[peter morey

8/18/2019 [Peter Morey

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/peter-morey 1/277



Alternative Indias

Writing, Nation and Communalism



C r o s su l t u r e s

Readings in the Post / Colonial

Literatures in English

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis(Aachen)

82Series Editors



Alternative Indias

Writing, Nation and Communalism

Edited by

Peter Morey and Alex Tickell

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005



The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -Requirements for permanence".

ISBN: 90-420-1927-1©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005Printed in The Netherlands

The cover montage includes elements from paintings of the Mughal school,Akbar period, c. 1580-90. Every effort has been made to trace copyright

holders.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

PETERMOREY ANDALEXTICKELL Introduction ix

ANSHUMANA. MONDAL The Limits of Secularism and the Constructionof Composite National Identity in India 1

ALEXTICKELL The Discovery of Aryavarta: HinduNationalism and Early Indian Fiction in English 25

ELLEKEBOEHMER “First Realise Your Need”:Manju Kapur’s Erotic Nation 53

SHIRLEYCHEW “Cutting Across Time”: Memory, Narrative,

and Identity in Shashi Deshpande’sSmall Remedies 71

AMINAYAQIN The Communalization and Disintegrationof Urdu in Anita Desai’sIn Custody 89



ASHOKBERY “Reflexive Worlds”:

The Indias of A.K. Ramanujan 115 PETERMOREY Communalism, Corruption and Dutyin Rohinton Mistry’sFamily Matters 141

SUJALASINGH

The Routes of National Identityin Amitav Ghosh’sThe Shadow Lines 161

RALPH J. CRANE Inscribing a Sikh India: An AlternativeReading of Khushwant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan 181

SHARMILASEN No Passports, No Visas: The Line of Control BetweenIndia and Pakistan in Contemporary Bombay Cinema 197

Afterword 225 Contributors 229 Index 231



Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Gordon Collier and the editorial team at Edi-tions Rodopi for their encouragement and advice as we completed themanuscript; the contributors for their patience during the volume’slengthy gestation period; the Research Committee of the School ofSocial Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of London andthe F.R. Leavis Award Committee, and especially Jack Donovan, at theModern School, University of York for their generous assistance inproviding funds to allow for the completion of the project. We wouldalso like to thank numerous colleagues in our respective institutionsand, lastly, our partners Amina Yaqin and Rachel Goodyear for theirforbearance, grace under pressure and living cheerfully for four yearswith this troll under the stairs. Very special thanks and gratitude go toRachel Goodyear for her invaluable editorial role in preparing themanuscript for publication. Earlier versions of the following essayshave appeared as follows: Alex Tickell, “Writing the Nation’s Destiny:Indian Fiction in English before1910 ,” Third World Quarterly 26 .3 (2005 ); Peter Morey, “Running Repairs: Corruption, Community andDuty in Rohinton Mistry’sFamily Matters,” Journal of CommonwealthLiterature 38 .2 (2003 ); Amina Yaqin, “The Communalization and Dis-

integration of Urdu,” Annual of Urdu Studies 19

(2004

).



INTRODUCTION Indias of the Mind:History, Culture, Literature and Communalism

Whether or not there has ever been a single civilisation that couldcall itself ‘Indian’, whether or not India was, is or ever will become a

cohesive cultural entity, depends on the differences and similaritiesin the cultures of the people who have inhabited the sub-continentfor centuries […] So is India Indian? It’s a tough question. Let’s justsay we’re an ancient people learning to live in a recent nation.1

N OCTOBER 1992 , the Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu

Council) announced that construction would start in Decemberon a temple to the God Ram at what is considered his birth-place, Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. The only obstacle tothis plan was the existence of a sixteenth-century mosque on the site, abuilding protected by an order of the Supreme Court of India. Never-theless, on the6th of December, scores of Hindu militants surged past asecurity cordon and began reducing the mosque to a pile of rubble. The

demolition of the Babri Masjid caused protest demonstrations, a ‘vic-tory’ parade by Hindu nationalists, and widespread communal viol-ence that lasted well into the following January. Almost ten years later,in the spring of2002 , a train full of Hindu pilgrims was attacked atGodhra in Gujarat in circumstances that have never been fully ex-

1 Arundhati Roy,The Algebra of Infinite Justice (London, HarperCollins,2002 ):

25 –26 .

I



x ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

plained, unleashing once more a tidal wave of communal violence dur-ing which the Muslim community, whose members were blamed for

the Godhra outrage, were attacked and saw their homes and busi-nesses destroyed. Whatever the reasons behind these two explosions ofHindu–Muslim violence – which recalled the carnage of Partition inferocity, if not in scale – they underlined two stark facts about Indiancultural and political life in the modern era: historical suspicionsbetween Hindus and Muslims could still act as mobilizing principlesleading to extreme violence and brutality; and a new militancy was

abroad among some in the majority Hindu population which sought toreclaim certain sites and privileges considered to have been ceded tominorities during the years since Independence in1947 . These actionswere backed up by organizational power and underpinned by a full-scale ideological programme. Such majoritarianism attempted to re-shape national identity along Hindu lines, was prepared to use demo-cratic and extra-parliamentary means to achieve its aim, and sought to

create a purified Hindu culture in a purified Hindu homeland.In response to this aggressive communal vision of national identityin India, historians such as Sunil Khilnani have asserted the inade-quacy of any homogeneous definition of the nation. Early in his over-view of post-Independence social and political developments,The Ideaof India, he observes that “over the past generation the presumptionthat a single shared sense of India – a unifying idea and concept – can

at once define the facts that need recounting and provide the collectivesubject for the Indian story has lost all credibility.”2 By the time one hasreached the end of Khilnani’s volume, this prefatory remark appears tobe a clarion call against a tendency which has recently gathered pace inIndian politics and which his text ably delineates: that of attempting tostandardize notions of what it is to be Indian around sanctioned reli-gious, cultural and ethnic identities. Instead, what emerges from its

pages is a testament to the heterogeneity of India and the differentversions and visions which, for both resident and non-resident Indians,are urgent and vivid: a contest over what India is, what it can be, andwhat it should become; a battle over contending political models of

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



Indias of the Mind xi

identity or what, in a migrant context, Salman Rushdie has termed“Indias of the mind.”3

This book examines some of those literary and cultural texts thatmap the ethnic and communal lineaments of contemporary India. Itseeks an understanding of the ways in which the tensions describedabove have evolved in the larger environment of history, and of howwriters and texts have interrogated and questioned – often on the levelof the individual life-worlds and interaction of their characters – anidea which has gained ground in political praxis: that India can and

should be defined in and through its majority Hindu culture. Thus,among the themes explored by contributors here are the history ofHindu nationalist thought and its articulation in early texts; the way inwhich communalism impacts on the experiences of characters in theurban space; how regional, linguistic and gender differences prob-lematize the project of homogenization; and the ambiguous effect ofthe attempt to maintain and police borders, both physical and meta-

phorical, in the name of national unity. There is certainly no simplecorrelation between the creative artists and works explored by thecontributors to this volume and any direct attempts to erase the muchcruder brushstrokes of the communalist vision of Indian culture. Oftenthemes of communal antipathy are secondary to crises of personaldevelopment or family interaction. Nevertheless, in their attempts toforge imaginative worlds populated by a diversity of characters and

communities, the literary and filmic visions that these essays deal withexpose, at least obliquely, the inevitable diversity in a land of above abillion inhabitants and myriad ethnic, regional and religious variations.However, to grasp what is at stake in the contention between centri-petal and centrifugal interpretations of Indianness it might be wisest tobegin by sketching briefly the historical coordinates of the religio-nationalist vision that has brought us to this point.

Although the communalist ideologies of groups such as theVishvaHindu Parishad and Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva), in their roles as affili-ated, factional cadres of theBharatiya Janata Party or BJP, have relied to

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



xii ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

a large extent on assertions of primordial religious legitimacy, mostpolitical analysts examining the intellectual genealogies of these claims

have emphasized their comparative modernity. Historically, the gristfor Hindu majoritarianism’s particularly productive ideological millcan be found among the projections of, and prognoses for, an assertiveIndian identity during the colonial era. In the face of colonial educa-tional and administrative policies in the nineteenth century, reasser-tions of Indian historical legitimacy became essential to indigenousself-esteem and political mobilization. Exemplified in Bankimchandra’s

famous exhortation, “We must have a history,” and further demon-strated in the growth of Indian historiography (as opposed to olderitihasa

4 writings), the engagement with history can be seen as an inte-gral component of a new political self-making in the late1800 s.

Paradoxically, the structure of early nationalist historiographyfound sanction in larger colonial models of Indian history, which de-scribed a sequential pattern of Hindu artistic cultural achievement,

followed by decline, defeat and eclipse by the Mughal invaders, afterwhich the British appeared initially as saviours but then, in their turn,as occupiers to be displaced. This historical template, which owesmuch to the European classical–medieval–Renaissance pattern, is stillstrongly influential as the basis for current Hindu nationalist models ofIndia’s past. As Partha Chatterjee reflects, “the materials of Hindunationalist rhetoric current in postcolonial India were fashioned from

the very birth of nationalist historiography.”5

And, while not the directprecursors of theHindutva movements of the1920 s and1930 s, the earlyequivalence of Hinduism and nationalism both in Bankim’s literaryinclusion of a national motherland in the Hindu pantheon and in thesanatan dharm movement emphasizes the shared idiomatic and discur-sive space occupied by contemporary religious and non-religiousnationalist tendencies.

For writers and political leaders in Bengal at the turn of the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries, anxious to represent their ‘national’past as the basis for a viable political re-imagining, colonial histories of

4 The Sanskrit term ‘itihasa’ refers to texts such as the Mahabharata that blendpolitical history with mythical or supernatural events.

5 Partha Chatterjee,The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial His-tories (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 1993 ):94 . See also95 –115.



Indias of the Mind xiii

the Rajput states and the sixteenth-century Maratha confederacy affor-ded a particularly important resource. Using accounts of resistance to

Mughal incursion, these works provided striking allegories for thestruggle for political autonomy under British colonial rule. Even innationalist works set in Bengal, such as Bankim’s landmark novel Anandamath , both Muslims and the British are staged as the aggressorsin a proto-national,sanyassi uprising. While writers and spiritualleaders contributed to the formulation of new and highly genderedconfigurations of nationhood, oriented around a symbolic Hindu

motherland and her virile sons, the foundations of popular commu-nalism were being laid by leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak. His resur-rection in1893 of Hindu festivals and public events such as the Mah-rashtrian Ganesh Chaturti , in response to local Muslim celebrations of Muharram , was, Wolpert argues, a political strategy in which “the grassroots of Indian cultural nationalism were […] tapped for the firsttime.”6 The subsequent fragmentation of the Congress into moderate

and extremist wings, following the ‘Surat split’ in1907 , played a fur-ther part in welding religious iconography to the nationalist cause.The communal political consciousness wrought by Congress

leaders such as Tilak had been incubated by Hindu reform organiza-tions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, most notably Daya-nanda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj, or ‘Society of Nobles’. Energized by twofundamental ideas – a return to the scriptural authority of the Vedas

(perceived as divine revelation) and a narrative of Hindu decline andpotential regeneration7 – the Arya Samaj also incorporated a civiliza-tional Aryanism, drawn from contemporary European race-theory,into the emergent nationalist paradigm. In some cases these politicalstrands combined – notably in the figure of Lala Lajpat Rai, who wasan Arya Samaj member and a supporter of newer political lobby groupssuch as theHindu Mahasabha (founded in1915 ).

The model of Hindu nationalism that informs today’s political ter-rain in India owes its defining contours to developments in the mid-1920 s, and the publication of significant writings by Swami Shrad-

6 Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (Oxford: OxfordUP, 5th ed.1997 ):

260 .7 T.N. Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in

India (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1998 )



xiv ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

dhanand and Vinayak D. Sarvarkar. Sarvarkar’s influential workHin-dutva – Who is Hindu? (1923 ) was especially important in the evolution

of Hindu-reformist thinking into claims of civilizational, territorial legi-timacy.8 For Sarvarkar, the only Indian community to fulfil the pre-scriptions of ‘Hindutva ’ or ‘condition of Hinduness’ was one that couldclaim ‘Aryan’ racial descent, and could define India as both a ‘father-land’ ( pitribhu) and a ‘holyland’ ( punyabhu). Other communities such asChristians, Parsis and Muslims could not be admitted toHindutva unless they reclaimed this meshed national-communal identity. Thus,

while the Arya Samaj had defined itself scripturally, as a religious re-form movement, Sarvarkar’s Hindus were called upon to see them-selves as the chosencultural custodians of Indian identity. Sarvarkar’smore exclusive ‘Hindu civilizational’ conception of identity alsoshaped the ethos of theRashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (national asso-ciation of volunteers), a new paramilitary organization formed byKeshav Baliram Hedgewar in Nagpur in1925 .

Highly important as a political foundation for the later develop-ment of theSangh Parivar , the RSS, while disavowing any direct poli-tical agenda, built on Sarvarkar’s thinking by rejecting the designation‘Hindu’ in favour of the more expansive national-communal concept ofRashtriya. As the founder of theRSS, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar wouldpoint out, “If we use the word ‘Hindu’ it will only mean that we con-sider ourselves only as one of the innumerable communities in this

land and that we do not realise our natural status as the nationals ofthis country.”9 TheRSS set out to mould its members into a new senseof physical and spiritual “self respect, unity and courage,” inaugurat-ing a regime of callisthenics, weapons training, ideological re-educationand prayers to the motherland.

The physical preoccupations of Hindu nationalists such as Hedge-war and his successor, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, reflected the func-

tionalist, somatic tenor of their politics, in which the ‘body’ of theHindu nation had to be protected (through increasingly aggressivepolicies towards India’s religious minority groups), from “the danger

8 Chetan Bhatt,Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Ox-ford & New York: Berg,2001 ):63 .

9 See Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds, 221 .



Indias of the Mind xv

of a cancer developing into its body politic of a state within a state.”10 At the same time, organizations such as theRSS largely ignored the

political-economic models developed by the Congress as part of thestruggle for decolonization, preferring instead to promote a vision ofIndian history as a longer, primordial conflict between Hindus, “in-digenous children of the soil,” and “alien invaders” such as Muslims.11 As Aditya Mukherjee points out, these claims of communal polariza-tion acted to justify colonial power as an arbitrating, peace-keepingpresence, replacing earlier imperial narratives such as the civilizing

mission. Communalist interventions toward the end of the Raj wereoften seen to play a loyalist role because, “on the one hand they ham-pered any mobilisation based on secular categories like class, or nation,which cut across religious categories, and on the other hand theyfocussed their attack on the [communal and not imperial] ‘other’.”12

In opposition to such narrow images of national selfhood, Jawahar-lal Nehru’s secular, historically based model of Indian identity became

the presiding political narrative of the new republic after1947 . Fiercelyopposed to the intrusion of forms of religious identity in the workingsof the postcolonial state, Nehru generally associated India’s religioustraditions with backwardness and superstition. However, if we con-centrate on the details of the culturally integrated, independent state inNehru’s work, the secular character of this programme is often difficultto define. Nehru may have fashioned an eloquent and avowedly non-

communal historical narrative for the republic, but his nationalist project drew on forms of primordialist identification and depended onsocio-religious categories even as it disavowed any communal bias.India’s first Prime Minister found it increasingly difficult to maintainhis secularist agenda in the post-Independence period. He had to re-main sensitive to the political anxieties of India’s religious minoritiesand considered Hindu majoritarianism a greater evil than the commu-

nalism that characterized minority claims to religious identity, andargued that: ‘honest communalism is fear, false communalism is poli-

10 See Bhatt,Hindu Nationalism , 130 .11 Bhatt,Hindu Nationalism , 127 .12 Aditya Mukherjee, “Colonialism and Communalism,” in Anatomy of a Con-

frontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal(London: Zed,1993 ):169 .



xvi ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

tical reaction’.13 Aware of the sensitive realities of communal coexis-tence, the Constituent Assembly of1946 – called to prepare India for

self-government – opted for an understanding of the secular state “‘asone that is based on (equal) respect for all religions or non-discrimina-tion on the ground of religion’ – rather than as entailing a strict separa-tion of state and religion.”14

Under Nehru’s secular leadership and Gandhi’s spiritual steward-ship, the Congress Party that led India to independence had strongpractical as well as ideological reasons for endorsing inter-communal

tolerance rather than a strongly secularist line. In order to increasenational solidarity and reinforce a sense of a common anticolonialgrievance, the Congress – itself a very diverse body – had maintained astrategy of absorbing the different religious communities into theIndian polity rather than demanding a uniform, secular adherence tothe concept of the nation. Discussing the recent reinvigoration of formsof Hindu nationalism, the historian and novelist Mukul Kesavan has

argued that the Indian elite only adopted secular politics underNehru’s tutelage as a “common sense” measure, and as an aspect of a“hegemonic style”:

Secularism as practiced by the Indian elite often had little to do withconviction or ideological principle; it was, instead, a marker ofmodernity and metropolitan good taste […] the failure of the State

to make India economically successful eroded this claim to be pro-gressive and modern. And because Nehru […] had twinned socialistautarky and secularism, the failure of the one discredited the other.

15

After Independence, the legacy of Partition also played its part inlegitimizing the communal expression of national politics, if only byproviding a traumatic, exemplary response to claims of communalautonomy. Indeed, since1947 the horrors of Partition have become partof a submerged collective memory. As Ashis Nandy argues, theseevents have become “an unwritten epic that everyone in South Asia

13 Sarvepalli Gopal, ed. Anatomy of a Confrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise ofCommunal Politics in India (London: Zed,1993 ):18 .

14 Stuart Corbridge & John Harriss,Reinventing India: Liberalism, HinduNationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity,2000 ):178 .

15 Mukul Kesavan,Secular Common Sense (New Delhi: Penguin,2001 ):29 .



Indias of the Mind xvii

pretends does not exist but are nevertheless forced to live by” [sic].16 Nandy also makes qualitative distinctions between the violence of Par-

tition and subsequent communal conflicts. For him, Hindu nationalismcan be defined less as a religious than as a political idea, designed toconcentrate the power to define and delimit the nation in the hands ofthose with particular political and economic interests.17 The resultingmajoritarianism, which seeks to subordinate the interests of minoritiesto those enjoying numerical preponderance, is a pervasive force in thecultural life of contemporary India.

Since the death of Nehru, the Congress Party itself has had a poorrecord when it comes to making a stand against aggressive commu-nalist discourses, adopting divisive rhetoric and actions when it hasbeen considered politically expedient. Khilnani records how it wasIndia’s political elite, taking its cue from Indira Gandhi’s populist flirta-tion with communal politics in the1970 s and early1980 s, that “drag-ged this language of religious affiliation into the arena of national poli-

tics.”18

Indeed, while the leaders of the earlyBJP, such as Atal BehariVajpayee, steered their party towards the political mainstream andelectoral respectability – not least as part of the opposition to Indira’santi-democratic interlude during the1975 –77 State of Emergency – thesymbolic vocabulary of Congress politics took on an increasingly com-munal idiom, as in Indira Gandhi’s public attendance at religiousshrines and temples such as theBharatmata Mandir in Hardwar.

In the 1980 s, two particular moments signify a watershed in theongoing process of the communalization of mainstream politics. Thefirst was Indira Gandhi’s initial toleration of the terrorist activities ofSant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in order to embarrass political oppo-nents in Punjab, demonstrating a striking retreat from her father, Jawa-harlal Nehru’s key principle of secularism. (And, of course, her militaryresponse to Sikh separatist claims to an independent Khalistan proved

personally fatal and nationally disastrous, when her assassination bySikh bodyguards in1984 led to the massacre of over three thousand

16 Ashis Nandy, An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other OddRuins of the Self in the Indian Imagination (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 2001 ):99 .

17 Ashis Nandy, “A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods andGoddesses of South Asia,”Postcolonial Studies 4 .2 (July2001 ):125–42 .

18 Khilnani,The Idea of India, 54 .



xviii ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

Sikhs in Delhi alone.) The second instance, a year later, was the contro-versial Shah Bano affair, a legal case concerning alimony payments to a

Muslim divorcee that pitted Muslim personal law against Indian civillaw. The new premier, Rajiv Gandhi, was seen to conciliate the Muslimcommunity when he overturned the Supreme Court ruling that hadfavoured the national code, thereby outragingBJP leaders, who weresubsequently able to present their party’s endorsement of a uniformcivil code as a sign of its progressivism. With hindsight, such develop-ments can be seen as giving impetus to the ongoing fragmentation of

the political scene, which now includes parties based on caste, class,tribe and region, as well as religious affiliation, all jostling to safeguardand advance those interests Congress has been seen to have aban-doned.

When reviewed in this cursory way, as a series of historical mile-stones in the politicizing of religious identity, the comparatively recentascendancy of parties such as theBJP – which headed India’s coalition

government from1998 to 2004 – can be seen as a major challenge tothe traditional secularism propounded by the Congress Party, puta-tively based on religious freedom, celebratory neutrality and reforma-tory justice. Moreover, mainstream attempts at reforming Hinduismand its practices, despite being designed to reassure minorities, haveallowed Hindu nationalists to depict the practice of secular politics asbiased, ‘communalist’ and only really ‘pseudo-secular’. Against this,

they have attempted to portray their own agenda as truly secular,based on rule by the majority.19 In a strange semantic reversal, then, thesecularism propounded by Nehru, with its claim to safeguard minorityrights and prevent the domination of any one group, has been appro-priated by a Hindu majoritarian lobby that excuses its own fascisticpropensities by recourse to the same political vocabulary of equalityand fair representation.

However, it is not only Hindu majoritarian voices that have beenraised against India’s secular polity. In recent years a number of intel-lectuals have spoken out to question the values on which the Indianconstitution was based, seeing secularism as a ‘myth’, or as inappro-priate to Indian needs. Critics such as Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee,T.N. Madan and Gyanendra Pandey are vehemently opposed toHin-

19 Corbridge & Harriss,Reinventing India, 179 , 193 .



Indias of the Mind xix

dutva and its violent methods. Nevertheless, they are also highly criticalof the Indian nation-state as it has developed and what they see as its

shortcomings. Such critics have been termed ‘anarcho-communitarian’,highlighting their indebtedness to Gandhi’s anti-modern, agrarianvision of India as a series of village republics. They tend to value thelocal and the fragmentary over what they see as the intolerant power-drives of the homogenizing modern nation-state. Perhaps the mostvocal of these critics is Ashis Nandy, a self-confessed anti-secularist forwhom bothHindutva and secular nationalism are intolerant of diver-

sity. Corbridge and Harriss comment: “In Nandy’s view, the nation-state is a power container that is defined by the violence which it isbound to dispense in its quest to govern the margins of the country thatit claims to represent and speak for.”20 (One might cite the instances ofKhalistani agitation in the1980 s, and the ongoing militarization ofKashmir as examples to support Nandy’s reading.) As an alternative tothis impasse, he posits a distinction between a desirable ‘religion as

faith’ – a syncretic, pragmatic way of life open to accommodations andvariations – and ‘religion as ideology’ incorporating the standardiza-tion and uniformity of Hindu nationalism. T.N. Madan sees secularismas an alien import into India, at odds with its existing traditions, whilePartha Chatterjee is critical of the failure of the state to keep religionand politics separate. He advocates minority cultural rights based on “apolitics of difference that empowers minorities to say ‘we will not give

reasons for not being like you’.”21

Although these critiques are powerful, they perhaps have a ten-dency to take an unduly romantic view of those local communitieswhose claims are advanced at the expense of the nation. They rely on ahighly debatable distinction between a violent state and an inclusivelocal community (despite the fact that such communities can be everybit as exclusive and oppressive as larger political constructs). More-

20 Reinventing India, 195 .21 Corbridge & Harriss,Reinventing India, 193 –96 . See also Ashis Nandy, “An

Anti-Secularist Manifesto,”Seminar 314 (October1985 ): 14–24 ; T.N. Madan,“Secularism in its Place,” Journal of Asian Studies 46 .4 (1987 ): 746 –58 ; ParthaChatterjee, “Secularism and Toleration,”Economic and Political Weekly 29 .28 (9 July 1994 ): 1768 –77; Gyanendra Pandey,The Construction of Communalism inColonial Northern India (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1990 ), all cited in Ahmad,Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika,1996 ):311.



xx ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

over, in the case of Nandy, what Corbridge and Harriss call “an un-critical attitude towards religious faith and the presumed virtues of

religious communities” might even be said to hamper the formulationof a distinctive and robust rebuttal of the anti-secularist position ofmilitant Hinduism.22 At what point does the project of critiquingstatism and searching for alternative, inclusive models of living toppleover into utopian complacency? (Indeed, Aijaz Ahmad has gone as faras to suggest that secularism is an irreducible precondition for the sur-vival of India as a democratic nation: “it is the issue of secularism […]

that produces the idea of equalityin general, and therefore the idea ofpolitical democracy.”23 )Nevertheless, it can be argued that religion and politics in the mod-

ern nation are interlinked to the extent that they are mutually constitu-tive: the secular needs the religious for its self-definition, and viceversa.24 The site where these forces contend most strikingly in contem-porary India is in the realm of culture. The politicization of a particular

cultural mythology is commonly seen as a staple ofHindutva’s massappeal. Thus, for example, theyatras , or processions, that became afeature of Hindu nationalist self-assertion in the late1980 s and early1990 s – in particular therath yatra of the Hindutva ideologue L.K.Advani, which traced a pilgrimage route to Ayodhya in October1990 ,and which has been described as an act of “militant cartography”25 –came to be seen as an extension of that patriotic conflation of the

modern nation with the ancient texts of Hinduism that received itsmost popular articulation in the television serialization of theRamayanaand the Mahabharata in the late 1980 s. It might be said that theideological potential of such texts, sliding across from the realm oflegend into that of history, acts as a palliative for those social ills whichhave a solidly material basis: myth overrides (indeed, overwrites) his-tory. As Aijaz Ahmad puts it, “if mythic literature can be said to be

history itself, and if the founding myths of the nation are already there

22 Corbridge & Harriss,Reinventing India, 197 .23 Aijaz Ahmad,Lineages, 318 .24 Talal Asad, “Religion, Nation-State, Secularism,” inNation and Religion:

Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer & Hartmut Lehmann(PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 1999 ):192 .

25 Corbridge & Harriss,Reinventing India, 188 .



Indias of the Mind xxi

in the Ramayana, then the utter destitution of a third of the Indianpopulation can be made to sink into insignificance and the rebuilding

of the Rammandir can be posited as the crux of national salvation.”26

Writing from a Marxist perspective, and comparing contemporaryIndia to the Italy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,Ahmad has suggested that the Bengal Renaissance – conventionallyregarded as the crucible in which the artistic and political vision ofIndian nationalism was formed – can be seen as a kind of failed cul-tural Risorgimento, on account of the “schizophrenic accommodation”

it made between indigenist and Western compulsions. According toAhmad, this has led to a rapprochement between an ‘institutional reli-gion’ (Brahmanic Hinduism) and an ahistorical, almost mythic pur-view that overlooks the functional nature of the concept of an Indiannation, an idea that came into being in the fight against imperialism.Thus, “more than a process, ‘nation’ is aterrain of struggle which con-denses all social struggles, so that every organised force in society

attempts to endow it with specific meanings and attributes.”27

Historically, this fusion of nation, religion and culture has allowedHindu nationalists to assume the role of cultural custodians for India.M.S. Golwalkar famously distinguished between his own culturalnationalism and the merely territorial nationalism espoused by Con-gress when it asserted that citizens of whatever religion could beencompassed within the borders of the nation. And if the ‘real’ India is

exclusively Hindu, then it behoves those ‘Others’ either to acceptHindutva and the cultural hegemony of the majority, or to get out.Inevitably, of course, such exclusivist agendas of nation-building

are historically traceable and constantly call attention to their ownblind-spots, lacunae and inadequacies. Addressing this point, HomiBhabha, inNation and Narration , has drawn on Benedict Anderson’sidea of the “cultural temporality” (the impermanence, the openness to

change) of the nation, which “inscribes a much more transitional socialreality” than in traditional nationalist accounts. Nation-formation as aprocess, as an endless negotiation, means that “The other is never out-side or beyond us; it emerges forcefully within cultural discourse,when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between

26 Ahmad,Lineages, 242 .27 Lineages, 241 .



xxii ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

ourselves’.”28 Although Bhabha is here mainly referring to the contra-dictions of metropolitan nation-formation and its attendant racism, his

remarks also resonate in a situation where another type of purismattempts to excise a perceived Other from the body of the Indiannation. The “cracks and absences” (to borrow from Bhabha, borrowingfrom Rushdie) in the idea of a Hindu India emerge most visibly pre-cisely when – as at Ayodhya in1992 and in Gujarat in2002 – it resortsto violence to enforce its vision. Looked at another way, the failure ofthe nation as an imagined community to reconcile itself to all those

occupying its space effectively exposes the contradiction at the heart ofcalls on minorities to “assimilate or emigrate”; might it not be arguedthat the concept of the nation as here promoted is too narrow to copewith existing realities, rather than that minorities ‘fail’ to accommodatethemselves to the dominant programme?

In the realm of culture, the activities of Hindu majoritarian groupsoffer an example of Michel Foucault’s contention that the operations of

power within modernity work as much to produce cultural formationsas to censor and interdict them. For example, writing about the appealof the Shiv Sena in Bombay, Gerard Heuze describes the ‘culturalpopulism’ at the core of the organization’s broad-based support; “Cul-tural populism arises, it seems, when culture is considered as the basisfor the foundation of a nation, or of a sub-nation and when the ‘people’,defined as a unified entity, is considered as the main actor of history.”29

Populist activism is encouraged by theShiv Sena, through theirmitramandals (friends clubs) which operate as quasi-families wherein mas-culine camaraderie and competition are emphasized. Cultural life es-chews secularism in favour of orchestrated Hindu festivals such asDurga Puja , Ganesh Chaturi, and Shivaji Jayanti which, as organized bythe Shiv Sena, can take on the quality of military training sessions.Emphasizing the upper-caste specificity of muchHindutva ideology,

Kshatriya models of masculine virility are invoked and the cult of youththat holds sway valorizes strength and violence for the cause. The mass

28 Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” inNation and Nar-ration, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge,1990 ):4 .

29 Gerard Heuze, “Cultural Populism: The Appeal of the Shiv Sena,” inBom-bay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi:OxfordUP, 1996 ):216 .



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demonstrations that form a key element in theShiv Sena armoury areportrayed as an appropriation of urban space by ‘the people’, as is the

mass mobilization that takes place during riots.30

On the other hand,the organization is involved in rendering charitable assistance tosections of the Hindu community deemed deserving, while at the levelof municipal popular culture theShiv Sena sponsored a concert byMichael Jackson in Bombay/Mumbai in1996 . (This sometimes contra-dictory blend of traditionalism and modernity in the approach to cul-ture itself highlights tensions between conservative and populist ten-

dencies withinHindutva , something that has also been evident in atti-tudes to wider social developments such as the liberalization of India’seconomy in the1990 s.)

The presiding historical and political self-presentation of groupssuch as theShiv Sena, and the interest that Hindu nationalist elementsof theBJP coalition take in issues such as school education syllabuses,reiterates the central place of culture in the discursive formation of a

Hindu national imagining. TheRSS run over20 ,000 Vidya Bharati pri-mary and secondary schools across India, in which an unashamedlycommunalist curriculum is followed. This is part of what theBJP minister for education in the1998 –2004 government called a “war forthe country’s cultural freedom.”31 A flavour of what this ideologicalstruggle entails can be gained from a question taken from an examina-tion paper given in the state of Uttar Pradesh which chillingly com-

bines raw bigotry and basic arithmetic: “If it takes foursevaks to demo-lish one mosque, how many does it take to demolish twenty?”32 Inparticular, it is in the provision of history that the struggle has beenfiercest, withBJP ideologues launching attacks on the work of ac-claimed historians such as R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar, and SatishChandra, who have for many years contributed to the school historytextbook series. With their intellectual fastidiousness and commitment

to objective scholarship, such figures have been traduced as “the child-ren of Macaulay, Marx and the Madrassas,” peddling a brand of left-

30 Heuze, “Cultural Populism,”217–30 . See also Kalpana Sharma, “Chronicle

of a Riot Foretold,” inBombay, ed. Patel & Thorner,266 –86 .31 Delhi Historians Group,Communalisation of Education: The History Textbooks

Controversy (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University,2001 ):7.32 Amitava Kumar, “A Nation of Converts,”Race and Class 43 .4 (2002 ):58 .



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culminating in enforced exile, for her indictment of the Muslim back-lash in Bangladesh after Ayodhya. In a combative essay entitled

“Transgressing Sacred Visions,” published in Ralph Crane and Radhi-ka Mohanram’s recent edited collection of essays on diasporic SouthAsian writing, Debjani Ganguly recounts the experiences of Rushdieand Nasreen and their texts, but also laments the fate of those other lessinternationally celebrated victims of the wrath of cultural funda-mentalists: writers such as the Urdu poet Mohammed Alvi, the Mara-thi poet Vasant Dattareya Gurjar and the Kannada dramatist H.S.

Shrivprakash. Ganguly’s intervention reminds us of the straitened cir-cumstances in which non-approved forms of literary expression canfind themselves on the modern subcontinent.35 Nonetheless, the veryfact that creative writing is so often an object of such close scrutinyindicates the power of literary representation to interrogate, howeverobliquely, the boundaries of sanctioned identities, both personal andnational. Ganguly herself celebrates the way in which, inThe Moor’s

Last Sigh, “Rushdie challenges precisely this political rhetoric in Indiawhich says that the experience of the majority […] is theonly authenticIndian experience,” by focusing on the Christian and Jewish minoritiesin his novel.36

So, too, with this volume. While it has not been our intention toelicit only contributions that deal directly with the experiences ofminority communities, the essays included here nonetheless engage

with issues around boundaries and borders, material and imagined,and the means by which identity and belonging are constructed. In ouropinion, the eclectic range of the writers and topics treated is anindication of an ineradicable polyphony at the heart of Indian literaturewhich, by its very nature, transgresses barriers of caste and com-munity. We are not suggesting some simplistic correlation betweenliterary activity – or, indeed, literary criticism – and the political. How-

ever, each writer chosen for examination has produced texts markedby, and dealing with, the impact of certain constructions of self which

35 Debjani Ganguly, “Transgressing Sacred Visions: Taslima, Rushdie and theIndian Subcontinent,” inShifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writingof the Indian Subcontinent, ed. Ralph J. Crane & Radhika Mohanram (Cross/Cultures42 ; Amsterdam & AtlantaGA: Rodopi,2000 ):102 –21.

36 Ganguly, “Transgressing Sacred Visions,”113.



xxvi ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

in some way come into conflict with sanctioned discourses. Whetherimagining the nation, its space and parameters, laying claim to identi-

ties within the urban centres, forging cultural narratives of regional orethnic affiliation, or testing generic and critical boundaries, the writersunder consideration find themselves engaged in a series of personal,communal, territorial or linguistic negotiations.

It is also pertinent at this point to acknowledge the volume’s weightingtowards critical writing conducted in, and dealing with literaturewritten in, English. This bias lays us open to the charge of adopting aparticular position in a fraught and sometimes acrimonious contempo-rary debate. For instance, in his polemical introductory essay to thePicador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Amit Chaudhuri criticizes boththe tendency to misread writing in English as the sole meaningfulvehicle for Indian literature and the mind-forged manacles of post-colonial theory. Despite claims to the contrary, Chaudhuri’s introduc-tion – with its welcome reassertion of the centrality of literatures inlanguages other than English – can be read as a riposte to SalmanRushdie’s infamous contention, in his own Vintage anthology of Indianwriting, that comparatively little of value has been written in Indianlanguages in the last fifty years or so.37 Clearly, this issue, of whospeaks for India and how, is alive and well and has provoked vigorousexchanges.

One of the more judicious interventions in this controversy comesfrom the distinguished critic of Indian literature, Meenakshi Mukher- jee, in an essay entitled “The Anxiety of Indianness.” Citing Raja Rao’scelebrated reflections in his Foreword to the second edition ofKantha- pura (1938 ), Mukherjee argues that while English may be part of the“intellectual make-up” of India, it is not part of its “emotional make-up”. This is partly because, since the days of colonial rule, English hasbeen a language of power and privilege, of the elite. For Mukherjee,Indian writing in English has, for reasons of “class mobility and reader-ship,” lately been promoted at the expense of what she describes as

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



Indias of the Mind xxvii

bhasha literatures: writing produced in any of India’s regional lan-guages.38 Indian-English literature – seen here as an adjunct of the

academic vogue of postcolonialism and purveyed by ‘Third WorldCosmopolitans’ – displays a greater tendency to homogenize Indianrealities in favour of an internationally approved set of concerns, suchas displacement, cultural hybridity and the legacy of the colonial en-counter. This is then contrasted with the social particularity and localspecificity ofbhasha literatures, wherein the colonial experience hasbeen superseded by more recent oppressions and dislocations. Mu-

kherjee remarks that English texts of India enact “a certain flatteningout of the complicated and conflicting contours, the ambiguous andshifting relations that exist between individuals and groups in a pluralcommunity.” This is inevitable as “the normal ground conditions ofliterary production – where a culture and its variations, a language andits dialects, centuries of oral traditions and written literature, all interactto create a new text – do not exist in the case of English in India.”39 A

new generation of writers, conditioned by “metropolitan parametersand agendas,” are under pressure to write in English, thereby partici-pating in the “erasure of the diversity of India.”40

Persuasive as some of these points may at first appear, they haveprovoked a strong response from both critics and literary authors.Among the latter, the most vigorous objections have been articulatedby the prominent novelist Vikram Chandra, who attacks what he sees

as Mukherjee’s concern for the greater ‘authenticity’ of regional litera-tures.41 Such rhetoric, he argues, claims a kind of better knowledge ofwhat is actually Indian and therefore what constitutes appropriatematerial and forms for the Indian writer. Chandra’s response is enter-taining and, it should be said, exaggerated for rhetorical effect. Hissummary of the criteria used by authenticity critics – whom he pro-vocatively describes in the essay’s subtitle as “cultural commissars” –

identifies the decision to write in English as a “betrayal of Indian38 Meenakshi Mukherjee,The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in

English (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 2000 ):166 –86 .39 Mukherjee,The Perishable Empire, 172–73 .40 The Perishable Empire, 179 , 181, 197 .41 Vikram Chandra, “The Cult of Authenticity: India’s Cultural Commissars

Worship ‘Indianness’ Instead of Art,”Boston Review (February–March2000 ):42 –49 .



xxviii ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

‘realities’” by those who would court a Western audience, who receivedisproportionate financial rewards for their efforts, and who often live

abroad and are therefore cut off from the very “Indian realities” theywould depict. Regional orbhasha writers then offer a corrective to themiasma of English’s dominance, carrying with them the fresh smell ofvirtue that, in the literary world, always attaches itself to neglect andcomparatively poor financial rewards.42 Polemicism notwithstanding,Chandra does make some effective forays against the promotion ofregional languages as occupying a purer and non-hierarchical space

suggested by Mukherjee, as when he comments:The attempt to locate Indianness in ‘regional writing’ is inevitablyproblematic, since – in a nation battling numerous secessionistmovements – regional specificity is inevitably in conflict with gene-ralised national traits. But ‘regional writing’ is always connected tothe soil, to “Real India”. And when it’s opposed to “Indo-Anglian

writing”, the term “regional writing” implies that writing in Englishis not regional, that it’s pan-Indian or, worse, cosmopolitan, belong-ing to nowhere and everywhere.43

Countering this binary opposition, he claims that English is “an in-extricable thread” in the texture of everyday life in his home city ofBombay and in India as a whole. Used by many different people indiverse situations, it becomes a kind of lingua franca, capturingexperience for the widest possible cross-section of society. Moreover,the Indian novel itself has developed from the interactions betweenEastern and Western forms of narrative, and Indian writers have neverinsulated themselves but have drawn influences from across the entireliterary world. Chandra concludes by recommending the same eclec-ticism to writers today, urging them to shun the “fake” “God ofAuthenticity.”44

As regards the present volume, we have sought to trace, as theyappear in the texts under discussion, some of the key trends and con-troversies characterizing the relationship of literature in English and itsreception, to national and political discourses in India. This collection,

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



Indias of the Mind xxix

which is indeed overwhelmingly from writing in the English language,is thereby inevitable partial and limited. However, the selection merely

reflects the interests of a particular group of literary and cultural criticsas they have responded to a suggested set of issues, and is in no waybased on any dubious Rushdiean conviction that the most importantwriting from India is necessarily in English. Nevertheless, we considerthat there are certain representative moves in the debate over authorityand national identity which one can trace using Indian-English fictionas a template.

