollywood formulation, the heroine might have found her opposite in the vamp. The former Miss Universe, Sushmita Sen, appears as a guest star to perform the hit “Mehboob mere mehboob” dance number that takes place in the Rajasthani borderland. This song sequence uses a number of easily recognizable codes for representing India’s internal Other, the familiar stranger, on screen. Up to the 1970s, Bollywood often relied on the figure of the vamp – a cabaret dancer, a tawaif (prostitute), a gangster’s moll – to provide musical entertainment of a more sexually explicit nature. The heroine might sing and dance, but the vamp wore more revealing clothes, smoked, drank, and sang in bolder terms of sexual desire. The heroine and vamp merged into one figure from the 1980s onwards when lead actresses increasingly performed the ‘vampy’ number in a film. Yet the vamp does not quite disappear from the Hindi screen. In recent years, the vampy dance has been replaced by what is called the “item number,” performed by popular actresses, models, and beauty queens who only make a cameo appearance in the film. An ‘item’, in filmi Mumbai slang, is a sexy woman. Sushmita Sen’s item number in Fiza, then, provides for the older form of entertainment, one that cannot be expected for diegetic or extra-diegetic reasons from the heroine. Fiza as backpacking tourist in search of her brother may not perform a sexy dance in the borderland. The guest appearance by Sushmita Sen, which seemingly stands outside the narrative, works precisely at the heart of the film. The veiled woman in the Rajasthani desert – dressed according to Mumbai’s vision of the Middle East, using lyrics that are coded as Muslim, and echoing the role of such legen-

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dary screen vamps/dancers as Helen – dances in the space where the patriotic citizen will reclaim her terrorist brother. As a dancer clad in diaphanous harem pants and a veil, Sushmita Sen performs against sand dunes in a perfect articulation of what Samaddar calls the “near abroad.” The borderland dancer is a conflation of the colonial idea of the nautch-girl, the orientalist fantasy of the harem girl, and the urban Indian bourgeoisie’s libidinous vision of the real ‘folk’. We consume our internal Other at the very moment we are asked to identify with our national culture. Women’s bodies (some dead, others repatriated), gyrating Rajasthani dancers, and lush Kashmiri hillsides represent the borderland between India and Pakistan. Not unlike a proud display of flags and military rituals at the Wagah–Attari checkpoint, Indian popular cinema represents a borderland ripe for tourism. Or, in some cases, it represents a borderland that was once ripe for tourism but can now only be enjoyed and remembered on screen. Instead of a consolidation of Indianness at the LOC, such nostalgic consumptions of the nation’s internal Other at the borderland only serves as a reminder that the line between home and elsewhere is irreducibly built upon internal lines of difference. Or, to borrow Amar’s words from Dil Se, the viewer’s consumption of “ourselves” at the border does not shorten the doori between “us” that gives one the excuse for pursuing another. Instead, such a consumption conveniently maintains – even reinforces – the difference, or the doori, between Amar and Meghna, between the citizen/viewer and the borderland, between an older genre of Bombay cinema and the newer films produced by Bollywood.

WORKS CITED Aggarwal, Ravina. “At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo-Himalayan Village,” American Ethnologist 28.3 (2001): 549–73. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). Balibar, Etienne. “World Borders, Political Borders,” P M L A 117.1 (January 2002): 71–78. Barnouw, Erik, & S. Krishnaswamy. Indian Film (New York: Oxford U P , 1980).

