CHAPTER V

POLITICAL CONFLICTS:

NATION, NATIONALISM, AND THE LITERARY ACT

In spite of a great deal of controversy about what constitutes "politics" and

"the political novel," critics seem to agree with the assertion that "there is no such

thing as genuinely non-political literature"(Orwel1 373). A political novel may be

broadly defined as "a novel in wh~ch political ideas play a dominant role or in which

the political milieu is the dominant setting" (Howe 19). The Partition and the

disillusionment about the functioning of democratic institutions, the quality of the

new leaders, and the erosion of moral values in politics found their articulation in

Indian fiction when, after Independence, political themes became more multifarious.

Except for the three or f o u small wars fought by the country, the most important

event on the post-Independence Indian political scene was the Emergency.

"Politics and the way major events shape individual lives, and how individuals

react to these events, have always been of interest to the literary imagination, since the

Greek and Roman epics and the Mahabharafa and, no doubt, beforehand" (Dooley

30). It is especially in the third world fiction after the Second World War that the uses

of "nation" and "nationalism' are most pronounced. The 'nation' is precisely a

discursive formation - not simply an allegory or imaginative vision, but a gestative

political structure which the postcolonial writer is very often either consciously

building or suffering the lack of. "The literary act, and the institutions of literary

production, are not only a pan: of the nation-forming process, but are its realization,

that nations are mental projections, or polyglot renderings of a single epic[. . .I" (Patra

39). The post-Independence se:nsibility born of the new challenges the Indians were

faced with after gaining Independence has a new dimension - a rich native heritage

co-mingled with a strong Western impact.

Indian nationalism, a product of political developments of many decades,

draws upon a mixture of social and political accents, ideologies and postulates

received from British civilization. The major players of the Indian political drama,

like Gandhi and Nehru were educated and trained by the British educational system.

As a result, the political conflicts in British India were an oiTshoot of British training

imparted to Indian leaders. The major political ideas which were tested on the Indian '

soil had their origins in Britain's long democratic practice. Probing further, it is found

that "modem India is thus both a British and an Indian invention, shaped as much by

the imperial imagination as the Indian will. This dual cultural inscription in the

imaginary construction of a nation informed the Nationalist struggle" (Salgado 64).

Nayantara Sahgal's novels deal with the changing political situation and offer

a political commentary on the volatile events that make up India's politics. On her

own admission, "the political situation is the background of all my books. I notice that

nobody else in India, at least writing in English, has used the technique of having a

political situation - a specific political situation - as the backdrop of every single

novel" (Sahgal, "An Interview" 10). The country's political life is a major reality in

the nation's life which remains mostly ignored by other writers. Sahgal says,

"Because we had had no political voice, I found it especially satisfying to express

myself politically and to speak a political idiom that was rootedly Indian, yet modem

in its 20" century legacy" (Sahgal, "The Myth Reincarnated" 27).

Sahgal "has the uniquc distinction of being the only political novelist on the

Indian English literary scene" (B. P. Sinha 33). The strength of Sahgal's fiction rests

upon the way she draws attention to the silence of the subaltern and the oppression by

the powerful and the way she frames both within a moral dimension. The political

texture is thus not confined to a particular political event or attitude, but is woven into

human emotions and lives. Ch.aracter, strength of conviction, personal commitment to

a cause, the desire, if not the ability to influence the surrounding world - all these and

much more have gone into the.je novels. Thus, Rich Like Us, Plans for Departure and

Mistaken Identity explore the political developments of three different decades with

characters chasing power or being chased by it, very often with disastrous

consequences to themselves or the community itself.

Rich Like Us is an illustration of the effects of socio-political upheavals on

the course of myriad ordinary lives. It "firmly rejects the arbitrary distribution of

166

power, be it on the purely political level as it was during the Emergency or on the -

interpersonal and familial level as in the gender roles in society"(P.Singh 145).

Freedom being fundamental to peace and progress, inability to make conscious

choices can result in failure and regret as expressed by Kacbru: "Things have slipped

out of control. There are no rules and regulations any more. I never realized it would

come to this" (229). Sahgal brings out how the politics of the bogus Emergency

encroaches on the personal. lives of people by colouring the whole fabric of society.

She shows how insidiously it eats into the moral fibre of individual human character:

"Teaching the virtuous life when virtue is in short supply is treason" (156). This is in

reference to J.P.'s speech the night before he was arrested and Emergency launched.

The shifting spectnlm of the socio-political life of the country during the

turbulent epoch of the Emergency explicates in artistic terms "the somber mood and

widespread disillusionment of the post-Independence generation" (Asnani 39). The

novel devotes a major part of it to the atrocities of the Emergency which is seen as a

mere excuse for perpetuating political power. Personal aggrandizement of the power-

wielding Premier becomes the norm of the day. Hero-worship and sycophancy are so

common that the minions lose all sense of democracy: "Delegations[. . .]to kiss the big

toe already worn out with pilgrim kisses" (73). Refemng to the Premier's undue and

unwarranted pampering of a son at state expense, the novelist asks sarcastically:

"Which mother anywhere in the world wouldn't move heaven and earth for her

son?" (82). The nation gets divided into two camps - one accepting and even enjoying

the misrule and the other opposing it overtly and covertly. The conflict, obviously, is

between the spirit of democracy and the craze for power on the part of the tyrant.

The novelist blames the acquiescing attitudes of the general populace failing

to realize its rights, privileges and duties vis-a-vis the preservation of democracy in

the national polity. The Indian heritage is not all bliss, for the bits of evil which

surface now and then are nct all the result of the colonial aftermath, but of "India's

inability to generate and persist in a native morality" (Kaur 37). She raises questions

like, "what if there is a coilective will to cowardice? How casual are we about cruelty,

depravity?'(30). Sahgal str-sses the imperative need for self-assertion, for active

intervention by the individual. Freedom is not just political freedom or even

economic freedom. It is essentially a personal and individual freedom, the freedom

Tagore wrote about, "where the mind is without fear and the head is held high". It is

"a habit of mind or a way of life," (Sahgal, Storm in Chandigarh 225) as she makes a

character declare in an earlier novel. Sahgal's enduring vision of the nation's political

life is marked by freedom as the first postulate followed by the courage of conviction

in the absence of which iyrants capture power and continue in it to the detriment of

the whole nation's freedom.

In the crossfire of political battles, some Sahgal characters do stand out. They

have strength of character and are imbued with a strong belief system which sustains

them in the battle against political corruption, tyrannical ways and denial of basic

human rights. Sonali and Rose, two of the major characters, are idealists. In the social

and political scheme of things they find themselves pitted against the survivors,

careerists and climbers. They are typical Sahgal women, in as much as they are strong

and self-respecting. Sonali is in conflict with her political masters and bureaucratic

superiors. She stands for Sahgal's ideal of the modem Indian woman - educated,

independent, upright and compassionate. She resigns from the IAS in protest against

the prevailing system. She can forego her love for Kachru if marriage to him will

mean subordinating her personal judgement and her independence of thought to his.

She refuses to be crushed by the abominable power structure which is the very

essence of the bogus Em-rgency. "The emergency had given all kinds of new twists

and turns to policy and the world's largest democracy was looking like nothing so

much as one of the two-brt dictatorships we had loftily looked down upon" (3 1).

Sonali, a government official, finds herself in disfavour with the powers-that-

be.She does not support rhe changing tide and is inspired by her father's commitment

to freedom, "refusing to compromise with dictatorship" (157). Sonali understands

why her father could not live through times when "history would be revised and

rewritten. I can see [says Sonali] that he had to die when he did but his death left me

desperately alone when 1 faced dismissal" (157). The diktat of the political masters is

not obeyed and carried out by Sonali and her ilk for the simple reason that politically

168

they think on different lines and more than that, the unfair and illegal orders are

opposed on moral grounds. This conflict between the ruling class and civil servants,

though rare, is a major fall-out of the Emergency re-created by Saghal in this

novelistic political document. .4s Sonali says : "It did not need much imagination to

sense the hate and fear inside the vans with iron-barred windows, like the ones used

for collecting stray dogs for drowning, that now roamed the streets picking up citizens

for vasectomy" (27). The conflict between the postulates of freedom and power is

precipitated by the "dual cultural inscription" within the nation's psyche - one with

the tendency towards imperialist behaviour and misuse of power, the other yearning

for true freedom.

The contamination of bureaucracy with politics does not augur well in a

democratic set-up. The civil :servants become minions of ministers sharing in the

booty:

The distinction between politics and the service had become so badly

blurred over the last few years it had all but disappeared. The two s~des

where hopelessly mixed, with politicians meddling in administration,

and favourites like Kachru, the prime example, playing politics as if

his life depended on it. His career certainly did. From the three-on-ten

general rating most of us now gave him, suddenly he was

indispensable, here, there and everywhere, the right hand and left leg

of the Prime Minister and her household. (28)

The dim-witted yet porr~pous and power-hungry Dev is a characteristic product

of the Emergency - a system that encourages and promotes such unscrupulous men,

men who present a dangerous threat to any honest, upright Indian. Sonali has a direct

experience of his lack of scruples when she finds herself helpless to stop Dev from

forging his father Ram's cheques. Later, she cannot even bring him to book for the

murder of Rose, his stepmother. The ramifications of the misuse of political power in

the name of Emergency are all too obvious throughout the novel. As Sonali says:

"We were all taking part in a thinly disguised masquerade, preparing the stage for

family rule. And we were involved in a conspiracy of silence [...Iw (29).

The mutilated personal and political freedom and its precarious survival in the

dark days of the tyranny are symbolised by the recurring image of the handless,

helpless beggar condemned by society ladies. What is at stake is the very existence of

the nation as a free, democratic polity. The objectives and functioning of the

Emergency and its effects on the lives of the people are glaringly exposed and the

nexus linking politics, business and crime clearly revealed. The countty is ruled by

"one and a half people" (37), and the Emergency is a dictatorship to ensure family

succession in a "republic." In fact, as an editor, a typical representative of the

subservient press during the Emergency, says in the novel, "Madam had in good faith

thought it her constitutional duty to ovemde the constitution," and a lawyer gives his

professional opinion "that the constitution would have to be drastically amended, if

not rewritten, to give Madam powers to fight disruptive forces and crush the vested

interests she had been battling against since infancy" (94).