Latterly, the question of who speaks for India has been viewed insome quarters in terms of the fetishized status in the West of writingsfrom the Indian diaspora. The work of writers who have chosen to re-main within the subcontinent is overlooked in favour of a privilegedmigrant aesthetic which casts a cold and sometimes critical eye overIndia’s recent past and contemporary predicament. Such argumentsdepend on a particular, yet broadly convincing, understanding of the

process of production and dissemination of South Asian literature inthe West. The argument runs that Western publishers and critics,versed in a bourgeois, discourse-oriented radicalism, are guilty of set-ting an agenda wherein the preoccupations of diaspora writing areinflated to occupy the whole of the available market space of writingfrom India. Such an argument endorses, and to a certain extent oper-ates within, postcolonial definitions of an omnipotent Centre enjoying

the privileges concomitant with the power to represent its ‘exotic’Other, and that Other itself: in this case, India, which is once more thesilent object of discourse – spoken of and spoken for – despite the pro-venance of the writers themselves. However, it could be argued that tointerpret the centre–margin dynamic in this way alone is to ignore, orat least displace, the effects of other sorts of political inequality ‘on theground’, so to speak, in an India increasingly shaping itself in the

image of a Hindu majoritarian conception of national identity. In itsunderstandable and necessary concern for the legacies of the Europeanempires, postcolonial criticism and theory has been in danger ofignoring – and certainly under-theorizing – hegemonic and sometimesdirectly aggressive modes of fashioning national identity in the formercolonial space, in both their manifestations as extensions of colonial ex-pediencies such as ‘divide and rule’, and as more organic trans-

formations of the contemporary body politic. In other words, the great



xxx ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

centre–periphery divide usually identified in relation to the Europeanimperial powers and their former colonies may have to be reconfigured

when analysing the internal political dynamic of postcolonial nations.Those at the centre and those on the margins of such units offer verydifferent views of postcoloniality.

Of course, anxieties about the power to define and control re-presentations of ‘Indianness’ dovetail neatly with the broader politicalterrain charted earlier. One example is in the manner in which theIndian state, and the political and intellectual elite, have shown a

marked sensitivity about writers of the diaspora - responding withhostility, at different times, to the writing of both Naipaul and Rushdie,among others. According to Amitav Ghosh, in a measured and per-ceptive essay entitled “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” which movesbeyond commonplace uses and abuses of the terms ‘nation’ and ‘cul-ture’, this sensitivity is not merely a colonial hangover. Rather, in aningenious thesis, he suggests it has to do with the adaptability which

Indians have shown as they have migrated across the world, and theirflexibility as they have come into contact with different cultures, anattribute he describes as “the process of adaptation to heteroglossia,”45 surely an antidote to any pathological attachment to boundaries andnotions of purity. Describing the relationship between India and itsdiaspora as “an epic without a text,” Ghosh concludes that “the linksbetween India and her diaspora are lived within the imagination. It is

because this relationship is so much a relationship of the imaginationthat the specialists of the imagination – writers – play so important apart in it.”46 The diaspora holds up a mirror to modern India, or, in thepsychoanalytic terms preferred by Vijay Mishra: “Diasporic discourseof the homeland is […] a kind of return of the repressed for the nation-state itself, its pre-symbolic (imaginary) narrative, in which one sees amore primitive theorisation of the nation itself.”47 Of course, the ques-

tion of point of view is crucial in all this: the point of view of the writer;of the reader; and of those in charge of the process of dissemination by

45 Amitav Ghosh, “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,”Public Culture 2 .1 (Fall1989 ):75 .

46 Ghosh, “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,”76 .47 Vijay Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorising the Indian Diaspora,”

Textual Practice 10 .3 (1996 ):424 .



xxxii ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

communally defined elites, were, argues Tickell, integral to the “na-tional imaginings” of Indian novels in English published before1910 .

Central to this critical analysis is an awareness of the cosmopolitan,transacted nature of Indian nationalism at the turn of the twentieth cen-tury, and the importance of alternative models of martial nationhoodand pan-Asiatic alliance provided by a rapidly industrialized Japan.These issues lead to a consideration of the impact of the spectacle ofimperial defeat (in conflicts such as the Russo-Japanese War) on earlyIndian nationalism, and prompt a reconsideration of the roots of

Nehru’s historical ‘discovery’ of a secular identity for India’s masses.Train to Pakistan , by the Sikh writer Khushwant Singh, is a seminalPartition novel often praised for its objective realism. Reading againstthe grain, Ralph Crane finds instead a ‘religious/communal’ bias and apreoccupation with gendering which works toward the inscription of aSikh rather than a Hindu India. The communitarian vision he uncoverschallenges the idea of a homogenized post-Independence nation, even

as it enacts the expulsion of the troubling Muslim element in the nameof national unity. It is figured through an appropriation of colonialgender binaries whereby the Sikhs are depicted as masculine – andthereby fit to assume the mantle cast off by the departing British –while Hindu characters are weak, cowardly and, thus, feminized. Inthis way, a challenge is posed to the Hindu right to inherit the post-colonial nation. In Singh’s novel, characters act as symbols of their re-

spective communities, so that the aggressive love-making by which theSikh Juggut Singh impregnates the Muslim girl Nooran enciphers thepower of one group over the other in a text organized through phallicsymbolism and castration imagery.

For Ashok Bery, the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, although rarelydirectly political, can be read as an aesthetic counterpart to models ofIndian identity, especially when we realize that Ramanujan’s creative

investment in cultural interaction and reflexivity involves an awarenessof order and dispersal. His verse, argues Bery, “enacts an aesthetic ofthe fragment, while at the same time acknowledging the aspiration tounity.” Bery traces this double movement on a thematic level; in Rama-nujan’s preoccupation with the chaotic relativism of history; and interms of his use of form, which depends on dialogic linguistic collageand structures that contradict or disrupt their own order. What stands

out in Bery’s attentive reading is the way Ramanujan’s poems always



Indias of the Mind xxxiii

refuse easy answers about cultural, political or even creative origins,and recognize but resist the attractions of what their author, rephrasing

Bakhtin, termed “the well-rounded, finalized, systematically mono-logic whole.” As Bery suggests, in the political context of Hindu nation-alism, these aesthetic questions take on an added urgency.

In Shashi Deshpande’sSmall Remedies, the subject of Shirley Chew’sessay, the impact of communal violence and its effects is felt on apersonal and familial level. Tracing the “dynamics of the acts of recall,”Chew shows how forms of autobiography andbildung in Deshpande’s

novel evolve into a sophisticated meditation on the problems of re-membering and, in the aftermath of trauma, recuperating the self. Thetrauma faced by Deshpande’s protagonist, Madhu, is the death of herson in the communal bombings that shook Bombay in the months fol-lowing the destruction of the Ayodhya Babri Masjid in1992 . For Chew,Madhu’s attempt to heal herself by working on the autobiography ofSavitribai Indorekar, a famous classical singer, involves her in a

journey into her own past, made possible by the human interactionsand cultural rituals of her new life in the town of Bhavanipur. Here,“Madhu learns to grow again into a circle of companionship” in whichher own memories and beliefs are reviewed in the light of Savitribai’smemoir. Simultaneously, Bhavanipur becomes a highly symbolic spacein Deshpande’s text, as a locus for Gwalior Gharana, and therefore aplace of (Hindu) cultural “becoming and […] realization in multiple

forms.” Juxtaposed against this symbolic artistic site is Bombay, a cityirrevocably altered by communal violence, and yet also a space thatresists fixity and easy retrospective interpretation. Returning from Bha-vanipur, Madhu realizes that her nostalgic vision of ‘pre-communal’Bombay is only a partial, middle-class perspective, and thus, as Chewargues, her search for meaning in the present becomes a fascinatingrecognition of an interconnected human investment in subjective pasts,

each of which promises a radically dialogic ‘remaking’ in the face of anaggressive, exclusive communal version of history.While Shirley Chew shows how self-recovery in the aftermath of

communal violence involves the reflective tracing of Madhu’s connec-tions with other women’s memories in Deshpande’s novel, EllekeBoehmer focuses on the erotic, self-fulfilling relationships betweenwomen in Manju Kapu’s fiction, and asks whether, in these writings,

“the nation has not paradoxically come into use as a refuge and site of



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sisterly, even homoerotic resistance – a resistance not only to globalmarket forces from without but to religious fundamentalism from

within?” This argument is particularly timely because it reveals thelimits of postcolonial critical approaches that treat contemporarynationalism as a negative, homogenizing and largely oppressive con-struct, and fail to acknowledge its potential for participatory agencyand positive self-representation. In her balanced reading ofDifficultDaughters and A Married Woman , Boehmer argues that Kapur hasshifted her focus in her latest work, identifying the erotic self-awaken-

ing of her protagonists with the national, secular values that Hindufundamentalism proscribes. However, Boehmer also suggests that therise of fundamentalist politics in India has exposed a ‘lack’ in theNehruvian narrative of secular state-nationalism “with its rationalistemphases on self-determination and democratic rights.” This is a lackthat Kapur’s A Married Woman addresses through an alternative, highlysubversive homoerotic plot that pushes the conventional sites and

figures of cultural nationalism – the home, the mother, domestic space– “beyond their convention meanings into both radical and tabooareas.” In doing so, Boehmer shows how Kapur’s novel cooperates “inunlikely ways with an edgy – sceptical yet emotive – narrative indefence of the secular nation.”

Rohinton Mistry’sFamily Matters, examined in Peter Morey’s essay,is a novelistic analysis of the pervasiveness of personal and political

corruption in the Bombay of the1990 s. Amid a landscape where com-munalist thugs intimidate minorities and those who resist their pro-gramme of aggressive hinduization, the Chenoy family struggle withthe financial and emotional responsibility of caring for an aged andinfirm relative while also attempting to maintain the long and, it issuggested, burdensome Parsi legacy for scrupulous probity in publiclife. Mistry’s characters are repeatedly exposed to situations where they

have to make choices that may compromise their personal integrityand besmirch the minority community of which they are a part: shouldthey use personal influence dishonestly to achieve professionaladvancement; is it fair to use other family members to take revenge ona stepfather one blames for the demise of a beloved mother; can it everbe right to betray the trust of employers or teachers? The choices theymake are always born of necessity, yet each carries with it unforeseen

consequences. The painful and sometimes tragic cost of the characters’



Indias of the Mind xxxv

actions is explored in a text concerned with cause and effect, duty andwill, and one that draws on the traditions both of post-Enlightenment

ethical philosophy and of the moral strictures of Zoroastrianism tomake connections between the small compromises that resonate in thedomestic sphere and those larger betrayals through which civic politicshas become a byword for corruption and communalism.

In “The Routes of National Identity in Amitav Ghosh’sThe ShadowLines,” Sujala Singh investigates the use of meta-narrative strategiesand techniques of reportage that deconstruct national histories and

territories in Ghosh’s novel. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s distinc-tion between “strategic” and “tactical” forms of narrative power, Singhargues that Ghosh’s novel can be read as a tactical narrative “utilizationof different temporalities to undermine the strategic spatial delimita-tions that ‘public’ histories of the subcontinent have instituted.”Throughout the text other forms of resistant historiography are devel-oped in the narrator’s ironic recollection of discrepant memories, the

concentration on peripheral details and the continuous challenge to the‘naturalness’ of national-historical narratives of belonging. For Singh,Ghosh’s novel is all the more effective because it engages with theideologically managed silences at the heart of national or communalidentities: “In a text that is permeated with spatio-temporal displace-ments, such silences act out the demarcation of a domain of intelli-gibility; they articulate the boundaries of ‘non-sense’ in order to allow a

space in which to articulate ‘sense’.” It is in the play of silences inGhosh’s novel that the violent ruptures of historical events such asPartition are, for Singh, most clearly articulated.

Amina Yaqin reads Anita Desai’s novelIn Custody as an explorationof “the communalization and disintegration of the Urdu language inpost-Partition India.” In this novel, Urdu is synonymous with a nos-talgic vision of a past that was lost forever in1947 . The migration of

Muslims to Pakistan, the view of Urdu as a Muslim language and thehegemony of Hindi in the postcolonial era have all contributed to itsmarginalization. Yaqin offers us a brief history of Urdu as a linguafranca in northern India – and as a mother tongue in Uttar Pradesh –and its longstanding rivalry with Hindi, latterly given the status of the‘official language’ of India. In Desai’s novel, the fate of Urdu is crystal-lized through repeated images of breakdown, decline and death, and

comes to be located in the experiences of the central protagonist,



Indias of the Mind xxxvii

albeit temporarily, the many and varied life-worlds that make up anyimagined community. Of course, instances such as those examined

here can only ever be symptomatic. Ultimately, one’s experience of en-gaging with the enormous diversity of Indian fictions in English is thatsome acknowledgement of social and cultural heterogeneity and poly-phony is inherent in all such writing – if not consciously, then at leastthrough an inevitable process of historical accretion. Truly, no singlenarrative is adequate to the task of ‘writing India’, but all may con-tribute to the possibility of understanding this variety more fully.

PETERMOREY ANDALEXTICKELL

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Mukherjee, Aditya. “Colonialism and Communalism,” in Anatomy of aConfrontation: Ayodhya and the Rise of Communal Politics in India , ed. Sar-vepalli Gopal (London: Zed,1993 ).

Mukherjee, Meenakshi.The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing inEnglish (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 2000 ).

Nandy, Ashis. An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other OddRuins of the Self in the Indian Imagination (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 2001 ).

Nandy, Ashis. “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto,”Seminar 314 (October1985 ):14–24 .

Nandy, Ashis. “A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods andGoddesses of South Asia,”Postcolonial Studies 4 .2 (July2001 ):125–42 .

Pandey, Gyanendra.The Construction of Communalism in Colonial NorthernIndia (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1990 ).

Patel, Sujata, & Alice Thorner, ed.Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India, (NewDelhi: OxfordUP, 1996 ).

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

Rushdie, Salman, & Elizabeth West, ed.The Vintage Book of Indian Writing1947

–1987

(London: Vintage,1997

).Rushdie, Salman.Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981 –1991 (London: Granta/Penguin,1992 ).

Veer, Peter van der, & Hartmut Lehmann, ed.Nation and Religion: Perspec-tives on Europe and Asia (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 1999 ).

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India (Oxford: OxfordUP, 5th ed.1997 ).



The Limits of Secularismand the Construction ofComposite National Identity in India

ANSHUMANA. MONDAL

N HIS DISCUSSION of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s for-mulation of a “new national religion” that would demonstratethe “autonomous subjectivity of the nation,” Partha Chatterjee

goes on to ask a question that has recently assumed much greaterurgency now that the forces of Hindutva have not only challengedthe ‘secular’ Indian state but found themselves comfortably em-

bedded at the centre of the all-India political arena. He says, “Whythis new national religion had to be based on a purified ‘Hindu’ideal is, of course, an interesting question and one that has embar-rassed secular nationalists in the20 th century who have givenBankim an important place in the pantheon of nationalist heroes.”1 One might add that Bankim is not the only member of this “pan-theon” to have lately found himself scrutinized over this point:

Gandhi, Tilak, Aurobindo, Bipinchandra Pal, Romesh ChunderDutt, Lajpat Rai and even Subhas Chandra Bose, to name but a few,are liable to find themselves in the dock as historians revisit thedynamics that have led to the stabilization of Hindu nationalism asa political force in India. As it has become increasingly evident that

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

I



2 ANSHUMANA. MONDAL

the binary opposition between nationalism (secular, good) andcommunalism (primordial, atavistic, bad) can no longer be sus-

tained, so it has become progressively important to interrogate theideological limits of nationalist discourse in India in order to iden-tify those symptomatic points at which Indian nationalism seems tocarry within it the implication that it was in effect equivalent to‘Hindu’ nationalism.

Chatterjee, however, quietly sidesteps the issue by resorting tothe same assumption that has become a familiar mantra within the

discourse of Hindutva ideologues: namely, that “for India as awhole, the majority of people could be said to have practised someform or other of Hinduism.” This, in itself, is not unreasonable, buthe goes on to state that

the national cultural project was not only to define a distinct culturalidentity for the nation [...] it was also to find a viable cultural basis

for the convergence of the national and the popular. In the Indiancase, unlike many countries in central and southern Europe, neitherlanguage nor racial distinctiveness was a suitable criterion fordefining national solidarity.2

In other words, the deployment of religion becomes an ideologicalnecessity for the purposes of mobilization in an age of ‘mass’ poli-

tics. However, ‘mass’ politics and Indian nationalism could notseriously have been spoken of in the same breath until the rise ofGandhi so the articulation of ‘Hinduness’ as the basis for ‘popular’identity remains at the level of representation only. Given this, it isunclear why it should be seen as an ideological necessity. More-over, given that in India concepts of racial distinction and languagedid intersect with those of nationality, the question remains as to

why, at the level of representation, such ideas were employed tobolster religious identities as opposed to more secular ones.3

2 Chatterjee,Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World , 75 .3 SeeThe Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (New Delhi: Oxford

UP, 1995 ). Though it is well-known that language became an increasingly ‘live’issue for nationalists from the1920 s, it was nevertheless a significant dimen-sion to nationalist debate in the late nineteenth century. The modernization ofIndian vernaculars was both an indicator of and a spur to the production of



The Limits of Secularism 3

Gyanendra Pandey has attempted to answer precisely this pointwithin the framework of a general speculation about nationalist

discourse per se. He suggests thatnationalism has everywhere had a deeply divided relation to ‘com-munity’ [...] On the one hand, nationalism must speak the languageof rationality, of the equality of individuals [...] on the other it needsthe language of blood and sacrifice, of historical necessity, of ancient(God-given) status and attributes – which is part of the discourse ofcommunity.4

For Pandey, then, it is this “deeply divided relation” within nation-alism “everywhere” which is responsible for the historical equiva-lence of Indian nationalism with ‘Hindu’ nationalism. In turn, thisdialectically produces a ‘Muslim’ nationalism, which in turn sets upthe dynamics of communalism – which only becomes ‘commu-nalism’ as such when theorized by a “refurbished nationalism” asbeing Indian nationalism’s irreconcilable opponent.5 At the heart ofthis argument lies a series of assumptions concerning the relation-ship between nationalism and cultural essentialism. Once again,however, this cannot in itself explain why the “discourse of com-munity” in India took the forms it did – namely, religious forms –when the “discourse of community” in other nationalisms, whichwere equally essentialist, adopted more ‘cultural’ and secularidioms. Nor does it explain why ‘secular’ nationalists in India sounproblematically assumed that ‘community’ in India should beseen in terms of either ‘nation’ or ‘religion’. Overlooking the possi-bility that there might indeed be forms of community that areneither suggests that these ‘secular–liberal’ nationalists were them-selves afflicted by the blind spot in Indian nationalist discourse thatthey avowedly eschewed. Even the most secular of them, Jawahar-

nationalist discourses. See Vasudha Dalmia,The Nationalization of HinduTraditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and 19th Century Banaras (New Delhi: Ox-ford UP, 1997 ); Sumanta Banerjee,The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and PopularCulture in 19th Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books,1989 ).

4 Gyanendra Pandey,The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1990 ):209 .

5 Pandey,The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 233 –61.



4 ANSHUMANA. MONDAL

lal Nehru, assumes that ‘syncretism’ in India involves the blendingof religious communities. This implies ‘units’ that are distinct prior

to their syncretization. These units are seen, unselfconsciously, asbeing religious in nature.6 In effect, the secular–liberal nationalistsfailed to alter the terms of reference whereby ‘community’ automa-tically refers to ‘religious community’, and ‘communalism’ to ‘reli-gious politics’.7

All of this suggests that secularism and secularization, and theirlimitations in colonial and postcolonial India, are of determinate

importance in assessing the current political situation in India. Theterms themselves are ambiguous and complex and have developedspecific meanings in India that differ somewhat from their con-notations in Europe and America.8 Indeed, part of the ‘problem’,politically speaking, of communalism in contemporary India, and atleast a portion of the difficulty in combating it, lies in the constel-lation of meanings through which this struggle is conducted.9 In

particular, the assumption that ‘secularism’ in India refers only tothe relationship of religious communities to the state has deter-mined both the formulation of communal ideologies and the re-sponses of their opponents. Hindu nationalists have in recent yearssuccessfully identified the supposed appeasement of minorities bythe state as the basis for their ideological campaign to ‘desecularize’

6 See hisThe Discovery of India (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1946 ). Although inthe brief section entitled “The Variety and Unity of India” he refers to regionalidentities, the book as a whole is structured with reference to the cultural in-fluences upon Indian civilization by its major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism,Islam and Christianity. Interestingly, the trope of “unity in diversity” whichNehru employs is echoed in the writings of some of the members of the HinduMahasabha, a communalist organization. See John Zavos,The Emergence ofHindu Nationalism in India (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 2000 ):118 .

7 The term has thus acquired a special sense with respect to India over andabove that to which it refers in general. Generally speaking, communalism in-dicatesany form of communal organization, identification or practice. In India,however, it has been sutured specifically to religion.

8 For a full and penetrative discussion, see Achin Vanaik, “Religion, Mod-ernity, Secularization,” inThe Furies of Indian Communalism: Religion, Modernity,and Secularization (London: Verso,1997 ):65 –129 .

9 SeeSecularism and its Critics , ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: OxfordUP,2000 ).




it (and the Indian constitution) so as to reconstitute India as a‘Hindu’ nation. Paradoxically, using the language of majoritarian-

ism as a basis for their concept of a ‘Hindu’ India while also sug-gesting that this self-same majority is constantly under threat be-cause of the actions of the state, Hindu nationalists have in theprocess redefined ‘secularism’ as tolerance, of which Hinduism isthe supposed exemplar.10 On the other hand, the defenders of In-dian secularism have themselves concentrated on “strengtheningthe secular nature of the state, supplemented perhaps by mass ideo-

logical campaigns in support of a secular interpretation of Indiannationalism.”11 As we shall see, this strategy is misguided, because,first, the real battle over secularism needs to be fought not withrespect to the state but within civil society12 and, second, becauseIndian nationalism has throughout its history been either covertlyor overtly associated with a ‘Hindu’ majoritarianism that is far fromsecular.

In the course of what follows, it will be argued that the implicitequivalence of Indian nationalism with Hindu nationalism is theconsequence of what I have termed the “limits of secularism” inIndia. It has created an ideological cavity throughout the career ofnationalism in India into which much bad blood has flowed. How-ever, the limitations of secularism and secularization were them-selves the consequence of a complex and multi-dimensional his-torical process encompassing Indian society’s encounter withmodernity.

A number of points suggest themselves immediately. First, it isclear that one of the most significant effects of colonial policy was to

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

11 Vanaik,The Furies of Indian Communalism, 52 .12 The Furies of Indian Communalism, 5.



6 ANSHUMANA. MONDAL

determine the basis of political legitimacy in the subcontinent. As Judith Brown puts it,

the way the British saw Indian society, particularly in assessingwhat were legitimate interests meriting representation, was a crucialinfluence on Indian responses to the imperial order [...] Imperialstructures and categories not only influenced Indian responses totheir rulers, but became a significant factor in Indians’ relationshipswith one another.13

In particular, the relationship of the post-Company colonial state tosociety had a decisive impact on the formulation of the parametersof political engagement. John Zavos has suggested that althoughQueen Victoria’s Proclamation of1858 established a principle ofneutrality with respect to religion in India and established the rightof religious freedom, this right was itself conceptualized as the legi-timate basis for the representation of political interests within thefield of colonial politics. He also states that “the reason for the pro-minence of religion can be explained through British preoccu-pations in the wake of the1857 Rebellion, and through the under-lying assumption that religion, degenerate though it may be, wasthe motor force of Indian civilization and social relations.”14 Thisdoubleness in the colonial state’s attitude towards its relationship toreligion would be reflected back by the generation of Indian poli-ticians whose careers were moulded by the expectations it set out,so that religious interests were merged with political ones, and theidioms of liberal constitutionalism were imbricated with those ofdharma and the shastras.15 Related to this was the accumulation of aconsiderable body of colonial knowledge, the purpose of which wasto justify the assumptions of colonial discourse, and to deliver its

13 Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford:OxfordUP, 2nd ed. 1994 ): 151; see also Anil Seal, “Imperialism and National-ism in India,” inLocality, Province and Nation, ed. John Gallagher, Gordon John-son & Anil Seal (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1973 ):15.

14 Zavos,The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism, 36 .15 Exemplary in this respect was Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The same was true, of

course, for other religions as is evidenced by the work of Sir Syed AhmedKhan.




categories as empirical realities.16 In the process, colonial prejudicesvis-à-vis what constituted ‘community’, ‘religion’, ‘caste’ and so on

came to acquire the mark of finality as both sides of the colonialdivide came to see these categories as ‘objective’, ‘real’, fixed and‘immemorial’.17 The result was the ‘construction’ of ‘singular’ reli-gious communities out of the seemingly incomprehensible mass oflocally practised cults and minor religions.18 All of this contributedto ‘Hinduism’, and later ‘Islam’, acquiring something like thehomogeneity that could be claimed as a legitimate basis for national

unity. Moreover, it is also clear that since ‘Hindus’ took up the op-portunity of Western education in much greater numbers thanMuslims, their greater participation in the field of constitutionalpolitics meant that not only would they begin to see themselves as‘Hindus’ representing the political rights of the ‘Hindu’ commu-nity, but also that that community would come to be seen as politi-cally the most important.19

However, all of these factors not only contributed to but alsoworked in relation to certain limitations in thinking about the

16 On the codification of Hindu and Muslim personal laws, for example, seeThomas Metcalf,Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1995 ):12–15.See also J.D.M. Derrett,Religion, Law and the State in India (London: Faber &Faber,1968 ).

17

Pandey traces this in some detail in hisConstruction of Communalism. Seeespecially the Introduction and Chapter1, “The Colonial Construction of theIndian Past.”

18 The imposition of colonial knowledge here was by no means a straight-forward process and, indeed, was fraught with difficulty and uncertainty. Thiswas particularly true in the compilation of the census which caused colonialadministrators and ethnographers severe problems, especially in relation to‘placing’ certain tribes and castes against their ‘religion’. See Zavos,The Emer- gence of Hindu Nationalism, 74 –76 , 107 –11.

19 The numbers game again. Zavos has many interesting things to say aboutthe impact of colonial policies and the census on the formulation of majoritarianidioms. For instance, “By quantifying caste and religious communities, thecensus inevitably placed the emphasis on numerical size as a means of assess-ing political importance.” And later, “Progressively in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, the idea that numbers, demographic majorities andminorities were directly related to power in the colonial polity was becomingembedded as a feature of Hindu consciousness in the public space”;The Emer- gence of Hindu Nationalism, 76 , 107 .



8 ANSHUMANA. MONDAL

‘secular’ and the concept of secularism. As has been pointed out, inIndia secularism has been narrowly defined in terms of the relation

of religious communities to the state. This qualification – that is,that Indian secularism is not concerned with the relation betweenreligion and the state per se, but rather of religious communities – isimportant because, in India, the semantics of secularism, and of thedebate that surrounds it, is deeply enmeshed with discourses ofcommunity, as opposed to forms of secularism in western Europeand America which have been articulated by liberalism.

Broadly speaking, secularism in India revolves around the cru-cial question of whether the state should stand above India’s reli-gious communities or should in fact represent India’s religiousdiversity so that the state formally embodies the nation’s plurality.In fact, it does neither because it does both. Constitutionally, thestate stands above and beyond all religious communities in a posi-tion of secular neutrality; on the other hand, it has throughout its

career involved itself in the active management of community rela-tions by not only safeguarding minority communities throughseparate electorates, but also reserved quotas for government ap-pointments, resource distribution and the recognition of speciallegal provisions for Muslims with respect to personal law. It is thisambiguity in the form and function of the state that has opened thefront that Hindutva has so effectively exploited. For if secularists

wish the state to operate above and beyond all religious communi-ties, they also know it cannot do so, because national identity, andtherefore the character of the state, has throughout the career of theIndian nation been articulated by the discourse of religious com-munity. To advocate absolute state neutrality would be to removethe hand of the state as a regulatory mechanism that functions tomaintain relative equality in civil society in a situation where the

principle of equality is framed in terms of relations between com-munities and not between individual citizens. As a consequence, ifthe state must at least partly ‘embody’ the diversity within thenation while formally maintaining its distance, the Hindu majori-tarian argument seizes on this paradox and argues instead that thestate should go the whole way and abandon any pretence at neut-rality; rather, state and society should coincide, resulting of course

in a Hindu state.




If it is one of the purposes of this essay to trace a genealogy ofthis situation back to mainstream nationalism and its supposedly

secular variants, one must acknowledge that the grammar of poli-tics in India has been communal even when its syntax has beensecular. In other words, the limits of secularism in mainstreamIndian politics have evolved historically in a way quite differentfrom its development in western Europe. While it must be admittedthat, even in Europe and America, secularism can be defined nar-rowly as the separation of church and state, this definition coexists,

in the literature on secularism and secularization, with two others.The first of these locates secularism within the history of ideas, as atransformation of European thought; the second, more properlyreferred to as secularization, refers to a transformation in society,which involves a decline in religion as a principle of social life. Al-though often treated separately as a result of disciplinary exclu-sions, if taken together these three definitions of secularism in

Europe symptomatically encompass the political, the social and theintellectual aspects of historical development in Europe, such thatsecularism can be seen as an experiential concept that infuses theindividual subject’s existence.20 In India, however, secularism as aconcept remains confined to politics, and politics alone. As AchinVanaik has argued, while the debate about the secularization orotherwise of state is consuming the minds of political leaders, jour-

nalists and activists, not much thought has been given to the secu-larization of civil society and consciousness.21 Indian secularism hasnever separated religion from the state based upon a liberal view ofreligion as a matter of individual faith. Instead, it has always beencommunitarian and pluralist rather than individualist and liberal.Accordingly, there was no consequent separation of the “privateworld of ‘meaning’” – where religion may remain the dominant

organizing principle – from “the public arena of ‘legitimacy’” –where it may not.22 20 A history of secularism which encompasses all of these dimensions is yet to

be written. However, a notable recent contribution to the theorization of secu-larism is Talal Asad,Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (StanfordCA: StanfordUP, 2003 ).

21 Achin Vanaik,The Furies of Indian Communalism, 54 .22 Vanaik,The Furies of Indian Communalism, 33 .



10 ANSHUMANA. MONDAL

Indian secularism was thus determined by this limit. The modesof thought which perceived and categorized the world, and identi-

fied material interests, remained rooted in a concept of ‘community’defined religiously – a state of things which, as we have seen, theBritish did little to change, and in fact actively encouraged. It wasthis kind of secularism that determined the character of Indiannationalism from its very inception. As Bipinchandra Pal said later,while discoursing on the importance of history to a nationalist,“Indian history is the record of the dealings ofGod with the Indian

people. It is no profane or secular book.”23

Effectively a theory ofpopular sovereignty, this illustrates how Indian nationalism hasbeen articulated in religious rather than secular idioms. The mostprofound consequence of all this has been that, even at its mosttolerant, Indian nationalism articulated visions of nationhood thatwere implicitly communalist in structure and specifically Hindumajoritarian in emphasis. The discursive trope where this becomes

most apparent is the one that is still cited by scholars as represent-ing the polar opposite of Hindu nationalist ideology: the compositeconcept of nationhood.24

The origins of the ‘composite’ concept of Indian nationhood lay inthe intense ideological struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘conser-

23 Bipinchandra Pal,The New Spirit: A Selection from the Writings and Speeches

of Bipin Chandra Pal on Social, Political and Religious Subjects (Calcutta: Sarva-dhikari,1907 ):95 (my emphasis).

24 This is where I differ from John Zavos’s otherwise excellent analysis of theemergence of Hindu nationalism. He says that Hindu nationalism was “anideological formation with enough historical and political resonance amongst acertain class of Hindus to challenge the ideology of composite national identitypropagated by the Indian nationalist leadership” (The Emergence of HinduNationalism, 2). The distinction between ‘Indian nationalism’ and ‘Hindunationalism’ is one that I find problematic. Rather, it is perhaps better to seeHindu nationalism as having a career within Indian nationalist discourse –often within the very mainstream – that only became anathematized in the1920 s, following widespread communal rioting, the formation of the HinduMahasabha andRSS, and the rise of the kind of more secular nationalismespoused by young intellectuals such as Nehru.




vative’ nationalists in the latter decades of the nineteenth centuryover the definition of ‘India’.25 The idea of India being composed of

‘communities’ that had a prior ontological status reflects both acompromise and a hesitancy over the idea of India itself: compro-mise insofar as ‘India’, as a ‘community’ that had not existed before,would have to negotiate its own niche in the scale of possibleidentities with others that possessed some form of existing affectiveforce; hesitancy because this very compromise contained withinitself deep uncertainties as to whether India had a prior existence as

a nation, or whether it was entirely new, an identity under con-struction – a thoroughly modern identity.Within the parameters of this particular problematic, the idea of

the composite nation began to take shape as a tessellation of variousdiscursive alignments. From the British systems of classificationsand prejudices, and Indians’ own self-perceptions as they weremoulded by them, the concept drew on notions of existing ‘singu-

lar’ religious communities: Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, etc.As Pandey writes, “‘Hindu unity’, like ‘Muslim unity’ appears to bea prerequisite [...] for a larger national unity.”26 It was also com-prised of a combination of political, territorial, cultural and civili-zational conceptions of the nation, elements which were given dif-ferent emphasis by ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’. The interest

25 Notable progressives include Surendranath Banerjea, Pherozeshah Mehta,Mahadev Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale; conservatives counted amongtheir number Balgangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo Ghosh, Madan Mohan Malaviya,Lajpat Rai and Bipinchandra Pal. The terms ‘progressives’ and conservatives’are used in contradistinction to the usual epithets of ‘moderates’ and ‘extrem-ists’. Both sets are heuristic constructions, but the former draws attention to theideological distinctions within Indian nationalism as opposed to the ‘tactical’differences. While it would be true to say that there is a rough homologybetween progressives/moderates and conservatives/extremists, the strugglebetween progressive and conservative ideologies was a contemporaneous one,whereas that between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ was, with the exception ofTilak, based upon a generational difference as younger nationalists became in-creasingly frustrated with the political methods of an elder generation of politi-cians. For a fuller explanation of these terms, see Anshuman A. Mondal,Nation-alism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (London:Routledge Curzon,2003 ).

26 Pandey,The Construction of Communalism, 224 .




of the ‘composite’ concept of Indian nationhood thus lies in its roleas a signifier of deeper ideological conflicts within the nationalist

movement, conflicts that have had profound effects upon the trajec-tory of Indian nationalism in the twentieth century.For the ‘progressives’, the dominant emphasis lay on territorial

and political conceptions. For them, the nation was predominantlya political unit, and the nation’s unity was based upon a common,modern polity constructed by the British, as stated by SurendranathBanerjea:

Here we stand upon a common platform – here we have agreed tobury our social and religious differences, and recognize the onecommon fact that being subjects of the same Sovereign and livingunder the same Government and the same political institutions, wehave common rights and common grievances.27

This political emphasis required a corresponding emphasis uponterritory, so that the nation was increasingly seen in purely geogra-phical terms as a unity of common habitation: “But who constitutethe nation? Not surely the Hindus or the Mahomedans alone, butHindus, Mahomedans, Parsis, Sikhs, Christians – the varied racesthat inhabit this vast empire.”28 The nuances here are striking andworth reflecting on, particularly the slippage from a liberal andconstitutionalist idiom to a communitarian one. More significantly,the communitarian idiom classifies community along religious linesand then, interestingly, conflates religion with ‘race’. The impli-cations of such a conflation will be examined in further detail in duecourse, but here it is worth remarking upon the coexistence of twosupposedly incommensurable idioms within the discourse of anoted ‘moderate’ and manifestly loyalist nationalist.

The coexistence can be partly explained by the fact that territoryand political commonality was not in itself sufficient to fashion anational identity, and never would be. An exclusive emphasis upon

27 Surendranath Banerjea, “Congress Presidential Address, Poona1895 ,” inSpeeches and Writings of Hon. Surendranath Banerjea, Selected by Himself (Madras:G.A. Nateson,1920 ):15.

28 Surendranath Banerjea, “An Appeal to the Mahomedan Community,” inSpeeches and Writings of Hon. Surendranath Banerjea, Selected by Himself , 265 .




such a basis was constantly open to competing identities, them-selves premissed upon other territorial and political units, and the

national ‘Self’ could be consistently fractured. Foremost amongthese were ‘regional’ and ‘provincial’ identities, since the directpolitical experience of the vast majority of educated Indians lay inthe arenas of locality and province. New groups of interests andidentity arose from the creation of frameworks of political compe-tition in these arenas.29 Alongside these, and nurtured within thesame frameworks, rose cultural identities creating cleavages onto

which political identities could be mapped. The linguistic ‘national-isms’ arising out of the vernacular ‘renaissances’ of the nineteenthcentury tied together the bonds of ‘regional’ language, culture andtradition, and, along with a “keen appreciation of the changingnature of provincial resources,” meant that a ‘Bengali’ self, a ‘Mara-thi’ self, a ‘Tamil’ self, and so on, could arise in competition to the‘Indian’ self.30 And, of course, there were the ever-present tensions

caused by religious identities that had become increasingly drawninto the system of political competition.Thus territory, in and of itself, was not sufficient for ‘progres-

sives’ wishing to elaborate an all-Indian political identity whichcould stand over and above these divisions. What was required wasa territorial conception that could be represented as a ‘natural unity’in which all these competing identities could be subsumed. As each

piece of the territorial jigsaw that made up the colonial state inBritish India fell into place, and as colonial surveys produced moremaps, censuses and atlases, and brought more information aboutthe Indian ‘peninsula’ to the attention of Indian nationalists, moreemphasis could be placed, with increasing coherence, upon the‘geographical unity’ of India, which now became the preconditionof any ‘cultural’ or civilizational unity.31

29 See Judith Brown, Modern India, 167–76 ; Anil Seal, “Imperialism andNationalism in India.”

30 Brown, Modern India, 177.31 This was precisely the basis of Nehru’sThe Discovery of India. For a general

account of the history of mapping India, see P.L. Madan,Indian Cartography: AHistorical Perspective (New Delhi: Manohar,1997 ); for more detail on the prac-tice and politics of British surveys of India in the late eighteenth and early nine-teenth centuries, see Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical




This would prove to be as convenient for the conservatives as itwas for the progressives. Their vision of India was grounded in the

primacy of its civilizational unity since antiquity, a unity that wasby definition based on an ideal Hinduism. This, in effect, meant thatfor conservatives the nation was equivalent to Hinduism. In addi-tion, ‘culture’ was increasingly being identified with ‘race’ as orien-talist scholarship and colonial ethnography began to alter the cogni-tive frameworks of middle-class Indians.32 Not only were Muslims,Parsis, Sikhs, Christians and other religious communities excluded

from this concept of the nation but, as racial emphases grew, so toowere ‘Dravidians’, ‘uncivilized’ tribes such as the Santhals and theKols or the ‘Assamese’, as well as those linguistic communitieswhose mother-tongues did not derive from Sanskrit. However, theconservatives were players in a political game in which divisionwas seized upon by the British as evidence of the non-existence,indeed the impossibility, of Indian nationhood. Recognizing the

potential political liabilities of their ideology, they supplemented its‘Hindu’ base with the territorial discourse formulated by the pro-gressives.

However, the adoption of the territorial dimension was compli-cated in conservative ideology by definitions of Indian culturewhich pre-empted definitions of India’s territory. Here, race onceagain emerges as the most significant trope. Thus, Hindustan, the

Construction of British India, 1765 –1843 (Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1997 ). SeeSusan Gole, A Series of Early Printed Maps of India in Facsimile (New Delhi: Jaya-prints, 1980 ) for a selection of maps from that period and earlier; for a glimpseof native mapping traditions, see herIndian Maps and Plans from Earliest Times tothe Advent of European Surveys (New Delhi: Manohar,1989 ). See also Pandey,The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 247 , where he suggeststhat this territorial aspect was advanced by the secular-liberals of the1920 s inopposition to the composite model. Yet it is clear that this territorial emphasis isnot at all in opposition to the composite model but rather an integral aspect ofit.