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Bose, Sugata, & Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1999). Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000). Calderón, Héctor, & José David Saldívar, ed. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1991). Chakravarty, Sumita S. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–1987 (Austin: U of Texas P , 1993). Dwyer, Rachel, & Divia Patel. Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (London: Reaktion, 2002). Faiz, Faiz Ahmed. The Rebel’s Silhouette, tr. Agha Shahid Ali (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1991). Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988). Gokulsingh, K. Moti, & Wimal Dissanayake. Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1998). Gopalan, Lalitha. Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2003). Hazarika, Sanjoy. Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, India’s East and Bangladesh (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000). Kaur, Raminder, & John Hutnyk, ed. Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics (London: Zed, 1999). Manto, Sadaat Hasan. Kingdom’s End and Other Stories, tr. Khalid Hasan (London: Verso, 1987). Michaelsen, Scott, & David E. Johnson, ed. Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997). Moviemag (April 2004; North American edition). Nandy, Ashis, ed. The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1998). Prasad, M. Madhava. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000). Samaddar, Ranabir, ed. Reflections on Partition in the East (Calcutta: Calcutta Research Group, 1997). Valicha, Kishore. The Moving Image: A Study of Indian Cinema (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1988). Vasudevan, Ravi S. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2000). ——. “National pasts and futures: Indian cinema,” Screen 41.1 (Spring 2000): 119–25.

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Afterword

A

in this book are testaments to a situation in which communal identities have taken on added, and often dangerous, resonance in contemporary India, they also bear witness to the durability – indeed, the inevitability – of connection, transgression and difference. As has often been noted, the appeal of communalism is distinctly limited. Not only are there logical shortcomings, but the casteist and regional profile of Hindu nationalism has meant that there have always been areas, both geographical and emotional, it has been unable to reach. Commentators have remarked on its failure fully to extend much beyond the Brahmin and Kshatriya castes or to spread far beyond its power bases in northern India.1 Similarly, although economic benefits may have accrued from the liberalization of India’s economy in the 1990s – presided over by Congress and B J P governments alike – they have in no way been distributed evenly, a factor seen as in large measure responsible for the B J P ’s surprise defeat in the general election of 2004. Of this election result Arundhati Roy has commented that “It cannot but be seen as a decisive vote against communalism and neo-liberalism’s economic ‘reforms’.”2 Moreover, the move to embrace global capitalism has exposed the paradoxes at the heart of Hindu nationalist 1

LTHOUGH THE TEXTS UNDER SCRUTINY

Stuart Corbridge & John Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalism, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2000): 193. See also The B J P and the Compulsions of Politics in India, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen & Christophe Jaffrelot (New Delhi, Oxford U P , 1998). 2 Arundhati Roy, “Let us hope the darkness has passed,” The Guardian (May 14 2004).

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attitudes to aspects of ‘modernization’ which, while not in essence Indian, might operate to the benefit of certain strategically useful interest-groups.3 Always an acute observer of double standards, Roy has made searching connections between India’s increased openness to global multinationals and the rise of communalist politics. The recourse to religious identity seems to palliate the “cultural insult” of a colonial history while at the same time obscuring India’s new neocolonial relationship with foreign companies. As she points out, the Bal Thackeray who proscribed birthday parties and Valentine’s Day as attacks on Indian culture was also the signatory of a thirty-million-dollar deal with Rebecca Mark of Enron; Indian intellectuals today feel radical when they condemn communalism, but not many people talk about the link between privatisation, globalisation and communalism. I think [privatisation and communalism] have to be addressed together, not separately. They are both two sides of the same coin. Growing religious fundamentalism is directly linked to globalisation and privatisation. The Indian government is talking of selling its entire power sector to foreign multinationals, but when the consequences of that become hard to manage, the government immediately starts saying ‘Should we build the Ram temple in Ayodhya?’ Everyone goes off baying in that direction. Meanwhile contracts are signed.4

Inequalities remain stark, for all the celebration of India’s economic, technological and military achievements. As Aijaz Ahmad has remarked, Hindutva lacks that “class radicalism […] which could offer the immiserated anything more substantial than the intoxicants of religious ideology and fascist spectacle […] Hence its concentration on symbolic politics and its floundering on the substantive issues.”5 Now that the language of communalism has entered the political mainstream, it is too much to hope that it will be put to 3 See Thomas Blom Hansen, “The Ethics of Hindutva and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in The B J P , ed. Hansen & Jaffrelot, 291–314. 4 Arundhati Roy, The Chequebook and the Cruise-Missile (London: Harper Perennial, 2004): 29. 5 Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika, 1996): 305.