The contrast between the reality of the repressive Emergency and the fa~ade of

apparent discipline is highlighted by Sahgal. Some fifty thousand to one hundred

thousand people are held under detention without trial (77), and "citizens [are] broken

on the wheel for remembering their rights" (258). One individual's hands are cut off,

rendering him a handless beggar for life. The farmers and the workers are exploited

and the resources of the whole nation are quietly used for the benefit of a few. In

forced vasectomy camps even the old and the unmanied are not spared.

All this ugly reality is given cosmetic touches. There is the myth of a rational,

humane "top" (36) that is quite unaware of the ugly goings-on and to which an appeal

can possibly lead to redress. There is a faqade of discipline, punctuality and efficiency

accompanied by a hypocritical public and private swearing by the ancient Indian

scriptures, myths and ideals and repeated references to Mahatma Gandhi and

assertions to serve the masses. In spite of controlled press and "news less

newspapers", however, the people are not taken in, and there are whispering

campaigns and open protests. Even in the bureaucracy there are sensitive souls like

Sonali who cannot be a party to all this corruption and outrage against human dignity,

even though they may have to quit the service. As a typical Sahgal heroine, she is

seen "rebelling against established social inequalities and Hindu ambivalence"

(Lakshmi Sinha 51). Even Ravi Kachru, at one time the chief explainer of the

Emergency, is at the end a disillusioned man thrown out of favour only because he

has pleaded for Rose, a victim of deception and forgery. "Like the sati, the

Emergency is doomed to take its place among the frightful tableaux in the unending

cavalcade of our history, for in all ages there have been strong and sensitive people to

fight out such cruelties" (Fdathur 71).

The spirit of freedom takes on the tyranny of power despite the initial shock

and confusion. "The decline and the despair and the gathering clouds after freedom,

the build-up of the totalit,arianism, which finally lead to the climax of Emergency"

(Mohini 63) severely shake Sonali's system of ideals. Her Marxist commitments had

been different from Kachnl's: "Our hearts beat quite differently over our discovery of

it [Marxism], his for humanity, mine for small actual conscience-pricking images,

giving me a starchy inner lining of anxiety" (1 10). Her commitment is closer to reality

and she refuses to be carried away by ideology when later she admits, "It was doubts

and uncertainties that kept things alive and kicking" (261). It would have been

impossible for her to contiriue to work in a corrupt environment: "The Emergency had

finished my career, but suddenly I didn't want a career in the crumbling

unprofessionalism that bowed and scraped to a bogus emergency" (36). Her father

dies rather than "compromise with dictatorship," which she regards as "his strong and

positive best" (175) in spite of her grief at his death. Her ideas about the virtue of

taking action against tyranny are further illuminated when she reads a story about her

great grandmother's death by Sati, and her son's desperate struggle to avenge her. "I

saw a world revealed but strangely enough it was not the evil in it I saw [...I. Not all

of us are passive before cruelty and depravity [...I. And I fell asleep to dream of

heroisms whose company I was scarcely fit to keep" (152). Individual acts of bravery,

Sonali feels, are always worth doing, whether the ends are achieved or not. "The book

closes on a note of hope; artificial limbs for the beggar and the realization by Sonali

that Emergency could and would be overn(Sanjogita Singh 93).

"Rich Like Us offers no easy solutions to mankind's problems, on the contrary

it challenges all known solut:,ons[. . .] finally Rich Like Us is about the complex nature

of reality" (Jain 34). For S;ihgal the Emergency threw a powerful search light on

Indian character. "It was a time of trial and it divided the country quite dramatically

into those who succumbed quietly or enthusiastically to dictatorship - as large

sections of the intellectual, professional and commercial elite did - and those who

stuck their necks out to oppose it" (Sahgal, "Passion for India" 87). Sahgal is deeply

aware of her own significance as a witness to the political drama unfolding in post-

Independence India. Her ic.ealized vision of India's political future gets warped,

distorted and partly destroyed at the hands of those rulers who came to occupy the

seats of power in very devious if not diabolic ways. She says, "it has been said that a

person who survives her childhood has enough information to last her the rest of her

days, and it must be true, or my novels would not have reflected the political idealism

of an emergent nation, ancl its progressive destruction and decay" (Sahgal, "The

Schizophrenic Imagination" 33).

Witnessing what is perceived as the attempt at killing democracy during the

70s, Sahgal takes a clear stand against it. She stands for political morality and

personal integrity, and therefore opposes the bogus Emergency. She says: "I belong

to the Nehru family, and as you know, I fought Mrs. Gandhi during the Emergency. I

stood out against many of h~:r policies, wrote a whole book about that in fact. There

was no place for me in any set-up which she headed. And I was not one to ever

compromise my heliefs"(Sa1gado 47).

The political conflicts and inequalities are sustained on purpose by the ruling

elite. The result is the great. chasm between the ruling class and the ruled. "They ,

them, the ruling class on one side, the ruled on the other" (227); for many Indians

(represented in the novel by the handless beggar) it has not mattered who the ruling

class is because the chasm between that class and them (as the ruled) has been the

same. The biggest divide i:j, of course, between the rich (irrespective of how the

riches have been acquired) and the poor - the haves and the have-nots.

The ruthlessness ancl craftiness of the Empire in creating tensions and rifts for

facilitating its hold on the colony is not left umemarked and in fact, it is taken up as

the major cause of the political conflicts in the Indian sub-continent: "The British

have conquered us, they have divided and ruled [...]"(I 15). The rift between Hindus

and Muslims is an outcome of political manipulation, a reminder of the truth under

the picture of carnage and hatred. It is Rose who voices the truth: "England hadn't

occupied territories to give English lessons. Empire was for profit" (143). As the

economic fall-out of neo-colot~ialism of multinational business, the thefts and the

production of poverty in another guise continue. Neuman, who represents the

multinational corporation of soft drink manufacturers, is a product of the new set-up,

an offshoot of neo-colonialism which is making its conquests with political

implications.

Sonali, as an individual, fails to bring about any change in the debilitating

status quo of the bureaucracy overwhelmed by politics. The conflict between her

idealism and the unscruplllous political manouevres remains unresolved. Teresa

Hubel feels that "individualism, even feminist individualism, operates on the

universalist premise that it has access to the whole world and rationalizes itself

through an abstraction that posits all people in liberal nations as individuals with the

full rights that status implies"(Hubel 94). The conflict between the individual and the

powers-that-be ultimately appears to be a losing battle for the former, in Sahgal's

perception.

The strand of the cc'ntemporary political situation and, woven into it, a lament

for the passing away of the idealism and euphoria of the new chapter of history

opened up by Independence, adds dark colours to the rich tapestry of India. Sahgal

squarely blames the Emergency as depicted in the novel, virtually the culminating

point of the degeneracy and political rot that has set in. The Emergency of self-

seeking, near-despotism exposes the unholy alliance between politics, crime and

business. We see Dev, only concerned about "need [ing] a contact in political circles"

(19) instead of running a busmess with proper consideration for efficiency, quality

and labour relations. Frorn Chairman of New Entrepreneurs he becomes Cabinet

Minister as well as a patron of criminals. The ugly reality of unwamnted

constitutional amendments, silencing of political opposition, repressive police action,

preventive arrests and detention without trial, exploitation of the poor at all levels,

vasectomy camps and press censorship followed by shamelessly hypocritical

promises and swearing of allegiance to the Mahatma and his ideals, accompany the

most blatant acts of a despotic machinery operated with sheer disregard for

democratic principles and the welfare of the masses. It is the story of India's journey

"from Mahatma to Madam" (49).

During the Emergency, all norms are flouted and individual rights curtailed in

the name of political stabiliiy. It is done with the willing assistance of a bureaucracy

interested only in self-seeking. The political crisis is thus exploited by all concerned.

Social uplift is sought to be brought about through hasty, ill-considered and

repressive measures. The innocent are jailed for having committed non-existent

crimes. The young and ambitious opportunists prosper through officially supported

shady deals: "It was a preposterous proposal, requiring the import of more or less an

entire factory[ ...I although essential items the economy needed that we could not

produce for ourselves were iexempt from the list. There were a number of those but a

fizzy drink called Happyola was not one of them" (29-30).

Dev, in the novel, is a typical example of an opportunist. While welcoming the

Minister Dev says how grateful he is to have the Happyola foundation stone laid by a

person famous for religion, tradition and moral values. Sahgal sarcastically exposes

the Minister's pretensions, "the Mahatma had inspired him to shed his profession, the

law, the luxuries of life, to follow, a humble disciple, in his footsteps. A humble

follower of Gandhi was what he still remained though the journey had taken him and

the country from Mahatma to Madam" (49). The Emergency means many things to

many people. It is a period of profit and power for some, jails for others, and mobile

vasectomy clinics for many more.

Colonial countries by becoming free, or acquiring independence, do not

completely undo the social and political structures they inherit and neither can-they

smoothen the rough edges they may have acquired for purposes of survival. Political

1 74

polarisation is most likely to take place. The desire to control can be a self-destructive

desire as noticed in the novels of Sahgal. Frantz Fanon's idea in The JVrerched ofrl7e

Earth that a section of the newly independent nations assumes the ch3lacteristics of

the fonner colonizers is borne out by this Indian reality. In the colonial situation any

act of defiance is \.ie\rred as treason, and the punishment for it or any act of

questioning is some kind of death. Moral principles, concepts of right and wrong are

waived in view of political expediency. The experiences of Sonali, Ravi Kacbru and

Dev exemplify the evils of political power games. Rich Like (is is important for more

reasons than one: it commen::s on the political situation which has, in effect, colonial

overtones

Owing to political corruption, the nation gets divided between the rich

growing richer and the poor growing poorer. "We had both new and hereditary

poverty staring through the tall glass doors of five-star buildings. But managers,

politicians and bureaucrats like me all got into our cars and hurried away to our next

engagement" (150). Rich Like 15 is much more directly political than the earlier

novels as it is not only about a particular situation or political personalities, but also

about political stances, value structures and ideologies.