32 See The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb, especially: IndiraChowdury–Sengupta, “The Effeminate and the Masculine: Nationalism and theConcept of Race in Bengal,”282 –303 ; Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Idea of theHindu Race in the Writings of Hindu Nationalist Ideologues in the1920 s and1930 s: A Concept Between Two Cultures,”327 –54 ; Peter Robb, “South Asiaand the Concept of Race,”1–76 .




land of the Hindus, coalesced with India or Bharat, and Aryavarta,the land of the Aryans. Yet such a conception confined ‘India’ to

northern India or, more precisely, to the Indo-Gangetic plain, de-scribed by one conservative nationalist as “bounded on the northby the Himalayas; and on the south by the Vindhyan chain.”33 Thiseffectively excluded south India, parts of the Deccan, the far north-eastern stretches of Bengal and Assam, and places associated withthe ‘tribals’. Moreover, if the geographical unity of India was, forthe ‘progressives’, grounded upon the ‘fit’ between British India

and the South Asian peninsula, the ‘conservatives’ faced a problemwith the ‘misfit’ between the political geography of the Raj andtheir concept of the Aryavarta.34 This problem raised its head ontwo counts. First, because of this ‘misfit’, the majority of national-ists, ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’, lived and originated in thecoastal presidencies of Bombay, Madras, and Bengal and not in theAryavarta. Their own location in ‘India’ was thus outside the ‘India’

they posited as the ‘true’ nation. In effect, their ideology threatenedto alienate them from their own nation. Second, the Aryavarta justhappened to be the area where the Muslims were, if not always in amajority, the traditionally dominant group. Thus, the very locationof ‘essential’ India was also the location most visibly inhabited bypeople who, according to the ‘conservative’ criteria, were ‘for-eigners’.

A concept of nationhood was thus required which could neut-ralize such a possibility, and the composite conception fitted the billperfectly. Its strength as an ideological concept lay in its ability toaccommodate different emphases while also complementing andfilling the lacunae in the two competing paradigms. Territorially, itmeant that the two geographical areas – the Presidencies and theAryavarta – could be made to complement one another, and a full

territorial conceptualization of all-India could thus emerge whileretaining a cultural perspective. Here, conservative nationalists

33 Rajendralala Mitra,Indo-Aryans, vol.2: 438 –39 , cited by Chowdury–Sen-gupta, “The Effeminate and the Masculine,”296 . According to Jaffrelot, Daya-nanda saw the Aryavarta as covering Punjab, the Doab, and the Ganges Basin(“The Idea of the Hindu Race,”330 ).

34 The phrase is Peter Robb’s (“South Asia and the Concept of Race,”35 , fn57).




could draw upon a body of knowledge and assumptions to equateAryavarta with the traditional ‘centre’ or the ‘seat’ of ‘all-India’.35 In

other words, India could be seen to spread out from its Aryan(Hindu) ‘heart’ in the Ganges Basin, out towards the extremities ofthe east (particularly the hilly areas such as Assam, home to manyof the problematic ‘tribes’) and the (Dravidian) south. Moreover, ifIndia was now conceived of as a composite of communities, thenthe territory associated with problematic communities could beeasily incorporated while maintaining an emphasis on ‘Hinduism’

as the majority and, therefore, foremost community of the nation.This also had the political advantage of being able to present aunified façade to their colonial opponents, since political allianceswith the other communities was not precluded.

The ‘composite’ nation became axiomatic within Indian nation-alist discourse, surviving to this day as the paramount basis forIndia’s secular state. It was, however, always already determined

by the limits of secularism, so that the ideological work for which itwas developed was always the articulation of a ‘tolerant’ idea ofIndia that could accommodate both secular and religious concernswithin a political framework in which the two were necessarily im-bricated.36 The political idiom that naturally accompanied thisvision of national identity was that of majoritarian/minoritarian-ism. Composite nationalism is the ‘grammar’, as it were, that helps

majoritarian/minoritarian politics to make sense. Its mask of tole-rance underwrites a chauvinistic logic that can be witnessed in the‘unconscious’ of Indian nationalist discourse.

A classic enunciation of composite nationalism: Bipinchandra Pal,on the anniversary of the Partition of Bengal, writes:

In thy waters, Holy Mother, are mixed the two streams of Aryanand Semitic culture [...] both the Hindus and the Mahomedans have

35 Ronald Inden,Imagining India, 186 –87 .36 As suggested above, the Sangh Parivar have in effect returned to this con-

cept of secularism as tolerance.




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

On the face of it, all very inclusive, with its talk of “mixing,” “com-mon inheritance” and “minstrelsy.” Yet it soon becomes apparentthat the “two great world-cultures” retain their essential difference.The ‘Aryan’ world-culture is specifically identified, especiallythrough the symbol of the Ganges, with the territory of India, orAryavarta, while the ‘Semitic’ world-culture, since by definition itcannot share the same territorial origins, must of course be identi-fied with a territory originating outside India. This difference ismaintained despite the assertion of commonality, and it can neverbe overcome, since the two cultures can never share the same terri-torial foundations. The use of the term ‘Semitic’ is particularly rele-vant here insofar as it categorically identifies Islam with the MiddleEast – a ‘world culture’ but one that is ‘foreign’. A week earlier, on10

October1906

, Pal had written:And in the organisation of this Nation-Day the peculiarities of thegenius, the past history, and the ancient culture of the differentcommunities of the Indian people must receive due care and consi-deration.

Again, a generous statement perhaps. But he goes on:

To formulate one set of rituals for all would really be to kill the spiritof these functions [...] The Nation-Idea had a particular line ofdevelopment [...] in Hindu consciousness; while it followed a dif-ferent line of evolution in Muslim or Christian history or culture.38

Thus, the historical trajectories of India’s ‘communities’ remain es-

sentially separated; at no stage do they overlap but, rather, evolvein parallel.There do not seem to be any traces of supremacism at this point;

though essentially different, none of the communities seem intrin-sically superior to the others. Yet the territorial exclusion illustrated

37 B.C. Pal, “Ganges Bath,”16 October1906 , inThe New Spirit, 10–11.38 B.C. Pal, “Rakhi Day,” inThe New Spirit, 12.




and Christian [...] The Hindu nation-builder shall not seek to super-impose his own ideals upon his Mahomedan brother, nor shall the

Mahomedan, Buddhist, or the Christian seek to obliterate the essen-tial characteristics of the Hindu cultureand the Hindurace.41

The final separation is significant here, for it implies that there is abiological Hindu race which in turn produces a Hindu culture.Cultures, here realized in religious terms, are racially determined,and therefore have a biological origin. We can return profitably tothe territorial exclusion of the ‘Semitic’ culture of Islam from Indiaand note that Pal locks onto racial as well as religious cleavageswhich in turn operate vis-à-vis colonial ideology. For the legitimacyof the Indian (Hindu) nation is premissed upon the racial com-monality between the ‘Hindu’ and the Briton. The relationship, it issuggested, is one of racial equality, and should thus be one of poli-tical equality as well. The Muslim, however, cannot claim this equal

parentage and is consequently excluded from the circle of racialequality which is the basis for the legitimacy of the Indian nation;conversely, the Muslim is therefore not a legitimate or equal part ofthe nation. The identification of ‘Muslim’ with ‘Semitic’ also at-taches itself to and addresses European antisemitic prejudices. Theeffect is to build up a racial hierarchy in which Englishmen, Aryansand Hindus are superior to Muslims and Jews. This implicitly de-

constructs the apparent inclusiveness of the composite nation, for ifMuslims are racially inferior, then genuinely to include them in theIndian nation would be to compromise the imagined parity of Indiaand England. (But one notes a contradiction: the Aryan ‘commonal-ity’ between the colonialist and the Hindu is offset by their religious‘difference’ – Hinduism versus Christianity – ironically, a Semiticreligion. Hence, if race, culture and religion are intrinsically asso-

ciated with each other, one of these assertions must be wrong forthe other to be valid. No matter; the Semite remains at the bottom ofthe ladder regardless.) Pal’s discourse is suffused with the term‘race’, and though its significations are usually connoted with ‘cul-ture’, he uses it often in a biological sense, using metaphors of‘blood’. Here, however, the potent metaphor prefigures the concep-

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




tual matrix of nation (as territory), biological race and culture/civilization (“environments” includes both what he terms “physical

environments” – territory, Bharat, mother/ fatherland – and “socialenvironments”: i.e. culture and civilization) so typical of the extremeright-wing nationalisms of the twentieth century: Nazism, Serbiannationalism, Hindu nationalism (BJP, RSS, etc) and so on.

Pal goes on:

No more than we can force the colt to develop into a cub, than wecan force one type of civilisation to grow into another, quite distinctfrom it. No more can we take the flower of the rose, the leaf of themahogany, the white and straight trunk of the ash and the fruits ofthe vine, and combine them into a new vegetable organism, than wecan take the best and most distinctive characteristics of the differentworld-cultures, and combine them all into a new culture.42

Composite nationalism, which so relentlessly polices the rigorousseparation of essentially different cultures, does so partly in re-sponse to colonial critiques of Indian nationalism which chastised itfor not conforming to the European ideal of homogeneity. Itsideological power lay in the manner in which it systematically ex-cised these differences precisely in order to conform to the ideal ofhomogeneity within the context of the political realities of differ-ence; the two coexist: difference is seemingly admitted whilesimultaneously effaced as the ‘Hindu majority’ becomes surrep-titiously identified with the ‘nation’ and the minorities are quietlyexpelled. Thus, Pal seems to be saying that the ‘new’ Indian nationis only different from the ‘old’ insofar as it is a composite – anunavoidable historical consequence; the ‘old’ Indian nation was ahomogeneous Hindu nation and, but for the passage of time, stillwould be. Conversely, therefore, the new Indian nation is compo-site because it is new; at its heart, in its soul, lies the old Indiannation, the real Indian nation which, like any European nation, wascompletely homogeneous; moreover, this ‘real’ Indian nation sharesa common racial ancestry with the best of them. In fact, India is

42 Pal, “Nation Building,”103 .




really the equivalent, indeed the precursor, of modern Europeannations, since it is so much older.

The rationale of this vision of Indian nationalism is centredwholly upon the logic of exclusion which underpins it and uponwhich it depends for its symbolic power. Its extreme point is asupremacist language which is echoed today by theBJP and SanghParivar. Thus, “[The] Hindu religion tolerates all religions. Ourreligions say that all religions are based on truth, ‘you follow yoursand I mine’” can, without apparent irony, be followed by this:

they [other religions] are based on the partial truth whilst ourHindu religion is based on the whole – the Sanatan truth, andtherefore it is bound to triumph in the end [...] All that is requiredfor our glorious triumph is that we should unite [...] work hard forthe final triumph [...] the time will come when instead of Christianspreaching Christianity here we shall see our preachers preaching

Sanatan Dharma all over the world.43

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

From the vantage-point of the twenty-first century, the currentpolitical situation within India stands at one end of what might betermed the “long arc of the nationalist imagination,” a parabolawhose other arm stretches back into the late nineteenth century.The ideological formulations of that first generation of nationalists

have led a recalcitrant subterranean existence within the Indianpolitical imagination, facilitating the orgies of violence that havepunctuated India’s twentieth-century history. While it cannot beclaimed that the pogroms in Gujarat in February and March2002 are directly connected to the communal riots of the1920 s and 30 s

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




and the Partition holocaust, these events do nevertheless form partof a depressingly predictable series which was only attenuated for a

brief period during the immediate post-Independence years.During that period, the apex of the parabola, when secularismseemed to have a good chance of not only surviving but also takingfirm root in Indian soil, it would possibly have been unimaginablethat fifty years on the visceral suspicions and cultural chauvinismsof the earlier period might once again dominate the Indian politicalagenda.

It has been argued here that such a return is, in part, a conse-quence of nationalism in India; not just Hindu nationalism butnationalism as such. True, some nationalists were more secular thanothers, but even they were limited in their modes of apprehendingand exploring the ‘communal’ problem because the limits ofsecularism in India had deep historical roots which could not justbe resolved by rhetorical sleights of hand. On the other hand,

Indian nationalist discourse did deploy a number of tropes thatsurreptitiously encoded a Hindu majoritarian point of view, even inthe most secular-seeming and tolerant formulations. Foremostamong these was the idea of the composite nation. While it woulddo the cause of historical analysis no service whatsoever to flattenimmensely complex and contradictory processes by suggesting thatall nationalists were therefore the ‘same’ (which they clearly were

not), it would be unwise to overlook some of the recurrent motifsthat have become axiomatic in Indian politics, motifs that have beenshared by ideologues across the political spectrum and that are notas benign as they might at first appear. In particular, any attempt toarticulate an alternative India by appealing to some ‘pure’ or‘uncontaminated’ secular nationalism is fraught with particulardangers. There have been visions of Indian nationhood that are

more suitable for this purpose than others, but before appropriatingthem in the fight against Hindutva it is worth considering carefully,forensically, their precise implications.




WORKSCITED Asad, Talal.Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford

CA: StanfordUP, 2003 ).Banerjea, Surendranath.Speeches and Writings of Hon. Surendranath Banerjea,Selected by Himself (Madras: G.A. Nateson,1920 ).

Banerjee, Sumanta.The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in19th Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books,1989 ).

Brown, Judith. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford:OxfordUP, 2nd ed.1994 ).

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

Chowdury–Sengupta, Indira. “The Effeminate and the Masculine: Nation-alism and the Concept of Race in Bengal,” inThe Concept of Race in South

Asia, ed. Peter Robb (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1995 ):282 –303 .Dalmia, Vasudha. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu

Harishchandra and 19th Century Banaras (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1997 ).Derrett, J.D.M.Religion, Law and the State in India (London: Faber & Faber,

1968 ).Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of

British India, 1765 –1843 (Chicago: U of Chicago P,1997 ).Gole, Susan. A Series of Early Printed Maps of India in Facsimile (New Delhi: Jayaprints,1980 ).

Gole, Susan.Indian Maps and Plans from Earliest Times to the Advent of Euro- pean Surveys (New Delhi: Manohar,1989 ).

Inden, Ronald.Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell,1990 ). Jaffrelot, Christophe. “The Idea of the Hindu Race in the Writings of Hindu

Nationalist Ideologues in the1920 s and 1930 s: A Concept Between TwoCultures,” inThe Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. Peter Robb (New Delhi:OxfordUP, 1995 ):327 –54 .

Madan, P.L.Indian Cartography: A Historical Perspective (New Delhi: Mano-har, 1997 ).

Metcalf, Thomas.Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1995 ).Mondal, Anshuman A.Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and

Ideology in India and Egypt (London: Routledge Curzon,2003 ).Nehru, Jawaharlal.The Discovery of India (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1946 ).Pal, Bipinchandra.The New Spirit: A Selection from the Writings and Speeches

of Bipin Chandra Pal on Social, Political and Religious Subjects (Calcutta:Sarvadhikari,1907 ).

Pandey, Gyanendra.The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1990 ).

Robb, Peter, ed.The Concept of Race in South Asia (New Delhi: OxfordUP,1995

).



The Discovery of AryavartaHindu Nationalism and EarlyIndian Fiction in English

ALEXTICKELL

India is now fallen from her high estate. The ground crumbles underher feet. She was rich in the past; she is poor at the present. There hasbeen a fall – a mighty fall! […] The writer looks far behind throughthe long avenue of ages and lets his memory linger for a moment onthe happy years his country once passed […] His tale is, as it were,the lament of a lover.1 As I grew up and became engaged in activities which promised tolead to India’s freedom, I became obsessed with the thought of India.

What is this India apart from her physical and geographical aspects?What did she represent in the past? What gave strength to her then?How did she lose that old strength? […] Does she represent anythingvital now [… and] how does she fit into the modern world?2

N HIS MAGISTERIAL, historically layered vision of Indianidentity, The Discovery of India (1946 ), the third in a “complex

triptych” of works which “synthesize personal life-writing,political memoir and public history,”3 Jawaharlal Nehru describes

1 K.K. Sinha,Sanjogita, or the Princess of Aryavarta (Dinapore: Watling PrintingWorks,1903 ): i–ii.

2 Jawaharlal Nehru,The Discovery of India (London: Meridian,1960 ):36 . 3 Sunil Khilnani, “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English,” in A History of

Indian Literature in English , ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (London: Hurst,2003 ):148 .

I



26 ALEXTICKELL

Hindu nationalism as an undeniable but redundant part of thenation’s ideological maturing. It was, he stated, “a natural growth

from the soil of India, but inevitably it comes in the way of thelarger nationalism which rises above differences of religion orcreed.”4 As Gyanendra Pandey argues, for nationalists such asNehru, caught up in the momentous anticolonial struggle of the1920 s and 1930 s, “communalism appeared as a great political threat,the most obvious source of danger for the advancing cause ofnationalism.”5 The answer, for India’s future Prime Minister, was to

advocate a progressive “refurbished” nationalism that focused onshared histories and ethnic syncretism, a counter-version of politicalidentity that would become India’s grand narrative in the imme-diate post-Independence period.

We need only refer to an earlier political memoir, the highly suc-cessful An Autobiography (1936 ), to realize how important it was forNehru to distance his ‘new’ nationalism from what he saw as an

earlier, less secular sense of identity. Here, Nehru’s anxieties aboutthis political transition are dramatized in a particularly striking wayin an account of a journey to Switzerland made with his ailing wifeKamala and their daughter Indira in1926 . While Kamala receivedtreatment forTB at a Swiss sanatorium, Nehru took the opportu-nity to visit a number of older political radicals and exiled activists.Among these was the aged Shyamji Krishnavarma, a revolutionary

nationalist, Sanskrit scholar and former member of the Hindu re-form movement the Arya Samaj, who had operated a revolutionaryterrorist network from London two decades earlier. Living as asemi-recluse with his wife on the top floor of a Geneva apartment-house, Krishnavarma is presented in An Autobiography as a senile,bookish obsessive and becomes a salutary warning of the way poli-tics can go bad if it is divorced from the real world:

The aged couple lived by themselves […] and their rooms weremusty and suffocating and everything had a thick layer of dust […][Krishnavarma] was suspicious of all comers, presuming them, until

4 Nehru,The Discovery of India, 240 .5 Gyanendra Pandey,The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India

(New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1990 ):9 .



The Discovery of Aryavarta 27

the contrary was proved, to be either British agents or after hismoney. His pockets bulged with ancient copies of his old paper, the

Indian Sociologist and he would pull them out and point with someexcitement to some article he had written a dozen years previously[…] the walls of his rooms were covered with shelves full of oldbooks, dust laden and neglected, looking down sorrowfully on theintruder. Books and papers also littered the floor; they seemed tohave remained so for days and weeks, and even months past. Overthe whole place there hung an atmosphere of gloom, an air of decay

[…] with relief one came out of that flat and breathed the airoutside.6

In Nehru’s account, one of Krishnavarma’s contemporaries, Ma-dame Bhikaiji Cama, a Parsi activist who had famously unfurledthe Indian flag at the Stuttgart Socialist Congress of1907 , receivesthe same irreverent treatment:

In Paris we saw old Madame Cama, rather fierce and terrifying asshe came up to you and peered into your face, and, pointing at you,asked abruptly who you were […] the answer made no difference(probably she was too deaf to hear it) for she formed her own im-pressions and stuck to them, despite facts to the contrary.7

Written while Nehru was a political prisoner in Almora jail, thesedescriptions of an earlier nationalist generation beg comparisonwith the nineteenth-century gothic, and one wonders if Nehru re-called Great Expectations as he worked on his memoirs and wroteletters to Indira, inquiring “Have you read much of Thackeray orDickens? They are rather old-fashioned now but I remember how Iused to enjoy them in the old days.”8 In terms of his political situa-tion, the intertext could not have been more apt.Great Expectations,with its Satis House motif of the present arrested and imprisonedby the past, might have echoed Nehru’s fears about his own incar-

6 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (London: The Bodley Head,1989 ):149 .7 Nehru, An Autobiography, 151.8 Jawaharlal Nehru, inFreedom’s Daughter: Letters between Indira Gandhi and

Jawaharlal Nehru, 1922 – 39 , ed. Sonia Gandhi (London: Hodder & Stoughton,1989 ):145 –46 .



28 ALEXTICKELL

ceration. More profoundly, Dickens’ sleight-of-hand plot, in whicha long-expected inheritance is suddenly exchanged for one which

reconnects Pip with his deepest fears, could have spoken to Nehru’sworries about the repressed aspects of India’s “religious attitude,”an attitude which he associated, in Krishnavarma’s gloomy apart-ment, with “blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, supersti-tion and exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.”9

In retrospect, Nehru’s evocative representation of his revolu-tionary predecessors alerts us to conceptual aporiae in his work,

and the involved nature of his own political heritage. By the time hemet Krishnavarma in the mid-1920 s, communal politics seemed tobe polarizing the nationalist movement as a whole (followingevents such as the Mapilla rebellion of1921 ), and Nehru’s attemptto disassociate himself from earlier Indian nationalist groups re-flects his increasing disquiet about the activities of the Hindu Rightunder the direction of Krishnavarma’s contemporaries such as V.D.

Sarvarkar. Even so, for all Nehru’s rhetorical investment in a new or‘refurbished’ mass nationalism, it is equally clear now that duringthis period the secularism of the Congress Party was more notionalthan Nehru’s political writings claimed. Indeed, there is persuasivehistorical evidence that a continued ideological investment in pri-mordialist nationalism was maintained across the nationalist move-ment even as ideas of Hindu–Muslim unity were promoted by the

Congress. As Chetan Bhatt points out,an overarching process of the interpellation of discovered archaicand primordial Hinduism was a major, significant and before the1920 s often a dominating strand in the national movement such thatsecularism itself was neither sufficiently interrogated nor adequate-ly developed beyond an elemental, if often strong and principled,

commitment to anti-communalism […] given its importance, therewas an absence of detailed, elaborate and sufficient national discus-sion of what secularism might mean across both state and civilsocieties until arguablyafter the Nehruvian period.10

9 Nehru, An Autobiography, 374 .10 Chetan Bhatt,Hindu Nationalism (Oxford: Berg,2001 ):9 .




While immediately challenging a simplistic periodizing of Indiannationalist thought, Bhatt’s insight also has important implications

for our reading of the politics of contemporary Indian-English fic-tion, and invites us to reappraise the widely assumed connectionbetween ‘secular’ nationalism and the emergent novel-form.

Judging from his letters, Nehru’s literary tastes were decidedlyconservative, and he cared little for contemporary (modernist) fic-tion, preferring the work of authors such as H.G. Wells and SamuelButler. However, the stylistic impact of his own writing on the de-

velopment of the Indian novel in English, during what is now seenas its formative nationalist phase, was considerable. Both Nehru’sand Gandhi’s life-writings were profoundly influential in their useof “an Indian prose committed to clarity and humanist principles”11 and recurring thematic features in their work such as the village-pastoral and the ‘image of return’ were recycled by Raja Rao andMulk Raj Anand in their novels of the1930 s and 1940 s. With the

appearance of specialized nationalist genres like the ‘Gandhi-novel’,stylistic contiguities grew into close relationships of citation andhagiographic cross-reference, and after independence the Indian-English novel maintained and strengthened this investment in whatAshis Nandy has termed the “rational […] secularism [that] hasdominated India’s Middle Class public consciousness.”12

We must remember, however, that the literary-historical connec-

tions between Indian mass nationalism and the Indian-Englishnovel have always been qualified (often in a perfunctory way) incritical studies by an awareness of a substantial body of Indian writ-ing in English stretching back to the1860 s, a largely overlookedtradition that was well-established by the turn of the century. Pub-lished decades before the Congress transformed Indian nationalisminto a mass movement, these early Indian-English fictions draw

their political themes from the very texts in Krishnavarma’s Genevaapartment that make up the “sorrowful,” “suffocating” politicalarchive from which Nehru’s narrative escapes. Moreover, if we ap-preciate the close formal connections between Nehru’s prose andcontemporary Indian-English fiction, then might not the same pro-

11 Khilnani, in A History of Indian Literature in English , ed. Mehrotra:152 .12 Ashis Nandy,Time Warps (London: Hurst,2002 ):69 .



30 ALEXTICKELL

cess of disavowal characterize the politics of the Indian novel inEnglish? If the secular version of India’s national identity has a con-

cealed or repressed ideological inheritance, then does the Indian-English novel, which has entered so decisively into an interrogationof monologic or primordialist identities in recent years, have causefor postcolonial embarrassment about its own past?

My aim, in the following pages, is to consider these questions bytracing the political genealogy of Indian fiction in English back tothe early 1900 s. Concentrating on two popular ‘middlebrow’ ro-

mances published in London in1909 – Sarath Kumar Ghosh’sThePrince of Destiny and S.M. Mitra’sHindupore – and making referenceto earlier historical romances such as K.K. Sinha’sSanjogita (1903 ),this essay interrogates the automatic critical equation of the Indian-English novel with a secular or pluralist national imagining, andpays special attention to a closely interwoven fabric of political dis-courses, among them forms of regional nationalism, Vedic Aryan-

ism and European theories of racial efficiency, that provide a politi-cal source-text for Indian writers and intellectuals at the turn of thetwentieth century. As I will argue, far from representing the politi-cal antithesis of the ‘cosmopolitan’ Indian novel in English, the riseof Hindu majoritarianism and forms of Hindu nationalism in Indiais, instead, prefigured in some of the earliest, most popular ex-amples of the form.

The Political Purana:‘Princely’ Fictions and the Influence of BankimBefore the development of modes of humanist social realism andnew experimental narrative techniques in the1920 s and 1930 s, amajor formal template for Indian authors writing in English was the(historical) romance. For migrant London-based writers such asGhosh and Mitra, the bias towards the romance must be seen partlyas a commercial choice, reflecting the contemporary popularity of‘romancers’ such as Maud Diver and Flora Annie Steel, but Indianauthors also exploited the genre as a way of entering into discursivenegotiation with their metropolitan and colonial audiences. Becauseof their awareness of a potentially hostile British readership, bothGhosh and Mitra adopt a revisionist narrative position, using theromance – or what I have called elsewhere the “informative ro-




mance”13 – as a way of correcting colonial prejudices while simul-taneously exploring variations on a conciliatory cultural-nationalist

theme in their work. In striking contrast to the interest in rural set-tings and village life of many later nationalist novelists, these earlierromance-writers also use the ‘princely’ kingdom as the setting oftheir fictions; the reasons for this are partly tactical (their criticalfocus is, ostensibly, not ‘directly ruled’ British India) and partly be-cause representations of Hindu dynastic leaders, who often claimeddirect descent from heroes in the Puranas and epics such as the

Mahabharata, could be used as a figurative link with a mythicalHindu past.Sarath Kumar Ghosh’s highly successful novelThe Prince of Des-

tiny, or the New Krishna , which appeared in colonial and domesticeditions and ran to a second impression within six months of itspublication in October1909 , is perhaps the most sophisticated earlyIndian-English presentation of the princely state as a singularly

political space. Written while Ghosh was enduring an impover-ished student existence in a boarding-house in north London, thisheavily symbolic work tells the story of Prince Barath of Barath-pore, whose role as a messianic national leader is hinted at through-out the text. ABildungsroman on an epic scale, the narrative followsBarath’s childhood and growth to maturity as he journeys to Eng-land and Cambridge for his education, returns to inherit the throne

of Barathpore, and tries, in a strikingly modern way, to reconcile hisloyalty to Britain with his love of his own homeland.14 Published inLondon in the same year, S.M. Mitra’s less accomplished novelHindupore: A Peep Behind the Indian Unrest , a fictional reworking ofthe author’s journalism, also features an idealized princely figure,Raja Ram Singh, who is a transcultural representative of Indianopinion. The Raja is not the central protagonist of the text, but the

friend and confidante of the hero of the story, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish MP Lord Tara, who eventually marries Ram Singh’s niece,Princess Kamala, in a symbolic reconciliation of colonizer and colo-

13 Alex Tickell, “Terrorism and the Informative Romance: Two Early Indian

Novels in English,”Kunapipi 25 .1 (2003 ):73–83 .14 See Meeenakshi Mukherjee,The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing

in English (Oxford: OxfordUP, 2000 ):63 .



32 ALEXTICKELL

nized. A member of the Royal Asiatic Society, Mitra tended todefend empire in his fiction and journalism, but here we also find a

call for a greater understanding and mutual cooperation betweencolonizer and colonized.In their tense mixing of archetypal characterization and anti-

colonial critique, both novels cited above are curiously fraught, andtheir ambivalence is more understandable when we realize thatthey reflect and mediate an early phase in Indian nationalism thatPartha Chatterjee has termed, famously, the “moment of depar-

ture.” For Chatterjee, this is a founding point in the continuum ofIndian nationalist thought, during which it becomes clear to thecolonized that

The West has a superior culture, but only partially; spiritually theEast is superior. What is needed, now [in the late nineteenth cen-tury] is the creation of a cultural ideal in which the industries and

sciences of the West can be learnt and emulated while retaining thespiritual greatness of Eastern culture. This is the national-culturalproject at the moment of departure.15

Both novels condense these themes in the figure of the Indian princeand the proto-national space of the princely kingdom, and in doingso Ghosh and Mitra draw on the work of a writer whom ParthaChatterjee selects as a representative of his nationalist “departure”phase, the Bengali novelist and intellectual Bankim Chandra Chat-terjee, who is now remembered in literary studies for his landmarkhistorical novel of Bengali nationalism, Anandamath (1882 ).

As Chatterjee notes, Bankim’s model of political emancipation, “aproject of national-cultural regeneration in which the intelligentsialeads and the nation follows”16 is marked by an inherent elitism,and this is repeated in the presentation of feudal (and, in Ghosh’scase, messianic) figures of proto-national leadership inThe Prince ofDestiny and Hindupore. More revealing, in terms of the conceptualreliance of “departure-phase” nationalism on forms of Hindu pri-mordialism, is the way the novelists discussed here cannot conceive

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

16 Chatterjee,Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World , 73 .




of anticolonial resistance in anything but (Hindu) spiritual terms. InHindupore, the major threat to British sovereignty in India comes not

from “the [swadeshi] movement for ‘Hind Swaraj’”17

but from anetwork of politicized priests andsanyassi who form a Pan-Hindufraternity throughout the subcontinent. As one of Mitra’s Britishcharacters argues, “Hinduism is a great religious society as well as apolitical organisation […] the Hindu sadhu (hermit) is sworn to doall he can to protect the religion and interests of the Indian Mother-land […] we hear much of Pan-Islam, but it is not in India so impor-

tant a power to us as that of Pan-Hinduism.”18

Mitra’s vision of a Pan-Hindu brotherhood pledged to theMotherland owes much to Bankim’s plot of asanyassi rebellion in

Anandamath , but both authors also mobilize Puranic narratives(especially forms ofbhakti devotionalism) in their fiction. As Bhattpoints out, in political prose writings such asKrsnacaritra (1886 )Bankim skilfully avoids both a Western metaphysical model and

the more abstract textualism of contemporary Hindu reform move-ments while at the same time “reconfigur[ing] […] Puranic, devo-tional religion such that Krishna symbolis[es] a ‘de-sexualised’,ethical, militant ideal of what humanity could become.”19 This poli-tically ‘activated’ refashioning of Krishna is mirrored very clearly inthe subtitle ofThe Prince of Destiny – “The New Krishna.” Indeed,throughout the novel Ghosh continually hints at the potentially

mythical, redemptive identity of his hero, in “the thousand allu-sions, the thousand suggestions” that Barath hears “vaguely heardhalf-uttered […] since his childhood,”20 suggestions that finallyforce the “New Krishna” into a literal identity crisis, causing him torenounce his throne at the very moment he seems poised to leadIndia to independence.

17 See S.M. Mitra,Hindupore (London: Luzac,1909 ):142 .18 Chatterjee,Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World , 220 –22 .19 Bhatt,Hindu Nationalism , 31.20 Sarath Kumar Ghosh,The Prince of Destiny, or the New Krishna (London:

Rebman,1909 ):495 .



34 ALEXTICKELL

The Novel, Primordial Hinduism and AryanismEarly Indian-English novelists such as Ghosh and Mitra did not de-pend solely on forms of (Bengali) cultural nationalism for inspira-tion. Nor was their interest in the political potential of Hinduismrestricted, following Bankim, to the creative use of Puranic myth.Because they both engage closely (and in Mitra’s case very ambi-valently) with a spectrum of contemporary nationalist discourses,these novelists reveal the extent to which an early Indian nationalistintelligentsia excavated Hinduism’s religious prehistory, rediscov-ering a classical South Asian civilization already made available inorientalist scholarship. One of the most radical of these politicalarchaeologists, and the staunchest defender of India’s lost goldenage, was Dayananda Saraswati, the leader of a Hindu reform move-ment, the Arya Samaj (society of nobles), founded in Bombay in1875 and Lahore in1877 . Taking its cue from older reform groups such asthe BengalBrahmo Samaj, Dayananda’s Arya Samaj was effectively afundamentalist organization that sought to strengthen and purifythe spiritual basis of Hinduism. Like Bankim, Dayananda realizedthat Hinduism’s political potential derived both from the way itconnected the colonized with a forgotten spiritual greatness21 andalso, more practically, from its broad social base as the majorityfaith in the subcontinent. (Although his organizational thinking, incommon with Bankim, maintained the importance of elite leader-ship cadres.) On these terms, Hinduism could provide the discur-sive coherence essential for a truly subcontinental national move-ment.

In a radical challenge to the Brahminical theocracy, theSamaj called for a return to the textual foundations of Hindu religiousculture and a recognition of the Vedas as a set of revealed mono-theistic truths. This was augmented, as Bhatt has shown, by claimsto an ancient ‘Aryan’ heritage, an orientalist concept-term which, inDayananda’s usage, could shift between a moral or social definitionof arya as ‘nobility’ and equally strong territorial, ethnological andracial meanings.22 In Dayananda’s thinking, therefore, the re-imagining of Hinduism’s primordial beginnings not only relied on

21 See Chatterjee,Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World , 75 .22 Bhatt,Hindu Nationalism , 16.




a selective exegesis of the Vedas but also drew, as the movement’sname suggests, on colonial race theory and other metropolitan

concerns such as social evolutionism and degeneration. Tounderstand how contemporary writers like Ghosh and Mitraexploited this stock of transacted ideas it is necessary to review,briefly, the wider significance of Aryanism, and its centrality inEuropean debates about race.

The theoretical location of humanity’s primeval Aryan origin incentral Asia, usually in the Himalayas, had been widely accepted

by European philosophers and historians, Kant among them, by theearly nineteenth century. Following Friedrich Schlegel’s use of com-parative philology to make claims about Indo-European racialinterconnectedness, French race theorists such as Renan and Gobi-neau and the German Sanskritist Max Müller all ascribed to a racialanthropology which saw the Aryans as a primal race that repres-ented the future of civilized humanity, and had made a prehistoric

migration from central Asia to Europe and the subcontinent. Thesetheories were adopted in a more general form by British scholar–administrators such as William Hunter–Wilson, who reiterated theidea of a noble Aryan race that had peopled Europeand India in hisinfluential Annals of Rural Bengal (1868 ), a text which, incidentally,provided the historical plot-line of Bankim’s Anandamath in an ac-count of asanyassi rebellion in1771–72 .23 In the Annals , Hunter–

Wilson argued that Bengal was the site of a historical intermixingbetween “noble” invaders of Aryan ancestry and “inferior tribes,” atheory that became paradigmatic in ethnological accounts of Indiaand was later used to explain caste stratification in Hindu society.

The ‘Aryan migration/invasion’ model was consistent, as SusanBayly has noted, with contemporary European views that advancedsocieties “could survive and flourish only if they found means to

protect themselves from the formation of racial ‘composites’ throughthe merging of people from separate racial ‘stock’ and very unequaldegrees of civilisation.”24 In this model, the once great Aryan racehad become gradually weakened in its journey into India as it di-

23 See Priya Joshi,In Another Country (New York: ColumbiaUP, 2002 ):162 .24 Susan Bayly, “Race in Britain and India,” inNation and Religion, ed. Peter

van der Veer & Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton NJ: PrincetonUP, 1999 ):78 .



36 ALEXTICKELL

luted itself through intermixture with indigenous peoples. Indeed,“racial theory, with its insistence on the purity and supremacy of

Aryan races,”25

seemed, therefore, to supply a racial justification forcolonial supremacy as the natural ascendancy of a purerEuropean Aryan bloodline. However, as the British empire expanded acrossthe globe, colonial anthropologists and race theorists had to admitthe “inevitability of [European] decline as different races and cul-tures mixed and reproduced.”26 Increasing colonial contact withnon-European cultures, and the often genocidal or pathogenic con-

sequences of these encounters, only reinforced late nineteenth-cen-tury anxieties about racial degeneration. In these discourses, arguesRod Edmond, “a complex dialectic was at work [and the] obsessionof Western observers with the death of other cultures was, in part, adisplaced expression of fear of the extinction of their own.”27

We find that by the late1880 s, therefore, the comparatively frat-ernal model of shared ‘Aryan’ origins advanced by Sanskritists

such as Max Müller, in which Indians had been described as “ourbrothers in language and thought,”28 gives way, as Thomas Traut-mann notes, to a more aggressively empirical race science whichseeks to sideline Indian Aryanism and reassert the superiority ofEuropean ‘Aryan races’ such as the Celts.29 Condemning Max Mül-ler’s ideas out of hand, the anthropologist Isaac Taylor celebratedthe new paradigm of Aryanist thinking by proclaiming in1889 that

the “tyranny of the Sanskritists is happily overpast […] hasty philo-logical deductions [now] require to be systematically checked bythe conclusions of prehistoric archaeology, craniology, anthropo-logy, geology, and common sense.”30 However, even as a new‘scientific’ anthropology, with its paraphernalia of anthropometricmeasurement and craniology, reasserted European racial superior-

25

Rod Edmond, “Home and Away: Degeneration in Imperialist and Mod-ernist Discourse,” in Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality , 1890 –1940 , ed. Howard Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester: ManchesterUP):40 .

26 Edmond, “Home and Away,”40 .27 “Home and Away,”42 .28 Friedrich Max Müller, in Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India

(Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1997 ):178 .29 Trautmann, Aryans and British India .30 Aryans and British India , 186




ity, the distant Indo-European racial connections plotted by theSanskritists still left the option of a renewed race-fitness open to

both colonizer and colonized. Hence, in a reversal of the degenera-tive trope of ‘going native’ (something that colonial fictions oftendwelt on), colonial commentators found themselves facing the dis-agreeable possibility that Indians might reverse their evolutionarytrajectory, and were “dangerously ready to recover the vigour andcompetitive greatness that was implanted in their [Aryan] racialheritage.”31

These ideas were of particular interest to contemporary Indianreformers and intellectuals who, as we have seen, grafted Aryanistideas onto discourses of primordialist nationalism, but they alsohad an enduring impact on the political shape of the early Indiannovel in English. In these fictions we encounter an intriguing co-option of metropolitan race theory which accepts the idea of racialdegeneration and regeneration, but is equally attuned to cross-

national allegiances and hidden cross-racial commonalities. Amongliterary works published at the turn of the century, K.K. Sinha’s his-torical romanceSanjogita or the Princess of Aryavarta (1903 ) exempli-fies Indian hopes about the reactivation of an Aryan ancestry as theprelude to national rejuvenation. Basing his novel on the popularlegend of the twelfth-century princess Sanjogita, Sinha signals hisdidactic intention in his preface by “remind[ing] his countrymen of

the glory and greatness of their ancestors and […] [drawing] atten-tion to the direct causes of their fall.”32 His use of a xenological AryaSamaj term for India, Aryavarta, confirms the contemporary depen-dence, noted earlier, of Indian nationalist thought on forms of Vedicprimordialism. Indeed, Sinha goes on to make an impassioned pleafor national-racial reawakening:

Heroes of Aryavarta, have you passed away forever? Is therenothing to infuse life into the dead ashes? Mighty sons of Ind, whereare you gone? […] Will you not be reincarnated for the advance-ment of our race? […] Ours is a fallen condition. We have [sic] adegraded age when the glories of our ancestors are almost forgotten

31 Bayly, “Race in Britain and India,”82 .32 K.K. Sinha,Sanjogita, or the Princess of Aryavarta , iii.



38 ALEXTICKELL

and we are drawn away from the path they had struck out; whenthe dictates of duty are not carefully obeyed and the spiritual great-

ness of a Janak or a Vashista seems wholly beyond our mental hori-zon. (266 –67 )

As this passage shows, the ‘shared’ Indo-European Aryanism plot-ted by European Sanskritists and downgraded in scientific ethno-logy could always be replaced, in Indian-English fiction, by a selec-tive, regional claim to Aryan ‘nobility’ that excludedEuropean entitlement to an ‘Aryan’ heritage (such as those made by spiritual-ist groups like the Theosophists with their invocations to the“Himalayan masters”) and, instead, privileged the inhabitants ofAryavarta, as true Aryans.33

In the late nineteenth-century settings ofThe Prince of Destiny andHindupore, the fantasy of Aryan regeneration is presented in a num-ber of ways. In both novels, a reformed Hinduism, manifested as a

primordial Vedic Aryanism or (as we saw in the previous section) aradical form ofbhakti devotion, acts as a vehicle for political changeand potential proto-national liberation. Like Sinha, Ghosh adoptsthe political vocabulary of primordial Hinduism, most obviously inthe naming of his protagonist, Bharat, the legendary primal Aryanwhose name constitutes the descriptive termBharatiya, used todesignate India in Sanskrit and Hindi texts.34 As Christophe Jaffre-

lot confirms, “these usages hark back to the conviction that Hinduculture contains within it the essence of Indian identity.”35 In arather more circuitous way, Ghosh’s novel allegorizes a merging ofthe historical and the mythical in its own topography, as the narra-tor dwells on the palimpsest-foundations of Delhi and calls for asymbolic rebuilding of the legendary city of Indraprastha: “theprize for which the sons of the gods of Meru fought and died” (12).