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rest simply by a change of government, not least because of the Congress Party’s well-known forays into divisive politics and its penchant for the politically expedient. In the end, despite the communalist vision, Indian society remains both heterogeneous and heterodox, and there is no natural link between diversity and ethnic or cultural antagonism. Fresh reasons for suspicion of the ‘Other’ will undoubtedly continue to be circulated in a global climate where the so-called ‘War on Terror’ has made every neighbour a potential enemy and where India’s Prevention of Terrorism Act has increased the legal cover for human-rights abuses of all kinds. However, India is not alone in facing the modern dilemma of rights versus security. It is to be hoped, however, that those particular pressures that are always present in the wary stand-off between the nuclear neighbours in South Asia can be creatively sublimated in the cultural arena at least, and that the kinds of multiplicity everywhere apparent in art and literature can continue to find expression in the work of India’s writers, whatever their ethnic or religious background.

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Notes on Contributors

A S H O K B E R Y is Senior Lecturer in English at London Metropolitan University. He is a contributing editor to Wasafiri and co-editor of Comparing Postcolonial Literature (Macmillan, 2000). His monograph Postcolonial Poetry and Cultural Translation: Reflexive Worlds will be published by Palgrave in 2006. E L L E K E B O E H M E R is the Hildred Carlile Professor in Literatures in English at Royal Holloway College, University of London. She has published three well-received novels, Screens Against the Sky (1990; shortlisted for the David Higham Prize), An Immaculate Figure (1993) and Bloodlines (2000), as well as Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford University Press, 1995), and the monograph Empire, the National and the Postcolonial (Oxford University Press, 2002). She has edited the anthology Empire Writing, 1870–1918 (1998) and the UK bestseller Scouting for Boys (2004), as well as Cornelia Sorabji’s 1934 India Calling (with Naella Grew; Trent Editions, 2004). In 2005, Elleke Boehmer’s new monograph Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester University Press) will be published, as well as an expanded 10th anniversary edition of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. S H I R L E Y C H E W is Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds. She has published widely in the field of postcolonial literature and is the founding editor of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writing, the first issue of which appeared in 2001. Her work in progress includes the Blackwell History of Postcolonial Literature. R A L P H J. C R A N E is Associate Professor of English and Head of the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He has published widely in the field of colonial and postcolonial literatures and is currently editing a series of

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Raj novels for Oxford University Press India, the first of which are Love Besieged by Charles E. Pearce (2003) and Lilamani by Maud Diver (2004). Since 2004 he has been co-editor of the New Literatures Review. A N S H U M A N A. M O N D A L is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Leicester. He is the author of Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (Routledge Curzon, 2003) and Amitav Ghosh (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). P E T E R M O R E Y is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. He is the author of Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and Rohinton Mistry (Manchester University Press, 2004), as well as various essays and reviews. He specializes in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory, with a particular interest in South Asia. S H A R M I L A S E N is Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University. She specializes in anglophone literatures from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. S U J A L A S I N G H teaches postcolonial literature at the University of Southampton. She has published several articles on South Asian literature and popular culture and is completing a monograph titled Postcolonial Children: Representing the Nation in South Asian Literature. A L E X T I C K E L L is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He has published widely on colonial and postcolonial literature, and is the editor of Selections from Bengaliana, a collection of writing by Shoshee Chunder Dutt, (Trent Editions, 2005). His work in progress includes a study of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, to be published by Routledge in 2006. A M I N A Y A Q I N lectures in Urdu and postcolonial studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interests are in gender and women’s writing. She has written on feminist Urdu poetry, culture and ideology in contemporary Pakistan and her work in progress includes a monograph on gender and intertextuality in Urdu poetry.