In Plansfor Departure, Sahgal takes a long-range shot of the pre-First World

War scene. The novel takes place in 1914 and the locale is India, but "its inner moral

chumings are all rooted in pre-War 1914 Europe" (Mitra 94). Sahgal invokes a

historical field of reference to show history as a vast theatre in which political dramas

unfold touching upon the lives of individuals. The tragedy of war is such a political

event which affects people in large numbers. The political masters who are the

decision makers are least affected by their decisions which turn the lives of common

people upside down: "Private matters will soon be at the mercy of bigger outer events,

for that, ultimately is the tragedy of war" (154). The War has overtaken Europe like

retribution (196). Thus, there is a widening of the political horizons against which the

individual quest for freedom is in conflict. Henry feels that if Austria's suppression of

the Serbs, Czechs and Transylvanians bears any significance in relation to the British

repression of India, it would be the sacred duty of the Indian people to "shoot their

175

way out of the Empire" (38). Set in a continent poised for revolution and a world on

the edge of war, in Plans ,for Departure, "even socially privileged and personally

strong human beings are shown to be not wholly masters of their own destinies, but

fragments swept into directions determined by those currents of world affairs that

power-wielding people initiate" (Ravenscroft 116).

The main theme relates to the transformation of the nascent Indian national

movement into an irresistible and chiefly non-violent force to reckon with. In a word,

it is a fictionalization of the gradual, slow but steady radicalization of the Indian

struggle for freedom even as Europe in general and England in particular prepare

themselves for a World War. In this fictional document of a generally taken-for-

granted phase of India's freedorn struggle, the public and the private issues are subtly

integrated and resolved. The birth of the Indian National Congress, the gradual

decline of the Moderates' 1.nfluence in the Congress, the Serbian-Austrian conflict

culminating in the outbreak of World War I form the political background. Robert

Pryor admits: "They don't see us as morally superior any more. The war did that,

Europeans falling out among themselves. The old imperial magic is gone. Things are

not what they used to be when a man we could trust implicitly, Sir Nitin Basu, gives

up his knighthood as a protest against the trouble in Amritsar" (205). Despite Tilak's

unequivocal and wholehearted support to the British during the war, and in spite of

the rising Indian expectaticns of a gracious British gesture of appreciation of the

Indian sacrifices and support during the war period, the colonial attitude seems to be

not only unrealistic and unwise, but highly provocative and negative.

The time in which the novel is set coincides with Tilak's trial, the rumblings

of the Indian freedom struggle and the outbreak of the First World War. Sahgal's

worldwide political perspec.;ive takes into account the pre-1914 struggles of British

Suffragettes, Gandhi's effolts for the welfare of the voiceless and the voteless in

South Africa, and the conditions of the oppressed peasants in Central America. All

these struggles mark the political situation of the times. "The struggle for self-

mastery was all that was really real" (47).The cry for freedom at all costs becomes

all the more strident. "The plans for British departure from India have their roots not

only in the freedom struggle, in the protest manifested by men like Tilak and Gandhi,

but also in the uneasiness which men like Brewster experience when they come into

contact with India" (Jain 64).

In Mistaken Identiry Sahgal frames her narrative against a turbulent period of

Indian history in the first three decades of the 2oth century. It is a graphic document of

the twilight years of the Raj in India and a reference point to many events and actions

of the freedom movement. The narrator of the novel, Bhushan Singh, after a sojourn

abroad is on his way back horne, \\.hen a cruel case of mistaken identity grips him and

lands him in jail. As the case of treason against Bhushan drags on in the court, Sahgal

takes a panoramic view of the global events though the spotlight is on India and her

landmark movements. Sahgal is ntthiess in her view of politicians and the gains and

double-speak they indulge in. She exposes the politician's way of communalising the

situation. "By unity they mean trumped-up unities. Public emotions gushed on like

taps, then each to his lair until it is time to tear each other to pieces again" (36).

Mistaken Identity is idoned with significant signposts of the Indian freedom

movement. The Lahore conspiracy case is presented with poignant details - "Bhagat

Singh and his two close colle.lgues were executed in Lahore jail yesterday, March 23

and surreptitiously cremated on the banks of the Sutlej river - Gandhi is out of jail but

he could not get the execution stayed" (157). Sahgal describes the confrontation

between Gandhi and the government. The Dandi march is presented as a major step in

dislodging the British government which "passed thirteen ordinances - more than any

other time since the Mutiny -- outlawing practically every activity - peasant groups,

youth leagues, Khaddar worlcers, strikes, nationalists and communists" (191). The

encounter between the nationalists and the British government take on new

dimensions with the anival of Gandhi. Gandhian methods of non-violent resistance,

Civil Disobedience, Satyagraha, fasts unto death co-exist with violent methods

symbolized by the Lahore Conspiracy, the Alipur bomb case and many other

underground activities to throw out the foreign rulers. Along with this, Sahgal

presents political conflicts in many other countries during the time especially the

change of guard, the reforms in Turkey, where Caliphate was ended in a coup d'etat.

"Mistaken Identity is a slice of history which captures dramatic political

events and dramatic changes in the contours and character of the country at a crucial

juncture" (Saxena 136). Bhushan, in Mistaken Identity indicates by his life that any

individual can come under suspicion, can be chased and tortured by an insensitive

political system. Bhushan is Young India, long desired and wanted, held captive in

political and bureaucratic entanglements. The British saw to it that the Muslims and

Hindus got separated socially and politically. They needed a "Hindu-Muslim riot

now and then. No riot, no Raj" (92). The later and larger conflicts between the two

communities are expressions of this British conspiracy which is based on the policy of

Divide and Rule. The conflicts are often engineered by the governmental actions

which implicitly proclaim there are bloods which do not mix" and the administrator

jargon "Hindoo-Moslem Prc~blem" (1 lo).

Most political conflicts in the 2oth century India had two aspects - the

Nationalist Movement clashing with the British government and the Hindu-Muslim

encounters encouraged and masterminded by the Britishers to serve their own

political purposes. Communal riots become very frequent and are started at the least

provocations. The relationship between Bhushan and Razia results in yet another riot,

"their union separates Hindus and Muslims into the anonymity and uncomprehending

brutality, into riots" (Satya Brat Singh 140).

In Mistaken Identip, the backdrop of the novel, the Khilafat agitation and the

Civil Disobedience Movement of 1929 shows that "while oven text faithfully

reproduces the hegemonic historical narration of events around 1919 and 1929[ .. .I it

also encodes within itself a record of the freedom movement from the experiences of

the subaltern masses rather than one where the elite figures of Gandhi and Nehru

function as agents" (Mohanram 143). The basic premise is that the constitution of

India, far from evoking a nationalistic unity, is actually premised on the maintenance

of differences between Hindus and Muslims, the two main ethnic groups in India.

While discussing Bhushan's character in the course of an interview, Sahgal says: "He

can't see any possibility other than a Hindu-Muslim India, an India which is.neither

Hindu nor Muslim" (Salgado 45).

The crucial instance of "mistaken identity" explored in Sahgal's Misfalien

Identity is not so much thai: of the protagonist Bhushan's arrest but of the long-

standing assumption of cultural purity, of difference, between Hindus and Muslims,

on which Partition was based. Mistaken Identity argues, finally, that this massive error

is alterable. That this potential for political change is missed is the tragedy of

Mistaken Identity. With her novels like Plans for Departure and Rich Like Us,

"Sahgal shows how there is e growing concern in her with the novel as expressing the

collective fate of a nation releasing itself from subjugation" (Rao %).The controlling

temper of the period wished for is synthesis or polymorphism where all religions. all

communal groups, including the minorities have an important place making for the

political unity of the country. "In the political context she [Sahgal] applies the concept

of freedom in its larger sense[. . .]. She is defiant of a social order that denies freedom,

she disapproves of a relationship that denies freedom to those involved in it" (Sujata

22).

The kind of modern epic represented by Salman Rushdie's Midnight's

Children shows political history not as a succession of linear moments heading

towards a definite end. It shows that behind the illusion of linearity what works is the

opposite of it. It is because political conflicts of different kinds clog the times and

events take strange turns resulting in stranger situations and unpredictable ends, as

noticed in Indian political life. What Foucault said about Nietzsche's effective history

applies to Midnight's Children as well: "The forces operating in history are not

controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts

[...].(History) is a profusion of entangled events" (Foucault 154-55).

The episode that allegorizes the Widow and her Emergency is an indictment of

state-controlled media which foists the myth of development on the people and keeps

silent on the government's atrocities. Thus, no one knows how many people lost their

freedom during the Emergencyyaeither thirty thousand or a quarter of a million"

(434). But for the Widow this represents "only a small percentage of the population"

(434). Censorship leads to doctored and misleading news as Saleem says, "All sorts of

things happen during an Emergency: trains run on time, black money hoarders are

frightened into paying taxes, even the weather is brought to heel and bumper harvests

are reaped[. ..](434). The media also projects the dictator as god; the Widow becomes

"Devi, the mother goddess in her most terrible aspect, possessor of the Shakti of the

gods, a multi-limbed divinicy with a centre parting and schizophrenic hair[.,.]" (438).

The Fascist slogan "Indira is India and India is Indira" (427) is relayed over the media

as if to wipe away all the misdeeds of her authoritarian power.

More importantly, in Saleem's narrative, the Widow sees him as her main

rival. Her Hand (the Election symbol of the Congress I ) maintains, "millions of

gods[...]. For the masses, our Lady is a manifestation of the OM" (438). The

propaganda machines work overtime to create an extra-ordinary image of the tyrant.

"But this goddess is afraid of Saleem the narrator whose "I" an assertion of plural

identity, matches the Widow's own projection of herself as Bharat Mata (Mother

India)" (Syed 95). But she is deeply aware of the storm of protest gathering

momentum in invisible ways. As a result fear grips her actions and she becomes

paranoic, fully aware of the public indignation gathering momentum at the behest of

the Opposition parties. As Saleem says "I learned from the Widow's Hand[ ...I that

those who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities[. . .I" (438).