33 Bhatt points out that “Whereas most Theosophists considered Americans,Europeans and Indians as ‘Aryans’, Dayananda rejected this for his view thatonly the inhabitants of Aryavarta (‘India’) could be so designated”;HinduNationalism, 19.

34 Christophe Jaffrelot,The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics,1925 to the 1990 s (London: Hurst,1996 ):57 .

35 Jaffrelot,The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics , 57 .




In Hindupore, the landscape of India is split, in rather clumsynational-colonial symbolism, between princely Hindu India (Hindu-

pore) and directly ruled British India (Barrackpore). On his visit toHindupore to stay with his new friend Raja Ram Singh, Mitra’s pro-Indian hero, Lord Tara, is treated to a lesson in cultural historywhich echoes the communal essentialism already noted in Ghosh’snovel. As he drives through the streets with the Raja’s Prime Mini-ster, Tara is told that

India has been under foreign rule now for about a thousand years.Her foreign rulers have included some iconoclasts of Central Asia.They did everything to break the faith of the Hindu in his creed, butfailed – miserably failed.36

Here, Mitra’s vision of an ‘occupied’ India seems to develop the pri-mordialist thesis along more exclusive lines than Ghosh, and in thisway his novel anticipates the historical narratives of continualcommunal tension and conflict that would later become such a sig-nal feature of Hindu nationalist thinking in the writings of V.D.Sarvarkar.

The Body Politic: Aryanism on the World StageIf the princely state becomes the primary imaginative site for a dia-

chronic investigation into India’s religio-mythical and ‘racial’ ori-gins in novels such asThe Prince of Destiny, it also dramatizes thetranscultural synchronic aspects of this collective bid to reclaim anational history. In a way that recalls Chatterjee’s definition ofdeparture-phase nationalism as a difficult political rapprochementbetween (‘eternal’) Eastern spirituality and (‘progressive’) Westernmodernity, bothThe Prince of Destiny and Hindupore feature settings

that are really platforms for continually searching comparisons andtranslations between India and the wider imperial world. InGhosh’s novel, Bharat’s emissaries use imperial transport networksto gather political and technological know-how from Japan, Ger-many and America, in a busy itinerary of departures and arrivals

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



40 ALEXTICKELL

that makes the novel’s setting seem more like a threshold or cross-national transit zone than a culturally unified homeland.37 In con-

trast to the renewed interest in iconic ‘Indian’ settings such as therural village in later nationalist fictions, the hybrid energies of de-parture-phase fiction seems to generate this self-conscious politicalmeditation on travel and cross-cultural comparison as a requisitestage in the development of a viable national identity.

This fictional cross-border traffic finds an interesting analogue inBenedict Anderson’s most recent work,The Spectre of Comparisons,

in which his earlier reading of nationalism as a form of inward-looking, textually augmented “imagining”38 is complemented by anawareness of the global circulation of universal political ideas andtheories that make up nationalism’s conceptual vocabulary. As An-derson argues, a form of “unbound [conceptual] seriality”39 stretch-ing across and between national boundaries, developed out of newinformation and transport systems in the late nineteenth century,

and was facilitated by the increasing speed and coverage of imper-ial news networks that provided the colonized with images of theirown concerns in other, far-flung conflicts and national struggles. Asour discussion of the early Indian-English novel suggests, alongwith ‘people’ and ‘nation’, ‘race’ seems to have been a unit in thistransacted, ‘replicable’ currency of political terms, and could beused as part of the international self-positioning and self-validation

of a new Indian intelligentsia, especially where European colonial-ism seemed to be failing as a global political force.The way Indian nationalism discretely remodels prevailing im-

perialist ideas about race in a strategic synthesis of nation, ethnicityand religion is most apparent in a close thematic engagement withthe idea of racial fitness inThe Prince of Destiny and Hindupore, andin the way these texts monitor and play on colonial racial anxieties.

37 For a more detailed investigation of the ‘cross-border’ affiliations of earlyanticolonial nationalism, see Elleke Boehmer,Empire, the National, and the Post-colonial1890 –1920 (Oxford: OxfordUP, 2002 ).

38 See Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism (London: Verso,1987 ).

39 Benedict Anderson,The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia,and the World (London: Verso,1998 ): esp. ch.1, “Nationalism, Identity, and theLogic of Seriality,”29 –45 .



42 ALEXTICKELL

creasing evidence that European races were failing on the worldstage. Between1890 and 1910 , remarked the diplomat Alfred Lyall,

“came events which materially altered the attitude of Asiatic na-tions towards European predominance.”43 These included the rout-ing of the Italian army by Abyssinian forces at Adowah in1896 , andRussian defeat in the1905 Russo-Japanese war, a failure whichLyall took as “a significant and striking warning that the era offacile victories in Asia had ended.”44 For other colonial administra-tors like the Africanist Harry Johnstone, the Russian defeat was,

simply, “the first set-back of the Caucasian since the neolithicperiod.”45 The racial significance given to these events by British officials

like Johnstone accounts for their resonance in contemporary Indian-English novels, in which the potential national-racial ‘efficiency’ ofSouth Asians balances the incipient degeneration of the West. It alsoinforms the interesting cross-national alliances and power-blocs

(almost always involving the Japanese) imagined by Ghosh andMitra. For both authors, Hinduism, because it is a religion that pre-dates and therefore claims Buddhism as a historical offshoot, offersthe possibility of a linked counter-imperialist Asiatic empire encom-passing India, China and Japan. At the same time, the great anti-quity and the territorial and cultural claims of Hinduism ensurethat, within an orientalist historical framework of South Asian reli-

gions, India, or Aryavarta, can be seen as a distinctive, originaryspace compared with its neighbours.Again, the most revealing point of this national-communal histo-

riography is the way Hinduism is accorded an exclusive historicalmonopoly on Indian identity, to the extent that other major reli-gions of the subcontinent are either ignored, as is the case with Is-lam, Zoroastrianism and Christianity, or incorporated as minor

variants of Hinduism, as with Buddhism – a strategy that antici-pates currentBJP thinking about communal ‘re-conversion’ to the‘original’ Hindu faith of India. As a Japanese character in Mitra’s

43 Lyall, in Valentine Chirol,Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan,1910 ): ix.44 Alfred Lyall, in Chirol,Indian Unrest , ix.45 Harry Johnstone, in Paul Thompson,The Edwardians: The Remaking of Brit-

ish Society (London: Routledge,2nd ed.1992 ):183 .




Hindupore suggests, the close historical links between Vedic Hindu-ism and Buddhism might provide the basis for a massive shift in

global power, as the balance of racial efficiency swings away fromWest to East:

“Japan loves India for the sake of the future, as well as the past” […]said the pilgrim with a confident air […] “Without the Hindu, Japancannot attempt the unification of a grand Asiatic empire. India,China, and Japan in one empire would be beyond the dreams of anyWestern Power. And such a day will come.” (291 ).

These politically charged discourses of racial de/regeneration, Hin-du primordialism and ‘Asiatic’ anticolonial alliance converge, in thenovels discussed here, in a concern with the body and collectivephysical ‘efficiency’. InThe Prince of Destiny, Barath instigates aregimen of physical exercise, modelled on Japanese military train-ing, as part of his reform of Barathpore. Reporting on the plan, thecommanding officer of his army states decisively: “at first my mainduty will be to teach our men gymnastics […] I shall begin with jiu- jitsu” (390 ). The fact that Bharatpore’s citizens are being taught a Japanese martial art reasserts Japan’s exemplary conceptual place inearly Indian nationalism,46 but the emphasis on physical training inGhosh’s novel also anticipates the regimes of ideological and para-military ‘man-moulding’ characteristic of later parent organizationsof the Hindu Right such as theRSS or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps).

Founded by K.B. Hedgewar in1925 , the RSS rejected earlier,more hybrid models of civic nationalism in favour of a concept of

46 The importance of Japan as an ‘alternative’ model for Indian nationalistaspirations also anticipates the later political sympathies and alliances of Ben-gali nationalist leaders such as Subas Chandra Bose. In1943 , after the fall ofSingapore to the Japanese, Bose created the provisional government of “Azad”(‘free’) India, and with Tojo’s consent took command of the “Indian NationalArmy” made up of IndianPOWs in Singapore. Declaring war on Britain andAmerica, theINA marched for Delhi, but was defeated at Imphal in the sum-mer of1944 . See Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (Oxford: OxfordUP,5th ed.1997 ).



44 ALEXTICKELL

nationhood which elided race, culture and religious affiliation. Al-though the political philosophy of theRSS proposed a gradual

(and, in their words, “non-political”) transformation to aHinduRashtra, it shared a great deal with contemporary Italian and Ger-man fascism and drew on German race theorists such as JohannKaspar Bluntschli. Integral to these discourses was a functionalistsomatic view of Indian society, and a political updating of the Vediccreation concept of the primal man in which ‘separatist’ Muslimminorities were seen as cancerous growths threatening the healthy

cells of the Hindu national body. In a form of political metonymy,the programme of mass national-communal regeneration embarkedupon by the RSS involved (and still involves) a ‘man-moulding’focus on physical fitness,lathi drill and the disciplines of the Hinduakhara or temple-gymnasium tradition.

Clearly, Ghosh’s interest in physical training predates the moresinister corporeal symbolism of theRSS but both are part of a poli-

tical framework structured on narratives of redemptive ‘racial’ self-fashioning, and a view of Muslim communities as marginal, if notactively detrimental, to the (Hindu-) nationalist project. This said, inThe Prince of Destiny it is not so much the body as its clothed publicpresence that conveys the complex semiotics of anti-colonial nation-alism. As Emma Tarlo has shown, clothes became a vital index ofidentity for later national leaders such as Gandhi, and it is apt,

therefore, that in Ghosh’s writing types of sartorial disguise betraythe conflicting demands of primordial identification and industrial,military advancement. In the novel’s denouement, a revolutionaryarmy, mobilized in secret by Barath’s chief minister, confronts thePrince with the demand that he lead a national uprising against theBritish. Disguised as wandering Hindu holy men, Bharatpore’s re-volutionary fighters signal their insurrectionary plans by throwing

off their saffron robes to reveal military uniforms at the crucialmoment:

Then Chandra cried out passionately, “Heaven-born, I implore theeto say but the word, and I shall call up a hundred and twenty thou-sand men to proclaim thee!” He flung off his saffron robe, andrevealed a military uniform beneath – of Japanese pattern. His com-

panions did likewise. (588 )




Here, inThe Prince of Destiny, the signifier of a spiritual link with In-dia’s primordial Hindu past literally cloaks and stabilizes a poten-

tially alienating transaction with European/Japanese militarism, atransaction which is also naturalized, as we have seen, throughclaims of pan-Asiatic racial and spiritual commonality.

The Problem of Mass Nationalism:Leadership and the EliteWhile novelists such as Mitra and Ghosh rely, in their writing, on afunctionalist terminology of racial “vitalism, evolution, telos, palin-genesis, survival and degeneration,”47 and return, repeatedly, to an-cient Hindu civilization as the basis of their political aesthetics, theirfiction is still distinctively ‘pre-national’ in its unwillingness to en-gage with the cultures of the Indian masses. Recalling the passagefrom Nehru’s autobiography quoted earlier, we realize that thismay be another reason why India’s future premier is so vehementin his self-affirming dismissal of revolutionaries like Krishnavarma.In Nehru’s memoir, older nationalists are censured not just becauseof the redundancy of their political models, but because they areout of touch, “too deaf to hear,”48 and strangely textual instead ofphysical beings. For Nehru, they belong to an earlier culture of elitediscursive negotiation that had little in common with the moreclearly mass-orientated, agrarian objectives of the Congress duringthe 1920 s and1930 s.

The elitism of early Indian nationalism can be linked very clearlyto the Aryanist discourses already sketched out here and is, in someways, their natural correlative. Thus, nineteenth-century anthropo-logical ‘invasion’ theories of a racial encounter between light-skin-ned Aryans and dark-skinnedDasyus in India’s prehistory mapeasily onto orientalist models ofvarna or caste polarized betweenlight-skinned ‘twice-born’ Aryans and darker ‘untouchable’ indige-nous peoples, a discursive manoeuvre that Trautmann calls “a fan-tastic back-projection of systems of [colonial] segregation onto earlyIndian history.”49 Certainly, inHindupore one of Mitra’s secondary

47 Bhatt,Hindu Nationalism , 10 .48 Nehru, An Autobiography, 151.49 Trautmann, Aryans and British India , 211.



46 ALEXTICKELL

characters, a missionary named Mr Long, vouches for the durabilityand flawlessness of caste as a “vast hierarchical system [that is] […]

firmly rooted throughout the length and breadth of the land [andis] perfect in its organisation” (25 ). Elsewhere in his novel, Mitraelides racial oppositions in favour of a class-based discourse of aris-tocratic affinity, a strategy that allows him to proscribe Anglo-Indian ‘half-castes’, but concludeHindupore with the symbolic re-conciliation of East and West in the inter-‘racial’ marriage of LordTara and Ram Singh’s niece, Rani Kamala.

The elitism intrinsic in much early nationalist thought was al-ready evident in Bankim’s call for special intellectual and moralcadres that would supervise the nation’s rebirth. As Chatterjee re-lates, this was not necessarily an “elitism of birth or caste or privi-lege or wealth, but of excellence. The leaders were leaders becausethrough anushilan (practice) they attained an exemplary unity ofknowledge and duty.”50 Similarly, while defendingvarna as a Vedic

social formation, reformers like Dayananda Saraswati were deeplysuspicious of the fixity of Brahminical versions of the caste systemand argued that caste referred, ideally, “to thenon-hereditary socialclassification of individuals based on their merits and actions, quali-ties and propensities.”51 Given these political concerns, it is unsur-prising that the authors I have discussed here focus more closely onthe nature, scope and basis of political leadership than the means by

which this leadership might communicate with the wider, morediverse national community.The character of this intellectual elite is further complicated by

advances in technology in the latter half of the nineteenth century.Indeed, in contrast to the stress on national-physical regenerationthat so pervades contemporary political thinking, we find somerevolutionary nationalist groups challenging or at least attempting

to circumvent the physiological claims of race theory. Describingthe tellingly named Anushilan Samiti (the society of practice), asecret terrorist cell set up in Calcutta in1902 by Aurobindo Ghoseand his brother Barindrakumar, Peter Heehs points out that thebrothers “first tried […] paramilitary training [with] the recruits.

50 Chatterjee,Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World , 79 .51 See Bhatt,Hindu Nationalism , 18 .




But [they] […] had no interest in martial discipline or long-termplanning. Why bother to learn drill or lathi-play when you could

blow up a train or a magistrate with a well-made bomb?”52

Thus,for militant nationalists like the Ghose brothers, the possibilities ofterrorist violence (through technological means) suddenly madeprogrammes of national-racial regeneration based on physical andspiritual discipline less urgent.

The political potential of technological or organizational knowl-edge explains some of the more equivocal aspects ofThe Prince of

Destiny, particularly Ghosh’s eccentric interest in Japanese martialarts, which, as I have argued, seems to answer a perceived need forIndian ‘racial’ regeneration but simultaneously makes a high levelof ‘race-fitness’ unnecessary because, conveniently, “jiu-jitsu makesa man of the lowest wreck of humanity” (471). Similarly, during adiscussion about German economic growth, Barath and his ad-visors talk appreciatively of the way the fear of military service (as a

penalty for failed examinations) works as a spur to greater educa-tional achievement and “makes every German [student] put forththe maximum efficiency he can attain” (493 ). There is a sense here,reiterated in contemporary English fiction, that national ‘efficiency’requires the forging of a technocratic as much as a physically ‘effi-cient’ elite.

As with the primordialist themes and the subtle inter-discursive

transaction of concepts such as degeneration that inform bothThePrince of Destiny and Hindupore, the striking feature of their authors’elitism is the way their aristocratic concerns bind them closely toavant-garde non-conformist and socialist groups in the colonialcentre. We find, for instance, Ghosh’s and Mitra’s literary-politicalelitism reflected in the contemporary ‘novel of ideas’ such as H.G.Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905 ), which features an elite “voluntary

nobility” styled, intriguingly, as “the Samurai.” Like the KnightsTemplar, Wells’s “Samurai” had “a purpose in common in main-taining the state and the order and the progress of the world” (195).While the idea was welcomed by prominent Fabians like SidneyOlivier and Beatrice Webb, the elitism of the Samurai, and their op-

52 Peter Heehs,Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism (Delhi: OxfordUP,1998 ):4 .



48 ALEXTICKELL

position to “anything in the nature of class spirit” as William Green-slade has argued, “denoted the somewhat ambiguous relationship

of Wells and the Fabians to organised labour.”53

More significantly, in relation to Ghosh’s uncertainty about thekind of elite that Indian nationalism might require, we find inWells’s writing an endorsement of the engineer as the ‘comingman’. In a prophetic short story written by Wells in1903 , the victor-ious soldiers of a future European war are not perfect physicalspecimens, but military technicians – “alert, intelligent, quiet.”

Here, “technology privileges mind over body, intelligence over‘effort’, and places the townsman at the acme of man’s evolution.”54 However, while Ghosh and Mitra touch on similar issues in theirwriting, neither author proposes the “negative eugenics” that makesome of Wells’s fictions so disturbing. Ideas of this kind were notexplored by Hindu nationalists until the advent of Sarvarkar’sxenological manifestoHindutva in 1923 , and there is no equivalent

in the early Indian novel in English of Wells’s degenerate, raciallyexpendable “People of the Abyss” – unless these are mixed-racecharacters such as Mitra’s villainous Eurasian policeman, Mr Hunt,who is despised because of his racial hybridity, and fortuitouslydispatched before the end of the novel.

The influence of Edwardian social utopianism in novels such asThePrince of Destiny is another example of the continuity, proposedearlier, between these works and the new, secular, historicizedvision of India forged by Nehru in his writings. As Nehru stated inhis prison correspondence with Indira: “I have always been inter-ested in utopias and books peeping into the future. William Mor-ris’sNews from Nowhere was an early favourite of mine. Then thereis […] a fairly recent book by H.G. Wells: Men Like Gods.”55 Nehru’spolitical (and elitist) affinities with Fabian socialism are also well-documented and, like the generation of intellectuals, writers andradicals that preceded him, his imaginative projections of India’s

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




ancient past were intimately bound up with the country’s possiblepolitical future. As Khilnani points out, “The crucial point about

[Nehrus’s] […] historical writing was that it was not driven prima-rily by a curiosity about the past, but was impelled by anxietiesabout the present and the future.”56

As he tries to overhaul and ‘secularize’ India’s narrative ofnational identity, Nehru’s historiography rehearses and improvisesmany of the discursive manoeuvres of earlier Indian nationalism.Thus, inThe Discovery of India, mythical and racial spaces such as

Indraprastha and Aryavarta, which form such a rhetorical featureof the primordialist thesis, are replaced by actual archaeological evi-dence of the Indus Valley civilization at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. These sites become Nehru’s way of making a prior historicalclaim for his own new multicultural narrative of Indian identity.For Nehru, “the Indus Valley civilization, as we find it […] was,surprisingly enough, a predominantly secular civilization, and the

religious element, though present, did not dominate the scene” (58 ).As Anna Guttman points out in her perceptive reading ofThe Dis-covery of India, Nehru also saw a precursor to his socialist project inthe grand civic buildings of Mohenjo-daro, a claim that was rathereasier to defend than his unsubstantiated conviction that these civi-lizations were inherently secular.57

In their self-mythologizing connection between personal life and

public duty, both Gandhi’s and Nehru’s life-writings seem to an-swer a political need for new messianic ‘grand narratives’ of Indianidentity, narratives which are already foreshadowed in the novelsdiscussed here. Throughout his memoirs Nehru hoped to show, ashe said to Gandhi, that “our prozaic existence has developed some-thing of an epic greatness in it,”58 and these “prozaic epics,” built onthemes of quest, destiny and redemption, carry echoes of the

Indian-English political romances written in the first years of thetwentieth century. In the process of formulating and popularizing56 Khilnani, in A History of Indian Literature in English , ed. Mehrotra,148 .57 Anna Guttman, “Compromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru’s

Multicultural Nation-State: Constructing National History inThe Discovery ofIndia,”Clio 32 .3 (Spring2003 ):264 .

58 Nehru in Khilnani, “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English,” in A Historyof Indian Literature in English , ed. Mehrotra,153 .



50 ALEXTICKELL

his plural model of India’s national spirit, Nehru was bound by apolitical and cultural inheritance that he sought, in many ways, to

disavow. In an account of his work during the election campaign of1936 –37 , Nehru employs a surprisingly primordialist vocabulary inhis public speeches as a kind of concession to the rural, uneducatedaudience, staging his own political aspiration in Sanskrit terms: “Ispoke […] of this India of ours, of Hindustan andBharata, the oldSanskrit name for the mythical founder ofour race.”59 But theseideas have a deeper resonance than simple village rhetoric. As Gutt-

man points out, Nehru’s interest in Sanskrit, particularly in con-cepts of unity in diversity that derive from his reading of theUpani-shads, “suggests a significant overlap [in his thought] between thespace of the nation and the space of a specifically Hindu culture.The appearance inThe Discovery of India of phrases such as ‘nationalkarma’ further reinforces this view”(268 ). Like Gandhi’s golden-ageconcept ofRam Rajya, Nehru’s rhetoric hints at the messier political

realities of ‘secular’ Congress–nationalism in the1920 s and 1930 s.Far from achieving a linear political evolution or development be-yond the ‘natural growth’ of religious nationalism, Nehru’s new‘secular’ vision of India grew alongside and became interwovenwith other nationalist narratives that sustained themselves throughprimordialist and national-communal roots.

WORKSCITED Anderson, Benedict.Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,1987 ). —— .The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (Lon-

don: Verso,1998 ).Bayly, Susan. “Race in Britan and India,” inNation and Religion, Perspectives

on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer & Hartmut Lehmann (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 1999 ):71–95 .

Bhatt, Chetan.Hindu Nationalism (Oxford: Berg,2001 ).Boehmer, Elleke.Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial 1890 –1920 (Ox-ford: OxfordUP, 2002 ).

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

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




—— .The Nation and its Fragments (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 1993 ).Chirol, Valentine.Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan,1910 ).Edmond, Rod. “Home and Away: Degeneration in Imperialist and Mod-ernist Discourse,” in Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality,1890 –1940 , ed. Howard Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester: ManchesterUP, 2000 ):37–63 .

Gandhi, Indira.Freedom’s Daughter: Letters Between Indira Gandhi and Jawa-harlal Nehru, 1922 – 39 , ed. Sonia Gandhi (London: Hodder & Stoughton,1989 ).

Ghosh, Sarath Kumar.The Prince of Destiny, or the New Krishna (London:Rebman,1909 ).

Greenslade, William.Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880 –1940 (Cam-bridge: CambridgeUP, 1994 ).

Guttman, Anna. “Compromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru’sMulticultural Nation-State: Constructing National History inThe Discov-ery of India,”Clio 32 .3 (Spring2003 ):263 –84 .

Hansen, Thomas Blom, & Christophe Jaffrelot, ed.The BJP and the Compul-sions of Politics in India (Oxford: OxfordUP, 2nd ed.2001 ).

Harvey, David.The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell,1993 ).Heehs, Peter.Nationalism, Terrorism, Communalism (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1998 ). Jaffrelot, Christophe.The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics,

1925 to the 1990 s (London: Hurst,1996 ).Khilnani, Sunil. “Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English,” in A History of

Indian Literature in English , ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (London: Hurst,2003 ):135–56 .

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

). —— . Indian Problems (London: John Murray,1908 ).Mukherjee, Meenakshi.The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in Eng-

lish (Oxford: OxfordUP, 2000 ).Nehru, Jawaharlal. An Autobiography (London: The Bodley Head,1989 ).

—— .The Discovery of India (London: Meridian,1960 ).Pandey, Gyanendra.The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1990 ).

Pick, Daniel.Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848 –1914 (Cam-bridge: CambridgeUP, 1989 ).Polikov, Léon.The Aryan Myth (New York: Basic Books,1974 ).Sinha, K.K.Sanjogita, or The Princess of Aryavarta (Dinapore: Watling Print-ing Works,1903 ).

Tarlo, Emma.Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst,1996 ).

Tickell, Alex. “Terrorism and the Informative Romance: Two Early IndianNovels in English,”Kunapipi 25 .1 (2003 ):73–83 .



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Thompson, Paul.The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London:Routledge,2nd ed.1992 ).

Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India (Berkeley: U of California P,1997 ).

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India (Oxford: OxfordUP, 5th ed. (1997 ).



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

ELLEKEBOEHMER

ESPITE THE GLOBALIZATION of national economies,the transnational reach of cultural influences and thewidespread cross-border movement of peoples, the

world today remains divided along national borderlines, as SamirAmin and Neil Lazarus among others contend.1 The nation-statecontinues to be an important agent in the world political order, acountervailing force to transnationalism: it retains the power toregulate the operations of capital, and, culturally, to delimit some ofthe more serious outrages of fundamentalism. Of course, as num-bers of women critics, Sangeeta Ray, Deniz Kanyoti, and NatashaBarnes among them, have argued, the achievement of postcolonialnational independence has, to this day, nowhere brought a con-comitant liberation of women. Transitions from colonial and otherauthoritarian rule are often forged by way of “elite pacts” betweenmen. Nationalism – to quote from Ray, and to underline an argu-ment I, too, have made for some time – signifies an “engendered”ideology and political movement, invoking the male citizen as nor-mative and the mother symbol as its reified, governing ideal.2

1 See, for example, Samir Amin,Capitalism in the Age of Globalisation (London:Zed, 1997 ); Neil Lazarus,Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the PostcolonialWorld (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1999 ):29 –51.

2 Sangeeta Ray,En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Post-

D



54 ELLEKEBOEHMER

Yet it remains the case – contradictory as this may seem – thatnationalism appears to hold an undying attraction for many wo-

men, especially in new or post-independence nation-states. AsDjurdja Knesević writes of the Croatian context, or Mampele Ram-phele of the South African, the nation encourages a sense of belong-ing-to; it provides channels through which women can mobilizeand take part in public debate.3 Symbolically, too, albeit in a back-handed way, the nation can be seen as invoking the prominence ofwomen’s roles in the imagining of a community in ways that post-

colonial women writers at least, from Buchi Emecheta through toCarol Shields, have found enabling.Given that from the point of view of women political and cul-

tural freedoms cannot be expected as the natural harvest of inde-pendence and must therefore be claimed, the nation continues to befor women – as for other minorities – an indispensable or irrefu-table means through which to forge such claims. And if there are

admittedly many instances of the nation-state failing to deliver onits promises of freedom for all classes and groups, the failures of thenightmare-ridden ‘postcolony’ must be set in the context of con-tinuing neocolonial domination by the West (and of the overween-ing idealism of post-independence nations). When all is said anddone, nationalism, with its defining attributes cross-hatched out ofmyth and historical legend, provides a new civil society with a

usable past and a serviceable set of cultural identities. And if the

colonial Narratives (Durham NC: DukeUP, 2000 ); Deniz Kanyoti, “Identityand its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium: Journal of InternationalStudies 20 .3 (1991 ):429 –43 ; Natasha Barnes, “Reluctant Matriarch: Sylvia Wyn-ter and the Problematics of Caribbean Feminism,”Small Axe 5 (March1999 ):34 –47 . As regards my own work, see, for example, “Stories of Women andMothers,” in Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbeanand South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: The Women’s Press,1991 ): 3 – 23 ,and Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester:ManchesterUP, 2005 ).

3 See Djurdja Knesević , “Affective Nationalism” and Mampele Ramphele,“Whither Feminism,” inTransitions, Environments, Translations , ed. Joan W.Scott, Cora Kaplan & Debra Keates (London & New York: Routledge,1997 ):65 – 71 and 334 –38 , respectively. See also Simon Gikandi, “Globalization andthe Claims of Postcoloniality,”South Atlantic Quarterly 100 .3 (Summer2001 ):626 –58 .



Manju Kapur’s Erotic Nation 55

nation in many cases intolerantly identifies itself in contradistinc-tion to an Other and therefore quickly raises enemies, globalization,

too, is arguably based on very similar premisses, as the currentglobal war on terror chillingly demonstrates.4 The likelihood is, infact, that the forces of globalization disallow diversity and sabotageclaims to rights far more thoroughly than the nation ever did.

If, finally, in contradistinction to the uniformities imposed bytransnational capital, the modern nation channels what both An-thony Smith and Perry Anderson acknowledge as the overpower-

ing drive within cultures to establish collective meaning, does thisnot offer persuasive grounds for recuperating the seeming oxy-moron of the ‘women’s nation’?5 By way of the reading of ManjuKapur which follows, I will ask whether the nation has not, para-doxically, come into use for women as a refuge and site of sisterly,even homoerotic, resistance – a resistance not only to global marketforces from without but to religious fundamentalism from within?

Does the nation not provide a base where important cultural andlibidinal solidarities for women may be recuperated?

Manju Kapur’s National NeedsManju Kapur specializes in the telling of ordinary, apparently insig-nificant women’s stories – stories that provide extended footnotes,pitched from a woman’s perspective, to the official narrative of In-dian nationalism.Difficult Daughters (1998 ) and A Married Woman (2003 ), her two published novels, each take the tale of an individualwoman’sBildung from young adulthood through marriage, work,and motherhood as their central narrative strand. Fulfilling a prin-ciple of the petit récit, the novels’ narrative structure is in each casemade up of snapshots or snatches of day-to-day life, including let-ters, diary entries, and first-person interjections from one or other of

4 For a critical view of the nation which targets its tendency to other, seeChristine Levecq, “Nation, Race and Postmodern Gestures in Ishmael Reed’sFlight to Canada,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35 .2–3 (Spring–Summer2002 ):281 –98 .

5 See Anthony Smith,Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (London: Polity,2003 ), and the review by Tom Nairn, “It’s not the Economy, Stupid,”TimesLiterary Supplement 5223 (9 May2003 ):24 .



56 ELLEKEBOEHMER

the main characters, often set up like monologues in a play.6 Signi-ficantly, as in the1990 s writers Yvonne Vera and Arundhati Roy,

both novels concentrate on the articulation of personal emotionsand feelings, in particular on erotic self-fulfilment.However, where inDifficult Daughters a personal jouissance, or

women’s self-expression generally, is placed in a marginal positionin relation to the authoritative narratives of the traditional family onthe one hand, and the coming-into-being of the nation on the other,in A Married Woman the situation is, intriguingly, reversed. Here the

narrative of erotic (specifically and subversively of homoerotic) self-awakening, is identified, even if implicitly, with the increasinglyembattled narrative of secular nationalism. My concluding para-graphs will revolve around this fascinating shift of focus in Kapur,one that intriguingly interacts with the May2004 change of for-tunes for the Congress Party. For, if the taboo petit récit of a liaisonbetween two women, a widow and a wife, is offered as a protest

against communalism, what does this say about women’s revisedrelationship with the secularist, formerly hegemonic nation?In Difficult Daughters , set during the years preceding Partition in

the cities of Amritsar and Lahore, Kapur movingly evokes the mul-tiple frustrations encountered by the central character Virmati inher efforts to educate herself and establish a domestic space she cancall home. Struggling to integrate her aspirations for learning (initi-

ally identified as a masculine terrain) and her desire for a lovematch, Virmati endures and survives a clandestine abortion, asocially condemned affair, self-chosen marriage, and the difficultposition of second wife. Unlike her decisive, politically involvedfriend Swarna Lata, Virmati spends long periods of time “soft with

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




compliance,” languishing in her incapacity to assert herself, in parti-cular vis-à-vis her domineering if well-meaning lover.7

Yet, although she is often alienated and alone, Virmati’s story isnot singular, as the titleDifficult Daughters itself suggests. Her narra-tive is woven into a lineage of three generations of daughters, ex-tending from Kasturi, Virmati’s mother, through to Ida, Virmati’sdaughter and the novel’s narrator, each one of whom grows alien-ated from her mother while negotiating between the poles of “edu-cation and marriage” (38 , 57). By thus probing daughter–family

relations, Virmati’s story refracts the divisions between mothersand daughters as correlates for the political Partition in the countryat large. In this novel, unusually, daughters’ as opposed to sons’lives parallel national history, though negatively so. Virmati, in herwrangling with tradition and authority, reflects the turmoil in thepublic political world, though she is also positioned, paradoxically,as peripheral to national debates. Daughterhood signals ‘difficulty’

therefore, not only insofar as it denotes rebelliousness, but becausedaughterhood – traditionally subordinate and dependent – itself re-presents a difficult or painful position. Moreover, matrilineal links,however full of potential, by no means guarantee continuity ofcommunication across the generations (190 , 203 –204 ). After hermarriage. Virmati is symbolically cast out of her mother’s houseand forced to find her own way. Her punishing exile ends only

when the massacres of Partition make her family’s continuing rejec-tion untenable.It is a sign of Virmati’s marginality that events surrounding the

struggle for Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan arerelayed in the novel by way of external report, at times almost as anofficial voice-over. Harish the Professor, Virmati’s married loverand then, much later, husband, interprets the progress of the Sec-

ond World War and its implications for India through occasionalcommentaries paternalistically intended as educative. At the end ofthe novel Nehru is quoted speaking with heavy, retrospective ironyof a free and inclusive India (252 ). Other than this, we are preoccu-pied largely with the affairs of Virmati’s heart and her conflicted

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



58 ELLEKEBOEHMER

quest for education – her mediation, central to many Third-Worldwomen’s lives, between the apparently opposed poles of tradition

and modernity, one which repeatedly threatens her social positionand her peace of mind. Rather than being in any sense a building-block of her identity, therefore, the nation at first features mainly asa subject her lover brings up in conversation. In this sense, Virmatisets to one side the male-identified nation just as much as she is setaside or excluded by it.

Towards the end ofDifficult Daughters , Virmati, a married wo-

man at last, exiles herself from her marriage to continue her educa-tion in Lahore. Rather than being perverse, this balancing of optionshas become her preferred mode of being (33 , 169 ). She now elects tooccupy a split space–time or domestic limbo, separate from her hus-band. From the beginning, her dogged attempts to cope with thedemands of love against independence have committed her to aseries of successive confinements in intractable situations and en-

closing, stifling rooms. The “small” Lahore house where she goes towork on her MA is but the latest in a succession of imprisoningspaces: her first “poky” student room, her two-room hill cottage,and the dressing-room that is the only available place to conducther married life (232 , 80 , 105 , 168 ). Faced throughout with new be-ginnings, degrees, teaching positions, she attempts with each newbid for escape to put the past behind her, “[blanket] everything in

oblivion” (182 , 125). Yet with every door she closes, a new confiningroom, an infinite regression of near-prisons, appears to shut her in.She thus becomes reconciled to her difficult choices only by livingout a kind of modern schizophrenia, in effect a self-Partition, choos-ing to occupy tenuously linked locations in her unconventional roleas a wife who remains a student.

If Difficult Daughters is to be read as a reinscription of the male-

authored nation and the history of middle-class self-determinationfrom which it derives, it is significant that Virmati’s story effectivelyundermines the structures of the Western-origin romance. In a ro-mance plot, the narrative closure provided by marriage conven-tionally connotes the successful achievement of national and/orbourgeois class identities: take, for example, the ending of E.M. For-




ster’s Howards End or, indeed, of Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat.8 Bycontrast, marriage merely brings Virmati a new phase of emotional

agitation and discomfort, as well as professional compromise andcontinuing social embarrassment. Kapur’s romance plot carries analien, even ridiculous imprint, insofar as the Oxford-educated Pro-fessor, a reader of Wordsworth, is a classic mimic man who seesVirmati as his Romantic “other soul” and, Pygmalion-like, tries toremake her in his image. In an emblematic, tragicomic scene duringthe final, critical stages of their courtship, Harish explains to Vir-

mati the touching significance of a picturesque hill tomb com-memorating the loyalty of a colonial wife who survived her medicalofficer husband by several decades. Virmati response is literal, cyni-cal and uncompromising: “Silly woman! … Staying for thirty-eightyears. Just because her husband died there” (177). For a woman,unlike for a man, she perceives, marriage and parenthood do notequate with public success, or the accession to an important

national or civic role. All the same, just as she rejects the privatecompromises of classic romance, so, too, does she elide the publicconflicts of emergent India when she is pregnant, choosing to baskin a dry swimming-pool, an anomalous island in the storm. For her,both romance and the nation signify the unwelcome surrender ofself to the collective will.

It is, of course, true that Virmati’s dogged attempt to survive

against all odds while at the same time erasing the past can be readat one level as an extended metaphor for the fate at Partition ofPakistan and, to a lesser extent, India.Difficult Daughters itself, al-though a daughter’s rather than a national son’s story, would ac-cording to this reading emblematize the nation and fulfil the termsof Fredric Jameson’s hypothesis “writ small,” as Susan Andradewould put it, referring to his controversial theory that Third-World

8 Cf Doris Sommer,Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin Ameri-ca (Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1991 ), who contends that the progress of love inLatin American romance novels mirrors the processes of consolidating thenation-state. So, too, in key works of African fiction. As well as A Grain of Wheat,Ben Okri’sThe Famished Road features a tightly knit nuclear family whose tra-vails “write small” trouble in Nigerian society at large. At the end of ShimmerChinodya’sHarvest of Thorns (1989 ) and of Mongane Serote’sTo every birth itsblood (1981 ), symbolic women are pictured big with child or as giving birth.



60 ELLEKEBOEHMER

narrative tends to produce “national allegory.”9 To support thisinterpretation, the social and political situation in Lahore as well as

in Amritsar at times mirrors Virmati’s personal state. This is madeexplicit when she comments: “I fret about my petty, domestic mat-ters at a time when the nation is on trial. I too must take a stand. Ihave tried adjustment and compromise, now I will try non-co-operation” (239 ). Simultaneously, however, Virmati feels increa-singly cut off from the city, as she does from her past – as, indeed,Lahore is from the Indian nation (232 ). The obvious analogy is with

Saleem Sinai’s amnesia over the creation of Pakistan in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children .Yet to see Virmati’s life as bearing the weight of the national

Symbolic is to erase the tensions, contradictions and accidents fromher meandering story. One of the more resonant of these tensionsoccurs at the very end of the novel when, overcome by the tragedyof Partition, it is Harish who refuses the name Bharati (India) for his

daughter, a name Virmati suggests. Exclaiming that, rather thanbeing born, his country has descended into atavism, he rejects thenational narrative as treacherous, and in so doing decisively breaksthe metaphoric link between submissive woman and emergentnation. Instead, their daughter is given the name Ida, “two lettersshort of India.”10 In other respects, too, the novel deliberately fallsshort of attempting to represent the “public turmoil” of the nation.

It offers by its own admission a women’s story based on personalhistory and, though it concedes that women may be interpellatedby the national cause, it warns that unless they have political andsocial power they should be wary of any such link.