Index

N O T E : Proper names have been indexed under the final element of the name, regardless of language of origin. 1857 Rebellion 6 1975–77 State of Emergency xvii 1992–92 riots 218–19; see also com-

munal violence 1999 India–Pakistan war, representation in film 214

Advani, L.K. xx Ahmad, Aijaz xx–xxi, 89–90, 93–94, 226

Alvi, Mohammed xxv Anand, Mulk Raj 29 Anderson, Benedict xxi, 40, 95, 178 Anderson, Perry 55 Andrade, Susan 59 antisecularism xix–xx, xxii, 2; see also secularism antisemitism 19 Anushilan Samiti 46 Army of Shiva see Shiv Sena Arya Samaj xiii, xiv, 26, 34–35 Aryan Hindu, perception as origin of India identity 124 Aryanism xiii–xiv, 30, 34–45 Aryavata 15–17, 25–50, 120 autobiography see life-writing

Ayodha, demolition of Babri Masjid ix, xxii, 62, 95, 141, 207–208; literary representations of xxiv–xxv, 61–63, 65, 67 Babri Masjid see Ayodha Bakhtin, Mikhail 123, 126 Bal, Mieke 71–72, 87 Baldwin, Shauna Singh 181, 193–95 Balibar, Étienne 202–203 Banarsi, Rashid 93–94 Banerjea, Surendranath 12 Bangladesh 169–70, 174, 176 Bankim see Chatterjee, Bankimchandra Bano, Shah xviii Bengal Renaissance xxi, 13 Bengali nationalism xii–xiii; see also Bankim; Bengal Renaissance Bhabha, Homi xxi–xxii Bhagavad-Gita 152 Bharatiya Janata Party xi, xvii, xviii, xxiii, 21, 42, 141–42, 146, 225 Bharatiya 38 bhasha literatures xxvii–xviii Bhatt, Chetan 28–29, 33

232 Bhindranwale, Sant Jarnail Singh xvii; see also Sikh separatism biography see life-writing BJP see Bharatiya Janata Party Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar 44 Bollywood see Indian cinema; Indian film industry Bombay riots 73, 95, 141 ,146, 207– 208, 218–19; see also communal violence Bombay 73, 141–42, 146–48; literary representations of 81–88, 143 Border 197–98, 211, 212, 214 Bose, Subhas Chandra 1 Bourdieu, Pierre 175–77 Brahmo Samaj 34 Buddhism, viewed as offshoot of Hinduism 42–43 Calcutta, literary representations of 163, 168–70, 173–77 Cama, Madame Bhikaiji 27 capital, transnational 53, 55 caste 45–46, 119 Certeau, Michel de 166–67, 171, 174 Chandra, Satish xxiii Chandra, Vikram xxvii–xxviii Chatterjee, Bankimchandra xii, xiii, 1, 65; Anandamath xiii, 32–33; elite nationalism 46; Krsnacaritra 33; use of Puranic myth 34 Chatterjee, Partha xii, xviii–xix, 1–2, 32, 46, 116–17, 120 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra see Chatterjee, Bankimchandra Chaudhuri, Amit xxvi, 82 Chhalia 207 Chopra, Vidhu Vinod, Mission Kashmir 198–99, 215–17, 219 colonial cartography 13

ALTERNATIVE INDIAS colonial policy: educational and administrative xii; linguistic policy 96, 98; religious 6–7 colonialism: use of Aryanism to justify 36; use of communalism xv, xxix, 14, 183 communal violence ix–x, xxii, 21–22, 62, 73, 95, 141, 146, 162–63, 168, 173, 180, 208, 218–19; following Partition xvi–xvii, 56, 206 communalism: definition of 4; opposed to nationalism 2, 26; politics of 142; and Sikhism 183; use of by colonialism xv, xxix, 14, 183 communalist nationalism 189 communalization of contemporary Indian politics 178 Congress Party xiii, xv, xvi; and communalism xvii, 227; Congress nationalism 50; and inter-communal tolerance, xvi; nation as territorial concept, xxi; and secularism, xvi, xviii, 63; Surat split of xiii Constituent Asssembly 1946 xvi Corbridge, Stuart & John Harriss xix–xx cultural memory 71–72, 90–94 cultural nation, location in private female space 65 Dangarembga, Tsitsi 62, 66 Dāsimayya, Dēvara 121 degeneration see race fitness democracy, central to idea of India 94

‘departure-phase’ nationalism 32– 33, 39–40 Derrida, Jacques 178 Desai, Anita: Clear Light of Day 91, 105; In Custody 89–92, 100–11; In Custody, film version 111n.