But Saleem's and Indira's urges towards this appropriation of omnipotent

power are different: "one is political, driven by an unquenchable quest for power over

human lives; the other is also a search for power but its politics are those of aesthetics

and not fascist" (Syed 103). Saleem's parting lines here, "Who am I? Who were we?

We were, are, shall be the gods you never had" (438), suggests that the more desirable

power of aesthetics, of imagination, of art - processes that are enabling and liberating

in their effects - are now lost to the county's multitudes.

Saleem Sinai, the narrator who is at the center of the vast web of stories,

which constitutes postcolo~~ial Indian history is in conflict with the political realities

which go against the common weal of the nation. He finds the political masters using

and misusing power for their selfish ends, starting with Partition, ending with the state

of Emergency. So he rewrites the whole of Indian history experientially, uith himself

at its centre, drawing correspondences between national events and his personal life,

dissolving referentialin. into fantasy, forging connections in order to confer mealling

on the political chaos. He leavens and seasons his experiences and creates memory

which is the instrument of his self-expression in re-creating the political conflicts of

postcolonial India: "Xfemory is truth, because memory has its own special kind. I t

selects, eliminates alters, ex.aggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vivifies also; but in

the end it creates its own reality" (21 1). The political balkanization of India is a

painful truth which is the cause of many problems of the subcontinent. The problems

continue to be relex-ant and binding on the life of the nation. "Politically and

historically, its oneness right. from the heritage of Indian Asia - Hindu and Buddhist,

spans a potential drifting apart of segments, truncation, dismemberment-the latest

dismemberment is of India and Pakistan" (Satyabrat Singh 152).

The political conflics preceding the Emergency are depicted in Midnight's

Children in terms of Parvtiti's thirteen-day labour which coincides with the thirteen

days of political tumulr when the Prime Minister refused to resign after the verdict of

the Allahabad High Court declaring her election invalid on the grounds of corruption.

Instead of resigning she declared Emergency. Saleem's son is born at midnight of the

day the Emergency rule was clamped on India. Parvati's travails are parallel to those

of the nation. But in the naion's case the sufferings lasted for twenty one months.

"[...]the Prime Minister was giving birth to a child of her own[. . .]suspension of civil

rights, censorship of the press and armoured-units-on-special-alert, and arrest of

subversive elements" (1 19).

Saleem's uncle Zulfilcar is a Pakistani General who helps General Ayub Khan

plan a military take-over in 1958. Through satire he shows that history's violent

events have their source in kivial situations as with the language demonstrations and

riots in Bombay demanding the split of Bombay into Maharashtra and Gujarat. Yet

another political conflict comes about because of the theft of the Prophet's hair at

Hazratbal Mosque in Kashmir. Thus, confrontations, fights and riots are proved to be

the essential nature of the sui~continent. The tussle is between tyranny and democracy,

consensus and confrontation, power and powerlessness, and during the process what

is witnessed is the loss of inalienable rights, erosion of values and worse than all, the

cyclical repetition of the same tragic el;isodes.

By means of archetypal figures in handling political realities Rushdie easily

moves into the realm of' postmodernism marked by ephemerality, fragmentation,

discontinuity and the chac~tic nature of situations. "The novel and history are played

off against each other interposed with a mixing of other genres like the epic, rendering

it a typically complex postmodernist art" (Wilson 19).

Conflicting situations, attitudes, personalities and the postmodemist chaos

resulting from them occupy centrestage. "The novel abounds in dualities - of

character, situation and of moral purpose. The hero commands large dimensions and

moves through an expansive landscape; yet both he and the landscape are deflated to

share the novel's parodic space" (Raina 167-68). Saleem Sinai, born on the midnight

of 15 August, 1947 and destined to be the torch bearer of a new age of welfare, is

gradually sucked into the hordes of his compatriots, defeated and lobotomized.

Structurally, the political clualities entail the accelerated movements of history like

Independence, Partition, wars with Pakistan, the genesis of Bangladesh, the

Emergency, the Janata inter-regnum. The eerie shadows of these conflicts alternate

between bursts of galloping narrative. The unresolved dualities make for not just

contrast, but a series of political conflicts with a bearing upon three nations and the

political life in each of them.

A son is born to Saleem Sinai on the night the Emergency is declared on June

25, 1975. If Saleem Sinai's birth is truly memorable and rich with prophetic

intimations, Adam Sinai's i r t h is vainglorious and totally inconsequential: "at the

precise instant of India's arrival at Emergency, he emerged[. . .I, he was mysteriously

handcuffed to history, his destinies indissolubly chained to those of his country.

Unprophesied, uncelebrated, he came; no prime ministers wrote him letters; but just

the same, as my time of coll~iection neared its end, his began" (500). '

The euphoria and glory of midnight August 15, 1947 is contrasted with the

shame and tragedy of the midnight of June 25. One night signifies the birth of a nation

and its political sovereignty whereas the other night stands for the death of democracy

182

with even the fundan~rntal r~ghts cancelled. The political controversy, which is the

life-breath of the democratic process was brought to an end by the tyrannical

declaration of the Emergency. Rushdie's perception of the political reality could be

found in the following statement in Midnight's Children: "Midnight has many

children - the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption,

poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots[...]. I had to go into exile to learn that

the children of midnight were more varied than I - even I - had dreamed" (382).

With the crashing of their hopes and aspirations, the world of Emergency

makes the world of the Midnight Children void. Saleem's disinte,mtion in the

Emergency is symbolic of such a failure of the world of Midnight's Children. Thus

his ultimate release is into a world of dis-embodiment and timelessness. His

disintegration is the disintegration of a national ethos itself in 1975. Rushdie perceives

the decay of the nation's political life culminating in the clamping of the Emergency,

the lifting of which after twenty one months let loose another series of political

controversies.

Saleem's forays into Pakistan as an exile from India, at least twice, do not

provide him any kind of iden1:ity with that nation. His connection, if any, is religious.

But even this proves tenuous. His disillusionment with Pakistan is both for reasons of

history and politics. Comparing the levels of freedom, including political freedom, in

that country, in contrast to that of India, he says:

in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite

literally ceases. to exist, so that everything becomes possible except

what we are ,:old is the case and may be this was the difference

between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence - that in the

first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the

second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of

falsenesses, unrealities and lies (389).

Rushdie is found responding strongly to what bad politics can make of a

nation. The forthright condemnation subsumes the poignancy of the grim realities that

the nation is faced with. In these novels, "the national and individual destinies are

inextricably interwoven. Thus, the inseparable quality of generality and particularity

in the narrative is complete" (Madhusudhana Rao 34).

Every personal event in the life of Saleem and his family is inextricably linked

to the political events that unfold in India. As Saleem puts it, he "had been

mysteriously handcuffed to history, [his] destinies indissolubly chained to that of [his]

country" (3). The narrator-protagonist implies that he is responsible for all the major

political conflicts-the language riots of the 1950s that divided Bombay into

Maharashtra and Gujarat, the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971 and the declaration of

Emergency in 1975, in direc:t response to the activities of Saleem and his conference

of midnight's children. Midnight's Children records Saleem's struggle to present his

critical political history as a (counter-narrative to the official history of India. Hence all

deviations and levels of meaning marked by sarcasm. "Only he who is oppressed [. . .]

and who wants to throw o:ff his burden at any cost, has need of critical history"

(Nietzsche 72).

The political conflicts between the British and the Indians may be examined

from the angle of imperiali:;t norms. Methwold expresses the British superiority to

Ahmed Sinai, "You'll admit we weren't all bad: built your roads. Schools, railway

trains, parliamentary system, all worthwhile things" (109-10). Methwold's "we" is

necessarily restrictive; out of political mastery over India he arrogantly views the

British as the quintessentially civilizing influence on the Indian subcontinent.

Methwold, like many of his ilk, is simply unable to acknowledge the existence of any

cultured society other than his own, including one that pre-dates his by a few

millennia. After subjugating a whole nation to political slavery the British claimed

that they were the messiahs of the subcontinent, paving the way for the political

struggle for 90 long years. The gravity of the sufferings of the people during

Emergency could be inferred from the statement of Amnesty International, according

to which, "140,000 Indians were detained without trial in 1975-76 (Malhotra 178).

According to The Shah Cc~mmission Report on the Emergency, "thousands were

detained and a series of totally illegal and unwarranted actions followed, involving

untold human misery" (qtd. in Ali 186). These forgotten segments of history were

184

swept away by the flood of monumentalism that the Prime Minister released in her

quest to retain power. But .Widriight's Children recaptures these sordid episodes of

political conflicts and repression vividly.

The description that Saleem offers of the Widow also underscore her

monumentalism. The \\'idow first appears in a terrifying dream that Saleem has

during a bout with fever. Here she takes the form of a huge, voracious monster who

gathers children in her hands, rips them apart, and rolls them into little green balls that

she hurls into the night (249). The Widow, in this guise, most closely resembles the

goddess Kali who represents "Death and the Destroyer". The Widow "simultaneously

destroyed the democratic institurions of independent India and reinforced the notion

that the repetitive cycle of destruction and regeneration that obtains in Hindu

teaching can also be used to explain modem political processes" (Price 100).

In the context of the history of India, Rushdie perceives an inevitable

antagonism between artists like Saleem, who seek to explore the myriad dimensions

of past experience, and politicians who seek to preserve the historical truth. In

Midnight's Children Rushdie represents the conflict between artistic and political

rendering of history. Both the writer and the politician seek to make reality in their

own image. In short, Rushdie says, "they are doing the same thing " (Chaudhuri 47).

Hence, the inevitable conflict between these "natural rivals" who "fight for the same

territory" (47). Rushdie believes that the confrontation between writers and politicians

in power is inevitable and nec1:ssary. In the essay "Outside the Whale," he pleads with

writers to abandon the current retreat from the political that characterises so much of

their writing today. The reason for this is clear to Rushdie: "I don't think that there

has ever been a time when the truth has been so manipulated, because the weapons of

manipulation are now so sophisticated" (Brooks 68). The power of governments to

manipulate images and information is so immense and the reservoir of the cultural

semiotic so deep that the writer remains one of the few people who can construct an

entire narrative in opposition to the unidimensional, simplistic, reductive, slogan-

laden messages offered up by government.