IfDifficult Daughters steers a path around the national imaginary,although always with reference to it, A Married Woman , despite itsprovocative homoeroticism, is by comparison firmly committed to

the success of the secular nation. Even if it at times questions itspolitical efficacy, it takes its imperatives of social justice seriously.

9 “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,”Social Text 15 (1986 ): 65 –88 ; Susan Andrade,The Nation Writ Small (DurhamNC: DukeUP, 2005 ). I am grateful to Susan Andrade for sending me drafts of her bookchapters and for our continuing conversation on gender and the nation.

10 Pallavi Rastogi, “Manju Kapur,” inSouth Asian Novelists in English , ed. Jaina C. Sanga (WestportCT: Greenwood,2003 ):123 .




Set in the sprawling suburbs of Delhi in the late1980 s and early1990 s, against the historical background of the Babri Masjid crisis in

Ayodhya, the novel follows more or less the same line of develop-ment as Difficult Daughters , tracking an individual woman’s lifefrom young adulthood into maturity. In this case, however, the em-phasis, certainly at first, is on the monadic individual and the nucle-ar family, rather than the individual’s relations to the extendedfamily or to tradition. Written in part while the author was abroad,on a fellowship in Britain, A Married Woman ’s tale of the middle-

class quest for self-improvement and self-pleasuring is recognizablyinformed by Western values of individualism and of personal de-sire as a viable site of self-realization. A related westernized focuscolours the language, which is less conversational than inDifficultDaughters , less grounded in the untranslated Hindi signifiers whichwere a localizing feature of the earlier novel:almirah, tikki, gol gappa,samagri, and so on.

Brought up on a diet of “mushy novels,” Astha, the eponymousheroine of A Married Woman (her name, ironically, means ‘faith’), isfrom the beginning in quest of “true love.”11 At the same time shefeels drawn to the “safe and secure” – it is this tendency that willultimately determine her decision to stick with her unsatisfactorybut financially stable marriage to the businessman Hemant Vadera.After a few romantic mishaps, she finds considerable erotic satisfac-

tion in the early days of her attachment to him, an attachmentbenignly choreographed by their families. Already at this earlypoint, the central character’s development begins to diverge from,while also intertextually commenting on, that of Virmati inDifficultDaughters . There, individual choice in matters of love led to re-peated emotional betrayals and deferred desire. Here, an arrangedmarriage brings delayed but real sexual gratification (46 ), and

proves to have considerable holding-power, surviving the rearingof two children, life with the in-laws, work outside the home forboth partners, and Hemant’s suspected one-night stands.

The greatest test that the marriage faces, however, is Astha’sdesire for self-fulfilment and some measure of autonomy away

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



62 ELLEKEBOEHMER

from the family, a goal which she conceives of in canonical Westernfeminist terms as being true to herself, an escape from feeling mis-

understood, “throttled, and choked” (109 , 167). She is “fed up withthe ideal of Indian womanhood, used to trap and jail” (8 ). Thesingularity of her quest is offset by the fact that the relationshipwith Hemant is viewed by virtually everyone other than Astha her-self as based, correctly, on wifely self-sacrifice, as against the phonymarriages of mutual convenience allegedly contracted byNRIs inAmerica (40 –41). As with the woman-loving undertones of the Afri-

can writers Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga,12

for example,Kapur in this novel is interested in those female potentialities thatexceed the possibilities for relationship sanctioned within the con-fines of the traditional family and its analogue, the nation-state.

Astha’s painting, her primary vehicle of self-expression sincechildhood, is raised to new heights of inspiration when she be-comes involved in political protests against the Hindu fundamen-

talist movement aimed at razing the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Builtby Emperor Babur on, it is said, the site of a destroyed Hindutemple, the birthplace of the god Ram, the mosque is eventuallypulled down in late1992 , as the novel reports at its end, and be-comes the flashpoint of serious communal tensions across India(290 –91). The first step in the politicization of Astha’s art occurswhen, in response to a request from an activist, Aijaz, she writes a

dramatic script about the Masjid’s history for a theatre workshop(110–11). The second step comes not long after with the MuslimAijaz’s death at the hands, it is presumed, of Hindu fundamental-ists. Astha’s paintings are then sold to raise money for the Manchset up in his memory to campaign for the preservation of the mos-que. Even if circumscribed by family commitments and her hus-band’s resistance, Astha’s agency as an artist, it becomes clear, is

given direction by this political activism, and her social awarenessin turn primes her to exercise a new-found autonomy as her friendPipeelika’s lover. “[Painting] represented security, not perhaps of

12 See Elleke Boehmer, “Tropes of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of De-sire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga,” Journal of Commonwealth Litera-ture 38 .2 (2003 ):135–48 .




money, but of her own life, of a place where she could be herself”(149 –50 ).

Within the pro-secular terms laid down by the novel, it is signi-ficant that a cultural movement pitted against fundamentalism isdirectly responsible for drawing Aijaz’s widow Pipee and Asthatogether in a self-delighting, intensely physical affair. As A MarriedWoman itself suggests, the Babri Masjid crisis, from its beginning,denoted for Congress and other secularist nationalist parties a seri-ous crisis of confidence in the brand of non-sectarian politics that

had sustained the Indian nation since Independence. They found totheir shock that they did not in fact have a sufficiently powerfulpurchase on the nation’s cultural capital, certainly not one powerfulenough to mount an adequate countervailing force to withstand theupsurge of religious feeling that animated the fundamentalists.Astha’s throwaway line, “I don’t need religion, whatever I am,”spoken in response to her mother’s growing devoutness, is a mar-

ker of this widespread secular disaffection (85 ). Ayodhya demon-strated that at the level of mobilizing the spiritual and privatedomains of society (those areas of culture and belief conventionallypresided over by women), fundamentalist nationalism had the dis-tinct edge over secular state nationalism with its rationalist empha-ses on self-determination and democratic rights.

It is into this lack within the Nehruvian tradition and, by exten-

sion, within the market-driven nation-state that the woman-centredpassion and respect shared by Astha and Pipee is strategicallyallowed to flow. The novel explicitly chooses not to mobilize reli-gious belief of any description, even though its heroine is calledAstha.13 Its alternative to the strong affective hold of religion is anemotionally invested, mutual relationship, especially though notexclusively intimacy between women, the kind of relationship that

is relatively unspoken in the Indian women’s novel in English. Thewomen’s feelings (and the fact they are reciprocated) are set up incontradistinction to, on the one hand, the fullness represented by a

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



64 ELLEKEBOEHMER

communal sensibility, for both women and men, and, on the other,the unbridled individualism represented by India’s economic neo-

liberalism, which is Hemant’s domain.14

To deflect the charge that her alternative domains of intimacy aremerely Western and middle-class in derivation (as, of course, wasNehru’s modernizing nationalism), Kapur significantly chooses notto describe Ashta and Pipee’s relationship in terms of a conven-tional Western vocabulary of lesbian queer or homoerotic desire. Inthis way, she strategically sidesteps, if perhaps not entirely convin-

cingly, the widespread controversy with which films like MiraNair’sKamasutra or Fire by Deepa Mehta (1996 ) were met, both ofwhich showed graphic erotic exchanges between women.15 If any-thing, the novel’s language of female love is decorous, modest, evenchaste. At the height of the affair there is much lingering descrip-tion of the women’s (largely non-Western) clothing, ofdupatta , sariand blouse tantalizingly revealing and concealing, of the delight of

touching arms, breasts, fingers, the focus remaining on the upperbody. Intercourse itself is conceived of in terms of an abstracted“mind-fucking,” Hemant’s sceptical term for what he believes thewomen in love share – literally visualized by Astha as intercoursein the head (218 ).16

In terms of the politics of the relationship, too, this sexual reserveor relative conservatism is corroborated: there is no significant dis-

ruption of conventional heterosexual identity-formation. Pipee in-sists all too soon on becoming the dominant partner, so repeatingthe power differential between Astha and her husband and precipi-tating the breakdown in their affair (233 , 234 ). Astha never uses thewords “lesbian” or “woman-loving” of herself. She is not given tolooking into her sexuality to that extent. She also avoids any allu-sion to adultery and finds the prospect of leaving her family to set

up with Pipee unthinkable (232 ). To Pipee’s disapproval, and even-tual indifference, their love is always subsidiary to the marriage14 On the appeal of a communal sensibility for women, see Sangeeta Ray,En-

Gendering India (DurhamNC: DukeUP, 2000 ),6–7.15 Chitralekha Basu, “A meeting of minds,”Times Literary Supplement 5212 (21

February2003 ):23 .16 To adapt from a description which is given of Astha’s poems, such same-

sex “mind-fucking” is like “her own experience endlessly replayed” (79 ).




with Hemant. It is a diversion, not a rival to that socially establishedbond: “So far as her marriage was concerned, they were both wo-

men, nothing was seriously threatened” (232 ). For the lovers tospend time together, they must occupy, uncomfortably, the hidden,child-free spaces of Pipee’s flat.

As the references to women’s domains and hidden space willhave suggested, Kapur arouses the suspicion that to locate a suffi-ciently powerful cultural alternative to religious nationalism, shemust make a move reminiscent of the masculine nationalist dis-

courses of the past. Yet, given prevailing prejudices, she must do soin a circumscribed, perhaps even compromised, always already co-opted way. As in Tagore or Bankim, she offers private, femininespace as the central locus of the cultural nation. A creative, self-realizing love between women is set up in contrast to the self-abnegating love of the divine. But this is not all. Problematically butperhaps unavoidably, Kapur goes one step further by not only

eroticizing but also homoeroticizing this love – a step that commitsher to raising the stereotype of the secret, allegedly lesbian passionof the Eastern woman. Despite her precautions, she runs the risk, inother words, of basing the cultural heartland of the nation withinthe ne plus ultra of orientalist discourse, the colonial “phantasm.”17 The activist Aijaz, in fact, draws a direct analogy between Pipee’slove for other women and the strong ties shared by women in the

zenana (129 ).It is a sign of the historical and moral difficulty that women’serotic mobilization represents in A Married Woman that the narra-tive is committed to so many complex, contradictory conflations,which function either as tactical diversions or as a mode of self-censorship. Astha’s is but is not a gay relationship. It is but is notconceived in westernized terms. It is within a domestic space, albeit

an alien, sterile one, that her affair runs its course. It is when she ispolitically conscientized that Astha becomes aware of Pipee’s eroticinterest in her, yet her involvement with Pipee also distracts herfrom the Ayodhya tragedy and eventually leads her back to the

17 See Inderpal Grewal,Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire (London:LeicesterUP, 1996 ): 5–7; and also Partha Chatterjee,The Nation and its Frag-ments (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 1994 ):147 .



66 ELLEKEBOEHMER

solitary, if politically preoccupied, activity of painting. Kapur refer-ences a whole matrix of cultural resources to which different con-

figurations of the Indian nation have traditionally had recourse:home, the mother (Astha), the widow (Pipee), the realm of theprivate, the harem, theKamasutra, symbolic art. And yet, such is hersense of crisis concerning the future of secular nationalism that shepushes these well beyond their conventional meanings into bothradical and taboo areas. There is a connection here with the Zim-babwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’sNervous Conditions, where the

loving friendship between the cousins Nyasha and Tambu buildsan alternative space of interactive bourgeois self-identification forwomen, one, however, that does not reject the story of nationalistcoming-into-being.18

Indian women, Inderpal Grewal observes, have historically re-sisted hegemonic nationalist formations “by rearticulating [thehome] as a site of struggle rather than of resolution.”19 Astha comes

closest to rearticulating fundamentalist formations from the site ofher subversive love affair when she and Pipee briefly join aYatra orpilgrimage across India in the train of a religious “Leader,” organ-ized to demonstrate belief in the united motherland (157–58 , 184 –86 ,193 , 246 ff). Although Pipee has professional reasons for her parti-cipation, and both women are happy about the opportunity ofspending time together, theYatra soon inspires in Astha a different

sort of excitement, stimulated by the symbolic geography of thetrip. At the beginning, for example, the lovers stand together at thesouthern tip of India, viewing with interest the Vivekananda Rock(256 –57). Later, during time she has to herself, Astha begins to re-flect on the diversity of India and what it signifies (“The Onenessunderlying the Difference”). She is generally delighted to discovernew areas of the country. It is as if, as she concedes to her diary, she

has fallen into the rhythm of theYatra Leader’s thoughts (258 ); as if,indeed, she were plotting an alternative sentimental journey awayfrom her lover and towards the mythic nation. While taking painsto distinguish her India from theBharat Mata worshipped by funda-

18 Tsitsi Dangarembga,Nervous Conditions (London: The Women’s Press,1989 ).

19 Grewal,Home and Harem, 7.




mentalists (who, as she recognizes, enhance their masculinity inserving the nation), she begins implicitly to position herself as the

daughter of a nation intriguingly defined in masculine terms. Backin Ayodhya she has already allied herself with a network of affilia-tion to “Gandhiji, father of the Nation” (198 , 203 ).20 Now she findsthat the nation’s trumpeted qualities of “patience, tolerance, loveand resignation” are qualities she seeks in vain in Pipee (260 ). Un-surprisingly, theYatra represents both the culmination-point andthe end of their relationship.

As Astha’s pilgrimage suggests, in Kapur a homoerotic plot ismade to cooperate, if in unlikely ways, with an edgy – sceptical yetemotive – narrative in defence of the secular nation (216 ). Whereaspreviously a concern for the propriety of the nation might havedenied any such alliance, now an intense concern for its survival asa unified polity – as unity in diversity – encourages the cooperation.This is especially so, considering that the greater evil from the point

of view of democratic freedom, and middle-class respectability, isfundamentalism. Nationalism, Kapur appears to suggest, is mobil-ized most effectively around some powerful emotion – if not reli-gious, then erotic or homoerotic. After all, given theKamasutra, whois to say that the homoerotic, far from being outlawed, is not centralto the nation’s cultural makeup? Far from detaching sexual self-realization from political activity, a typical move in the bourgeois

novel, in A Married Woman the union of the lovers, even at its mostdiscreet, champions values associated with the secular, nationalcontext.21 To adapt a comment made about Hinduism by one of thecharacters in the novel: “The [Indian nation] is wide, is deep, is

20 A Married Woman does, however, criticize the Congress Party’s conces-sionary handling of the build-up to Ayodhya (111).

21 There is evidence to suggest that among urban, middle-class Indians, reli-gious affiliation is becoming itself increasingly private, individualized, ‘secular-ized’. At the same time, the growing sense is that women should not have to‘de-sex’ themselves to gain access to the wider space of the nation. See, respec-tively, Maya Warrier, “Processes of Secularisation in Contemporary India,” Modern Asian Studies 37 .1 (2003 ): 213 –53 , and Nilufer E. Barucha, “InhabitingEnclosures and Creating Spaces: The Worlds of Women in Indian Literature inEnglish,” ARIEL : A Review of International English Literature 29 .2 (1999 ): 93 –107 . See also Nancy Armstrong,Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History ofthe Novel (Oxford: OxfordUP, 1987 ).



68 ELLEKEBOEHMER

capable of endless interpretation. Anybody can get anything theywant from it, ritual, stories, thoughts that sustain. But first you have

to realise your need” (85 ).

WORKSCITED Amin, Samir.Capitalism in the Age of Globalisation (London: Zed,1997 ).Andrade, Susan.The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958 –

1988 (DurhamNC: DukeUP, forthcoming2005 ). —— . “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,”Social Text 15 (1986 ):65 –88 .Armstrong, Nancy.Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the

Novel (Oxford: OxfordUP, 1987 ).Barnes, Natasha. “Reluctant Matriarch: Sylvia Wynter and the Proble-matics of Caribbean Feminism,”Small Axe 5 (March1999 ):34 –47 .

Barucha, Nilufer E. “Inhabiting Enclosures and Creating Spaces: TheWorlds of Women in Indian Literature in English,” ARIEL: A Review of

International English Literature 29 .2 (1999 ):93 –107 .Basu, Chitralekha. “A meeting of minds,”Times Literary Supplement 5212 (21 February2003 ):23 .

Boehmer, Elleke. “Stories of Women and Mothers,” in Motherlands: BlackWomen’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia , ed. SusheilaNasta (London: The Women’s Press,1991 ):3 – 23 .

—— .Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Man-chester: ManchesterUP, 2005 ).

—— . “Tropes of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in YvonneVera and Tsitsi Dangarembga,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38 .2 (2003 ):135–48 .

Chatterjee, Partha.The Nation and its Fragments (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 1994 ).

Dangarembga, Tsitsi.Nervous Conditions (London: The Women’s Press,1989 ).

Gikandi, Simon. “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,”South Atlantic Quarterly 100 .3 (Summer2001 ):626 –58 .Grewal, Inderpal.Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire (London: Leices-ter UP, 1996 ).

Kanyoti, Deniz. “Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20 .3 (1991 ):429 –43 .

Kapur, Manju.Difficult Daughters (London: Faber & Faber,1998 ). —— . A Married Woman (London: Faber & Faber,2003 ).Lazarus, Neil.Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1999 ).




Levecq, Christine. “Nation, Race and Postmodern Gestures in IshmaelReed’sFlight to Canada,”Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35 .2–3 (Spring–Summer2002 ):281 –98 .

Lyotard, Jean–François.The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr.Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (Manchester: ManchesterUP, 1984 ).

Nairn, Tom. “It’s not the Economy, Stupid,”Times Literary Supplement 5223 (9 May2003 ):24 .

Rastogi, Pallavi. “Manju Kapur,” inSouth Asian Novelists in English , ed. Jaina C. Sanga (WestportCT: Greenwood,2003 ):123 .

Ray, Sangeeta.En-Gendering India (DurhamNC: DukeUP, 2000 ).Scott, Joan W., Cora Kaplan & Debra Keates, ed.Transitions, Environments,

Translations (London & New York: Routledge,1997 ).Smith, Anthony.Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (London: Polity,

2003 ).Sommer, Doris.Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: U of California P,1991 ).

Warrier, Maya. “Processes of Secularisation in Contemporary India,” Modern Asian Studies 37 .1 (2003 ):213 –53 .



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“Cutting Across Time”Memory, Narrative, and Identity in ShashiDeshpande’sSmall Remedies

SHIRLEYCHEW

The singer alone does not make a song, there has to be someonewho hears:

One man opens his throat to sing, the other sings in his mind.Only when waves fall on the shore do they make a harmonious

sound;Only when breezes shake the woods do we hear a rustling in the

leaves.Only from a marriage of two forces does music arise in the world.Where there is no love, where listeners are dumb, there never can be

song.1

XPATIATING ON MEMORY as “a cultural phenomenon as

well as an individual or social one,” Mieke Bal notes in par-ticular the following points: that, “for better or worse, [cul-tural memory] links the past to the present and future”; that “theinteraction between present and past” is “the product of collectiveagency” – in other words, the act of recall is “something that you

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

E



72 SHIRLEYCHEW

actually perform,” and requires the presence of some person or per-sons as confirming witness; and finally, that such an exchange is

location-bound, the emergent narrative being “constituted in theculture” in which the memorizing subject lives.2 In view of the vitalrole narrative plays in making coherent sense of a person’s remem-brance of the past, of his or her identity, and meaningful function-ing within the community, it stands to reason that investigations oftrauma and healing should occupy to a large extent the contents ofBal’s co-edited volume.3 Traumatic memories are, in her words, “in-

flexible and invariable”; vividly present, they are compulsively re-peated as drama by the subject and “cannot become narratives.”The result is that, lacking narrative control as well as the presence ofa confirming witness, traumatic re-enactment is “tragically soli-tary.”4

Taking Bal’s comments as its point of departure, this essay ana-lyses the dynamics of the acts of recall in Shashi Deshpande’s novel

Small Remedies,5

the ways in which they enable the narrator’s sturdyexamination of the problems of life-writing and, in turn, her endea-vour to “remake a self from the scattered shards of disruptedmemory.”6 It reads the novel, in particular the imagining of Bha-vanipur, as exemplifying the “functioning of literature as culturalmemory.”7 Finally, it probes the questions that Deshpande’s fictionof private life puts to the relationship between that life and public

morality – for example, to what extent can we refrain from partici-pating in the nation as political process and a site of struggle, and towhat extent does inaction of the kind amount to colluding in a poli-tics of identity such as theShiv Sena represents, a politics which is

2 Mieke Bal, “Introduction” to Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present,ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe & Leo Spitzer (HanoverNH & London:UP ofNew England,1999 ): vii–x.

3 See, for example, the essays by Susan J. Brison and Irene Kacandes.4 Bal, “Introduction,” viii–x.5 Shashi Deshpande,Small Remedies (New Delhi: Viking,2000 ). Page refer-

ences to this edition in the following are in the main text.6 Susan J. Brison, in Acts of Memory, ed. Bal et al.,45 .7 The phrase is from Jonathan Crewe, “Reading Adamastor: Literature as

Cultural Memory in ‘White’ South Africa,” in Acts of Memory, ed. Bal et al.,76 .



“Cutting Across Time”: Shashi Deshpande 73

driven by, and battens upon, nostalgia for fabricated versions of thepast, and for exclusivist, ‘alternative’ worlds?

“Remember, Madhu, remember?” urges Tony, in the hope ofreintegrating her into the old “circle of companionship”. ButMadhu remains trapped in the repetition of grief, traumatized asshe is by the death of her seventeen-year-old son Adit, a casualty ofthe communal violence that overtook Bombay between December1992 and March1993 ,8 and, in a manner of speaking, of parentalstrife.

What do I tell you, Adit? That I slept with a man when I was agirl, a child really, and your father can’t take it? That your fatheris tearing himself apart, and me too, because of something thathappened – and only once – years ago? (258 )

Unable to obtain the ‘truth’ or to put a stop to his parents’ hideous

quarrels, Adit flees the flat. About the same time, news begins tocome in of trouble brewing, and then of the “bombs that have goneoff across the city, a series of macabre bonfires lighting it up. TheStock Exchange Building … Air India …” (301 ). After the bitternessand anger Madhu and Som have known in recent months, thedeath of their son leaves behind “a frightening emptiness” (47 ).Looking back at those months, it is as if the “malignant force at

work” in their personal lives was in like manner “working out itsplans” through the mobs “running amok” (299 ) and all the otherdemonstrations of senseless violence in the streets.

To get away from Som and their mutual sorrow as well as aBombay alien in its divisiveness, Madhu accepts a commission froma small publishing firm to write the biography of Savitribai Indo-

8 Thomas Blom Hansen,Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in PostcolonialBombay (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 2002 ): ch.5, 121–59 . This third outbreakof violence in the city occurred on12 March1993 , and consisted of a series ofbomb blasts arranged and executed by “a group of people, mainly Muslimsaffiliated with criminal networks in Bombay” (Hansen,Wages of Violence, 125 ).The riots previous to this erupted on6 December1992 following the destruc-tion of the Babri Masjid in Avodhya, and on8 January1993 . The Muslims bore“the brunt of police brutality and ethnic rage from militant Hindus in bothrounds of violence” (Hansen,Wages of Violence, 126 ).



74 SHIRLEYCHEW

rekar, the doyenne of Hindustani music.9 In Bhavanipur to inter-view the singer, Madhu sees that the task she has taken on is going

to be more difficult than anticipated. While she wishes to be on herown, the young couple she lodges with, Hari and Lata, is anxious tobe attentive. And while she hopes to observe a degree of formalityin their association, Hari turns out to be a blood relation, a nephewon her mother’s side, with a keen interest in various members of thefamily, in particular his great-aunt, Leela.

But, undoubtedly, Madhu’s chief problem is her subject, Savitri-

bai. Frail though she may be, the singer has lost nothing of herstrong will, and knows exactly the kind of image her biographymust communicate – that is, a woman whose distinction as thevocalist of classical Indian music rests entirely upon three factors:individual talent, training with her Guruji, the renowned KashinathBurwa, and unswerving dedication to the art.

As it happens, Madhu has her own, conflicting memories of Bai.

Though the topic is never raised between them, they had beenneighbours many years ago in Neemgaon. To the eight-year-oldchild that Madhu was at the time, Bai was a source of fascination.Equally so were her good-looking and gifted tabla player and, aswas generally accepted, her daughter by this man. It troublesMadhu, therefore, that Bai should make no mention in their meet-ings of two of the significant influences in her life – the Muslim

Ghulam Ahmed, who, as one of her musicians and her lover, canstill be noticed in Bai’s old photographs; and Munni, the daughter,who, like Adit, was killed only recently on a bus, in one of the series

9 It is likely that Deshpande’s Savitribai is a composite figure, based broadlyon such distinguished and senior artistes of Hindustani music as GangubaiHangal (1913 –) of the Kirana gharana and the late Moghubai Kurdikar (1904 –2001 ) of the Jaipur gharana. Some of the traits of these artistes, which can befound in Bai also, are: (1) the strict adherence to purism in singing classicalmusic, “preferring austerity to the heaven of popularity,” hence their prefer-ence for concert performances over recordings; (2) the long and rigorous train-ing; (3) the tendency to allude to “the old, painful memories […] kept lockedaway in [the] heart,” whatever these might be. See Yogesh Pawar, “Classic Re-visited – Article on Gangubai Hangal,”Indian Express (21 April 1999 ); and<http://www.rediff.cpm/news/ 2001 /feb/ 14spec2 .htm> Gangubai Hangalspeaking to Leela Pawar.



76 SHIRLEYCHEW

goaded by the silence or curiosity of the other characters, she triesto make coherent sense of her own “fractured, fragmented” memo-

ries, in particular the tangled events leading up to Adit’s death. It ishere that, like the Victorian novelists Madhu and her friends quotefrom regularly, Charlotte Brontë being one, Deshpande makes ex-tensive use of plot complications, coincidences, and buried secrets.

Given these key concerns, questions pile up inSmall Remedies,each “like a grappling hook” bringing up another.13 To be troubledby Bai’s refusal to speak of Munni, and of Madhu herself as “Mun-

ni’s friend,” and “the daughter of my father, [Bai’s] doctor and heradmirer,” is to be faced with other attendant perplexities: “Andwhy haven’t I declared my identity to her either? Why haven’t Isaid, I’m Munni’s friend Madhu. Remember me?” (29 ). Speculating onthe reasons for Bai’s silence, Madhu comes up with various possi-bilities. They include Bai’s desire to reinvent herself as both eminentartist and respectable woman, making up for all the years when she

was not seldom an object of scorn, derided as “that Bai,” one of“those women”;14 her arrogant disregard of other people, so thatMadhu is reduced to nothing more than “the writer from Bombay”and Hasina, her student and teaching assistant, to “that girl”; asteely indifference forged over the years in the face of her daugh-ter’s denial, first, of Ghulam Ahmed and then of Bai herself; andfinally, prosaic as it may seem, her illness, which, as her doctor re-

marks, has left her with “residual deficits” affecting her languageand her memory (61), and, hence, portions of her narrative.As for Madhu’s own reticence, the reasons must partly lie in

what she can recall of Munni and their brief friendship. Bold, mis-chievous and headstrong, Munni was unusual among the otherchildren in Neemgaon. At the same time, she hankered after ‘nor-mal’ ways and relationships; and, to be dissociated from Ghulam

Ahmed, she would rehearse a particular version of her identity foranyone who cared to listen: “My name is Meenakshi,” “My father is

13 “They keep pulling things out of the past, each memory like a grapplinghook bringing up a question”; Shashi Deshpande, A Matter of Time (New Delhi:Penguin,1996 ):16–17.

14 See also Attia Hosain, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, for representations of thesinger/courtesan. And, of course, the Urdu classic of1905 , Umrao Jan Ada (“TheCourtesan of Lucknow”) by Mirza Ruswa.




Sadashivrao, he’s in Pune.” If Madhu was drawn to Munni fromthe start, it was because, motherless, with only her father and an old

male servant for company, she was aware of the oddity of her ownposition. Did she also feel a need to be ‘normal’ and ‘respectable’?Was that why she was unable to cope with the thought that herfather, as Munni put it, “goes to a woman at night” (139 )? Howmuch was it jealousy at the thought of having to share her fatherwith another person? Madhu the adult is able to rationalize herfather’s relationship with the unknown woman, even though it has

not ceased to disturb her entirely. At the time, as the bearer of un-pleasant news, Munni had to be cast aside.

I asked Babu to tell her to go away, which he did with enormouspleasure […] But I couldn’t, I wouldn’t speak to her. Saying suchhorrible things about my father! In a while, she stopped coming. It ispossible that there was a gap between this and their going away

from Neemgaon. I don’t remember. I only remember the lockeddoor and the absence of music next door […] All these things arethere in my memory, unconnected however, to any other event. Imake the connection only now, only now I think – I turned my backon Munni, I let Babu drive her away. (140 –41).

Madhu’s reticence is, in part, a way of avoiding too close an ex-amination of her sense of guilt as a parent. Perhaps criticizing Baifor her denial of Munni helps to displace her self-reproach. Perhapsit helps to keep at bay, even now, the dark secret from the pastwhich has so unaccountably turned her life upside-down. A name,a story, a painting – out of that collision had erupted a buriedmemory, taking Madhu back to a day in Neemgaon when – withher parent dying in a Bombay hospital, her anticipations of loss, herchance encounter with a strange woman she understood instinc-tively to be her father’s mistress – the fifteen-year-old girl hadreached out for comfort from a family friend and become involvedin a moment of sex with him that led to his suicide. The instabilitiesof her narrative mirror the largely futile if also continuing struggleto find a satisfactory explanation for the occurrence; for havingblotted it from memory for so long; for the acute sense of estrange-



78 SHIRLEYCHEW

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

“I have come here [Bhavanipur ] to forget” (153). Instead, and theirony does not escape Madhu, Bhavanipur is both a beginning anda way back, the ground where her burden of pain is daily repeatedand where, despite herself, new links with people and new feelingsbecome possible. Some of the recognitions are the outcome of narra-tive memory – from Hasina, an account of the later years of GhulamAhmed, who turns out to be her grandfather, picking up from thepoint when his relationship with Bai ended and he returned to hisfamily; from Hari’s eager questions relating to his great-aunt, recol-lections (as we shall see below) of Leela the “ordinary woman” andthe political activist; from the casual violence of a mugging, thewords that release her to some extent from her grief. Other recogni-tions come, apprehended at deeper levels, so that to be briefly in-volved in the rituals of theupanayanam family group at the templeis to see what it means to be human. In other words, as Madhulearns to grow again into a “circle of companionship” (54 ), so aparallel movement in the narrative is the unfolding of Bhavanipuras symbolic space, configured of historical and cultural details andimages which Deshpande handles with an unerring sureness oftouch and an inwardness of knowledge.

Called after Bhavani, the dark stone goddess of the local temple,the name of the township incorporatesbhava and bhavan, ‘being’and ‘dwelling-place’, the state of becoming and its realization inmultiple forms.15 With its schools and colleges and university, itprides itself “as a centre of learning and culture […] famous for itswriters and musicians” (37). It was here that Bai’s Guruji passed the

15 The fictional Bhavanipur may have borrowed something of the ambienceof Hubli, where Gangubai Hangal has lived since1928 . The town falls in “oneof those friendly zones of mixed cultural and linguistic heritage which softenthe chauvinistic rigidity of state borders. Lying just south of Maharashtra, theDharwar–Hubli belt has contributed as much to Marathi culture as it has doneto Kannada”; Shanta Gokhale, “Gangubai Hangal” (1999 ), http://www.chembur.com/anecdotes/gangubai.htm




last years of his life, teaching and living close to the temple, hispresence turning Bhavanipur into “a kind of focus for the Gwalior

gharana […] [with] students coming from all parts of India to learnmusic from Guruji” (37). It was here, too, that Bai was finally accep-ted as a disciple. Since Guruji’s death and in homage to him, annualrecitals have been held at the Bhavani temple. Each year the event ispresided over by one of his students, beginning with the mostfamous of them, Rashid Mian, and attended by musicians from allover India. That Hasina has been nominated by Bai to perform at

the forthcoming recital is a personal triumph for the youngerwoman; it is, moreover, a public acknowledgement of her dual cul-tural inheritance. Claiming as her gurus, first, Ghulam Ahmed, andthen Savitribai, Hasina takes forward through her art the distinctivecrosscurrents that have, since at least the early thirteenth century,invigorated, sustained and enriched Indian music.

As an example of Deshpande’s adroit use of detail, Bai’s Guruji,

we are told, belonged to the Gwalior gharana, a piece of passing in-formation that brings to mind the historical importance of theprincely state in the development of Indian music, in particular thecontributions it made to the revitalizing of theDhrupad style of sing-ing under Raja Man Singh Tomar (1486 –1518 );16 and, in addition,Gwalior’s association, even today, with the great musician (singer,composer, musicologist) Miyan Tansen. “A peculiar synthesis – a

Brahmin Muslim,” Tansen, “even though he was a Muslim in nameand in faith […] often visited Hindu temples to pray and to chantthe Vedic verses,” and, in so doing, opened the way for other Mus-lim musicians “to partake in, and create, Hindu religious music.”17

The recital brings to fullness an act of cultural recall, performedand enabled through collective agency. The setting is the humanand otherworldly space of the temple; the vocalist, the embodiment

16 See Reginald & Jamila Massey,The Music of India (London: Kahn & Averill,rev. ed.1993 ):45 –46 .

17 Tansen was born to a Brahmin couple in the village of Baher near the cityof Gwalior and given the name of Tanna; he was subsequently adopted by theSufi fakir who had foretold his birth and renamed Ata Mohammad Khan;“Mian Tansen,” which means ‘he who commands an army of notes’, was thetitle conferred upon him by Akbar when he was invited to the imperial court.Massey,The Music of India, 50 –53 .



80 SHIRLEYCHEW

of the cultural legacies handed down in the course of time; her re-pertoire, an exquisitely layered arrangement of sacred chants such

as the Shankaracharyashloka in praise of Annapurna (“giver offood”),raagas such as the Malkauns, various vocal styles such as thetarana (the originator of which was Amir Khusro, the great Muslimmusicologist of the thirteenth century), and the single devotionalsong, avachana by Akka Mahadevi. However narrowed down Bai’sversion of her life and career may be, there is no denying on thisoccasion the creative pull and rich twining of forces which have

made her so distinguished an exponent of her art, and which mani-fest themselves anew in Hasina’s singing of thebhajan: “Now herstudent Hasina, a Muslim woman, sings this poem, composed cen-turies ago by a woman, a Hindu woman, whose entire life was astatement of her faith” (319 ). Sung in Kannada, rooted in the livedexperience of the local and the everyday, it reaches out universallyin its passionate affirmation: “I saw a dream.”18 Juxtaposed with the

Sanskrit hymns to Annapurna, the mother goddess, it serves to callinto view the legitimacy of the unorthodox spaces in which women,like the twelfth-century saint-poet, like Bai, and, like Leela, choose,in their difference, to dwell.

Bhavanipur has given Madhu some measure of control over theevents of the past year and strength to contemplate a future withoutAdit. As the anniversary of their son’s death approaches, Som’s let-ter urging her to return to him meets with her consent:

We need to be together, we need to mourn him together, we need toface the fact of his death and our continuing life together. Only inthis is healing possible. […] between the two of us, we can recreatehim, we can invoke his presence and make his existence real. Andthen, maybe, we can have our own ceremony, Som and I, we canwash away the darkness and ugliness, not only of Adit’s death, butof what happened before, with our own oblations of sesame seedsand water. (323 )

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




This undertaking to seek absolution, along with reflections onmemory’s “own truth,” brings Madhu’s narrative to a close. But,

like Bai’s self-fashioning, it leaves as many questions as answers.Returning to Som, Madhu returns to Bombay. To what extent doesthe text invite us to interpret Bhavanipur and its figuring of culturalmemory as an alternative to Bombay and the “savageries” of its“politics of identity”? And again, to what extent can the text be said,in this instance, to “overvalorize the monuments of the past,” toadapt Aijaz Ahmad’s words, in a nostalgic revisioning of ‘nation’?19

In other words, if the statements about the crucial role memoryplays in our lives, “capricious and unreliable though it is” (324 ), arenot rhetorical flourishes merely, what acts of recall will allowMadhu some form of understanding of the collective amnesia thathad beset Bombay? It is to the discontinuities of Deshpande’s textthat we must look for possible answers. Cutting back and forthacross time, it resists a linear reading which moves towards “cul-

tural invocation” and plenitude20

– after the recital it is back to look-ing after Bai, now in a coma, and to preparing for departure. Fur-thermore. the narrative requires us to read past Madhu’s silences,uncertainties, and evasions to the overriding realities of contempo-rary Bombay, such as the vested interests of the well-to-do, econo-mic deprivation among a large section of the populace, and socialinjustice.

In the following passage –It was, though we didn’t know it then, the end of an era, the citymetamorphosing into something very different from the Bombay ofmills, factories and workers, the Bombay of middle-class dreamsand hard work that [Leela] had known and loved (198 –99 )

19 Aijaz Ahmad,Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in ContemporarySouth Asia (London: Verso,2000 ): 146 . Also, for “the savageries of the politicsof identity” and “cultural invocation,” see Ahmad,145 , 148 .

20 Compare my reading of Anita Desai’sClear Light of Day in an essay pub-lished in Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: The Women’s Press,1991 ):43 –52 .



82 SHIRLEYCHEW

– Madhu is referring to the early1980 s, and her nostalgia for theBombay she first encountered two decades ago is not exceptional.21

In an article published in1993 , in which comparisons are made be-tween the city he visited in mid-February that year and the one hegrew up in, Amit Chaudhuri remarks: “Bombay, in the Sixties andSeventies, had a utopian air about it: it was the only city in India inwhich everyone was potentially upwardly mobile […] In the Eigh-ties, Bombay began to change.”22 The literary imagination, as Ro-shan Shahani argues,23 drawing her examples from a range of

novelists including Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai,and Shashi Deshpande, has for long been captivated by the “multi-facetedness” of Bombay. And, perhaps more than any other author,Rushdie is regarded as having revivified the city in his representa-tion of its crowds, cosmopolitan peoples, language marches, Bolly-wood, and so on, a city seething with energy and opportunities.24 But there are other Bombays, rendered from very dissimilar points

of view, and not the least common among these is the view of thecity as a hostile and estranging place. Even then, as the excerptsbelow from two poems from the1970 s by Nissim Ezekiel and Ut-tam Kolgaokar illustrate, the attitudes vary, given the different so-cial and cultural contexts out of which the poetry is written. InEzekiel, the self-conscious translation of urbanscape into mindscapeis the strategy by which the middle-class poet distances himself

from the troubling contradictions of Bombay,

21 Cf “the riots questioned clichés and axioms about what the city repres-ented and how it functioned and, by implication, they threw into prominencethe fact that Bombay had changed as a city. Over the preceding decades Bom-bay had become a different kind of place and the riots in their dramatic waypointed out how it was different – populous, fragmented, economically devel-oped, antagonistic, and shorn of an encompassing consensus”; Jim Masselos,“Postmodern Bombay: Fractured Discourses,” inPostmodern Cities and Spaces,ed. Sophie Watson & Katherine Gibson (CambridgeMA & Oxford: Blackwell,1995 ):199 .

22 Amit Chaudhuri, “Diary,”London Review of Books (10 June1993 ):29 .23 Roshan G. Shahani, “Polyphonous Voices in the City,” inBombay: Mosaic of

Modern Culture , ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: OxfordUP,1995 ):99 –111.

24 See esp. Midnight’s Children and the essay “Imaginary Homelands.”




Unsuitable for song as well as sensethe island flowers into slums

and skyscrapers, reflectingprecisely the growth of my mind.I am here to find my way in it

but, in Kolgaokar, no escape is conceivable from the excoriatingsense of alienation to which as a Dalit he is subjected.

He was born here,

but didn’t belong here;[…]When the people herewere busy buildingtaller and taller houses,he sat alone in the woods[…]

His house, made of earth,looked so punyamongst the town buildings!He went insideand shut himself up.Then he sawthat the rear wall of his house

had vanishedand the whole skywith its thousand eyeshad invaded the house.25

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

25 Nissim Ezekiel, “Island,” in Ezekiel,Hymns in Darkness (Delhi: OxfordUP,1976 ): 14, and Uttam Kolgaokar, “His House” (translated from the Marathi byVilas Sarang), inNo Entry for the New Sun: Translations from Marathi Dalit Poetry ,ed. Arjun Dangle (Bombay: Disha,1992 ): 34 . The poems in Dangle’s volumeare not dated, but his introduction refers to the strengthening of the Dalit lite-rary movement in the1970 s (x).