Index Desai, Manmohan, Chhalia 207 Deshpande, Shashi, Small Remedies 72–88 Dharwadker, Vinay 124, 127, 128, 137

Dhavan, Rajeev xxiv Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield 75; Great Expectations 27–28 Dil Se 198–99, 204–207, 211, 222 Diver, Maud 30 divide and rule see colonialism, use of communalism dress, and identity 44 Dutt, Romesh Chunder 1 Dutta, J.P.: Border 197–98, 211, 212, 214; Refugee 198, 212–14, 215; LOC: Kargil 198, 214–15 Dwivedi, Chandraprakash, Pinjar (The Cage) 198, 210–11 East Pakistan see Bangladesh education, and language 96–97, 99– 100, 108 Ek Prem Katha see Anil Sharma Emecheta, Buchi 54 English language: Indian literature in xxvi–xxix; role in post-Independence Indian life xxviii, 99; what it represents in India 123 English literature, relationship with Indian-English literature 105 Ezekiel, Nissim 82–83 Fabianism 47–49 Faiz, Faiz Ahmad 90–91, 104–105, 205

feminism 62; see also liberation of women; nationalism, and gender; nation, and female identity; Indian nationalism, female perspective on

233 feminization of Hindus in literature 187–91 Fiza 198, 211, 218–22 folk culture and national identity 92 folklore 123 Forster, E.M.: The Longest Journey 48; Howards End 59 Foucault, Michel xxii Freud, Sigmund 187–88 Gandhi, Indira: 1975–77 State of Emergency xvii; assassination xvii; and communalism xvii Gandhi, Mohandas K. xvi, 1; agrarian vision of India xix; and dress 44; as ‘father of the Nation’ 67; on Hindi–Urdu debate 98; influence of writings on Indian-English literature 29; Ram Rajya 50 Gandhi, Rajiv xviii ‘Gandhi-novel’ 29 Ganguly, Debjani xxv Geertz, Clifford 175 gendering of religious groups 184– 95

ghazal form 91; see also Urdu literature; Faiz Ahmad Faiz Ghose, Aurobindo xii, 1, 46–47 Ghose, Barindrakumar 46–47 Ghosh, Amitav: In An Antique Land 171–72; and Indian diaspora xxx; literary representations of Bangladesh 170, 174, 176; The Shadow Lines 161–80, 203, 214 Ghosh, Sarath Kumar, The Prince of Destiny 30–31, 33, 38–39, 41, 44–45, 47–48 globalization 53, 55 Golwalkar, Madhav Sadashiv xiv, xxi; see also Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

234 Gopalan, Lalitha 220 Grewal, Inderpal 66 Gujarat, communal violence in ix, xxii, 21, 95 Gupta, Jyontirindra Das 96–97 Gurjar, Vasant Dattareya xxv Hedgewar, Keshav Baliram xiv, 43; see also Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Heehs, Peter 46–47 Henna 198–99, 207–208, 210 Heuze, Gerard xxii Hindi 95; history of 96–100; seen as Hindu language 99; seen as Indian national language 93, 99 Hindi–Urdu debate 90–100 Hindu Mahasabha xiii Hindu myth xx–xxi, 121; see also Bhagavad-Gita; Mahabharata; Ramayana Hindu nationalism: Brahminic bias 124; and caste ideology 119; equated to Indian nationalism 2, 5, 18; and Hindu primordialism 32, 34– 39, 118; limitations of reach 225; as part of Indian nationalism 26; and school education xxiii; and physical training xiv, xxii, 47; resurgence in recent Indian history 115, 142; as threat to Parsi community 142, 156–57; see also Hindutva Hinduism 102 Hindus, stereotyping of 185–87 Hindustani music and musicians 74n., 78–80 Hindustani 93, 95, 98 Hindutva, and secularism in the Indian constitution 8 Hindutva xii, xiv, xix–xxii, 1–2, 48, 115–16, 118, 138, 142, 146, 226 historiography xii–xiii, 116–18, 172