"The unwieldy, chaotic language of the large dialect passages in Midnight j

Children attempts to be a reflection of the unwieldy chaotic f o m which in turn

attempts to reflect the chaotic history" (Jussawalla 4O)and politics of India and

Pakistan since Independence. This linguistic equivalent of the political crises is the

only effective means of adequately representing the Indian polity in flux, tending to

polarize in two different directions -democratic and tyrannical.

Saleem reinforces llushdie's idea of the nation as imagined community when

he speaks of India as a country dreamed into existence by "a phenomenal act of

collective will"(112). If the nation itself is an imagined construct, then nationalism

and a sense of national identity seem also to be products of individual and collective

will. Saleem's embrace o i Pakistani citizenship is seen as an act of submission.

Nationalism in this instance becomes an embrace of non-identity. Saleem's lack of

consciousness as he becomes a tracker dog for the Pakistani military leads to a split in

him which minors Pakistan's own split as it divides to form Bangladesh. This can be

seen as an important stage in the development of the argument that a lack of

consciousness of, or belief in, one's identity can be a specific by-product of

colonialism. In contrast, Saleem sees the Brass Monkey's newly construcred stage

personality of Jamila Singe:: as a by-product of emergent Pakistani nationalism. Her

patriotism in the land of the pure is counterpoised by Saleem's ability to sniff out the

seedier side of life, away from the virtues of nationalistic fenour. Aadam Aziz and

Saleem both suffer from the gaps in their identities left by the god-shaped hole, while

the national identity of Pakistan uses religion as the "glue" to hold itself

together(35 1).

As for the political make-up of the nation, there is a tension between the desire

to explore heroism and individuality on the one hand and the attraction of the

collectivist politics of such figures as Mian Abdullah and Picture Singh on the other.

The novel illustrates the complexity of Rushdie's position - he achieves the

individualization of Saleem's identity through his very relation to the social units of

family and community. He i:j as handcuffed to society as he is to history. In its level

of engagement with the reali;:ies of political life and in particular the abuses attendant

186

on the assunlption of dictatorial power, the depiction of the Blnck Widow locates her

simultaneously as historical rtzality and monstrous fantasy.

Invisibility as a political necessity can be seen as crucial to the question of the

postcolonial writer's relationship to the society he observes. Saleem as postcolonial

artist becomes the spectator on the periphery of society, able to view the actions of

others, in his washing chest or concealed in the clock tower, because he is literally or

socially invisible. The text demonstrates how authorial control in directing the

construction of his account of history becomes vitally important for maintaining an

authorial or creative identity.

Rushdie's novel is a subversive political act: the canon is shown to be

arbitrary rather than true, devised by concealing or eliminating other resistant

readings. In its mixture of rhetoric and referentiality, the novel is as much a fiction

as it is political history, specializing in crisis points. Rushdie is writing in a modem

postcolonial context about three political entities - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

He is engaged in an act of reclamation by re-reading and rewriting the past. His is re-

interpretation, an attempt to read significance into social and political events

according to a selected frame of reference. What is foregrounded is a conflict of

cultures, political styles and the inevitable consequences of domination and

dispossession. The novel is obs~:ssed with the multiplicity and the duplicity of history

which contains so many stories and so many silences. "In seeking to make

visiblelaudible what has been pushed to the margins and forcibly silenced, he is

seeking to deconstruct the opposition between political history and fiction, to make

available what has been suppressed and, by so doing, to reveal the official interests at

stake in this suppression" (Howells 202). It is a critique of authority for it shows in

the end how violence imposes a single meaning on the multiplicity of truth, and how

it is political power that makes laws and makes lies. "And the novel is one way of

denying the official politician's version of truth" (Rushdie, "The Indian Writer in

England" 78).

In Shame, the political corlflicts which mar the peace of the world get satirical

lashes at the hands of Rushdie. How the heads of state go about their business without

even the least interest in the welfare of the people could be found presented when he

takes up the Pan-Islamic Conference in Shame:

Heads of State arrived from all over the globe, and they all brought

mothers along, so that all hell broke loose, because the mothers in the

zenana wing embarked at once on a tooth-and-nail struggle for

seniority, and they kept interrupting the conference's plenipotentiary

sessions to complain about moral insults received and honour

besmirched, which brought the world leaders close to starting fist-

fights or even wars. Raza Hyder didn't have a mother to land him in

hot water, but he had worries of his own (245-6).

The political conflicts in Shame are of lasting interest to people of democratic

ideology. The autochthonous and plebeian base of the nation is torpedoed by the

tyrant who claims that hi:; tyrannical rule is something fixed in heaven, prescribing

nationhood from above in much the same way as the historical ruler of Pakistan, Zia,

did. According to Tariq Ali, he "informed a bewildered nation that he had been

overpowered by a dream in which a voice (presumably that of the Almighty) had

suggested that elections were un-Islamic" (Ali 136). Pakistan history is in this way

frozen into formulaic patterns that would be "gross sacrilege to alter" (Shame 81).

The murderous career of Raza Hyder is a nearly typical situation in a

recurring cycle of despotism, recorded in an act of unalterable prophecy. The political

prophecy is assured not so much by Providence as by Raza's predictable dictatorial

skills. The inheritance of Raza is shown here to rely on the grossly inappropriate

Hindu concept of "reincarnation". Rushdie's is a novel about a specific nation which

is a shame. "By overgrafting of ironic contemporary sources, he hopes to destroy any

coherence his imagination might have given the country by adopting a formal attitude

that makes every statement capable of being at the same time withdrawn" (Breman

218). The political exploitation of Pakistan through military manoeuverings gives rise

to a never-ending series of conflicts which engulf the nation at the cost of both social

peace and economic prosperity.

The entire nehvork of political dilemmas caused by the conflict between

democracy and tyranny is attributed to Pakistan's failure resulting not from its

excessive "reason" in the Enlightenment sense, but just the opposite - its pseudo-

religious, feudal despotism. Rushdie's novel is the process of inst~mentalization of

fantasy which aims at destabilization of an unjust political system. It becomes

paradigmatic of the postcolonial attempts at undermining the given version of

governments by giving the subaltern a voice.

The kings and soldier:; of' Rushdie's fairy tale are the medieval leftovers

cleverly used to indicate and condemn the anachronistic nature of Pakistani rule. This

technique is used to contrast it with decent democracies of the world. What Rushdie

creates is a compounded political conflict at the ideological plane. This artistic

performance speaks more loudly than any arguments within the story about leaders

repressing their subjects. "He n'zver liked arguments. Do as he ordered and do it now,

fut-a-fut, or out on your ear you go" (184). The absolute power that tyrants wield

may be tokenised thus.

The hidden side of pc)stmodem discourse lies precisely in a conflict of

attitudes between writers on the one side and the imperial masters on the other.

Rushdie's writing is dedicated I:O recovering individual expression and to weakening

the power that various politiciars hold over us. Rushdie and other cosmopolitan Third

World writers engage current political issues with a sense of human tragedy and

protest.

As depicted in Shame, the political history of Pakistan is marked by conflicts

involving democratically elected rulers and generals of the army. Each power-crazy

ruler is disposed of by a new dzspot often belonging to the army of the nation. The

political drama enacted is a consequence of conflicts for the purpose of capturing

power. Each of the dictators is got rid of "in, you know, the usual way" (29), whether

he is Isky or Raza or their real-life counterparts - Yahya, Bhutto or Zia. Only Raza

has to be disposed of by what Rushdie calls goblinish, faery means, indexing the

method of magical realism used throughout: "I mustn't forget I'm only telling a fairy

story. My dictator will be toppled by goblinish, fairy means. 'Makes it pretty easy for

you,' is the obvious critici:jm; and I agree, I agree. But add, even if it does sound a

little peevish; 'you try and get rid of a dictator sometime"' (257).

Despite the tongue-in-cheek style of Rushdie's narration the bitter truth is that

Pakistan has been witnessing the rise and fall of dictators of various kinds with

sinister results on the body politic. The political conflict seems to be a never-ending

tug of war between the tyrants and the democrats with the former winning the game

except for short breaks. Rushdie's use of fiction to expose political realities is in tune

with his belief that writers owe it to themselves to pursue and expose truths of various

kinds. "The fantasist in Rushdie is not encumbered by the actualities of history"

(Jaidka 372).

The veracity of the realities may be considered from different angles. The

novel is "neither a political treatise nor a fantastical tale; it is an act of sedition,

committed not just against the state, but against a prescribed conception of literature.

Rushdie's implication - that if' history is composed of fictions, then fiction can be

composed of history - is perhaps the most potent message of Midnight S Children"

(Batty 64). This is equally applicable to Shame.

In Shame, in particular, Rushdie is acutely aware of a split, a sense of

schizophrenia in himself as narrator. And, as in Midnight S Children, he correlates

this to the uneasy political situation and confused historical sense of India and

Pakistan. However, with rcspect to their sense of history and their consequent

construction of a national sense of "self," Rushdie sees Pakistan and India very

differently. Pakistan suffers from a lack of history whereas India has a sense of long

tradition and continuity. Ye!: "both Khayyam and Saleem fear being annihilated from

and by history altogether" (Srivastava 69). Khayyam is afraid of "never emerging

from the disintegrating history of his race" (Shame 32) and the amnesiac Buddha-

Sinai talks of "seceding from history" (Midnight's Children 35 1).

Both point up the place of and necessity for discontinuity or moling away

from a historical way of thinking, a process that goes against conventional

historiography - a process vihich does not oppress, confine and rigidify. This kind of

history becomes important because it is more inclusive and comprehensive since it is

a repository of all kinds of socio-cultural and religious as \\,ell as political conflicts.

Rushdie has absolutely no faith in the manipulated and manipulative kind of political

history served up by official versions. Thus, his novels become vital documents in

understanding the many truths of the Indian subcontinent. This is in line with

Foucault's thinking. In his essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History", Foucault opposes

conventional history which deals with genealogy and descent. "It disturbs what was

previously considered irnrnot~ile; it ftagments what was thought unified; it shows the

heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself' (Foucault 147).