84 SHIRLEYCHEW

were, overnight; and, finally, the curious juxtaposition of “the Bom-bay of mills, factories and workers” and “the Bombay of middle-

class dreams and hard work,” two phrases that between them elidethe many and unlike worlds within the urban scene. Which of theBombays did Leela know and love? And which is Madhu’sBombay?

Hari, who does not have time for self-centred artists like Bai,believes Madhu would be better occupied writing the biography ofLeela and such prominent aspects of her life as the part she played

as a freedom-fighter, then as a teacher, her membership of the Com-munist Party and later of the Socialist group, her role in the tradeunions, and her work among the factory workers. But, in spite ofMadhu’s indebtedness to her aunt and their fondness for eachother, she finds it nearly impossible to recall anything of conse-quence relating to Leela the public figure. Her memories are per-sonal, tied to the Leela she knew as a friend and a surrogate mother,

“the woman who made me part of her life after my father’s deathand brought me out of the terrifying emptiness I faced when hedied. It was because of Leela that I have never felt an orphan” (98 ).

Nevertheless, the information Madhu retrieves about Leela’spolitical activities, patchy though it is, outlines a lengthy careerstretching from the Quit India movement to the industrial unrestand protest marches of the1950 s and 1960 s, the women’s anti-price-

rise revolt of the early1970 s, the Emergency, when she was jailedfor “her involvement with the striking railway workers, with theirfamilies” (46 ), and the beginnings of the textile-workers’ strike of1982 –1983 . As noted above, the Bombay of these decades was, tomany, full of promise. It was also the breeding-ground of division,conflict and communal tensions, with a rapidly expanding popula-tion which included, then as now, countless refugees and homeless

people; precarious working conditions and wages; flawed urbanplanning; and inequalities of land and services distribution in thecity.

This was the Bombay that Madhu came to know in the late1960 sand early1970 s when, after leaving college, she took on the editor-ship ofCity Views, a small English-language publication. ThroughLeela’s connections with the mills, and tenements like Maruti

Chawl and the people living in it, Madhu was able to bring to the




magazine “the world of Bombay factories, the mills, the workerswho come from all over the country and live together in chawls”

(145 ). Another initiative was to publish every month a map of aparticular area of Bombay, each map reproduced by the otherwiserepugnant Dalvi “with painstaking care, working out the fine de-tails with the skill of a miniature artist” (86 ), each map the textualrepresentation of an actual place inviting scrutiny. In its literarypages,City Views carried

stories, poems, articles, photographs on Bombay from people […]memories of the city, of events that took place in it. I even search outMarathi poems and articles, translating them myself with pleasure.(145)

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

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



86 SHIRLEYCHEW

She tries her rudimentary Marathi on me, oblivious of her mistakes,of her confusion in genders. With [Hari], she slips occasionally into

Hindi – a faltering, searching-for-words-Hindi, that often ends inKannada or English. (39 )

During her time as editor, Madhu succeeds in altering the imageof the magazine, and taking it away from a coterie audience to“ordinary people to whom Bombay is important as well.” Herassociation with the magazine did not last long. When she became

pregnant, it was time to move away from the window she hadopened on the city and dedicate herself to motherhood.One of Deshpande’s achievements as a novelist rests upon her

intimate knowledge both of the life-enhancing aspects of familyrelationships and of their rigid constraints – the male dictates, theconformism, the bourgeois aspirations. Marrying Som draws thesolitary Madhu into the fold of “a model family” in which each

member seems set upon “playing out her or his allotted role to per-fection” (103 ). But it is only with the birth of Adit that her assimi-lation is complete:

I really become a part of it, a full member of the society. Suddenlyeveryone matters to me; they’re Adit’s grandparents, his uncles andaunts, his cousins. But above all, I learn the magic of that small

circle, the basic unit of family life – father, mother and child. Thebeginning of the world, the Gangotri of humanity. Now, at long last,I’m playing the game of “house, house,” I’m playing the mother’srole. (105 )

In other words, unlike Leela and Bai, each of whom started out as“the rebel in a wholly conventional, tradition-bound family” (44 )

and remained an independent spirit, it is Madhu who identifiesherself with the Bombay of “middle-class dreams.”27 In this she is

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



88 SHIRLEYCHEW

women like Leela and Bai, which forms part of Madhu’s learningprocess, and which must surely underpin any radical remaking of

Bombay.

WORKSCITED Ahmad, Aijaz.Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary

South Asia (London: Verso,2000 ).Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe & Leo Spitzer, ed. Acts of Memory: Cutural Re-

call in the Present (HanoverNH & London:UP of New England,1999 ).Chaudhuri, Amit. “Diary,”London Review of Books (10 June1993 ):29 .Dangle, Arjun, ed.No Entry for the New Sun: Translations from Marathi Dalit

Poetry (Bombay: Disha,1992 ).Deshpande, Shashi. A Matter of Time (New Delhi: Penguin,1996 ).

—— .Small Remedies (New Delhi: Viking,2000 ).Dickens, Charles.David Copperfield (1849 –50 ; Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1966 ). —— .Great Expectations (1861 ; London: OxfordUP, 1978 ).Edel, Leon.Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W.W. Norton,1984 ).Ezekiel, Nissim. Hymns in Darkness (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1976 ).Hansen, Thomas Blom.Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial

Bombay (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 2002 ).Lele, Jayant. “Saffronization of the Shiv Sena: The Political Economy oCity, State and Nation,” inBombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. SujataPatel & Alice Thorner (1995 ; New Delhi: OxfordUP, 2000 ):195 .

Masselos, Jim. “Postmodern Bombay: Fractured Discourses,” inPostmodernCities and Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson & Katherine Gibson (CambridgeMA & Oxford: Blackwell,1995 ):199 .

Massey, Reginald, & Jamila Massey.The Music of India (London: Kahn &Averill, rev. ed.1993 ).

Nasta, Susheila, ed. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, theCaribbean and South Asia (London: The Women’s Press,1991 ).

Ramanujan, A.K.Speaking of Shiva (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1973 ).Shahani, Roshan G. “Polyphonous Voices in the City,” inBombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture , ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: OxfordUP,1995 ):99 –111.

Tagore, Rabindranath.Selected Poems, tr. William Radice (Harmondsworth:Penguin,1987 ).



90 AMINA YAQIN

both Desai and Ahmad belong to this “intelligentsia” through thepostcolonial secular English connection but equally they are impli-

cated in the discursive structures of cultural hegemony in civilsociety.3 However, it is not my intention here to re-inscribe anauthentic myth of origin about Indianness through linguistic asso-ciations, but to assess the significance of Anita Desai’s interventionin a communally charged Hindi–Urdu debate.

The key concerns I have in this essay are about the kind ofcultural memory Desai presents in her novel, and how this depic-

tion can be read in relation to the actual machinations of Indianpolitics with regard to the language question. As a successfulauthor, writing for an international publishing market, she is in-vested with a certain power to represent an ‘authentic’ India. Whileshe is not a writer who bombards us with an epic-style narrative,purporting to offer ‘the great Indian novel’, her exploration of indi-vidual identities and self-formations work in a subtle and proble-

matic way, creating instead miniatures, and guiding the reader’sresponses through a combination of omniscience, internal focaliza-tion, indirect speech and symbolic tropes.

In Custody, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in1984 , can retrospec-tively be read as a literary account of the communalization anddisintegration of Urdu in post-Partition India. The year in which itwas published was, coincidentally, the year that saw the death of an

Urdu literary legend, the master lyricist Faiz Ahmad Faiz, who stir-red the hearts of millions with his haunting melodies and sustainedhope for many with his romantic vision of a return to a belovedhomeland. Radiating optimism, his poetry revived disheartenednationalists with its belief in a destination which had not yet beenrealized, a desire for which marked even his most pessimisticpoem, “Subh-e azadi: August1947 (Freedom’s Dawn),” with its im-

portant ideological rejection of the “pock-marked dawn” of free-dom from colonial rule:

The time for the liberation of heart and mindHas not come as yet

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



Communalization and Disintegration of Urdu: Anita Desai 91

Continue your arduous journeyThis is not your destination4

It is ironic that Faiz, stylistically wedded to the traditional formof the ghazal, was concerned with forging themes of modernity inhis poetic message, constructing a new direction for his Urdu lis-teners and readers, while Desai, working with a modernist narra-tive, takes it back toward a sensibility rooted in tradition and pre-modern aristocracy. Her idea of Urdu is that it is trapped in an aris-

tocratic lineage, a theme which she also touches on in her earliernovelClear Light of Day.5 Desai’s perception of Urdu as an artefact ofOld India and its communal heritage are key features of her story.One of the narrative devices she uses is that of cultural memory,and this, in connection with the theme of Urdu, is inevitably tied tothe memory of separation and Partition. Here it is important tomake the distinction that, whereas Faiz is still looking for national

liberation in “Subh-e azadi,” Desai is analysing Urdu as the culturalobject of a lived experience in post-Partition India. Later in hiscareer, Faiz was commissioned by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s govern-ment in post-Partition Pakistan to conduct an ‘official’ search forPakistani culture and nationalism. His findings and ruminationswere subsequently collected and published in a volume entitledPakistani kalchar aur qaumi tashakhus ki talash (Pakistani culture and

the search for national character).6

In this volume, it is evident thatFaiz was driven by an Arnoldian cultural sensibility looking to pre-serve “culture as perfection” in his search for a representativemodel of a future collective Pakistani national consciousness.7 Desai’s fiction, by contrast, demystifies the idea of a national col-lectivity and looks to the arts and the way of life of individuals for

4 In The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl: Poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, tr. DaudKamal, ed. Khalid Hasan (London: Independent,1988 ):36 .

5 Anita Desai,Clear Light of Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1980 ). See PartI I, which details Raja’s attraction to Urdu poetry, his heroic character, and hisadmiration for his neighbour and landlord, Hyder Ali, who encourages hisinterest in Urdu.

6 Faiz Ahmad Faiz,Pakistani kalchar aur qaumi tashakhus ki talash (Lahore:Ferozsons,1988 ).

7 Terry Eagleton,The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell,2000 ):32 .




Aijaz Ahmad, tracing the history of Urdu language and literaturefrom 1947 to 1965 , describes three aspects of the break-up and re-

distribution of the Urdu writing community that changed the per-ception of Urdu after Partition. First was the migration and resettle-ment of religious communities across the newly drawn borders;second was the increased communalization of Urdu as a Muslimlanguage, its implementation as a national language in Pakistanand its decreasing status as a language of ‘minority right’ and ‘Mus-lim interest’ in India; and finally, the Indian Parliament’s abandon-

ment of Hindustani in favour of Hindi as the official language. InAhmad’s estimation, the loss of Hindustani as a recognized linguafranca was a major event because it had served as a “living link be-tween Urdu and Hindi which now became more and more distantfrom each other, especially in their written forms.”12 In postcolonialIndia – specifically Uttar Pradesh, where the mother-tongue Urduspeaker has been marginalized through a lack of representation in

the linguistic federation of states – Urdu is indeed perceived as anendangered language by the minority who are literate in it.For Ahmad, the political nation and the cultural community are

the two ultimate “framing realities” which dominate post-PartitionUrdu literary production in India and Pakistan. With the absence ofa middle-ground Hindustani, the communal perception of Urdu asa Muslim language has become stronger. This religious separatism

saturates the verse of a contemporary Urdu poet, Rashid Banarsifrom Varanasi:

We understood a lot about the prejudices of this ageToday languages too are Brahmins and Shaikhs? We don’t

understandIf Urdu too is under blame for being an outsider

Then whose homeland is India? We don’t understand.13

12 Aijaz Ahmad,Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika,1996 ):201 –202 .

13 Quoted in Christopher Lee, “‘Hit it with a stick and it won’t die’: UrduLanguage and Muslim Identity and Poetry in Varanasi, India,” Annual of UrduStudies 15.1 (2000 ):338 .



94 AMINA YAQIN

There are interesting similarities between Desai, Ahmad and Banar-si, all speaking of Urdu but in varying tones and differing forms.

Desai’s pessimistic view of Urdu’s survival in India is tied to thefact of mass Muslim migration, Ahmad sees migration as a contri-butory factor in the break-up of the Urdu writing community, andBanarsi articulates the frustration that comes from Urdu’s marginal-ized status and its perception as a migrant’s tongue, which makeshim an outsider/other in his own home. The Urdu that was the“voice of North India,” as Desai remembers it, and its survival are

indeed major concerns for Urdu traditionalists, and in turn thoseanxieties reinforce a region-specific idea of Urdu eliding its identifi-cation as a lingua franca.The limitation felt by poets such as Banarsiwho cannot escape the reflected cultural memory of Urdu is recog-nized and re-imagined in a novel such asIn Custody. If a commonhistorical moment is to be mentioned which irrevocably changedthe idea of Urdu in India, then that is the time of Partition.

Sunil Khilnani, in his insightful study entitledThe Idea of India,has argued that Partition is a tangible memory in the subcontinent

around which the inevitable disappointments of modern politicscan gather […] Partition is the unspeakable sadness at the heart ofthe idea of India: a memento mori that what made India possiblealso profoundly diminished the integral value of the idea.14

For Khilnani, the idea of India is ultimately a political one becausein his view the history of India since1947 has been marked by acontinuing faith in democratic procedures, expressed through partypolitics; Indians have in the past been inspired by the charisma ofthe Congress Party, and more recently by regional, caste-based andcommunal political groupings. In this respect, the evolving modernnation is still disrupted by hierarchical stratifications and – in thesometimes fraught relationship between Hindu and Muslim – thememories of its ruptured birth.

In the opening section of Desai’s book, the protagonist Deven, alecturer in Hindi, applies in person for a week’s teaching leave inorder to conduct an interview with the legendary Urdu poet Nur

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




Shahjahanabadi. However, his head of department, Trivedi, meetsthe request with a belligerent, short-tempered and communally

charged reaction:“I’ll get you transferred to your beloved Urdu department. I won’thave Muslim toadies in my department, you’ll ruin my boys withyour Muslim ideas, your Urdu language. I’ll complain to the Prin-cipal, I’ll warn theRSS you are a traitor.” (145)

Trivedi’s reactionary stance encapsulates the fear and paranoia thatsurrounds Hindi and Urdu speakers in a national culture wherelanguage is, ironically, both the carrier of religious identity and themarker of national loyalty. Trivedi’s utterance, long before the de-struction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, has an ominous ring toit. With its evocation of theRSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), itcan retrospectively be seen to anticipate majoritarianism in India,and the monologue of his speech stays with us in the Bombay riots,the violent eruptions in Gujarat, the continuing Kashmir crisis.

The Hindi–Urdu DivideThe knotty issue of national language has been a topic of muchscholarly deliberation in historiographical and sociological studiesof the Indian nation. Several researchers have drawn our attention

to the contentious fates of Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi in nine-teenth- and twentieth-century India.15 Such linguistic differencescan be read as marking an important distinction from what Bene-dict Anderson has theorized as an integrated “imagined commu-nity” coming together through a common language through therise of a homogenizing print capitalism.16 These studies have re-

15 This is reflected in monographs such as Christopher Shackle & Rupert

Snell,Hindi and Urdu Since 1800 : A Common Reader (London: School of Orientaland African Studies, University of London,1990 ); Amrit Rai, A House Divided:The Origin and Development of Hindi-Urdu (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1991 ); Paul Brass,Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1974 );Christopher King,One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in NineteenthCentury North India (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1994 ).

16 See Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed.1991 ) and alsoNation and Narra-



96 AMINA YAQIN

vealed a multilingual nation which cannot comfortably assimilateits diverse linguistic groups.

Urdu came to prominence in the middle-to-late eighteenth cen-tury at the same time as the ousting of Persian from the courts bythe British and its replacement with the official language of govern-ment, English. Generally, in eastern and northern India, Bengaliand Urdu remained in use on the lower levels of administrationand judiciary, while in the northern state of Punjab, the British im-posed English and Urdu “as the languages of government.”17 On an

informal basis they relied on Hindustani/Urdu as a lingua franca inNorth India, while official recognition was accorded to the verna-culars on4 September1837 .18 While the Muslim reformer and earlymodernizer Sayyid Ahmad Khan was deeply influential in instigat-ing linguistic reform and advocating cultural change for his com-munity, his interventions in the cause of Urdu with the colonialgovernment suffered setbacks in Bihar in1881 and in Uttar Pradesh

in 1900 under pressure from a rising middle-class Hindu lobby.19

According to Francis Robinson, the proposed replacement of Per-sian script by Nagari, led by a Hindu deputation in1900, and theBritish government’s favourable response to it marked a key mo-ment in the increasing sense of separatism among Indian Muslims.20

The historical perspective of Urdu’s decline has been directlylinked to Hindi’s rise by Jyotirindra Das Gupta, who charts the

national movement alongside language associations in pre-PartitionIndia.21 He claims that after1882 the Hindi movements pressed forteaching Hindi universally in all primary and secondary schools in

tion, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge,1990 ).17 Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political

Economy (London: Routledge,1998 ):84 –85 .18 Urdu was recognized in Bihar, the United Provinces, Avadh and the Pun-

jab, while in the south it was patronized by the Nizams of Hyderabad.19 Shackle & Snell,Hindi and Urdu Since 1800 , 8 .20 Francis Robinson,Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the Unit-

ed Provinces’ Muslims 1860 –1923 (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1993 ):133 –74 .21 Jyotirindra Das Gupta,Language Conflict and National Development: Group

Politics and National Language Policy in India (Berkeley & London:U of CaliforniaP, 1970 ).




North India. It was in the North Western Provinces that the Hindimovement displayed an antagonistic stance toward Urdu.

The constant refrain of the public petitions was that Urdu was analien language. A petition signed by 500 Hindi graduates andundergraduates declared Urdu to be ‘an alien and upstart language’while another petition described Urdu as a “hybrid production […]forced upon us by our former rulers.22

In Gupta’s view, “a large part of the language conflict in UP is in-fluenced by the memories of past conflict transmitted to the Hinduand Muslim communities by the cultural and political leaders.”23 For Gupta, these conflictual linguistic associations can be histori-cally linked to the shortsightedness of small elites whose commu-nity consciousness dictated their group loyalty in the transitionalperiod from a traditional multilingual society to a modern nation.Thus in the early nationalist phase in India “leaders rarely drew adistinction between the categories of common language, nationallanguage and official language.”24

For David Lelyveld, too, sociological perspectives are paramountin examining the organic history of languages such as Hindi andUrdu, rather than an abstract theorizing which focuses on “who

22

Gupta,Language Conflict and National Development,103

.23 Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development, 150 . While the Hindipetitions gathered strength, there was only one petition, signed by a smallnumber of people, submitted in favour of Urdu in the North Western Pro-vinces. As this shows, language petitions in the nineteenth century were be-coming communally charged and reflected the divisive forces of language andreligion on the communities. The culture of language petitions survived inpost-independent India and the late Dr Zakir Husain’s act of collecting2 .25 million signatures from the Urdu-speaking people inUP supporting a petitionasking the President to save Urdu under Article347 of the Constitution in1952 proves a case in point. For a critical comment on politicians taking on the Urducause inUP, see Danial Latifi, “Urdu inUP,” Nation and the World (16 August1999 ):44 –46 .

24 In his view, in a traditional multilingual society the power of representa-tion came to lie with a small elite whose community consciousness dictatedtheir group loyalty, and in the early nationalist phase in India “leaders rarelydrew a distinction between the categories of common language, national lan-guage and official language” (36 ).



98 AMINA YAQIN

gets to speak, who is allowed to listen, which topics and settings areappropriate to which linguistic codes.”25 He suggests that in at-

tempting to understand this linguistic code we may come closer tograsping the unique formula which delicately balances the forma-tion of self-conscious identity against the facts of power, competi-tion and exploitation. To put his sociological theory to the test, Lely-veld examines Gandhi’s role in nurturing an Indian national con-sciousness through a unified Indian language, which would bothreflect the identity of Indians and bridge the linguistic diversity of

its many regions. He argues:It would be debatable in1916 to say that Hindi was Hindu andUrdu was Muslim, but there were certainly grounds and occasionfor relating language and religion in this way. It was one of thecentral projects of Gandhi’s life, and a tenet of the Indian NationalCongress after1920 , that the national language must overarch this

distinction, that instead of being Hindi or Urdu, it should be Hindu-stani.26

Historically, the Indian National Congress gave official recogni-tion to Hindustani in its1934 constitution. Hindustani, suggested byGandhi as a neutral solution to the thorny Hindi–Urdu controversy,would reflect a unified national consciousness free from religiousaffiliations. But the stumbling-block on which the neutral solutionfell apart was that of the script. In Sunil Khilnani’s view, after Inde-pendence “Nehru’s initial hope had been for India’s regional statesto continue as the mixed, multi-lingual administrative units estab-lished by the Raj.”27 Nehru’s government resisted the pressure fromthe Hindi lobbyists for a centralizing national language, andreached a compromise with the post-Partition Indian Constitution(1950 ) recommending a fifteen-year use of English for official pur-poses, with Hindi in the Nagari script as the ‘official’ language of

25 David Lelyveld, “The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and theProject of a National Language,” inOrientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament:Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carole Breckenridge & Peter van der Veer (Phil-adelphia:U of PennsylvaniaP, 1993 ):192 .

26 Lelyveld, “The Fate of Hindustani,”192 .27 Khilnani,The Idea of India, 175.




the Union, and also extending recognition to other regional lan-guages. But eventually this pluralism had to be altered to accommo-

date the demand for decentralization and the formation of linguisticstates. The Official Languages Amendment Act of1963 gave Hindithe hegemonic status of ‘official language’ and English the sec-ondary role of ‘associate’ or additional official language.28 TheOfficial Languages Amendment Bill adopted in1967 included theacceptance of a historic Three-Language-Formula which would beimplemented in secondary education for language teaching. It re-

commends: “(a) the regional language and mother tongue when thelatter is different from the regional language; (b) Hindi or, in Hindi-speaking areas, another Indian language; and (c) English or anyother modern European language.”29

With regard to the situation of Urdu in contemporary India, thelanguage controversies of the past have had a detrimental effect onthe status of Urdu wherever religious identity has come to inform

the ideologically separatist correlation of Muslim=Urdu=Pakistanand Hindu=Hindi=India.30 According to Athar Farouqui, the situa-tion of native Urdu speakers has deteriorated in Uttar Pradesh tosuch an extent that “there is not even a single primary or juniorhigh school of Urdu medium. The only two Urdu medium schools

28

There were angry reactions to Hindi’s elevation and violence-led rejectionof this move in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. In1968 there was an Official Languages Amendment Act which strengthened the posi-tion of English as the acceptable sister alternative to Hindi “without any certaindeadline”; King,One Language, Two Scripts, 4–7.

29 Gupta,Language Conflict and National Development, 243 .30 The Urdu-as-Muslim issue has been particularly volatile in the state of

Uttar Pradesh, where the recent bone of contention has been the alleged statisti-cal miscounting of mother-tongue Urdu speakers.UP, once the heartland ofUrdu’s urban elite, is now unable to meet the needs of its mother-tonguespeakers. Political intervention on a regional scale was officially led by Dr ZakirHusain and a seven-member Urdu speakers’ deputation to theUP educationminister (Sampurnanand) in1952 , registering the marginalization of Urdu inthe state. In1958 the grievances were made known at a national level to thePresident of India and a request was made under Article347 of the Consti-tution for the recognition of Urdu in theUP, Bihar, Punjab and Delhi. In1958 Sampurnanand, the chief minister ofUP, said that Urdu could not be recog-nized as a regional language inUP in the Legislative Assembly.



100 AMINA YAQIN

are run by and affiliated to Aligarh Muslim University.”31 ForFarouqui, the Three-Language-Formula in Uttar Pradesh has thus

far failed to serve the needs of mother-tongue speakers of minoritylanguages. He passionately dismisses the Formula as a “white-wash” because it has failed to represent the regional Urdu commu-nity of Uttar Pradesh by recognizing Hindi as the language of theregion on the basis of inaccurate data collection of linguistic speechcommunities. Farouqui is outraged by the North Indian chief minis-ters’ unilateral implementation of the Formula, which recognizes

Hindi as the regional language, Sanskrit as the modern language,and English as a foreign language. To him, this signifies a sinisterpolitical manipulation of the Urdu minority in North India, parti-cularly at the time of census-taking, which, he argues, took forgranted that everyone’s mother tongue in the area was Hindi.32 InZoya Hasan’s estimation, the Hindi–Urdu controversy in Uttar Pra-desh has an explicit agenda of “political dominance and equally

significant subtexts on the cultural identity of the state and alterna-tive conceptions of political community.”33 Hasan places the blamesquarely on government policy, which has treated Urdu as a minor-ity Muslim affair breaching the stance on linguistic pluralism andthe separation of language and religion. The conflation of languageand religion in the sanskritized official Hindi expansion program-me has also created further alienation and division among the al-

ready communalized linguistic groups.34

The Decay of Urdu in CustodyIn Custody tells the story of the decline and decay of Urdu in mod-ern India. Deven, the anti-hero of the novel, is a Hindi lecturer de-voted to the classical tradition of Urdu poetry, a devotion that stems

31 Athar Farouqui, “Urdu Education in India: Four Representative States,”Economic and Political Weekly (2 April1994 ):782 .

32 Farouqui, “Urdu Education in India,”783 .33 Zoya Hasan,Quest for Power: Oppositional Movements and Post-Congress Poli-

tics in Uttar Pradesh (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1998 ):187 .34 Hasan,Quest for Power , 187 –88 . Also see Christophe Jaffrelot, “The Sangh

Parivar between Sanskritization and Social Engineering,” inThe BJP and theCompulsions of Politics in India, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen & Christophe Jaffrelot(Delhi: OxfordUP, 1998 ):22 –71.




from his childhood associations with the language as a mother-tongue speaker. Born in Lucknow, educated in Delhi, he is a poor

widower’s son who has found employment as a university lecturerat Lala Ram Lal College in Mirpore. While his career as a languagespecialist is not particularly lucrative, it has been directed by a prac-tical consideration of the market economy, which favours Hindi,the language of communication in North India. Urdu fulfils hisimagination and Hindi sustains his corporeal needs. “I am – only ateacher […] and must teach to support my family. But poetry –

Urdu – […] I need to serve them to show my appreciation.”35

Devenfeels trapped and frustrated in the confines of his chosen home, sowhen the opportunity of returning to the capital presents itselfthrough the intervention of his childhood friend, Murad, he takesan uncharacteristically risky step by agreeing to Murad’s sugges-tion. In taking this decision, he is temporarily freed from the con-strictions of his existence in the small town of Mirpore, which had

come to resemble the metaphorically “impassable desert that laybetween him and the capital with its lost treasures of friendships,entertainment, attractions and opportunities” (24 ).

The northern plain of Mirpore, situated “more than a thousandmiles from the coast,” had been shaped by the presence of Muslimaristocracy, in this case a long-forgotten nawab who had fled Delhito escape the aftermath of the1857 Mutiny and built a mosque in

Mirpore as a memorial of thanks to his Supreme Benefactor for pre-serving his life. The narrator tells us that the history of the mosquehas been swept away in the dust which saturates the Mirporeatmosphere, and all that remains of the “marble and pink sand-stone” is a decaying, filth-ridden stone structure overtaken by thedebris of modernity. But the narrator reiterates its continued use asa mosque. Continuing to map the cultural traditions of Mirpore, she

tells us: “The temples were more numerous but had no history atall. There was literally not a man in Mirpore who could have toldone when they were built or by whom” (20 ).

Here it can be argued that Desai’s reconstruction of the geogra-phy of Mirpore is interesting but problematic, because it links the

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



102 AMINA YAQIN

Muslim presence in Mirpore to a pre-modern urban aristocracy andcontrasts it with the timelessness of an indigenous Hindu tradition

embedded in an infinite antiquity: “the same kind of antiquity thatthe shacks of the poor had, and the stalls of the traders – they wereoften wrecked, rebuilt and replaced, but their essential form re-mained the same” (20 ). While it is not my intention to suggest thatDesai is articulating a communalist point of view, there is a particu-lar historical and ideological freight on the concept of Hinduism astimeless and Islam as latecomer which the narrative inevitably

duplicates. The miniature portrait of the town grafted on to thelarger linguistic landscape of Urdu replicates what, to borrow aphrase from Edward Said, might be seen as a “problematic struc-ture of attitude and reference” with respect to a whole culturaltradition.36 The narrator tells us that the Mirpore communities weremutually observant of the stratified “Muslim” and “Hindu” areas.While this separation was habitual and uneventful for the most

part, police presence had to make itself felt from time to time whenthe ritual mourning of Moharram coincided with the festival ofHoli. Despite the police, the communities

clashed […] from time to time, knives flashed, batons flailed andblood ran. For a while tension was high, the newspapers – both inHindi and Urdu – were filled with guarded reports and fulsome edi-

torials on India’s secularity while overnight news-sheets appearedwith less guarded reports laced with threats and accusations. (21)

Here, the reference to the Hindi and Urdu newspapers is highlycharged and can be seen as indicative of the manipulation of ethnicdifferences in the regional print media. This print culture has the

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




power to stoke the fires of dissent in a charged situation and inten-sify a separatist stance through divisive linguistic narratives.

In Custody begins with an unscheduled meeting between the twochildhood friends with contrasting personalities and backgrounds:Deven and Murad, his Muslim friend, “the spoilt rich boy withmoney in his pocket for cinema shows and cigarettes” (11). Thestory symbolically unfolds at the beginning of spring in the monthof March, signifying the theme of birth and hope. An encounter be-tween the two friends takes place in the college grounds of Deven’s

university. Murad has traveled from Delhi to Mirpore, metaphori-cally tearing across the regions like the changing March wind“whirling dust and dry leaves around violently” (10) to involveDeven in his latest project and sow the seeds of Deven’s fateful journey from Mirpore to Delhi. This initial paired characterizationof the two friends portrays Murad as active and Deven as passive.However, Murad’s active nature is supplanted by the darkness of

his actions. He comes to embody the exploitative city with its dis-regard for sentiment or nostalgia. In contrast, Deven’s residual pas-sivity makes him the unfortunate vessel of many betrayals, ultima-tely unable to cope with the pressures of modern living.

Deven is coerced by Murad to interview the renowned Delhipoet Nur Shahjahanabadi for the “Special issue” of his Urdu journal

Awaz . Nur’s nom de plume signifies the grandeur of the imperial

Mughal city and Murad’s outlook on Urdu is marked by a sense ofthe “glorious” past, and an intention to recover the lost high cul-tural tradition that flourished in the pre-modern urban literarylandscape from its present relegation to the nameless margins of thecity. He wishes to

keep alive the glorious tradition of Urdu literature. If we do not do it

at whatever cost, how will it survive in this era of that – vegetarianmonster, Hindi?” […] “That language of peasants,” Murad sneered,picking his teeth with a matchstick. The language that is raised onradishes and potatoes […] it flourishes, while Urdu language of thecourt in days of royalty – now languishes in the back lanes andgutters of the city.” (15)



104 AMINA YAQIN

Murad feels he occupies higher moral ground because, unlikeDeven, he has not surrendered to Hindi. His job as an Urdu editor

displays his commitment to and lifelong struggle in the cause of“the golden tradition” despite the constant worries of diminishingsubscriptions, low readership and escalating costs of production.He accuses Deven of betraying his mother tongue by selling out tothe professional service of its arch-rival, Hindi, and his accusationhaunts Deven throughout the book every time he enters the Urduarena.

Murad is facially disfigured by pockmarks, rather like his be-loved Urdu, which no longer has the patronage of emperors andnawabs, and while his stained face marks him as a metaphor forUrdu, it can also be read as a symbol of an Urdu speaker tainted byhis contempt for Hindi. However, his prejudicial attitude towardHindi does not seem to extend to a communal rejection of Hindus,as he confers the task of Urdu’s custody on Deven. He tells Deven:

“Nur will be the star of the issue. The light that blazes in the centerand sends its rays to all corners of the world where his verse isknown – in Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden – do you know, wehave sent his name to the Nobel Prize Committee for literature onceagain?” “I want a full feature on Nur – Nur in his old age, the dyingNur before he is gone, like a comet into the dark. I want you to do

that feature.” (17

)Here Desai’s reference to a well-known socially aware poet may beseen as an indirect nod in the direction of Faiz, the revolutionaryProgressive poet who was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in1962 .Desai’s narrative has a lyrical quality, with its use of symbolictropes, and echoes some of the indefinable nuances of Faiz’s verse;but, unlike Faiz, she is not sending out a message for social change.Faiz’s political agenda radically charged the classical imagery –lover and beloved, the literal and metaphorical desert of their sepa-ration, the hopeful symbol of the morning breeze – with new mean-ing. The nation became the unattainable beloved and Faiz its devo-tee. In Faiz’s poems, the morning breeze was tinged with revolu-tionary powers of change, while the pain of separation between thebeloved nation and its lovesick poet remained as agonizing as




ever.37 For Faiz, the poets were “the warriors – / the riders ofdawn” who wrote first against colonialism and then against the op-

pressive postcolonial state, giving hope to people where there wasnone.38 Nur’s celebrated persona borrows the revolutionary traits ofFaiz’s poetry but remains embedded in the romantic pursuit ofShahjahanabad.

In Desai’s narrative, Nur holds the key to Urdu’s revival. How-ever, it is difficult to say whether Desai’s guiding muse in this storyis Faiz, since the Nur we meet (a poet at the end of his career), con-

trary to the reader’s expectations, is very reluctant to part with theold metaphors and life-style of an aristocratic lineage and seems tobe untouched by a Progressive outlook. Obsessed with his pigeons,his body saturated with an excess of rich foods and alcohol, he livesin a dusty, faded house with his two wives and entertains extrava-gantly. His poetic muse is sustained by the poetry of Byron andShelley. This link between the melancholic Romantic English poets

and nostalgic Urdu poetry is also developed as a motif in Desai’scharacterization of Raja inClear Light of Day. In the days leading upto Partition, when Raja is struck down with tuberculosis, it is said:

His situation was Romantic in the extreme, Bim could see as shesponged his face and helped him […] his heavy, limp body as shelifted it as spent and sapped as a bled fish, and the city of Delhi

burning down about them. He hoped, like Byron, to go to the rescueof those in peril. Instead, like Byron, he lay ill, dying. (60 )

Similarly, Nur is “prepared for suffering” and his bodily ailmentsare a mirror of the sickened state of Urdu. But unlike Raja he is notsuffering the flames of Partition; his pain is of a different kind – it isembodied in his alter ego Deven, trapped in the harsh realities of amaterial world but, unlike Nur and Faiz, buoyed up by a poetic

37 Gopi Chand Narang,Urdu Language and Literature: Critical Perspectives (New Delhi: Sterling,1991 ). See the chapter on Faiz Ahmad Faiz which dis-cusses in detail aspects of tradition and innovation in his poetry.

38 Khalid Hasan, ed.The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl , 7.



106 AMINA YAQIN

spirit destined for failure, locked as it is in what Faiz called the “suf-ferings of the time.”39

In taking on the task of a custodian, Deven must sideline his owncreative output in favour of the living poetic legend. But in fulfillinghis duty as a custodian he has to overcome many obstacles, some ofwhich are foreseen and others not. His immediate priority is toestablish contact with the poet and obtain his consent to an inter-view. In getting close to the poet, he finds himself embroiled in theminutiae of Nur’s domestic life, an involvement which ultimately

spirals out of his control. Contrary to his expectations, he finds him-self at the mercy of the two wives, who appear to have charge overNur’s life. Having had the upper hand in his domestic life, Deven isoften confounded by the differing power-structures of Nur’s house-hold and unable to cope with the idea of woman as an equal, stillless as an intellectual.

Through a series of coincidences, Deven is asked by Murad to

fulfil his task by immortalizing the verse of Nur in an audio record-ing. Initially, he is dismissive of the idea, seeing it as a belittling ges-ture reducing the great writer’s poetry to “some song for the cine-ma, or radio” (91). However, Murad criticizes his small-town sensi-bility and convinces him that the idea of a tape recording of NurShahjahanabadi is “brilliant,” even though Deven has never boughtor used a radio before. Sarcastically, Murad exclaims, “This is the

age of electronics, haven’t you heard? Or hasn’t the news traveledto Mirpore yet?” (92 ). Murad continues to champion the forces ofchange and modernity in Deven’s life and Deven, despite suspect-ing his sincerity, submits to his friend’s rhetoric, only to ask himself,nearer the end of the novel, when things go disastrously wrong, iftheir friendship, too, might not be another meaningless symbol of alost custom.

39 Poems by Faiz, ed. Victor Kiernan (Lahore: Vanguard,1971 ):65 . This poemmarks an important initial stage in Faiz’s career as a poet. It is particularly im-portant because it changes the conception of the traditional beloved and intro-duces a modern self-consciousness for the lyric poet. For a critical reading ofFaiz as a Progressive poet, see Carlo Coppola, “Urdu Poetry: The ProgressiveEpisode,” doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago,1975 . Also see EstelleDryland,Faiz Ahmad Faiz 1911–1984 : Urdu Poet of Social Realism (Lahore: Van-guard, 1993 ).




Deven finds an unexpected ally in the Urdu section at Lala RamLal College, who assists him in acquiring college funds to purchase

a tape recorder for his assigned project. Deven’s poverty as a Hindilecturer is matched by the diminishing stature of his colleague,Abid Siddiqui, who is the head of the Urdu department. Siddiqui isdescribed as “a small man, whose youthful face was prematurelytopped with a plume of white hair as if to signify the doomednature of his discipline” (96 ). Lala Ram Lal College could afford theluxury of an Urdu section because of a very large donation from the

descendants of the very nawab who had fled Delhi in the aftermathof the1857 mutiny (96 ). Like the dying culture he represents, Siddi-qui lives in a deterioratinghaveli that underscores the decay of Urduand the peripheral position of Muslims in modern India. Desai’sreferences to Siddiqui’s life-style disturbingly reproduce the colo-nial constructions of a morally decrepit Muslim aristocracy collaps-ing from drink, debauchery and decay. The inevitable death of this

self-indulgent aristocratic Muslim culture is symbolized by the de-struction of Siddiqui’s house when the “decaying”haveli is razed tothe ground by developers and is lost in the metaphorical swirlingdust which absorbs Mirpore. Siddiqui has knowingly participatedin the sale of his house to a Delhi businessman. “He wants to […]build a block of flats with shops on the ground floor, cinema houseat the back, offices on top […] And as I need the money – you know

my weakness – the offer was too good to refuse” (198 ). From a dif-ferent angle, this depiction reinforces the idea that Siddiqui’s classcan no longer be the custodians of Urdu, as they have little powerto make themselves heard at the national level. The official situationand status of their language literally makes them outsiders in theirown home. Deven has the potential to release the ailing languageand its people, but he, too, is constantly reminded of his position as

an outsider when he is around Nur and his cronies. Nur says:He has come to speak for me […] through his throat my words willflow. Listen and tell me if my poetry deserves to live, or if it shouldgive way to – that fodder chewed by peasants, Hindi? […] Nur wasinviting him to join the fray, allowing the sublime concept of time todwindle into the mere politics of language again […] He knew he

ought not to have stayed, listening to this kind of talk, he a Hindu



108 AMINA YAQIN

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

In this instance, Desai connects the theme of language overtly withreligion and politics. Ultimately, what the novel shows us is that, asa mother-tongue speaker of Urdu, Deven is economically disem-powered by his first language, which he studied as a boy in Luck-now, where it was taught to him by his father, a teacher, a scholar,and “lover of Urdu poetry.” It does not stand him in good steadwhen, after his father’s death, his mother decides to move to Delhito live: “I was sent to the nearest school, a Hindi-medium school,Sir,” says Deven when he first meets Nur Shahjahanabadi. “I tookmy degree in Hindi, Sir, and now I am temporary lecturer in LalaRam Lal College at Mirpore. It is my living, Sir. You see I am amarried man, a family man” (43 ). In post-Partition India, Deven isforced into a minority debate and he finds it increasingly difficult to

maintain a secular stance. Nur openly attacks him:“Those Congress-wallahs have set up Hindi on top as our ruler. Youare its slave. Perhaps a spy even if you don’t know it, sent to theuniversities to destroy whatever remains of Urdu, hunt it out andkill it […] It seems you have been sent here to torment me, to showme to what depths Urdu has fallen.” (42 –43 )

Deven remains on the fringes of Urdu culture because he does notcome from an elite Muslim background and has chosen to teach alanguage that offers better employment prospects and economicgrowth than would an Urdu education. The unexpected opportu-nity to interview Nur temporarily frees him from his caged exis-tence, but it is a freedom that is fraught with danger.