ALTERNATIVE INDIAS history, and nationalism xii–xiii, xv, xxiii–xxiv, 10, 34, 42, 128 history-making 162 homoeroticism 55–56, 60–65, 67 homogenization of idea of nation 116–18 Hunter–Wilson, William 35 Husain, Intizar 110 idea of nation, communal identities and 178 Indian cinema 197–222 Indian Constitution of 1947 xviii; linguistic policy 98–99; and secularism 8, 116 Indian diaspora, writers of xxx–xxxi Indian economy 225–26 Indian film industry: regional language films, 199; Hindi films, reception outside India, 200 Indian literature, language, xxvi–xxix Indian Mutiny see 1857 Rebellion Indian nation: as composite of religious communities 11–12, 16–21; as political concept 12–13; as territorial concept xxi, 12–16 Indian nationalism: and elitism 45– 48; female perspective on 55; failure of 189; ‘moment of departure’ 32–33, 39–40 Indian novel, development of the xxviii, 29–50 Indian tourist industry 219 Indian-English literature: marketing of xix; and notions of authenticity xxvii–xxviii; othering of xxix–xxx; and race theory 37–38; representation of Indianness xxix–xx; representation in West xix; and Romanticism 105; use of romance form 30–31, 58–59

Index India–Pakistan war of 1971, representation in film 197–98 individualism 61, 64 intermissions, function in Indian film 220

Islam, representation as recent religion 102 Islam, and Urdu 93, 99 Jaffrelot, Christophe, 38 Jameson, Fredric 59–60 Japan, as exemplar in early Indian nationalism 42–43 Japanese martial arts 47 Japanese militarism 43–45 Johnstone, Harry 42 Kant, Immanuel 152, 155–56, 158–59 Kapoor, Randhir, Henna 198–99, 207–208, 210 Kapur, Manju 55–68; A Married Woman 55, 60–68; Difficult Daughters 55–61 Karmasutra 67 Kashmir xix, 162, 177, 215–17 Kesavan, Mukul xvi Khalistan see Sikh separatism Khan, Mehboob, Mother India 220– 21

Khan, Sayyid Ahmad 96 Khilnani, Sunil x, xvii, 49, 94, 118, 120

Kipling, Rudyard 184–85 Knesević, Djurda 54 Kolgaokar, Uttam 82–83 Krishnavarma, Shyamji 26–27, 28, 45

Kshatriya xxii Lakhon mein Ek 208–10 language: as carrier of religious identity and national loyalty 95, 108;

235 comparative philology and racial interconnectedness 35; conflation with religion 100; and nationalism 2; and print culture 102–203; question in India, 90, 95–100 Lelyveld, David 97–98 liberation of women, compared with liberation from colonialism 53–55 life-writing 49, 72, 75–76 LOC: Kargil 198, 214–15 Lollywood see Pakistani film industry Lyall, Sir Alfred 42 Lyotard, Jean–François 56n. Madan, T.N. xviii–xix Mahabharata xx, 31, 87; see also Bhagavad-Gita Maharashtrian state elections 141–42 Man, Paul de 170–71 Maniratnam, Dil Se (From the Heart) 198–99, 204–207, 211, 222 Manto, Sadaat Hasan, Toba Tek Singh 208

masculinity, political power and 183–84, 188 Masters, John 184 memory and identity 75; see also cultural identity Merchant, Ismail 111n. Mir, Raza, Lakhon mein Ek (One in Thousands) 208–10 Mission Kashmir 198–99, 215–17, 219 Mistry, Rohinton, Family Matters 142–59 Mitra, S.M. 30–33, 38–40, 45–47 Mohammed, Khalid, Fiza (Air) 198, 211, 218–22 Mosse, George 185, 192 Mother India 220–21 Mughal empire 92