Fictional mimetic trends give way to fantasy structures in Shame and it comes

to exist as Rushdie's all-too-imaginative addition to Pakistani reality. "As he indicates

in the case of Sufiya Zinobi.3, the novel projects the collective fantasy of a stifled

people, the reality that exists but cannot be acknowledged" (Oornmen 37). As Rushdie

explains, to comprehend Sufiya is to acknowledge savagery as a constituent element

in national make-up, recognition of which shatters a nation's concept of itself (Shame

200).

The political struggle in Pakistan is marked by violence which brings shame to

the country. Violence under Raza Hyder's rule becomes an elaboration of power,

tyranny and cruelty, and the country remains a silent spectator to the murder of the

deposed ruler, Iskander Harappa.. The former ruler has been made a scape-goat for all

the nation's ills. As his wife says, "they hanged a corpse" (188).

Rushdie contends that continued humiliation explodes into violence. In

Rushdie's ethically controlled fantasy this observation provides the thread to the

labyrinthine puzzlement of Pakistan's political conflicts. The conflict is such that

Pakistan becomes a split country, an extreme case of political schizophrenia. The land

is both victim and oppressor, trapped in a political maze. "The perception that

internecine conflict is the defining problem of postcoloniality, specifically its nation-

statehood, is reflected in much current[. ..]discussionn (S.Rajan 614). The haphazard

nature of the division of India after independence to allow for the formation of

Pakistan, and the subsequent secession of Bangladesh, has confronted writers in the

subcontinent with the image of a land mass separated by divisions which seem more

imagined than concrete.

The act of collective will that was needed to imagine India into existence in

Midnight's Children is perverted in Shame by the contradictory and conflicting forces

of the individual wills of slch men as Hyder and Harappa. Indeed, Pakistan was itself

the creation of the indivitiual wills of such figures as Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the

country's first president. Instead, the collective forces responsible for dreaming the

nation into existence become channeled into the creation and motivation of Sufiya,

the Beast - "the collective fantasy of a stifled people"(263), destroying shamelessness

in her apocalyptic fury. Rani Harappa's shawls, depicting the excesses of her

husband's political rule, embody the various Machiavellian faces of power -

espionage, corruption, electoral abuse, physical repression and torture, with the

thirteenth shawl showing Iskander with his hands literally round the throat of

Democracy, strangling the life out of it.

Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a monument raised to the human

spirit marked by a sense of liberty. This was written to challenge, as it were, the

authoritarian regime of Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini. The fatwah on the writer was

opposed by the democratic world which lined up behind the author. The conflict is

marked by political power and religious fanaticism on the one side and the spirit of

freedom on the other. Rushdie sets a scene reflecting the behaviour of the power-

crazy political masters. When young Haroun blurts out his horror at the desecration

of things, Khatam-Shud intones: "The world, however, is not for fun [. . .]. The world

is for controlling".

"Which world 9" Haroun made himself ask.

"Your world, my world, all worlds", came the reply, "they are meant

to be ruled"(l19).

The political conflicts as depicted in his novels point unmistakably to the

eternal fight between the power-mongers and those who love and live for freedom.

dignity and decency in public life. "There is a fearful relevance in the villainous

Khatam-Shud, arch enemy of stories, foe of all language, Prince of Silence, who has

192

his followers sew up their own lips," (Morley 5) smacking of censorship,

disinformation and manipulated news, which are weapons used by tyrannical political

masters ultimately inducing upsurges and moral wars.

Yet another facet of political conflict can be observed in The Great Indian

Novel by Shashi Tharoor. "Rel:elling a two thousand year old tale set in contemporary

India, Shashi Tharoor manages to convey a sense of continuity and change which is

so much a part of the Indian kaleidoscope" (Prasad 41). The disenchantment with

the political realities of the inhsxited world leads Tharoor to cast a shadow of doubt on

the very foundations of ancient wisdom enshrined in the Mahabharata. In juxtaposing

the unedifying political fights and power-mongering of modem India with those

presented in the ancient epic, Tharoor wants to prove that both the present democratic

set-up and the ancient bulwark of dharma are examples of the axiom that there is no

Truth, but tmths, no Reality, but realities. While observing the conflicts in both

Mahabharata and modem Incia, he finds that the essential nature of political life

anywhere is one of infinite conflicts, one-upmanship, conquest of power and the use

and misuse of it. "The traditiorlal bulwark, ancient wisdom or dharma, offers no way

to deal with the disillusionment generated by the darkening present". (Taneja 771).

The world of The Great Indian Novel is governed by considerations of

contingencies, expediencies, illustrating clearly the limitations of a moral view of the

universe and the difficulties iz. deciding on any course of action during periods of

intellectual crisis. All actions are prompted "more by impulses, selfish or otherwise,

than by any transcendental vision" (Seturaman 32).The seeds of the political conflicts

of India are sown by the British who tactically effected the division of the country by

constituting "separate electorates" on religious lines. This prompts Kama to come into

leadership of the Muslims. From the Kaurava party he switches over to the violently

theocratic Muslim Group though tie himself is an agnostic. His political ambitions

open up the terrible drama of Partition:

Shall I tell of Kama's dramatic rise to national importance through his

dominance of the Muslim Group? Of the mass meetings he began to

address, in impeccable English, with robed and bearded mullahs by his

side, speakin2 to Muslim peasants to whom he seemed as foreign as

the Viceroy, and who yet - another Indian inconsistency -hailed him

as their supreme leader? (165).

The conflict between Mohammed Ali Kama and all else in the Kaurava Party

leads to the most tragic consequences for the whole nation. The single-minded

obsession of Kama to be free from the hegemony of the Hindus, ultimately and

unfortunately, paves the way for the formation of Kamistan.

The painful end to these divisive tendencies comes sooner than expected and

India is cut up on religious lines. The political impact of the Partition and the conflicts

thereof are unexpected: "And as the Muslim Group consolidated its hold on, and its

taste for, power, a vocal section of its adherents began openly calling for the creation

of a new political entity[. ..] out of India's Muslim-majority areas" (207). What

follows is a holocaust in which thousands lose their lives. "Gangaji[ ...I took upon

himself the tragedy of the nation. He saw the violence across the land as a total

repudiation of what he had taught. All his later life he had seemed ageless, suddenly

he looked old" (227).

The creation of an exclusively Islamic state has but given rise to another

political impasse. Manimir is the new bone of contention: "To this day it is scarred by

tank-tracks, amputated by cease-fire lines, exploited by rhetoricians and fanatics on

both sides of the frontier who prostitute its name for their own meretricious purposes"

(260).Tharoor cryptically points to the Kashmir problem which has been a festering

wound, a political conundn~m, the mother of many problems for the Indian nation.

Tharoor takes on the political players of modem India who have been

pursuing their selfish ends rather than the nation's interests. His cynical but realistic

perspective is not without the comic element which prompts him to recreate the

political drama in the farcical mode. The Grear Indian Novel "contests imperialist

historiography and some fonns of nationalist historiography" @har 129). The

historical discourse pursued by Tharoor is motivated by the central purpose of

exposing many bitter truth:; in the political life of modem India. Far from being a

doctored document, the novel is a critique of what happens in the life of India with

focus on political conllicts with serious and far-reaching consequences for India and

her neighbours. For example, Tharoor indicates that the Partition of India could have

been avoided if Mohanlnled Mi Karna had been given the due respect by the Kaurava

Party. The personality clashes made it impossible to avoid the Partition, the most

painful political event of the century. According to Dhritarashtra, "I wonder

sometimes; if we had given :nim his due in the Kaurava Party, might he not today be

remembered as one of the finest Indians of us all?" (278).

The novel is, in a sense, a series of conflicts with deleterious effects upon the

nation's future and welfare - Dhritarashtra versus Mohammed Ali Kama, again

Dhritarashtra versus Pandu and later, Priya Duryodhani versus the Pandavas with

Yudhishtir in the lead. .kjun, Bhim, Nakul and Sahadev represent institutions of the

press, army, bureaucracy arid foreign service, all of which were gagged by Priya

Duryodhani to suit her convenience as a political climber. With Yudhishtir she has a

regular fight to capture power. After the Emergency she gets beaten at the elections

and Yudhishtir becomes the Prime Minister. But his government gets toppled and

Duryodhani once again captures power. Thus the whole political scenario is a

relentless effort to occupy the highest seat in Hastinapur. Tharoor's attempt is to

expose and ridicule all these persons who have been the undoing of the nation - self-

seeking and power-crazy, vindictive and treacherous, overtaking even the most

wicked characters in the original epic. Tharoor finds the hagiographies of the Indian

political leaders repugnant because they are indiscriminately laudatory and time-

serving. His main complain: is against the ones which gave too much importance to

the role of Nehru.

The novel deals with the conflicts between Gangaji and Pandu. In Pandu's

struggle for leadership in the Party, he fails, owing to Gangaji preferring

Dhritarashtra. Tharoor's extremely negative estimate of Nehm's abilities and role in

the politics of pre-and post-Independence India is suggested by the allegorical frame

itself. As Dhritarashtra, he is made into Gandhi's "blind and visionary son", with a

vaulting ambition and mon~imental ego. Dhritarashtra is implicated in the hasty deal

of the Partition, by colluding with the Viceroy Lord Drewpad and his charming wife

Georgina. The novel makes no secret of his amatory liaison with her, and charges him

with having failed to see that she was used by her husband as his "secret weapon"

(215). Tharoor comments, "The hopes and plans of millions seem to have been

betrayed but the calamity turns out to have been ordained all along" (245).

At some point of time Dhritarashtra does away with all political conflicts by

seeing to it that there are no rivals left. He is also charged with having mastered the

"technique of political self-perpetuation" (261) by promptly offering to resign

whenever criticism was openly raised within the Kaurava Party against him.

In Tharoor's allegorical design, Indian democracy is symbolised by Draupadi.

Whereas her health remained stable during Dhritarashtra's time, she was threatened to

the core by Priya Duryodhani. Dhritarashtra's secret plan to make Duryodhani the

next ruler of Hastinapur gives rise to all possible kinds of conflicts. At the end of it

all there is the Emergency, considered the most traumatic event of post-Independence

India. "[...]the political chaos in the country, fuelled by Drona's idealistic but

confused Uprising which a variety of political opportunists had joined and exploited,

could have led the country nowhere but to anarchy" (369). This provides a sharp

contrast to the perception of Sahgal and Rushdie. Tharoor's scepticism about the

worth of her political rivals who combined against her is reflected in the comment on

their coming to power: "The Indian people gave themselves the privilege of replacing

a determined, collected tyrant with an indeterminate collection of tyros" (402).