This sense of danger is illustrated during Deven’s first bus jour-ney to Delhi, crystallizing ominously in a teashop just after his arri-val at the Inter-State Bus Terminal on Ring Road:

When he had drunk to the bottom of the glass, he saw a dead flyfloating in the dregs of his tea.

The gasp he gave was only partly of horror at the teashopowner’s filthiness and the wretched standards of hygiene in his

shop. Or even from a fear of typhoid and cholera. It was the revela-




tion that all the omens of the day had come together and met at thebottom of the glass he held between his fingers. In it lay the struck

dog, the triumphant crows, the dead fly – death, itself, nothing less.Coming together in the separate prisms of the fly’s eye, drownedbut glittering in the tea, it stared back at him without blinking. (29 )

This portent is mediated through an omniscient narrator who fore-grounds the theme of dying through the symbolic motifs of the dog,the crows and the fly. It appears that Deven’s journey has ended be-fore it has begun, because the language he wishes to save is alreadydead. Another way of reading it is through the idea of shock experi-enced in the alienating city; but Deven is unable to resolve the crisisthat unfolds.40 His heroism is of a more romantic kind and his ideasare unsustainable in a modern environment.

It is, of course, inevitable that the tape recorder purchased byDeven with Murad’s unreliable help is a second-hand one and that

he does not know how to operate it and has to rely on Chiku – anadolescent technician – to help him make the recordings. The taperecorder is a symbol of modernity and thus fails to record the voiceof tradition or pre-modern India. Chiku’s ineptitude with a symbolof progress is a metaphor for the continuing inequalities of lan-guage and opportunity in India. The failed recordings are sympto-matic of the dysfunctionality of Urdu. “It was a fiasco. There was no

other word for it. Disbelievingly, Deven had the first tape removed,the second tried and then the third and the fourth” (173).Through the poetry of Nur’s second wife, Desai now seems to

offer an alternative vision – but this is rejected by Deven: he sees heras a snake, an impostor who has stolen her husband’s verse. Again,Imtiaz Begum’s character is problematic, because it wavers betweenthe stereotyped intellectual yet predatory courtesan/poet who, as

his second wife, is the chosen companion of the Progressive, pre-

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



110 AMINA YAQIN

modern Muslim poet, and the woman who sends her manuscript toDeven for critical perusal. She cannot shed her first skin as a perfor-

mer and always has to take a secondary role to Nur’s. The tone shetakes with Deven in a letter to him is confrontational:

The recording is no secret. Whatever your reason for concealing itfrom me, Nur Sahib could not conceal it from me. Was I consideredincapable of understanding the need to record Nur Sahib’s voice forposterity? Was Safiya Begum considered wiser and more capablebecause of her greater age and her longer years with him? Dearfriend, I beg to put it to you that you have insulted my intelligenceby your deception […] you thought I was a prostitute who dazzledNur Sahib’s eyes with my dance and so inveigled my way out of ahouse of prostitution into the house of a distinguished poet […]Kindly remember that unlike Nur Sahib and unlike your respectedself, I am a woman and have had no education but what I have

found and seized for myself. […] When you rose to your feet andleft the mehfil while I was singing my verse, was it not because youfeared I might eclipse the verse of Nur Sahib and other male poetswhom you revere? Was it not intolerable to you that a womanshould match their gifts and even outstrip them? (195 )

Deven’s answer to her challenge is to shred her manuscript and reject her plea as a false one. It seems that Urdu cannot sustain themodernity of a female narrative, either.

It can be argued that the abiding problem in Desai’s story is thatthere are no variants of Urdu – she does not draw upon an Urdulineage of the present.41 Her vision of Urdu stands in stark contrastto the opinion of the renowned Urdu novelist Intizar Husain, whohas argued that the cultural tradition of Urdu lies in its shiftingregional locations. According to him, this language cannot be asso-ciated with a single geographical locale or culture, because it is bynature hybrid and can adapt to new regions.42 Desai’s Urdu is des-

41 I have borrowed the phrase from the title of Aijaz Ahmad’s bookLineages of

the Present.42 Intizar Husain, “Urdu ka tehzibi mizaj” [The cultural etiquette of Urdu],

Annual of Urdu Studies 15.2 (2000 ):372 –76 .




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

ConclusionThe central characters Deven, Murad and Nur are all caught in anostalgic commemoration of Urdu and wish to restore it to its for-mer glory. Moreover, this nostalgia is rooted in the cultural memo-ry of a pre-modern past which rejects the values of an evolvingpresent. Desai’s novel is ostensibly a narrative about the death of alanguage and raises uncomfortable questions about its demise. Itinterrogates the discourse of a centralized ‘singular’ Hindi which isdominated by utilitarian values marginalizing cultural traditions inits ambitious struggle for material gain.44 The novel displays a criti-cal stance toward modernity, but this criticism is marked by ambi-valence in its idea of Urdu as a ritual to be narrated rather thanpractised. Desai’s overall novelistic portrayal of Urdu marks anelegiac farewell to a lost institution. Her symbolism is tinged withthe tropes of a communally charged present, unable to bridge thefragmentary Hindu–Hindi and Muslim–Urdu divide despite herstaging the debates within the ‘secular’ Indian-English novel. De-spite his many journeys, Urdu’s custodian Deven is unable to crossthe metaphorical desert that separates the small regional town ofMirpore and the national capital of Delhi, because, in the words ofone of Nur’s cronies, “Urdu is supposed to have died, in1947 ” (56 ).The city of Delhi has absorbed another cultural memory.

43 Interestingly, the novel was adapted as a screenplay for a film nine yearslater by the Bombay-born director Ismail Merchant, the successful partner inthe internationally acclaimed Merchant–Ivory production group. The scriptwas rewritten in Urdu by Shahrukh Husain in collaboration with Anita Desai.There is a crucial shift of power dynamics in the telling of this tale from Englishnarration about Urdu to a re-appropriation of the story of Urduin Urdu. Mer-chant’s view about Urdu is completely different to Desai’s – he does not thinkthat Urdu can die.

44 See Michel de Certeau,Culture in the Plural , ed. & intro. Luce Giard; tr. andwith an afterword by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1997 ), ch.8 ,where he discusses a centralized culture that imposes itself as a singularity andexpects celebration of “culture in the singular” in the twentieth century.



112 AMINA YAQIN

WORKSCITED Ahmad, Aijaz.In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London, New York:Verso,1992 ). —— . Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika,1996 ).

Anderson, Benedict.Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed.1991 ).

Bayly, Christopher.Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770 –1870 (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1983 ).

Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” inIlluminations , ed. &intro. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken,1969 ): 152–90 .

Bhabha, Homi K., ed.Nation and Narration (London: Routledge,1990 ).Bose, Sugata, & Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political

Economy (London: Routledge,1998 ).Brass, Paul.Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cam-bridgeUP, 1974 ).

Certeau, Michel de.Culture in the Plural , ed. & intro. Luce Giard, tr. with anafterword by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1998 ).

Coppola, Carlo. “Urdu Poetry: The Progressive Episode” (doctoral disser-tation, University of Chicago,1975 ).

Costa, Magda. Interview with Anita Desai. http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/usevs/sawweb/sawnet/books/desai_interview.html.

Desai, Anita.Clear Light of Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1980 ). —— . In Custody (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1985 ).Dryland, Estelle.Faiz Ahmad Faiz 1911–1984 : Urdu Poet of Social Realism (Lahore: Vanguard,1993 ).

Eagleton, Terry.The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell,2000 ).Faiz, Faiz Ahmad.Pakistani kalchar aur qaumi tashakhus ki talash (Lahore:Ferozsons,1988 ).

Farouqui, Athar. “Urdu Education in India: Four Representative States,”Economic and Political Weekly (2 April1994 ):782 –85 .

Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman. “Ju’rat’s sahr-ashob: An Afterword,” Annual ofUrdu Studies 3 (1983 ):11–16.

Gupta, Jyotirindra Das.Language Conflict and National Development: GroupPolitics and National Language Policy in India (Berkeley & London: U ofCalifornia P,1970 ).

Hasan, Khalid, ed.The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl: Poems of Faiz AhmadFaiz, tr. Daud Kamal (London: Independent,1988 ).

Hasan, Zoya,Quest for Power: Oppositional Movements and Post-CongressPolitics in Uttar Pradesh (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1998 ).




Husain, Intizar. “Urdu ka tehzibi mizaj” [The cultural etiquette of Urdu],reproduced from Akhbar-e Urdu May 1998 , Islamabad], Annual of UrduStudies 15.2 (2000 ):372 –76 .

Jaffrelot, Christophe. “The Sangh Parivar between Sanskritization andSocial Engineering,” inThe BJP and the Compulsions of Politics in India, ed.Thomas Blom Hansen & Christophe Jaffrelot (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1998 ):22 –71.

Khilnani, Sunil.The Idea of India (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1998 ).Kiernan, Victor, ed. & tr.Poems by Faiz (Lahore: Vanguard,1971).King, Christopher.One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nine-

teenth Century North India (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1994 ).Latifi, Danial. “Urdu inUP,”Nation and the World (16 August1999 ):44 –46 .Lee, Christopher. “‘Hit it with a stick and it won’t die’: Urdu Language andMuslim Identity and Poetry in Varanasi, India,” Annual Of Urdu Studies 15.1 (2000 ):337 –51.

Lelyveld, David. “The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and theProject of a National Language,” inOrientalism and the Postcolonial Predica-ment: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carole Breckenridge & Peter van derVeer (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P,1993 ):189 –214 .

Narang, Gopi Chand.Urdu Language and Literature: Critical Perspectives (New Delhi: Sterling,1991 ).

Pritchett, Frances W. “‘The World Turned Upside Down’: Sahr-asob as aGenre,” Annual of Urdu Studies 4 (1984 ):37–41.

Rai, Amrit. A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi–Urdu (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1991 ).

Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder.The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1992 ).

Robinson, Francis.Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the Unit-ed Provinces’ Muslims 1860 –1923 (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1993 ).

Said, Edward W.Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus,1993 ).Shackle, Christopher, & Rupert Snell.Hindi and Urdu Since 1800 : A Common

Reader (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University ofLondon,1990 ).

Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in

India (London: Faber & Faber,1989 ).



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

ASHOKBERY

T MAY SEEM SURPRISING to link A.K. Ramanujan to recentdebates about Indian nationhood, as I propose to do here. Hiswork as poet, scholar and translator appears tangential to such

debates. His poetry rarely touches directly on political themes.1 Hisscholarly essays are concerned with folklore, bhakti, classical litera-tures and anthropologically informed approaches to Indian civiliza-tions and cultures. His translations are mostly of south Indian reli-gious and love poetry. Nevertheless, one can find in his workmodels of Indian society and culture which intersect with some ofthe debates over Indian nationhood which have been taking placein India in recent years. Although these debates will be familiar tomany readers, I want to begin by rehearsing some of them in orderto provide a context for my discussion of Ramanujan.

IThe most troubling political developments in India during the lasttwo decades have been the resurgence of Hindu nationalism, withits ideology of Hindutva, and the rise of breakaway movements in

1 According to Keith Harrison, “the day-to-day business of political eventsheld little interest for him”: “Preface” to A.K. Ramanujan,Uncollected Poems andProse, ed. Molly Daniels–Ramanujan & Keith Harrison (Delhi: OxfordUP,2001 ): ix.

I



116 ASHOK BERY

various regions – most prominently Punjab and Kashmir. The secu-lar, multi-ethnic version of India embodied in the Constitution and

promoted by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, hasbeen increasingly under pressure.Over the same decades, there have also been vigorous debates

within academic disciplines such as history and politics about thenature of Indian nationhood. These debates have been complex,and I do not have space here to do more than select a few themesthat are relevant to my discussion of Ramanujan.2

One of these themes has been the tension between what ParthaChatterjee, drawing on an essay by Gyanendra Pandey, calls “thenation and its fragments.” The former term denotes unitary visionsof India, while the “fragments” are groups subordinated by theunitary views, groups marked by characteristics such as gender,caste, class, regional loyalties, and (minority) religious affiliations.The two unitary ideas of India which have been dominant since

Independence are secular modernizing nationalism, particularly inthe Nehru era, and, more recently, Hindutva.In Chatterjee’s account, there is a contention between the “hege-

monic project of nationalist modernity” and the “numerous frag-mented resistances to that normalizing project.”3 Dipesh Chakra-barty argues that this project of modernity was shared by colonialistand nationalist ideologies, but with one significant difference: the

former saw all Indians as backward and as needing to be broughtforward into modernity, whereas, in elite nationalist narratives, itwas the subaltern classes, such as the peasantry, who occupied thatposition.4 Although secular nationalism appears to make room for

2 For a fuller account, see my essay “‘We Have Grown to Look at the LargeWorld as Part of Us’: Modernity and the Nation in Two Indian Novels of the1930 s,” inThe Political Subject: Essays on the Self From Art, Politics and Science, ed.Wendy Wheeler (London: Lawrence & Wishart,2000 ): 160 –78 . I have drawnon that essay here.

3 Partha Chatterjee,The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial His-tories (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 1993 ):13.

4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: WhoSpeaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?”Representations 37 (Winter1992 ): 6–7. Chakrabartyhas recently developed the argument of this article into a book,ProvincializingEurope: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 2000 ).



The Indias of A.K. Ramanujan 117

India’s many ethnic groupings and religions, it is an imposition ofthe ideology of one portion of the nation – the modernizing elite –

on the whole nation. Such a perspective on “nationalist modernity”is shared by many associated with Subaltern Studies, and by otherprominent commentators such as Ashis Nandy.5 As Pranab Bar-dhan puts it, summarizing the views of these “anarcho-communita-rians,” among whom he includes Chatterjee and Nandy,

A small modernist elite arrogated to itself the title to speak on behalfof the society in general and deliberately went about a state-directedprogramme of heavy industrialization and modernization, with agrandiose vision of progress borrowed from the Western ideas ofEnlightenment and the nation-state, a vision unshared by the peopleat large.6

One of the aims of Subaltern Studies has been to question this pro-cess of arrogation, as Pandey makes clear when he criticizes “thedominant nationalist historiography” for its “interested use” ofterms such as ‘national’ and ‘secular’, for “its privileging of the so-called ‘general’ over the particular, the larger over the smaller, the‘mainstream’ over the ‘marginal’,” and for “its view of India, and allof South Asia, from Delhi alone.”7

In this view, the dominant historiography homogenizes the ideaof the nation by incorporating it within the structures of modernity,which is marked by institutions such as industry, technology, lawand education. As a result, according to Chakrabarty, to think thenarrative of modernity was “to think these institutions at the apexof which sat the modern state, and to think the modern or thenation state was to think a history whose theoretical subject was

5 Nandy’s critiques of the principles of secular modernity include “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto,”Seminar 314 (1985 ): 14–24 , and “The Politics of Secular-ism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” in Mirrors of Violence: Commu-nities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia , ed. Veena Das (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1990 ):69 –93 .

6 Pranab Bardhan, “The State Against Society: The Great Divide in IndianSocial Science Discourse,” inNationalism, Democracy and Development: State andPolitics in India, ed. Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal (Delhi: OxfordUP, 1997 ):186 .

7 Gyanendra Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu–Muslim Riots in India Today,”Representations 37 (Winter1992 ):50 –51.



118 ASHOK BERY

Europe.” Indian history thus became an “episode in the universal[…] march of citizenship, of the nation state, of themes of human

emancipation spelled out in the discourse of the European Enlight-enment and after.”8 The way to resist this homogeneity, Pandeysuggests, is to pay attention to the fragments: “The ‘fragmentary’point of view […] resists the drive for a shallow homogenizationand struggles for other, potentially richer definitions of the‘nation’.”9

The opposition to modernity and the secular state displayed in

such views is disputed by others. Sunil Khilnani, for instance, pro-poses a middle way between the “monochromy of the post-imper-ial imagination and […] of nationalist histories of a unified people,”and the “pointillism of the new Indian historians […] trawling andre-reading the archives for examples of ‘resistance’ […] to the ideasof nation and state.”10 This view makes room for the state (andhence for the institutions of modernity). Ramanujan, as I shall argue

later, also allows modernity into his conception of India.The secular ideal has also been under pressure from the otherpowerful unitary view of India mentioned earlier, Hindu national-ism, which conceives of India as essentially and primordially Hin-du, as “an organic and homogeneous whole which is threatened by‘foreigners’ (notably Muslims and the British).”11 Although thisnationalism, like the modernizing one, is primarily a product of the

nineteenth century, it projects itself backward into ancient India asits source. The ideology of Hindutva which inspires Hindu nation-alism is founded, in Chetan Bhatt’s words, on the notions of “terri-

8 Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,”8 , 17.9 Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment,”28 –29 .10 Sunil Khilnani,The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton,1997 ): 3 . A

recent defence of secularism against the strictures of Nandy, Chatterjee andothers can be found in Stuart Corbridge & John Harriss,Reinventing India:Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity,2000 ): 196 –99 . Another, qualified, defence of the modernizing state is con-tained in Bardhan, “The State Against Society,”190 –95 . A more extended cri-tique of Nandy and Chatterjee is Achin Vanaik,The Furies of Indian Communal-ism: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (London: Verso,1997 ): ch.4 .

11 Corbridge & Harriss,Reinventing India, 180 .



120 ASHOK BERY

Both Sunil Khilnani and Partha Chatterjee offer such definitions,although there are, as indicated above, differences between them.

For Khilnani, drawing on Nehru, Indian identities are “layered”and palimpsestic; India is “a space of ceaseless cultural mixing,” of“interconnected differences.”16 The Indian palimpsest includesmodernity, and this implies the necessity of a central state.17 YetNehru also had what Khilnani describes as a “de-centred” concep-tion of India: “Indian culture was so widespread all over India thatno part of the country could be called the heart of that culture.”18

Chatterjee questions the idea of a singular national history with“ancient Hindu civilization” as its source. “What” he asks, “is theplace of those inhabitants of India who are excluded from thisnation?”19 He, too, proposes a decentering process so that a differ-ent kind of history can be written. In this new history,

The center of Indian history would not need to remain confined to

Aryavarta or, more specifically, to “the throne of Delhi.” Indeed, thevery centrality of Indian history would then become largely uncer-tain. The question would no longer be one of “national” and“regional” histories: the very relation between parts and the wholewould be open for negotiation. If there is any unity in these alterna-tive histories, it is not national but confederal.20

IIRamanujan’s version of India is also decentred, although he ap-proaches his conclusions from a different direction. He begins witha critique of the notion of Great and Little traditions. The idea be-hind this dichotomy, as Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes explain,was that “a great civilisation, such as India, evolved from local roots

16 Khilnani,The Idea of India, 153 , 169 , 172 . The metaphor of the palimpsestcomes from Nehru’sThe Discovery of India, quoted by Khilnani,169 .

17 The Idea of India, 171.18 Nehru’s Autobiography, quoted by Khilnani,The Idea of India, 170 .19 Chatterjee,The Nation and its Fragments , 113, 110 .20 The Nation and its Fragments , 115.




in the process of urbanisation.”21 However, the concept fell out offavour:

Largely because of the ill-chosen labels “great” and “little,” the con-cept became synonymous with division, hierarchy, and a bias infavor of written, brahmanical, Sanskrit traditions; in response, manyanthropologists of India began to explore the “little” traditions. (CE,348 )

The Great/Little formulation resembles the idea of the nation andits fragments; the Great Tradition is conceived as pan-Indian (forexample, Sanskritic culture, which reached into all parts of India),while the Little Traditions are multiple and fragmentary.

Rejecting this model, Ramanujan develops a conception of Indiawhich emphasizes the processes of interaction between cultures.This feature is part of a wider emphasis in his work on the erosionof boundaries. Motifs such as role-reversal, dissolution of differ-ence, liminality and mirroring appear and reappear through hisessays and poems. In his essay “Men, Women and Saints,” for in-stance, he discusses, among other things, the crossing of genderboundaries inbhakti poets, closing the piece with his own transla-tion of the10 th-century poet Dē vara Dā simayya:

but look, the self that hoversin betweenis neither mannor woman (CE,294 )

The poem “Mythologies2” recounts the story of Narasimha, an in-carnation of Vishnu, who took on a liminal form (half-man, half-lion) to kill the demon Hiranyakashipu, who was invulnerable to

men or animals. The poem concludes by seeing this liminality as amodel for the kind of vision the speaker wishes to have: “Adjust my

21 SeeThe Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (NewDelhi: OxfordUP, 1999 ): 348 . Further page references (with “CE”) are in themain text.



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single eye, rainbow bubble, / so I too may see all things double.”22 But perhaps the most far-reaching manifestations of the idea in

Ramanujan’s work are contained in terms such as “reflexivity,”“mirroring,” “dialogue” and “intertextuality” applied to the rela-tionship between India’s different cultural traditions. This view ismost fully set out in his essay “Where Mirrors Are Windows: To-wards an Anthology of Reflections”:

Cultural traditions in India are indissolubly plural and often con-flicting but are organised through at least two principles, (a) context-sensitivity and (b) reflexivity of various sorts, both of which con-stantly generate new forms out of the old ones. What we call brah-manism, bhakti traditions, Buddhism, Jainism, tantra, tribal tradi-tions and folklore, and lastly, modernity itself, are the most promi-nent of these systems [on p.9 he adds Islam and Christianity]. Theyare responses to previous and surrounding traditions, they invert,

subvert, and convert their neighbours. Furthermore, each of theseterms, like what we call India itself, is “a verbal tent with three-ringcircuses” going on inside them. Further dialogic divisions are conti-nuously in progress. (CE,8 )

He goes on to define what he means by “reflexivity”:

Reflexivity takes many forms: awareness of self and other, mirror-ing, distorted mirroring, parody, family resemblances and rebels,dialectic, antistructure, utopias and dystopias, the many ironies con-nected with these responses, and so on. (CE,8 )

To make sense of India, we have to consider “a spectrum of forms,where one complements, contradicts, reflects, and refracts another”(CE,25 ). Reflexivity gives these forms “a common yet creative lan-

guage for dissent. Without the other, there is no language for theself” (CE,26 ).In another essay, he indicates how these processes operated in

his case, and in the cases of others like him:

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




Sanskrit, English, and Tamil and Kannada […] stood for three dif-ferent interconnected worlds. Sanskrit stood for the Indian past;

English for colonial India and the West, which also served as adisruptive creative other that both alienated us from and revealedus (in its terms) to ourselves; and the mother-tongues, the mostcomfortable and least conscious of all, for the world of women,playmates, children and servant […] Each was an other to theothers, and it became the business of a lifetime for some of us tokeep the dialogues and quarrels alive among these three and to

make something of them. (CE,450 )These ideas, he suggests, are anticipated by Mikhail Bakhtin’s “dia-logism,” and he frequently uses Bakhtinian terminology:

Such a presence of reflexive worlds; such a dialogic response of onetradition to another; the co-presence of several of them in one space,parodying, inverting, facing and defacing each other, sharing andtaking over characters, themes, motifs and other signifiers, butmaking them signify new and even opposite things – this is charac-teristic of Indian creativity. (CE,447 )

Reflexivity runs counter to monolithic notions of India:

Stereotypes, foreign views, and native self-images on the part of

some groups all tend to regard one part (say, the brahmanical textsor folklore) as the original, and the rest as variations, derivatives,aberrations, so we tend to get monolithic conceptions. But the civili-sation, if it can be described at all, has to be described in terms of allthese dynamic interrelations between different traditions, their texts,ideologies, social arrangements, and so forth. Reflexivities are cru-cial to the understanding of both the order and diversity, the open-

ness and the closures, of this civilisation. One may sometimes feelthat “mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.” (CE,9)

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



124 ASHOK BERY

contrast, the “mother tongues represent a democratic, anti-hier-archic, from-the-ground-up view of India.”23

What emerges is a decentred view of the nation. If “mirror onmirror mirrored is all the show,” there is no original, no core. Theseviews are clearly contrary to the ideology of Hindu nationalism,with its Brahmanic bias and its emphasis on an Aryan Hindu es-sence as lying at the origin of India’s identity. They also oppose thedominance of modernizing elite nationalism; although, as we haveseen, Ramanujan sees modernity as one of the systems within In-

dian culture, he also makes room for, and attaches considerablevalue to, subaltern forms such as folklore,bhakti, women’s tales andother modes.24

IIIIn the final part of this essay, I want to try and relate some of thethemes that have emerged above to Ramanujan’s own poetry. Hispoetry is notable, among other things, for its obliqueness and irony,so it is unsurprising to find that these links, too, are oblique ratherthan straightforward. In Ramanujan’s poems, both social and indi-vidual identities are decentred, and his aesthetic practice is basedon a sense of the fragmentary nature of truth and representation. Asa consequence, many of his poetic techniques themselves have adisplacing effect and therefore enact a decentredness of identities.

Vinay Dharwadker suggests that Ramanujan’s poems can bethought of as a “series of concentric circles, in which the outermostperiphery contains representations of various environments that lieon the edge of the poet’s experience, while the innermost peripherybrings together poems about the things that are closest to him.”Dharwadker distinguishes five circles radiating inward from “im-personal social poems” to the individual, “the subjective centrewhich gives all the concentric zones of experience their basic struc-ture and meaning” (CP, xxx–xxxi). For simplicity, I will collapseDharwadker’s five categories into two: the individual and thesocial. In each of these areas we can discern the ceaseless movementsuggested by Ramanujan’s notions of “reflexivity” and mirroring.

23 A.K. Ramanujan,Uncollected Poems and Prose, 55 .24 PartsII I and IV of hisCollected Essaysdeal withbhakti and folklore.




Identities in Ramanujan are in constant process, continually circu-lating, continually dispersing themselves.25

In the poem “Elements of Composition,” for instance, the “chat-tering self” is constantly disintegrating and turning into the other:

even as I add,I lose, decomposeinto my elements,

into other names and forms (CP,123 )

“Self-Portrait” uses the image of mirroring to represent this other-ness of and within the self:

I resemble everyonebut myself, and sometimes seein shop-windows,

despite the well-known lawsof optics,

the portrait of a stranger,date unknown,often signed in a cornerby my father. (CP,3)

Origin is at once modestly and tangentially asserted (the father’ssignature – but only in the corner of the portrait) and denied (thelack of a centre to the self, the resemblance to “everyone / butmyself”).

“Man and Woman in Camera and Out” replaces the mirror witha camera. The woman speaker turns the process of focusing thecamera into a symbol for her husband’s elusive nature:

25 This feature of Ramanujan’s work has been noted in three of the more sub-stantial pieces of criticism of his poetry: Bruce King’sThree Indian Poets: NissimEzekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes (Madras: OxfordUP, 1991 ), ch.5 and 6 (eg, 70 , 84 , 85 ); Vinay Dharwadker’s introduction to theCollected Poems (eg,xxviii, xxix, xxxiv); and Jahan Ramazani, “Metaphor and Postcoloniality: A.KRamanujan’s Poetry,” inThe Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chi-cago:U of ChicagoP, 2001 ): 72 –102 (eg,93 –94 ). Ramazani’s essay was origi-nally published inContemporary Literature 39 . 1 (1998 ):27 –53 .



126 ASHOK BERY

With a click of luck

I married him then,married a focus, nowa photograph in a frame

on the table in my living room,while he himself goesin and out of sight,

smooth by morning,hairy by night,growing from blur

to focus and back. (CP,59 )

To adapt Bakhtin’s words, quoted by Ramanujan (CE,26

,447

), to adifferent context, in none of these poems is the self “a well-rounded,finalized, systematically monologic whole.”

Despite this constant process within the self, there is still a placefor a sense of individuality. In “Eyes, Ears, Nose, and a Thing aboutTouch” (CP,77–78 ), sight, hearing and smell are depicted as con-necting us with and dispersing us into the outside world. In the

case of sight, for instance,Eyes are fog,are trees green or on fire,a man’s face quartered by the cross-hairs of a gunsight.

Touch, on the other hand, the physical body, separates us fromothers and the world:

Touch alone has untouchables,lives continent in its skin, sosegregating the bodyeven near is too far.




The counterpoint in this poem between contained individuality anddispersal of identity has, I shall argue later, an analogue in Rama-

nujan’s aesthetic through his preoccupation with the attempt bothto unify and fragment his poems.The idea of process also shapes his conception of social and cul-

tural identities. In one of his best-known poems, “Small-Scale Re-flections on a Great House,” a meditation on an extended familywhich, in Dharwadker’s words, turns into a ‘national allegory’ (CP,xxx), the house is both capacious and unstable.26 Its contents are

constantly being added to and lost:Sometimes I think that nothingthat ever comes into this housegoes out. Things come in every day

to lose themselves among other things

lost long ago amongother things lost long ago; (CP,96 )

And later in the poem, he says:

anything that goes outwill come back, processed and oftenwith long bills attached (CP,97 )

The capaciousness in this poem is not the somewhat romanticizedcapaciousness of, say, Nehru’s vision of the nation. The affectionate-ness of the portrait here goes hand in hand with a keenly ironicsense of the chaotic nature of the house and of India: the clutter, theskeletons in the cupboard, such as the daughters who “get marriedto short-lived idiots” and then return, the stray cows appropriated

by the household. Tragedy hovers on the fringes of the comedy, asin the conclusion of the poem, which depicts the deaths in warfare

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



128 ASHOK BERY

of two male members of the family. The origins of things disappear,as with the lost objects of the two opening tristichs quoted above, or

the cows which have wandered in “from nowhere.” History is mal-leable, Ramanujan implies in this poem. “The past,” as he assertselsewhere, “like other cultural constructions, changes as we attendto it […] One is changed by it and the past itself is changed by one’sstudy of it.” (CE,184 –85 ). Again, such a view is opposed to thatpropagated by Hindu nationalists, who locate India’s essence in afossilized Hindu past. Ramanujan explicitly rejects such revivalist

ideas:The past never passes. Either the individual past or historical past orcultural past. It is with us […] [Yet] disconnection is as much anunderstanding of the past as making the connection. And peopleliving in the present have to see both, because to assert continuitywhere there is none, where we cannot see any, is to be a revivalist.27

This view of the self, society and history as process is paralleled byan aesthetic which has some resemblance to modernism in its em-phasis on the fragment and the provisionality of art and representa-tion.28 As he says in the poem “Connect!” “my truth is in frag-ments” (CP, 178 ). A vivid illustration of this is given by Dhar-wadker in his introduction to theComplete Poems when he recountshow Ramanujan wrote a long poem called “Elements of Composi-tion” and then broke it up into fourteen shorter poems, dispersingthem through his second collection,Second Sight. One of the reasonsfor this step, according to Dharwadker, was that “the formal andthematic unity asserted by the long poem contradicted one of hiscentral insights in it, that his own “truth is in fragments” (CP,xxxvii).

27 Rama Jha, “A Conversation with A.K. Ramanujan,”The Humanities Review 3 .1 (January–June1981 ): 5–13, quoted by Bruce King, Modern Indian Poetry inEnglish (Delhi: OxfordUP, rev. ed.2001 ): 214 . The passage is also quoted byRamazani,The Hybrid Muse, 85 .

28 The most detailed study of Ramanujan’s work in relation to modernismcan be found in Mishra,Preparing Faces, ch. 6 . However, Mishra’s concern islargely with Ramanujan’s use of personae.




While breaking up the long poem, though, he retained links be-tween the fragments into which he divided them. All of them are

composed in similar tristichs. Furthermore, many of the poemsbegin by picking up a word, phrase or line from a previous poem.The poem “Questions,” for instance, ends with the line “of earthlylight, infected air?” while the next poem in the divided sequence,“The Watchers,” begins: “Lighter than light, blowing like air.” Thepoems, therefore, enact what Dharwadker calls a “double move-ment” between fragmentation and unity (CP, xxxvii). As I shall sug-

gest later, this double movement forms an aesthetic counterpart tothe sense of India as a series of “interconnected differences.”29 The double movement is embodied in his poetry through a num-

ber of devices. One of these is a characteristically oblique way ofstructuring many of his poems by returning to their themesthrough a series of different contexts or images, inviting us to con-sider them from different perspectives. A good example is “Some

Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day” (CP,74–75), which consistsof three brief narratives involving the present and the past. The firstdepicts some Madras bank clerks trying to get home after work.Unable to find a seat on the crammed buses, they begin to speak ofan incident in the reign of King Harsha (7th centuryAD), when theKing gave gifts to ten thousand monks. As a consequence of thisdiscussion, the clerks

miss another bus, the eighth,and begin to walk, for King Harsha’smonks had nothing but their own two feet.

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

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



130 ASHOK BERY

Germany, disorientated by the unfamiliarity of the place and thelanguage, makes what appears to him a connection with something

familiar, the ancient Hindu symbol of the swastika. The Professorsuddenly comes homein English, gesture, and Sanskrit,assimilating

the swastikaon the neighbour’s armin that roaring bus from a greynowhere to a green.

In this poem, there is little in the way of explicit argument or state-ment; instead, we are given three laconic vignettes embodying dif-ferent attitudes to the past. The turn to the past in the first sectioncan be seen as an escape from the realities of modern India (thedecrepit transport system); yet the thought clearly enables the clerksto take positive and independent action, as they start to walk home.This use of the past can be seen as both nostalgic and creative. Theother two sections are more problematic. The “Fulbright Indians,”with “colour cameras for eyes,” are presented satirically as theystand unanalytically mesmerized by the connection they discoverbetween ancient Egypt and India. The Professor of Sanskrit’s mis-reading of the swastika is more sinister, as, in his desire for orienta-tion, he ignores, or is unaware of, the ways in which the Nazismisappropriated the symbol. His homecoming, his “assimilation”of the symbol, domesticates it back into its Hindu contexts and somisses the threatening meanings it has acquired. The triple-pronged approach to India’s relationships with its past probes thesubject from different perspectives, dispersing itself into an un-resolved dialogue between its parts, rather than offering a consis-tent core of meaning.

A similar structure can be seen in a poem quoted briefly above,“Drafts” (CP,157–58 ), a four-part meditation on the theme of theoriginal and its copy or representation. In the first part, a witness ishelping the police to reconstruct “the well-known / but half-seenHyde Park rapist’s face,” a wavering, uncertain process:




now towards,now away from what one thought

one always knewwithout the help of policemen’s

drawings, a trayful of nosesand cruel lips.

“A rough draft, getting rougher,” as he puts it in the poem’s open-ing line.

The second part of the poem uses the image of the Indus valleyseals with their carvings and inscriptions to make the point that“Itself a copy of lost events / the original is nowhere.” In the thirdpart a series of different images is introduced:

And we have originals, clay tigersthat aboriginals drown after each small-

pox ritual,

or dinosaur smells, that leave no copies;and copies with displaced orginals

like these words,

adopted daughters researching parentsthrough maiden names in changing languages,

telephone books,

and familiar grins in railway stations.

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



132 ASHOK BERY

the original is reinforced by the image of his own words as “adop-ted daughters researching parents” who forever elude discovery,

since they are “displaced” in two ways: through changes in maidennames as a result of marriage, and through speaking a different lan-guage. This theme of the link between forebears and descendants iscontinued in the final part of the poem, which focuses on the unpre-dictability of genetic inheritance:

TheDNA leaves copies in me and mineof grandfather’s violins, and programmes

of much older music;

the epilepsies go to an uncleto fill him with hymns and twitches,

bypassing me for now;

mother’s migraines translate, I guess,into allergies, a fear of black cats,and a daughter’s passion

for bitter gourd and Dostoevsky;mother’s almond eyes mix with my wife’s

ancestral hazel

to give my son green flecks in a painter’s eye,but the troubled look is all his own.

Even the lines of inheritance involve a “guess” – a hypothesis, areconstruction, a verbalization; in short, a provisional, uncertainrepresentation. The end of the poem leaves us with an image oforiginality, something unique (“the troubled look is all his own”),but an originality that exists, as it were, in the margins of what weinherit, just as what we call “originality” in our discussions of art orliterature exists within a framework of intertextuality.30 This kind of

30 In his afterword toPoems of Love and War , Ramanujan discusses the rela-tionship of originality and intertextuality as manifested in classical Tamilpoetry;Poems of Love and War sel. & tr. A.K. Ramanujan (New York: ColumbiaUP, 1985 ):280 –86 .




structuring produces an effect similar to that which Ramanujan at-tributes to the use of insets or implicit comparisons in classical

Tamil poetry:Unlike metaphor and simile, it [an inset] often leaves out all thepoints of comparison and all explicit markers of comparison (eg,“like,” “as”); such an omission increases manyfold the power of thefigure. As we have seen in the poems, image intensifies image,associations flow into each other. These “montage” and “dissolve”effects are aided by the flowing syntax of the language.31

“Flow,” “montage” and “dissolve” are precisely the kinds of termsone might use to describe the effect of the structure of poems suchas “Drafts” or “Some Indian Use of History on a Rainy Day”: inboth poems, scene dissolves into scene, context into context, imageinto image.

Ramanujan’s reference to syntax is suggestive, a dissolving, frag-menting syntax being characteristic of his own poetry. In order toillustrate and explore this, I will need to quote at some length fromone of his poems, “Love Poem for a Wife,2,” since the syntacticalfeature in question takes a considerable time to unfold itself (severallines are omitted after the first two quoted below, but these areinterpolations rather than being grammatically essential):

After a night of ragethat lasted days,[…]

my wife’s alwayschanging syriac face,chosen of all faces,a pouting difficult child’schanging in the chameleonemeraldwilderness of Kerala,small cousin to tall

31 Ramanujan,Poems of Love and War , 246 .



134 ASHOK BERY

mythic men, rubberplantand peppervine,

frocks with print patternscopied locallyfrom the dottedbutterfly,grandmother wearing whiteday and night in a village

full of the colour schemesof kraits and gartersnakes;adolescent in Aden among stabbingArabs, betrayed and whippedyet happy among shipsin harbour,and the evacuees,

the borrowed earthunder the borrowed trees;taught dry and wet,hot and coldby the monsoons then,by the siroccos now

on copperdustcones, the cratertownships in the volcanoes

of Aden:I dreamed one day

That face my own yet hers (CP,83 –84 )

The subject of this poem, “my wife’s always/changing syriac face,”is another example of that instability of identity to which I havedrawn attention earlier. The poem embodies this changeabilitypartly through the dissolution of image into image, scene intoscene, place into place: “chameleon,” for instance, is followed by“emerald” and then, among other things, by the patterns on the

frocks, by the “dotted/butterfly,” the “colour schemes/of kraits




and gartersnakes.” These images resemble the inset technique refer-red to earlier not only in the way they flow into one another, but

also in another respect, which Ramanujan describes in the followingterms:

Poetry for the Tamils does not unify a multiverse but expresses auniverse from within, speaking through any of its parts. The manbelongs to the scene, the scene represents the man […] This kind of“metonymous metaphor,” based on an entire formal scheme, is aspecial feature of classical Tamil forms.32

The frocks, the butterfly, the grandmother, the kraits and garter-snakes, for instance, are not used as similes or metaphors for thewife’s changing face. They are components of the Keralan scenewhich, in themselves, and in their rapid displacement of each other,become metonyms for her changeability.

The dissolving effects are heightened by Ramanujan’s radicalline-breaks here, as throughout his poetry. “Chameleon,” posi-tioned at the end of a line, starts one train of thought, but this isthen rerouted somewhat by “emerald” at the beginning of the nextline. Other examples of this effect, created by the separation of theadjective from the noun it is qualifying, include: “tall/mythicmen,” “dotted/butterfly,” and “copper/dustcones.”

It is, however, the syntax of this poem that I especially want todraw attention to here. The poem consists of one (grammatically in-complete) sentence, divided in two by the colon after “the volca-noes/of Aden.” The logic of the syntax is elusive. Trying to graspthe main movement of thought, we start with a subordinate clausebeginning “After a night of rage”; the arrival of the apparent subjectof the sentence “my wife”s always/changing syriac face” is, how-ever, delayed for a number of lines. Furthermore, this subject of thepotential main clause of the sentence is not in fact completed by averb. Instead, the poem moves on to a different grammatical subject, “I”: “I dreamed one day.” As a result, the wife’s face and iden-tity disperse themselves among the various details in the quotationgiven above. The elusiveness of the syntax, I would suggest, re-

32 Ramanujan,Poems of Love and War , 247 .



136 ASHOK BERY

plicates this elusiveness of the wife’s face. A comment Ramanujanmakes about his practice as a translator is relevant here:

Many of my devices (eg, indentation, spacing) and compromises aremade in order to mimic closely the syntactic suspense of the origi-nal, without, I hope, estranging the English. Frequently the poemsunify their rich and diverse patterns by using a single, long, mar-velously managed sentence. I try to make my translation imitate asimilar management, even in the relatively simple examples citedhere. (CE,223 )

“Love Poem for a Wife,2” does indeed consist of “a single, long,marvelously managed sentence” and it also maintains syntacticsuspense through devices such as lineation and the grammaticalelusiveness discussed above.

