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.
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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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