With Duryodhani out of power, her political rivals fight among themselves

and bring down the government, writing yet another chapter in India's political

vicissitudes. Duryodhani makes use of this opportunity to captures power electorally,

exploiting the disunity among her opponents. Thus, their power games continue and

people at large cany on with their fatalism. Tharoor incisively points to the very lo\\;

standards and purely selfish motives of the players in India's political games for

power. They use conflicts lnostly for their subsistence, sustenance and occasional

gains with least regard to the common weal of the nation. The novelist pointedly

marks out Drona for his ujlwillingness to take up the role of the ruler. "Having

abandoned politics when he seemed the likely heir-apparent to Dhritarashtra, he tried

196

to stay above it all after the fall of Dhritarashtra's daughter" (409). His apparent self-

sacrifice results in unlr70rthy men assuming charge, fighting among themsel\.es,

splitting the Party and paving the way for the come-back of Duryodhani. All in all, the

emerging scenario is a bleak one for the narrator as well as the nation.

What is refreshing i l l Tharoor is that "the superimposition of the political

events of the 20" century on the basic structure of the Mahabharafa is made

plausible by variations in stylistic levels and tones" (Panicker 14). Yet, the parallels

between the original and th: novelistic version retain their veracity owing to the

inevitable repetition of history, and the value of the novel is far more than the

reflected glory of the classical masterpiece.

The chapter titled "Forbidden Fruit" brings into sharp focus the conflicting

views of two political figures - Sir hchard, representing the colonizer and Gangaji,

supposedly representing the colonized, but being among the most decolonised of men.

Gangaji is kept waiting by the Viceroy even after having been given an appointment.

In the light of the renowned English sense of punctuality, this wiltkl act is meant to

show the coloniser's presumptuous prerogative. Sir Richard condescendingly keeps

Gangaji company until the Viceroy can join them. This is how the conversation goes:

"I hope 1 have not come too early", Gangaji said at last

'?\To, not at all", Sir Richard found himself forced to reply. "His

Excellency has [. . . I er [...]been unavoidably detained."

"Unavoidably detained", Gangaji repeated. "Unavoidably detained."

He savoured tht: words, seeming to taste each syllable as he uttered it.

"Another one 3f your fine British phrases, suitable for so many

occasions, is it not?" (128).

Tharoor juxtaposes the decolonised personality of Gangaji alongside the

undependable, unpunctual colcnizer, proving that the Indian political leader could be

more than a match to the viceregal Britisher. The conflict between Britain and India is

presented as a ping-pong of claims and counter-claims marked by strength on both

sides. The colonial situation ,>resented by Tharoor highlights the strength of the

character of the colonized.

197

The colonisers' cruzlty is matched only by the helplessness of the colonized.

The blanket use of violence against a non-violent movement aggravates the political

conflicts which move fast towards a grand finale. The turning point comes with the

firing at the Bibigarh Gardens in which 379 people die and 1,137 are injured. When it

is ail over Rudyard is given the figures. He expresses satisfaction with his men in the

most inhuman manner: "Only 84 bullets wasted. Not bad" (81). The Massacre is no

act of insane frenzy, but a conscious, deliberate imposition of colonial will. It is sheer

folly on the part of the British because as a direct result of this Massacre the whole

nation gets galvanized under Gangaji and the conflict begins moving towards a

crescendo. "And by letting it happen the British crossed that point of no return that

exists only in the minds of men that point which, in any unequal relationship, a master

and a subject learn equally to respect" (82). The conflict suddenly comes to a head

and reconciliation is ruled 0r.t.

According to Oscar Wilde, "the one duty we owe to history is to re-write it".

What the political novelist is trying to do is a rewriting of history. In the Nietzschean

way, he brings the past to the bar of judgement and interrogates it remorselessly to

create fictional history which, in the postmodern sense, is metafiction. It is marked by

a constant act of parodying which is done not to destroy the past but to enshrine it and

question it. In it lies the clue to understanding the postmodernist paradox. The

paradox is apparent objectivity and self-reflexivity blended. Being poshnodemist,

Tharoor's novel combines intertextuality, open-endedness, subjectivity,

provisionality, indeterminacy, discontinuity and irony. Many of these traits of the

historiogaphic metafiction are embedded in novels like Midnight's Children and The

Great Indian Novel.. The writers are "anything but proper types; they are the ec-

centrics, the marginalized, pe~ipheral figures of fictional history" (Hutcheon 114).

Today's history is the politics of yesterday and today's politics is the h~story

of tomorrow. In basing fiction on certain historical personages and events, writers

have set a pattern. Most of the historical novels that are considered a part of Indian

writing are period pieces that deal \vith the workings of the Raj. They are indigenous

versions of the Raj nostalgia showing little sign of expanding beyond history, to work

towards relating contemporaneity to antiquity. But the novels of Rushdie and Tharoor

make an attempt to view political conflicts not merely against the immediate

provocative background but in more lasting terms as a subtle interplay of history and

contemporaneity that will retain its significance in an altered clime and time.

"Tharoor has taken the ancient epic as the basic frame work and filled it with a

contemporary cast of political characters for a serious and ironical reconsideration and

re-presentation of recent Indian history" (Balaswamy 230). One major conflict

represented is that betweer. Pandu and Gangaji. Pandu, true to his mythical

counterpart, rebels against the authority of Gangaji, and decides to strike out alone by

fleeing to Germany and lapaxi. The conflict is not a personal one; it is ideological -

Gangaji swearing by non-violence and Pandu believing only in anned struggle.

Gandhi's favouritism for Ne:hru disillusions Netaji and, compounded with their

ideological difference, the co~iflict becomes irresoluble. The political conflict in this

case has two aspects - the personal and the ideological.

As a critical review of :history as resorted to by Tharoor is nearer truth than the

officially handed-down history the reliability of his work has a premium on it. As a

critique of 20" century India it takes readers to the motives of the managers and

manipulators of the country's destiny. His trenchant attack of Dhritarashtra is not

without cause. For more than one-third of a century Dhritarashtra's family presides

over the political and econorlic decay of the nation. "If Dhritarashtra's socialist

beliefs went beyond anything Gangaji himself had never expressed, there was never

any question of the Great Teacher's endorsement of his sightless protege. The

Kauravas were left in no doubt that Dhritarashtra was Gangaji's man" (1 11).

When Dhritarashtra passes on power to his daughter the Dhritarashtra dynasty

is being shaped and groomed for selfish ends. "When, years later Duryodhani spoke

darkly of the immense and unrivalled sacrifices her father and she had made for the

nation, I would think of poor I'andu, by then long turned to ash and almost

forgotten[ ...I." (112). Thus, in the political battles Dhritarashtra has the upper hand

and ultimate victory at the expense of many valiant and competent ones, for the

simple reason that he has Gangaji always on his side.

199

The value of The Great Indian Novel as a story of political conflicts makes it

a postcolonial statement on the tragic consequences of internecine conflict in the inner

circles of power. It has a political standpoint which obviously indicts all self-seekers

and power-mongers. The ironic tone is exactly meant for scathing attacks on leaders

who lead the nation to disaster through mismanagement and misuse of power.

The novel fits into the postmodemist genre since it is informed by a constant

search for new values, and does not offer overtly any new alternative. Yet, "the novel

becomes a document of manifest socio-political criticism" (P.K.Rajan 160). It is

achieved through an unusual blending of fact and fancy. Ved Vyasa's fictional

history, in self-consciously 1:mphasising and asserting the porousness of genres and

blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, enjoins on their readers to realize

that Tharoor's book is "not a testimony offered in evidence concerning an external

reality, but is its own reality for itself' (Robbe-Grillet 153-54).

The logical perspective of the novel is Tharoor's disaffection with the colonial

inheritance and what the nation's leaders did with it. He typifies "a commonly shared

attitudinal pattern amongst postcolonial writers which constitutes a chief reason for

the need felt by these writers to undo the documents of colonial heritage" (Salat 128).

Therefore, Tharoor resorts to the method of parody, which is the most effective tool

of postmodemist compositions. This new kind of historiography alone could be used

to expose the absurdities and immoralities of political history. "The irreverence, the

irony and the humour are all based on the parodic effect that is consciously created by

a most unlikely fusion of tradition and modernity" (Kamnakaran 95).

Tharoor views the M,~habharaia not merely in terms of several incidents that

go to build up a story, but in its essence as an analysis of the conflict between good

and evil, between dharma and adharma and between love of power and rejection of it.

Tharoor has recast the rnajor events of India's traditional mythology and

contemporary histo~y in a patchwork that offers new insights into both. The novel

captures the essence of both mythology and lived history while ignoring the

peripherals, in a deliberate manner. For example, Tharoor re-presents a mythical

episode from the Mahabharata to highlight the injustice being done to people of the

lower echelons. In re-writing the Ekalavya episode in The Great I~idian Novel,

Tharoor ':reveals the machinations of the privileged in not allowing the subaltern to be

installed higher than his station" (Kirpal 28).

My various literary and less-than-literary devices serve an attempt to

look at Indian polltical history through the refraction of two different

kinds of light. One is, of course, the light cast by the past, by the values

taught to us in our mythology, by the examples set by our legends. The

other is the light cast by a satirical view of the present, which by

deliberate simplification and fictionalization(one might even say

conscious distortion) throws certain trends and issues into sharper

relief than his:ory makes possible. (Tharoor, "Yoking of Myth to

History" 7)

The vaulting ambition of Priya Duryodhani uses the nationalisation of banks .

and the abolition of privy purses as mere excuses for her long-range plan of

perpetuation of power. The final confrontation with the Party is on electing the next

de jure head of the nation, the President.