236 Mukherjee, Meenakshi xxvi–xxvii Müller, Friedrich Max 35–36 Mumbai see Bombay music see Hindustani music; ghazal form Muslims: literary representations of 188–89, 191–92; population in contemporary India 89, 96, 107, 181; representation as debauched 107; representation as martial 184 Muslim migration, effect on Urdu literature 94 Muslim women, representation of in literature and film 191–92, 221–22 myth, Hindu xx–xxi, 121; see also Bhagavad-Gita; Mahabharata; Ramayana Naipaul, V.S. xxx Nandy, Ashis xvi–xx, 29, 117 Nasreen, Taslima: exile from Bangladesh xxiv–xxv; Lajja xxiv nation: analogy with family 62, 67, 204; and communal identities 178; and female identity 58, 67; role in world politics 53 national allegory 59–60 nationalism: and cultural essentialism 3; and gender 53–68; and history xii–xiii, xv, xxiii–xxiv, 10, 34, 42; and loss of individual identity 59; and sexual symbolism 183–84, 188, 191 nationalist discourse 3 nationalist fiction, village-pastoral 40

nationalist historiography, homogenization of idea of nation 116–18 nationalists, progressive v. conservative 10–12

ALTERNATIVE INDIAS Nehru, Jawaharlal xv–xvi; An Autobiography, 26–28; N.’s attitude to early nationalists 28, 45; The Discovery of India 25–26; and Fabianism 48–49; and historiography 49–50; and multi-lingual administration 98; influence of N.’s writings on Indian-English literature 29; N.’s life-writing 26–28, 49; N.’s literary taste 27, 29; N.’s model of Indian identity xv, 50; and nationalism 28; N.’s rhetoric 50; and secularism xv, xvii, xviii, 3–4, 50, 116; and social utopianism 48–49; Western influence on N.’s nationalism 64 neocolonialism 54 Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat 59 nostalgia: and cultural memory 92; and identity politics 72 ‘othering’ of Indian-English fiction xxix–xxx Pakistani culture 91 Pakistani film industry 200, 208–10, 214

Pakistani literature 181; see also Urdu literature Pakistani nationalism 91, 93 Pal, Bipinchandra 1, 10, 16–21 pan-Asiatic alliance 42–43; see also Japan Pandey, Gyanendra xviii, 3, 11, 26, 116–18 Parsi community: culture 142–44, 149, 156–57; literary representations of 193–94; reasons for decrease 157; threatened by Hindu majoritarianism 144, 156–57

Index Partition xvi–xvii, 180, 206–207; effect on idea of Urdu in India 94; literary representations of 56–57, 59–60, 168–70, 181–95; representation in film 198, 207, 212–14; violence xvi–xvii, 56, 206 petit récit 56 philology, and claims of racial interconnectedness 35 physical training 43–47; see also racefitness Pinjar 198, 210–11 post-independence nation states 54 print culture, potential for linguistic divisiveness 102–103 Pritam, Amrita 210–11 Puranas 31, 33 race theory 19–20, 35–38, 44; in the Indian-English novel, 37–38; see also Aryanism, antisemitism race-fitness 35–37, 41–45 Radcliffe Boundary Commission 198, 203–204; see also Partition Rai, Lala Lajpat xiii, 1 Raj see colonialism Ram Rajya 50 Ramanujan, A.K. 115–16, 118, 120– 38; concept of reflexivity, 122–26, 138; R.’s syntax 133–37; as translator 121, 123, 136 Ramayana xx–xxi, xxiv, 210–11 Ramphele, Mampele 54 Rao, Raja xxvi, 29 Rashtriya xiv Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh xiv–xv, xxiii, 43–44, 95 reflexivity 122–26, 138 Refugee 198, 212–14, 215 regeneration see race fitness