And thus, over the essentially trivial issue of the election of a national

figurehead, the political equivalent of the dragon on the bowsprit of a

Viking ship, and ostensibly provoked by the even more trivial question

of whether the fattest bankers in the country should draw government

salaries or private ones, the great Kaurava Party, the world's oldest

anti-colonial political organization, sixteen years away from its

centenary, split. (350-51).

As a latter-day history of India, The Great Indian Novel is not conceived on

the exact lines of recorded history. Tharoor is more concerned about dharma or the

absence of it, in the work. Hence, his novelistic presentation with deviations of many

kinds. "I was not really aware of a recurrent concern with fidelity. I am concerned

with integrity in a certain sense. I have an abiding curiosity about the entire notion of

dharma which as a ruling principle has been lost in recent years" (Kanaganayakam

123). The irreverent tone and critical attitude are weapons used by the author to view

Indian history from the satincal perspective. "In Tharoor's novel the truth and dharma

of the Mahabharata suffer as much as the myths of recent Indian history, including

the great myths of the freedom movement" (Taneja 771).

Despite the fa~ade ol'comedy, the high purpose of Tharoor's novel is to show

Indians the truth of modem India both positive and negative, "to broaden

understanding of the Indian cultural and historical heritage and to reclaim for Indians

the story of India's national experience and its own re-assertion of itself, including the

triumphs and disappointmen-:s oflndependence" (Tharoor, "What the Novel Means to

Me" 5).

Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines gets focused on conflicts of the political

kind too. At the end of the freedom struggle the political conflicts between the

Congress Party and the Muslim League reach a point of no return, and Partition

follows. Tha'mma who belongs to Dhaka which is now part of Pakistan (Bangladesh)

thinks about the aftermath of the struggle for power and the division of the nation:

"Trenches perhaps, or soldiers, or guns pointing at each other, or even just barren

strips of land" (151), indic2ting the physical borders between the two countries.

Challenging and disproving the doctored documents of India's history and politics,

Ghosh breaks through many bamers of conventionality: "With its axis on the Indian

subcontinent's specified context the novel's breathtaking compass coils together

geographical distances and deliberately attempts to break many myths while taking

the country's history, culture and political situation in its stride" (D.Rao 81).

Questioning the very ideas of nationhood and nationalism, Ghosh seems to hope for

the end of political conflicts because the nationalistic spirit is the main evil behind

splits and bifurcations of people for fulfilling the ulterior motives of the power-

mongering politicians of the day. "The Shadow Lines obviously questions the idea of

nationhood that is consolida1:ed through the baptism of wars or coercive apparatus"

(Mukherjee 265). Leaving aside many other issues, Ghosh analyses novelistically the

problems that colonialism throws up - the way the invisible chains have a deeper grip

on the mind of a nation than the visible chains. "[...]he turns away from the novel of

Empire with its ambivalenct:~ towards colonialism in the tradition of Kipling and

Forster" (Sujala Singh 22).

Tridib hints at possibilities of community formation on the basis of post-

nationalist cosmopolitanism .which seems to be the only lasting remedy for political

conflicts emerging from nat~onalist and religious tendencies. His favourite story is

that of "a man without a country who fell in love with a woman across-the-seas"

(186), which is re-enacted in his own encounter with May. "Tridib is cast as the

paradigmatic figure of migrancy and hybridity, hinting at imaginings of the self other

than the traditional ones" (Roy 41). Ghosh foregrounds the most violent phase of

Indian nationalism against genteel domesticity, and engages with the silences and

amnesia of the dominant patriarchal nationalism which tries to cover up many gory

and blood-stained chapters oi'political conflicts.

A different exposition of the concept of nationalism is seen in the person of

the grandmother, to whom it is a hallowed word, the mainstay of political thinking in

the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It meant hatred of things British and, in her

desire to win political freeciom, she dreamt of killing English officials. She even

considered war as a necessary evil which inspired the idea of nationalism and thus

strengthened the foundation of a nation. She thought the English were a nation

because they were reborn in the same pool of blood shed during wars, while India was

yet to emerge as a nation as blood of near and dear ones shed in a war had not

baptized Indians: "They know they're a nation because they've drawn their borders

with blood[. ..]their churches are lined with memorials to men who died in wars[. . . I .

War is their religion. That's what it takes to make a country" (76). This firebrand

nationalism, having outlived its utility in the late twentieth century, degenerates into

the politics of hatred. What was basically a clash of political aspirations is sometimes

distorted into senseless animosity by the sharers of this limited view of nationalism.

The question "what was it all for then - partition and all the killings and everything -

if there isn't something in b1:tween?"(l51) to which Ghosh addresses himself shows

how the schism in our national life was formalized by drawing a line on the map right

through the homeland. Like war, this tragedy of Partition brought out the best as well

203

as the worst in the people of the subcontinent, juxtaposing crude barbarity against

, demonstrations of the nob11:st sentiments on both sides of the border. The personal

tragedy of Tridib's death in the 1964 riots in Dhaka transforms the meaning of the

border for the grandmother. It becomes something which defines her nationality,

though previously she was skeptical about the line, and in the context of the 1965

India-Pakistan War, the meaning of freedom comes to include fighting away the

Pakistanis who, barely twerty years ago, were her countrymen.

"The grandmother':. desire to even kill for freedom, May's internationalism,

Nick's colonial hangover, Ila's Trotskyite friends picketing for political causes and Ila

striving for personal fie-dom, are either strands of nationalism or political

commitment which the no\el brings forth" (Kapadia 205). By exploring connections,

distinctions and possibilities Ghosh shows that in a changing world, different strands

of nationalism and ideology will exist and even compete. The force of nationalism in

the quest for freedom or an ideology is often a source of violence. As Robi, an IAS

officer philosophises: "Yon know, if you look at the pictures on the front pages of the

newspapers at home now, ail those pictures of dead people - in Assam, the north-east.

Punjab, Sri Lanka, Tripura -people shot by terrorists and separatists and the army and

police, you'll find somewhere behind it all, that single word: everyone's doing it to be

free" (246). The meaning of political freedom in the modem world is shown as

complex and without any easy solutions. For humanity to survive, a new perception of

relationships must emerge.

When a restaurant owner of Bangladeshi origin, Malik, dismisses the 1964

riots (in which Tridib 10:jt his life) as insignificant compared with the war, the

centrelmargin pattern is replicated in nationalist discourse. Ghosh focuses on this

incident to unmask the distortions and suppressions in nationalist histories, to tell the

untold stories. "Even a small event like a riot did have as much historical importance

as a war, as all were results of the politics of hatred, though perhaps on different

scales and each provided insight into the personal and human aspects of political

violence" (Majumdar 4 : ) The perfunctory coverage of the event by English-

language newspapers calls attention to the complicity of the written discourse in the

clever erasures in the state versions. Aligning wars with nations and documented

history, Ghosh locates riots ir the people, reserved in personal memory, saying: "they

were subject to a logic larger than themselves [governments], for the madness of the

riot is a pathological inversion, but also therefore a reminder, of that indivisible sanity

that binds people to each other independently of their govemnlents" (230).

The virulence of po:.itical violence triggered by nationalist and religious

divisions is captured by Ghosh in the tragic end of the novel. Tha'mma's total

allegiance to her past (symbolised by her changing into a red-bordered sari at the

moment of departure) mimics her vision, so that in the end she remains isolated in the

Mercedes, while the mob butchers the old man in his rickshaw as well as Tridib who

sacrifices his life in trying to save him. An eloquent statement on the political

situation of the subcontinent may be found in the following passage: "It is this that

sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of

the world - not language, not food, not music - it is the special quality of loneliness

that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the

mirror"(204). The irrationaliiy and absurdity of political boundaries is such that "the

individual self sucked into history and public events[ ...I is either totally obliterated

like Tridib or left badly scarred like the narrator" (Sushila Singh 135).

All the perceptions of political conflicts radiate from the focal incident of

communal violence in Calcutta which the narrator experiences as a child and which,

he later realises, is the obverze side of the same violence in Dhaka that took Tridib's

life. "Thus, the irony of our political processes which seek to give people separate

identities by drawing boundary lines is highlighted" (Nandita Sinha 183). The novel

serves to introduce the reader to what Partition meant in the East of India. While

there has been a great deal of powerful literature written on Partition in our West, the

implications of the formation of East Pakistan on the spirit of composite Bengal has

remained unwritten, and Ghosh addresses the issue most effectively. Jethamoshai

symbolises the mindlessness of communal divides. " 'This India-Shindia' as

Jetharnoshai describes the political strait-jacket of nationality, sums up the instinctive

but tragical naiveti of the truly trans-continental sensibility which, in the words of the

205

late ornithologist Salim Ali, viewed religion-infused politics 'with astonished

disbelief "(Gandhi 41).

In recapturing and recreating the Indian reality, the novelists of the 1980s have

a multifocal approach. Even as some of them get tied down to the familial plane,

others focus on social problerns and cultural differences, the nation as a whole is

taken up only while dealing with the major political events and the problems

emanating from them. The larger canvas of this type alone can comprehend the

momentous events in the history of the nation. Thus, the political discourses

occupying conspicuous morrlents in history shed light on the great reality that India is.

The attempts by Rushdie, Sahga!, Tharoor and Ghosh go a long way in presenting to

the nation a mirror image of its political schisms, dichotomies and blood-stained

episodes caused by multifarious conflicts.

WORKS CITED

Ali, Tariq. An Indian Dyna.rfy: The S t o y of the Neh1-2r-Gandhi Family. New York:

Putnam's, 1985.

Cart Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State. Middlesex: Penguin, 1983.

Asnani, Shyam M. "Contemporary Politics in the Novels of Nayantara Sahgal."

Comn~onwealth Novel in English 5.2 (Fall 1992): 39-48.

Balaswamy, P. "The Presence of the Past: Shashi Tharoor's Tlre Great Indian Novel

as Historiographic Metafiction." Indian Literature Today Lfol II P o e q and

Fiction Ed. R. K Dhawail. New Delhi: Prestige, 1994: 228-36.

Batty, Nancy E. "The Art of Suspense: Rushdie's 1001 (Mid-) Nights." Ariel 18.3

(Jul1987): 49-65.

Breman, Timothy. "Shame's. Holy Book." The Journal of Indian Writing in English

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