237 regional languages xxvi–xviii, 13,14, 85

regional nationalism 30 religious communities and national unity 11 religious fundamentalism 53, 55, 62–63, 66–67 renaming of Indian cities 146 representation of Indianness in Indian-English literature xxix–xx Romanticism, and nostalgia 92, 105 Roy, Arundhati 56, 225–26 RSS see Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Rushdie, Salman xi, xxii; literature in Indian languages xxvi; literary representations of Bombay 82; Midnight’s Children 60, 212; The Moor’s Last Sigh xxiv–xxv, 142n., 147n.; responses to in India xxiv– xxv, xxx, 147n. Said, Edward 102 Samaddar, Ranabir 217–18 Sangh Parivar xiv, 21 Sanskritists 36–37 sanatan dharm xii Saraswati, Dayananda xiii, 34, 46; see also Arya Samaj Sarvarkar, Vinayak D. xiv, 28, 39, 48, 119 Schlegel, Friedrich 35 Scruton, Roger 152, 156 secular nationalism 3–4, 116–17; and women 56, 60, 63 secularism xv, 1–22; and communalism 4–5; definition of 4; and the India constitution 8, 116; see also antisecularism secularization 9 self-fashioning 75, 81

238 sexuality in Indian culture 67 Sharma, Anil, Ek Prem Katha (Traitor: A Love Story) 198, 213–14 Sharma, R.S. xxiii Shields, Carol 54 Shiv Sena xi, xxii–xxiii, 72, 87, 141– 42, 146–49 Shradhanand, Swami xiii–xiv Shrivprakash, H.S. xxv Sidhwa, Bapsi 181, 193–94 Sikh nationalism 189 Sikh population in India 181 Sikh separatism xvii–xviii, xix; Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale xvii Sikhism and masculinity 184–90 Sikhs, perception as martial 184 Singh, Khushwant, Train to Pakistan 181–95 Sinha, K.K. 30, 37–38 Smith, Anthony 55 Society of Nobles see Arya Samaj Steel, Flora Annie 30 Subaltern Studies 117 Tagore, Rabindranath 65 Tamil poetry 133 Taylor, Isaac 36 technology, effect on warfare 47, 48 territorial concept of nation xxi, 12– 16; see also colonial cartography; Partition; Radcliffe Boundary Commission terrorism: possibilities of technology 47; representation in film 198–99, 204–207, 211, 215–17, 220–21 Thackerary, Bal xxiv, 142, 146, 147n., 226

Thapar, Romila xxiii Three-Language Formula 99–100 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar xiii, 1 tradition and modernity 58

ALTERNATIVE INDIAS Urdu 89–111; and education in India 99–100; history of 93, 96–100; position in contemporary India 99–111; represented as minority language in India 93; represented as Muslim language 93, 99; represented as Pakistani national language 93; tradition 110 Urdu literature, 90–92, 103–11, 204; history of 93; see also Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Rashid Banarsi Vajpayee, Atal Behari xvii; see also Bharatiya Janata Party Vanaik, Achin 9 varna see caste Vedas xiii, 34–35, 44 Vedic Aryanism see Aryanism Vera, Yvonne 56, 62 Victorian novels 75 village-pastoral 29 Vishva Hindu Parishad ix, xi Voltaire, Candide 155–56 Wagah–Attari checkpoint 199, 201– 202, 217 ‘War on Terror’ 227 warfare and technology 47, 48 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney 47–48 Wells, H.G. 47–48 women, symbolic importance to idea of nation 206–207, 208–10, 214–15, 220

World Hindu Council see Vishva Hindu Parishad Yatras xx, 66–67 Zavos, John 6, 10n. Zoroastrianism 143, 150, 154, 157–58; see also Parsi culture