Another example of “syntactic suspense” is “Astronomer,” apoem about Ramanujan’s father – specifically the way in which hemoved between worlds represented by astronomy and astrology,Western scientific attitudes and Indian (specifically Hindu) belief.The young Ramanujan found this disturbing:

I had just been converted by Russell to the “scientific attitude.” I(and my generation) was troubled by his holding together in onebrain both astronomy and astrology; I looked for consistency in him,a consistency he didn’t seem to care about, or even think about.When I asked him what the discovery of Pluto and Neptune did tohis archaic nine-planet astrology, he said, “You make the necessarycorrections, that’s all.” Or, in answer to how he could read the Gītā religiously having bathed and painted on his forehead the red andwhite feet of Vishnu, and later talk appreciatively about BertrandRussell and even Ingersoll, he said, “The Gītā is part of one’s hy-giene. Besides, don’t you know, the brain has two lobes?” (CE,36 )

“Astronomer,” too, consists of one long sentence – in this case,spread out across nine tristichs. The unifying potential of this, how-ever, is countered by the syntax:

Skyman in a manhole

with astronomy for dream,



138 ASHOK BERY

roring and reflexivity which take place amongst them. They aresimultaneously in communion and separate, related to, but also

pulling away from, or refracting, each other. His own poetry, as Ihave been arguing, enacts an aesthetic of the fragment, while at thesame time acknowledging the aspiration to unity. This doublemovement could be said to form a kind of aesthetic counterpart tothe tensions between unity and fragmentation I emphasized whilediscussing models of Indian identity. Ramanujan’s aesthetic theoryand practice, as well as his explicitly articulated views on India’s

cultures, are opposed to any monolithic conceptions of India, suchas those embodied in the very different ideologies of Hindutva anda modernity which sees itself as the only model for India ratherthan as one element in the mosaic of the nation.

WORKSCITED Bardhan, Pranab. “The State Against Society: The Great Divide in IndianSocial Science Discourse,” inNationalism, Democracy and Development: Stateand Politics in India , ed. Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal (Delhi: OxfordUP,1997 ):184 –95 .

Bery, Ashok. “‘We Have Grown to Look at the Large World as Part of Us’:Modernity and the Nation in Two Indian Novels of the1930 s,” in ThePolitical Subject: Essays on the Self from Art, Politics and Science, ed. WendyWheeler (London: Lawrence & Wishart,2000 ):160 –78 .

Bhatt, Chetan.Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Ox-ford & New York: Berg,2001 ).Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: WhoSpeaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?”Representations 37 (Winter1992 ):1–26 .

Chakrabarty, Dipesh.Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Histori-cal Difference (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 2000 ).

Chatterjee, Partha.The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial His-tories (PrincetonNJ: PrincetonUP, 1993 ).

Corbridge, Stuart, & John Harriss.Reinventing India: Liberalization, HinduNationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity,2000 ).

Jha, Rama. “A Conversation with A.K. Ramanujan,”The Humanities Review 3.1 (January–June1981 ):5–13.

Khilnani, Sunil.The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton,1997 ).King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English (Delhi: OxfordUP, rev. ed.

2001 ).



Communalism, Corruption and Dutyin Rohinton Mistry’sFamily Matters

PETERMOREY

N 6TH DECEMBER 1992 , the Babri Mosque at Ayodhyawas destroyed by a large crowd of Hindu militants,claiming the site on which it stood as the birthplace of the

god Ram and therefore sacred to their religion. In its place they pro-posed the construction of a Ram temple. Within hours of the newsreaching Bombay, angry Muslims had taken to the street in protest.But they soon found themselves confronted by highly organizedgroups of Hindu activists celebrating the ‘victory’ at Ayodhya. Thehorrific violence that ensued continued sporadically throughoutDecember and January. By the time it came to an end almost eighthundred people were dead and many more had been made home-less. In a few short weeks Bombay’s reputation as a haven of tole-rance and communal eclecticism lay in tatters.1

The Maharashtrian state elections of1995 took place against abackground of anti-Muslim sentiment resulting from the civil un-rest which had followed the destruction of the Babri Mosque twoand a half years earlier. At the polls, theShiv Sena (Army of Shiva),depicting itself as the “defender of Hindus,” won enough supportto form a coalition government with theBJP (Bharatiya Janata

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

O



142 PETERMOREY

Party). This success represented the culmination of thirty years ofactivism by theShiv Sena in Bombay, fuelled by its charismatic and

ruthless leader, the Senapati, Bal Thackeray, which had seen theorganization develop from a cadre concerned with employmentopportunities for Maharashtrian speakers to a major player in theHindu nationalist movement on the metropolitan, and hencenational, stage.2 Drawing on its appeal to a broad spectrum of theBombay population, and raising the banner of Hindu majoritarian-ism or Hindutva, theShiv Sena exploited the inevitable conse-

quences, in terms of inequality, fostered by capitalist developmentin the city. It employed flexible tactics and a posse of young, vigor-ous activists trained to see political work as part of a larger strugglesometimes requiring unscrupulous methods and direct physicalviolence, and was involved in such nefarious activities as protectionrackets, illegal land deals, and drugs and contraband smuggling.The movement of theShiv Sena from fringe player to main actor in

the unfolding drama of Bombay politics both indicates, and is asymptom of, what Novy Kapadia has described as the “criminalisa-tion of politics and the politicisation of crime, so rampant in India inthe last decade of the twentieth century.”3

It is against this backdrop of communalist politics and corruptionthat the action of Rohinton Mistry’s third novel,Family Matters ,takes place. Ostensibly the story of the pressures faced by one

down-at-heel Parsi family in their attempts to care for an aged andinfirm patriarch, the novel also offers a consideration of how, de-spite all efforts to keep them separate, the public world impinges onthe private space, and how the taint of corruption can mark eventhe most insular and apparently upright of communities. Charac-ters are caught in a complex web of actions and reactions in theirdealings with each other and with the wider world they inhabit.

Physical corruption and the inevitable change and loss accompany-ing mortality are linked with the social and political corruption

2 Bal Thackeray is memorably lampooned as the Mainduck, Raman Fielding,leader of the Mumbai Axis in Salman Rushdie’sThe Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape,1995 ).

3 Novy Kapadia, “The Politics of Survival and Domination in A Fine Balance,”in The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry: Critical Studies, ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya (London:Sangam,1998 ):132 . See also Sharma, “Chronicle,”274 .



Communalism, Corruption and Duty: Rohinton Mistry 143

characteristic of modern Bombay, and with the moral corruption ofcharacters who, often for laudable reasons, perpetrate deceits and

engage in subterfuge. For example, Yezad Chenoy uses his family’sprecious housekeeping money to gamble on the illegal lottery, theMatka, making losses they can ill afford. Yet he does so in the hopeof meeting the increased expense caused by the arrival of his father-in-law, who, despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease, has beenousted from his home by the devious machinations of an embit-tered stepdaughter at her wit’s end. Similarly, in a move connected

to the endemic municipal and national corruption that sees politi-cians and criminals in league, his son Jehangir is tempted to betrayhis role as school homework monitor and take money for overlook-ing his classmates’ mistakes. In particular, Yezad’s attempts to in-fluence his ecumenical employer to stand for election on an anti-communalist, anti-corruption ticket – prompted less by concern forBombay than for the promotion he anticipates for himself as a result

– backfire in tragic fashion. The cost of such actions is investigatedas part of the novel’s interest in moral ambiguity and causality,means and ends, which often centres on the distinction betweenduty and free will. In this it recalls the strictures of Kantian ethicalphilosophy, and, emphasizing the text’s hybridity, the Zoroastrianinjunction to “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.”4 The ques-tion of how to identify the good course of action in a world seem-

ingly devoid of moral absolutes casts a shadow over the best inten-tions. Mistry explores the inevitable fragmentation of such ideals inpractice and the overlapping, and sometimes contradictory, com-pulsions of duty to family, to community, and to the Zoroastrianfaith. What is revealed is a Parsi community whose response to itsglorious past and attenuated status in postcolonial India is funda-mentally split between an urge for physical and imaginative escape

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



144 PETERMOREY

and a hidebound orthodoxy that, ironically, echoes the purist agen-das of the very Hindu nationalism that threatens it.

Family in the novel comes to have both positive and negativeconnotations. The Chenoy–Vakeel–Contractor family unit is alreadyfractured by loss: Coomy and Jal Contractor’s own father diesyoung and they are unwillingly swept into a new domestic arrange-ment when their mother seeks the security of a marriage to Nari-man Vakeel, who, in turn, carries with him the whiff of scandal anddivided loyalties owing to his liaison with a non-Parsi, Lucy Bra-

ganza. When his father refuses to countenance his exogamous in-tentions, Nariman reluctantly yields to the marriage with YasminContractor. Nariman soon adds a daughter of his own, Roxana, tohis newly acquired stepchildren, leading to longstanding jealousiesand resentment about favouritism.

As these almost ad-hoc arrangements indicate, families develop,change and some branches die out while others are propagated and

flourish. Beyond this, there are affiliations independent of blood tiesthat come to take on the supportive qualities of the family ideal: theletter-writer and bookstore owner Vilas Rane seems part of a multi-tude of “ready-made families” as he preserves the link betweenilliterate workers forced to leave their birthplaces and come to thecity for work and those they have left behind; “writing and readingthe ongoing drama of family matters.”5 Families can be protective

spaces, but they can also stifle with a blanket of over-protectiveness:Yezad’s older sisters fiercely resent anyone vying for a share of theirbrother’s affections; and even the well-meaning Roxana fusses overher sons, Jehangir and Murad, worrying at the slightest sign of theinevitable childhood coughs or stomach upsets. Yet, sinister exam-ples of parental control are at work, too, not only in Mr Vakeel’sinterdiction against Nariman marrying for love, but also toward the

end of the novel when Yezad, tossed by events back to a literal andracially based understanding of Parsi uniqueness, effectively re-enacts the same prejudicial injunctions when dealing with his eldestson’s first serious relationship.

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




Nariman’s Parkinson’s disease is linked to osteoporosis. Hebreaks his leg when out for a walk, leading to the regime of bed rest

which tests Coomy, with whom he lives at first in the inappropri-ately named Chateau Felicity, to her limit. Eventually, the plaster onNariman’s leg gives Coomy the idea of dislodging that other plas-ter, on the ceiling of their apartment, in order to keep her stepfatherat the Chenoy’s flat where he has been recuperating. Parkinson’sand osteoporosis are only two of the many examples of what onemight call bodily corruption that markFamily Matters . Characters

are furnished with a full complement of ailments: Coomy’s brother Jal is partially deaf and wrestles with a malfunctioning hearing aid;the increasingly choleric Yezad develops angina; and Jehangir has adelicate digestive system, upset by ill-prepared food and the pangsof conscience. Even the mechanical cricket-bat-wielding Santa, erec-ted by Yezad’s employer, Mr Kapur, in his sports-goods shop tocelebrate Christmas and represent his inclusive view of Bombay

and its communities, creaks rheumatically and shudders in itsdown-swing as if it too has Parkinson’s. Issues of mobility versusimmobility, decay and mortality are explored through Nariman’sfate. From a life lived fully through the body, he comes to existsolely in the life of the mind. As he thinks back on his blighted lovefor Lucy, Nariman becomes, in Yeats’s terms, “sick with desire /And fastened to a dying animal.”6 His struggles to perform the

simplest tasks become the most acute manifestation of the Sisy-phian labours of other characters, such as Roxana and Yezad, strug-gling every day to make ends meet, or Coomy fighting vainly tohold back the tide of bitterness she feels for the old man she blamesfor her mother’s untimely death.

Coomy and her brother-in-law Yezad actually share several psy-chologically significant traits, despite being at loggerheads over

who should look after Nariman. They both baulk at the unpleasantphysical realities of caring for a prostrate, paralyzed relative:Coomy is sickened by his bodily effluvia, and Yezad refuses totouch the bedpan on which Nariman is now reliant. Their revulsionis of a piece with their obsessive desire to exercise control over their

6 W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” in Yeats,Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Pan/Macmillan,1974 ): lines21–22 .




the tentacularShiv Sena has provided the ‘enforcers’ for many ofthese developments. In Mistry’s novel they are also shown to have

a finger in the Matka pie. The underground lottery helps to fundthe Shiv Sena machinery. It also finances the organized crime thathas infected the city and its institutions, causing the sagacious VilasRane to observe: “Matka is Bombay and Bombay is Matka” (200 ). Inaddition to its ties with gangsters, theShiv Sena has implemented acultural censorship programme, much to Yezad’s exasperation, andopposes a bizarre diversity of events and activities it deems cor-

rupting to the culturally homogeneous and “pure” nation it en-visages; targets have included certain artworks, Valentine’s day,men’s magazines, and women working in bars.10 Top of the list, asalways, are those ubiquitous “national enemies,” Muslims. Yezadshakes his head: “What a joke of a government. Clowns and crooks.Or clownish crooks” (265 ). Yet there is real danger in crossing them.Not only is it suggested that theShiv Sena was implicated in the

murder, during the Bombay riots, of the family of Husain, MrKapur’s Muslim peon at the shop, but Mr Kapur himself falls vic-tim to those representatives of the forces of sectarianism he hadbriefly resolved to oppose. They also beat up the radical journalist/actor Gautam for writing an article on the “politician–criminal–police nexus” (199 ). Nowadays the enemies and “defenders” of thestate are identical and funded from the same illegal sources. This

sorry state of affairs provokes a discussion between Gautam and hisfellow thespian, Bhaskar, over a central ethical question confrontingthe modern Bombayite: how does one act when faced with injusticein a situation where law and order has either broken down or isitself complicit with the wrong-doers? (A telling example of this isplayed out when, despite being an eyewitness to the murder of MrKapur, Husain is angrily advised by the police to stop making

“wild accusations” aboutShiv Sena involvement in his employer’sdeath.) The actors muse:

10 It has also included suppression of one of the most stinging indictments ofits ruthless style of government, Rushdie’sThe Moor’s Last Sigh, which was tem-porarily banned in India at the behest of the communalist kingpin, Bal Thacke-ray. See Ganguly, “Transgressing,”107 –15.



148 PETERMOREY

“Isolated incidents, they call them,” said Gautam.“Exactly,” said Bhaskar. “They say that our nation has made so

much progress – satelliteTV, they say, Internet, e-mail, best soft-ware designers in the world.”Gautam chuckled. “Hamaara Bharat Mahaan, they repeat like that

government slogan, and they laughed […] ‘What to do? People areafraid to accept the truth. As T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘Human kind cannotbear very much reality’.” (202 –203 )

Even cricket, that watchword for probity and fair play, is nowcrooked, as Vilas remarks, referring to the match-fixing scandalsthat rocked the sport in South Asia in the mid-to-late1990 s.

The moral taint that everywhere affects Bombay life also increa-singly makes its presence felt in the lives of Nariman’s family. Themost glaring example of this is Coomy’s devious plan to foist herstepfather on the already financially constrained Chenoy wing of

the family, and the even more underhand measures she takes tokeep him there. Yet, other, less overt instances of dishonesty alsotypify characters’ dealings with each other and, sometimes, withthemselves. Jehangir’s capitulation to his classmates’ entreaties toturn a blind eye to their mistakes, and so earn a few much-neededextra rupees for the family’s essential purchases, betrays that faithplaced in him as homework monitor by his teacher, the lovely Miss

Alvarez. He wholeheartedly embraces the teacher’s exhortations atthe beginning of the year, that moral choices made now can becarried on into adult life, and that her pupils can help to purify thebefouled air of civic affairs. As for the schoolmaster Herbert Pem-broke in E.M. Forster’sThe Longest Journey, who observes that“School is the world in miniature,” so here Jehangir’s classroomtakes on a metonymic relationship to society and nation.11 Although

he wants to help Miss Alvarez fight corruption in his own, smallway, Jehangir is eventually compromised and becomes part of it.Likewise, Yezad succumbs to temptation and removes money fromthe worn but neatly labelled envelopes containing savings for staple

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




items such as “Milk and Tea,” “Water and Electricity,” to place betson the Matka.

Both Yezad and Jehangir, in their different ways, violate Yezad’sfather’s example of that scrupulous Parsi honesty for which thecommunity is celebrated. This example was set when Mr Chenoyensured the safe delivery of a large consignment of money to thebank for which he worked, despite the surrounding chaos andpanic caused by wartime explosions. “In gratitude for an exemplarydisplay of courage and honesty in the course of duty” (FM,224 ), he

was presented with a commemorative clock, which Yezad conti-nues to cherish and refuses to allow Murad to wind, long after hehimself has compromised the values it represents. After relating thetale of his father’s heroism, Yezad, somewhat ironically, warns hissons: “Remember, people can take everything away from you, butthey cannot rob you of your decency […] You alone can do that, byyour actions.” However, Yezad, and the generation that comes after

him, are, in a sense, victims as well as inheritors of standards set inother times, and in other contexts. The myth of Parsi honesty andintegrity is an ambiguous one, both inspiration and burden. AsVilas Rane comments, such myths can become outdated and “makemisfits of men” (205 ). The complicating factor, and what preventsFamily Matters from being simply a text lamenting moral decline, isthat both Yezad and his son act as they do for the best of reasons: to

secure extra funds to cover the increased cost of looking after Nari-man with his expensive medicines.In fact, moral ambiguity in motivation is at the heart of the novel.

Family Matters repeatedly returns to questions of means and ends,and the negative outcome of the well-intended act. A number ofsituations lend themselves to a kind of double construction, accord-ing to the discrepancy between what characters think their actions

will achieve and what the end-result actually turns out to be:Roxana innocently suggests employing the incompetent handymanEdul Munshi to fix Coomy’s ceiling, thus setting in train events thatwill lead to both their deaths; the scam to frighten Mr Kapur intorunning in the forthcoming municipal election is suggested by theeminently sympathetic Vilas; while Yezad suggests that realShivSena goondas may be better equipped for the task than Vilas’s ver-

bose actor friends. Most intractable of all, perhaps – and the se-



150 PETERMOREY

quence of events that appears to initiate all the Chenoy family’ssubsequent troubles – is Nariman’s inability to give up his relation-

ship with Lucy Braganza, even after his marriage to Yasmin. Lucyfollows him to his new family home, takes a job as an ayah with aneighbour in order to be near him, and repeatedly threatens sui-cide. Time and again Nariman follows her up to the roof of ChateauFelicity and dissuades her from jumping. Despite his efforts to calmhis former lover, Nariman finds himself yielding to the promptingsof old emotions as well as the concern he feels for Lucy in her dis-

tressed obsession. At one point he allows himself to wonder whe-ther Lucy’s perseverance is the result of undying love or a desire forretaliation. Likewise, as readers we are aware that, by giving way toher entreaties – albeit out of sympathy – he is hurting his wife andstepchildren: in which respect his actions can be seen as selfishrather than benevolent.

Such moral complexity gives a new twist to Mistry’s perennial

concern with the idea of goodness as understood in Zoroastrianism.Each of Mistry’s works contains a reference to the prime require-ments of the Zoroastrian faith, “munashni , gavashni, kunashni”:“good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Characters orient them-selves, and to an extent are judged, according to this triple injunc-tion.Family Matters , however, complicates the picture by raising thequestion of what exactly these good thoughts, words and deeds

might consist of. How does one recognize them in a situation whereeverything and everyone is, to some extent, compromised? Accord-ing to Zoroastrianism, good and evil are completely separate: theformer being a positive quality emanating from Ahura Mazda, theWise Lord, and the latter being the result of the intrusion of theZoroastrian Devil, Ahriman, into the Ahuric realm.12 Yet in theworld inhabited by Yezad and his family, the notion of good is

adulterated and evil is immanent in humankind. Good and badpermeate one another, partly through those ageless human procli-vities vengeance, pride and intolerance. Hence characters’ motivesare often grey. Coomy behaves badly towards Nariman and off-loads him onto the Chenoys partly because she fears the distur-

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




bance of her carefully ordered existence and the introduction of dirtand decay, partly because she doubts her ability to cope, and partly

as a belated and perhaps subconscious act of revenge for the wayNariman treated her mother. Coomy’s unhealthy resentment mayhave festered for years, but she does have a legitimate grievance.(Hence, the father/”daughters” situation here is never as morallyclear-cut as in those other dramatic tales of filial disloyalty,KingLear and Père Goriot, which provide models for Mistry’s inves-tigations.) Coomy feels guilty about what she has done, as does the

younger Nariman when confronted with the proof of what his con-tinued infatuation with Lucy is doing to his family, and Yezadspends much of the second half of the novel tortured by guilt overhis covert activities until he finds that religion can conveniently bemade to bear the burden of a multitude of sins.

The great question of the novel, which permeates everything yetremains unasked until Jehangir’s epilogue at the end, is who is to

blame for Lucy and Yasmin’s fatal fall? Visiting old Dr Fitter, Jehan-gir learns for the first time his grandmother’s dying words, onlyhalf-heard by horrified bystanders, which have echoed down theyears and tarred Nariman and his kin with the indelible mark ofscandal:

“… all the confusion was due to one word in her sentence: did she

say ‘he’ or ‘we’?”“What do you think she said?” I inquire meekly.“Oh, I know what she said. She said, ‘What did we do!’ But there

were other people gathered around. Some of them heard, ‘What didhe do!’ and they claimed it incriminated Nariman.” (477 )

This is significant less as some sinister plot-twist than as a pointabout how actions have consequences which reverberate down theyears, but which people – often reading backwards from their ownpoint in time and circumstance – can interpret as they wish. Cer-tainly, Coomy has chosen to interpret her mother’s unhappy mar-riage and death in a certain way, as her lonely life, blighted bybitterness and an unforgiving attitude towards Nariman, makesabundantly clear.



152 PETERMOREY

Thus, characters inFamily Matters are seen largely to choose theirown fates. Yet they do not do so arbitrarily. Each is burdened by an

acute sense of duty: to family, to employer or to the city as a whole.When hearing of Mr Kapur’s intention to run in the forthcomingmunicipal election, Yezad initially counsels that his duty lies inlooking after his shop, before recognizing the opportunity for an in-crement for himself that would accrue from the increased responsi-bilities. He invokes theBhagavad Gita in urging the pre-eminentclaims of duty. Ironically, it is the secular-leaning Hindu, Mr Kapur,

who counters this when, having decided not to run after all, heechoes Kant in justifying the decision to put family above civicduty:

“Think about it – pure duty is unconcerned with outcome. Evenif I become a municipal councillor, fight the good fight, what do Ihave at the end? The satisfaction of knowing I’ve done my duty. As

far as Bombay is concerned, nothing changes. Nobody can turn backthe clock.” (294 )

As the pre-eminent philosopher of ethics, Kant famously pro-posed that the moral worth of any given action could be deter-mined not by considering its outcome, but by identifying the inten-tion behind it. Specifically, only actions performed in accordancewith duty have genuine moral worth.13 Although there are obviousdifficulties in trying to identify whether others are acting primarilyout of a sense of duty, Kant proposed some guiding principles bywhich the individual should orientate his or her actions. The mostfamous of these is his “categorical imperative”: “I should never actexcept in such a way that I can also will that my maxim shouldbecome a universal law.”14 As Roger Scruton, among others, hasnoted, this first formulation of the categorical imperative provides“the philosophical basis of the famous golden rule, that we shoulddo as we would be done by.”15 One behaves well, according to rulesone would expect everyone else to observe also, for the mutual

13 Immanuel Kant, “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals,” inEthicalPhilosophy, tr. James W. Ellington (IndianapolisIN: Hackett,2nd ed.1994 ):11.

14 Kant, “Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals,”14.15 Scruton,Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OxfordUP, 2001 ):86 .




benefit of all parties. In one respect, those of Yezad’s actions whichseem most questionable – taking the household savings for gam-

bling, temporarily pocketing the protection money, setting the fakeShiv Sena thugs to frighten Mr Kapur – are all motivated by a notionof duty: the long-term duty to provide for his family. However,there is a sense in which the various duties that hem him in – to MrKapur as his employer as well as to his family – come into conflictwith each other. Likewise, Coomy is forced to choose between theduty to look after her incapacitated stepfather and her sense of duty

to the memory of her biological mother, for whose death she holdshim responsible. She decides to prioritize the latter, and lies that herceiling has collapsed in order to absolve herself of her duties toNariman. In neither case, however, could Yezad or Coomy wishthat others would behave towards them with the same kind of de-ception and evasiveness as they themselves have employed. Com-menting on the responsibilities imposed by Kant’s categorical impe-

rative, Warner A. Wick offers the examples of lying and gangster-ism: both particularly apposite for the familial and urban politics ofFamily Matters:

to seek credibility by lying is not a point that can be universallyadopted! No rational agent can will that maxim as a universal law,for in its universal form it is self-contradictory. A lie can work only

if enough people tell the truth to make truthfulness the normalexpectation, just as the gangster can only succeed if most people arelaw-abiding. These miscreants act unfairly in that their maximsrequire that other people act differently.16

Extrapolating from his initial principle, Kant proposed a secondformulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way thatyou treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person ofanother, always at the same time as an end and never simply as ameans.”17 In other words, one should treat others always as self-determining agents, and not just as an instrument to be used toachieve one’s own aims. Once more, Yezad and Coomy can be seen

16 Wick, “Introduction: Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Kant,Ethical Philo-sophy,”xviii–xix.

17 Kant,Ethical Philosophy, 36 .



154 PETERMOREY

to fall short of this ideal: Yezad treats Mr Kapur and his genuinecivic concern as a means to promotion; Coomy uses Nariman’s ill-

ness as a way to exact revenge on him for his treatment of hermother. The point here is not to measure these characters againstsome impossible benchmark of good behaviour, nor to show howthey fail to meet the Zoroastrian requirement of good thoughts,good words, good deeds. Rather, it is to give an indication of howthe tussle between duty and inclination provides the motor thatdrives the action of the novel and its moral choices.

In short,Family Matters is concerned with causes and effects –both intended and inadvertent – and how one interprets and ac-counts for connections between past and present. If one cannotarrest time, as the evocative old photographs of Bombay that MrKapur shows Yezad briefly offer to do, can one at least exercisesome mitigating power over its apparently random dispensations?Formally, the concern for past–present connections is played out

through repetitions: Yezad comes to repeat Nariman’s father’s in-flexible religious dogma; Murad’s non-Parsi girlfriend threatens arepeat of the parental estrangement of the earlier generation; and, atone point, Yezad unfairly accuses Roxana of neglecting the rest ofher family in favour of her father, paralleling Yasmin’s earlier com-plaints as Nariman abandons her and the children to run afterLucy. Against these examples of family breakdown the reader can

set the many types of repair attempted inFamily Matters , only someof which are successful. Edul Munshi, the disastrous handyman,tries to repair the ceiling Coomy has vandalized, bringing down asupporting beam that kills them both. Dr Tavancore and the bone-setter at the hospital do their best to patch up Nariman’s brittlebody after his fall. Vilas’s letter-writing repairs families torn apartby migration. Yezad is “touched by his employer’s gentleness as he

went about mending the cracks in Husain’s broken life” (144 ).Finally, Dr Fitter and the father-and-son police combination ofSuperintendent and Inspector Masalavala scurry out to fix thedeath certificates and help tidy up after the two fatal accidentswhich threaten the Parsi community with scandal, viewing it as oneof the “good deeds” required of them.

A number of explanatory options are available to the Chenoys

and others as they attempt to piece together the chain of events by




which their family affairs have moved from initial domestic har-mony to tension and hostility. In their besetting concern to find an

explanation for phenomena, they sometimes resemble the charac-ters in another of Mistry’s fictional templates, Voltaire’s satireCan-dide, who deliberate “on the contingent or non-contingent events ofthis world […] on causes and effects, on moral and physical evil, onfree will and necessity.”18 InFamily Matters , as inCandide, events areinterpreted, variously, as the product of coincidence, free will, des-tiny, or God’s will. On the way to offer his condolences to Mrs

Kapur after the murder of her husband, Yezad reflects on the co-incidence by which Mr Kapur was visited by realShiv Sena thugs,after the actors he had engaged to frighten his employer by playingthe role ofShiv Sena goondas had departed: “That was the problem,everyone dismissing the possibility of coincidence” (393 ). Later,when his new-found religiosity has taken hold and he suggests as acoincidence the fact that Nariman develops bed sores as soon as his

new ayah arrives, Roxana reminds him: “You say there’s no suchthing as coincidence […] You call it another word for the Hand ofGod” (482 ).

The delivery of Nariman into the Chenoys’ care, and the acciden-tal death of Coomy, is ascribed to destiny in Yezad’s now-fatalisticoutlook. Roxana reflects on the tragedy of the shattered love-matchof Edul Munshi and his wife by asking “What is this absurd force

called destiny?” – to which the increasingly devout Yezad replies:“Man proposes, God disposes” (398 ). As characters with strong reli-gious convictions, Roxana and, later, Yezad read causality in a par-ticular way. They tend to assume that the operations of cause andeffect are regulated by a pre-existing entity they know as God, orAhura Mazda. In effect, they hold what Kant, and indeed Voltaire,would describe as an a-priori understanding of cause and effect. A-

priori truths are those deemed to exist independently of experience,and a-priori knowledge is that which is not based in empirically

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



156 PETERMOREY

verifiable experience. Roger Scruton gives some examples of the apriori:

the following propositions seem to be true a priori: “Every event hasa cause”; “The world consists of enduring objects which exist inde-pendently of me”; “All discoverable objects are in space and time.”These propositions cannot be established through experience, sincetheir truth is presupposed in the interpretation of experience.19

Thus, Scruton quotes Kant to show that the notion of God itself canbe seen as an a-priori regulative force: “‘the ideal of a supremebeing is nothing but a regulative principle of reason, which directsus to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated froman all-sufficient and necessary cause’.”20 Voltaire’sCandide famouslysends up Pangloss’s unquestioning a-priori justification of things asthey are and the complacent optimism encompassed by his con-viction that, regardless of how bad things appear, this is “the best ofall possible worlds.”21 Likewise, in Mistry’s novel, Roxana allowsherself the luxury of a Panglossian retrospective interpretation ofevents working out for the best, attributing this to God’s will;“when she looked back over the events that had led them to thisevening, it was almost proof of divine power in the universe, withPappa’s broken ankle the start of everything” (435 ). Doubtless, shewould concur with Pangloss that “free will is consistent with abso-lute necessity”:22 an outlook which can reconcile Coomy’s desire toattribute the collapse of her ceiling to an act of God with the factthat she herself encouraged her brother to take a hammer to it.

The religious components of identity are particularly importantfor the Parsi characters, especially in the context of the creepingHindu majoritarianism that surrounds them. However, the mainconcern for this vulnerable community inFamily Matters centres onissues of numerical decline and the merits or otherwise of tradi-tional notions of ethnic purity. Luhrmann records how “Until1941 the Parsi population was slowly but steadily on the rise in India.

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




But in1961 they were down to over100 ,000 ; in1971 , over90 ,000 ; in1991 there were76 ,000 Parsis in India, with around50 ,000 in Grea-

ter Bombay.”23

Near the end of the book, Dr Fitter and InspectorMasalavala discuss the shrinking Parsi community and whatshould be done to halt the diminution. They enumerate the mainfeatures accounting for decreasing numbers: a dwindling birth-rate,marrying outside the community, and migration to the West. West-ernization and Western ideas, once seen as the lifeline of the com-munity, are now identified as part of the problem. Inspector Masa-

lavala’s cranky suggestions to shore up the community includetying educational opportunities to an undertaking to bear a certainnumber of children. The more stoical prescription of Dr Fitter is fora Parsi time-capsule, containing items representative of the culture,to be buried for future generations to unearth when the communityhas died out. That sense of loss indicative of contemporary Parsiculture in India is articulated by the inspector: “To think that we

Parsis were the ones who built this beautiful city and made it pros-per. And in a few more years there won’t be any of us left to tell thetale” (404 ).

For Yezad, the issue is one of purity. He comes to view “thepurity of this unique and ancient Persian community” (127) as beingunder threat from miscegenation, and ponders on the ritual ges-tures of thedastur at the fire-temple, valuing “the cumulative grace

of generations and centuries […] encoded in blood and bone” (333 ).The psychological importance to the orthodox of the unique, un-tainted Persian blood, which is felt to distinguish Parsis from thesurrounding community, should not be underestimated. The ortho-dox are against the mingling of this blood with any other. In thisview, biology supersedes social morality as a guarantor of worth,with a corresponding shift in that notion of the good (thought,

word, or deed) fundamental to Zoroastrian ethics. As Luhrmannhas noted, “The central cosmological struggle of good against evil isdescribed as an effort to achieve purity – that which is evil is im-pure, that which is impure is evil.” However, for the orthodox, a“transformation took place with the concept of purity […] which

23 Tania Luhrmann,The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a PostcolonialSociety (CambridgeMA: HarvardUP, 1996 ):168 .



158 PETERMOREY

was refigured from holiness into racial superiority.”24 The continu-ously burning fire at the temple offers that elusive past–present

connection Yezad craves, and, in a way, the fire-temple replaces thefamily home as a sanctuary from the outside world. As he feels in-creasingly disempowered by events, he falls back more and moreon his reawakened faith, recoiling from the mongrelization andmixing inherent in urban life, to a space of ‘purity’ that is, of course,at the same time one of fantasy.

In his new dogmatic ultra-orthodoxy, he becomes a kind of Zoro-

astrian fundamentalist, imposing his racial and cultural obsessionson everyone around him. He is an active member of an orthodoxZoroastrian association, attempts to inflict draconian menstruationlaws on his wife, and rails against Murad’s non-Parsi girlfriend.Nor does it occur to Yezad that his Parsi purism is of a piece withthe exclusionary compartmentalizing of those Hindu nationalistforces he has previously despised. Mistry understands the psycho-

logical and nostalgic impulses behind social and cultural conser-vatism as well as any other contemporary writer. But his sympa-thies for the consoling qualities of religion and tradition evaporatewhen, as so often, they become a stick with which to beat others.For him, ritual and dogma are of less consequence than socialmorality. In a comment that sums up the choices confronting somany of his characters, Mistry has remarked:

I’m not a practising Parsi but the ceremonies are quite beautiful. Asa child I observed [them] carefully in the same way as I did myhomework, but it had no profound meaning for me. Zoroastrianismis about the opposition of good and evil. For the triumph of good,we have to make a choice.25

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

24 Luhrmann,The Good Parsi, 101.25 Angela Lambert, “Touched with Fire,”Guardian (27 April2002 ):7.26 Scruton,Kant, 96 .




The question “Are you happy?” insistently asked of her husbandand sons by the concerned Roxana, becomes almost a refrain in

Family Matters . Characters have sought happiness, or at least stabi-lity, by following the dictates of duty as far as possible, but, as thisessay has shown, they often find that duty comes into conflict withpersonal inclination or immediate need. According to Kant, there isno point in proclaiming happiness, in the sense of the fulfilment ofone’s desires, as the ultimate goal in life, because it cannot beelevated to the level of that kind of universal law his maxims de-

mand. In fact, to try to do so would be disastrous. This is becauseeach person’s interests, hence definition of happiness, would be insome way different, and would actually lead to conflict: “whileeveryone’s interests are the same in name (happiness), they differ infact; and this difference is almost without limit, because the specificcontent of happiness varies with the temperaments, circumstances,and histories of each individual.”27 In Family Matters , Yezad’s de-

sires for orthodoxy and order clash with Murad’s definition of hap-piness, which includes the right to go out with whomever he wants.Thus, ‘goodness’ and happiness are not necessarily synonymous –the one is not automatically to be found in the other – so the answerto Roxana’s anxious question, repeated at the novel’s end, remains,at best, hesitant and provisional.

WORKSCITED Clark, PeterZoroastrianism: An Introduction to an Ancient Faith (Brighton:Sussex Academic Press,1998 ).

Forster, E.M.The Longest Journey (1907 ; Harmondsworth: Penguin,1988 ).Ganguly, Debjani. “Transgressing Sacred Visions: Taslima, Rushdie andthe Indian Subcontinent,” inShifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Dia-

spora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent , ed. Ralph Crane & Radhika Mo-hanram (Cross/Cultures42 ; Amsterdam & AtlantaGA: Rodopi,2000 ):102 –22 .

Hansen, Thomas Blom. “BJP and the Politics of Hindutva in Maharashtra,”in The BJP and the Compulsions of Politics in India, ed. Thomas Blom Han-sen & Christophe Jaffrelot (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1998 ):121–60 .

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



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Kant, Immanuel.Ethical Philosophy, tr. James W. Ellington (IndianapolisIN:Hackett,2nd ed.1994 ).

Kapadia, Novy. “The Politics of Survival and Domination in A FineBalance,” in The Fiction of Rohinton Mistry: Critical Studies, ed. JaydipsinhDodiya (London: Sangam,1998 ):127–34 .

Lambert, Angela. “Touched with Fire,”Guardian (27 April2002 ):7.Lele, Jayant. “Saffronisation of the Shiv Sena: The Political Economy oCity, State and Nation,” inBombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. SujataPatel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1996 ):185 –213 .

Luhrmann, Tania.The Good Parsi: the Fate of a Colonial Elite in a PostcolonialSociety (CambridgeMA: HarvardUP, 1996 ).

Mars–Jones, Adam. “It’s all a bit of a mystery,”Observer Review (21 April2002 ):17.

Mistry, Rohinton.Family Matters (London: Faber & Faber2002 ).Rushdie, Salman.The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape,1995 ).Scruton, Roger.Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OxfordUP, 2001 ).Sharma, Kalpana. “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold,” inBombay: Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel & Alice Thorner (New Delhi: OxfordUP,1996

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–86

.Voltaire.Candide and Other Tales , tr. Tobias Smollett (tr.1761 ; London: J.M.Dent,1937 ).

Yeats, W.B.Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Pan/Macmil-lan,1974 ).



The Routes of National Identity inAmitav Ghosh’sThe Shadow Lines

SUJALASINGH

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

IKE THE“JETHAMOSHAI” in the quotation above, seve-ral of the characters in Amitav Ghosh’sThe Shadow Lines undertake journeys across countries. The text also conveys

an ongoing sense of flux as not only people but borders, too, are setin motion. It is against this background of the relative movement ofindividuals and boundaries that the invariants of community andidentity take on disturbing and violent dimensions. The convictionof the rootedness of identities and nations is voiced above by asenile old Hindu man who refuses to leave Dhaka to accompany hisrelatives, who have come to restore him to the nation where he issupposed to belong, “India-Shindia.” For although he has carriedon living in the same house, the borders have moved relative to him

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

L



162 SUJALASINGH

and have (in the eyes of his family) banished him from his truehome. It is because the old man’s religious identity and geogra-

phical location are presumed not to match that his relatives removehim from the material rootedness of his house and attempt to re-instate him within the embrace of the nation. In the process, he isviolently killed during a Hindu–Muslim riot – “The old man’s headhad been hacked off,” we are informed on the penultimate page ofthe novel (245 ).

The event that caused the Jethamoshai’s sons to leave Pakistan

was the Partition of India in1947 , and the old man’s death seven-teen years later (in1964 ) is a gruesome retracing of earlier journeys.The riot in which the old man was killed (in Dhaka in East Paki-stan) was sparked off by incidents in far-off Kashmir (in India), itsgeographical remoteness emphasized by the temporal proximity ofthese events.2 The violent assertions of communal identity as mani-fest in these riots (which occur almost instantaneously across wide-

ly separated spaces) are fashioned inThe Shadow Lines into a parableon the consequences of partitioned relationships within the Indiansubcontinent.

The Jethamoshai who is killed in the riot is the uncle of the narra-tor’s grandmother. In this essay, I trace the uncanny links betweendisjunct temporal and spatial spheres and discuss how these aremapped onto a narrative of private–public interaction, an inter-

action that is far from straightforward. The violent ways in whichpublic histories invade private lives is woven into a narrative thatbuilds up the story of a family as sifted through and reported by theunnamed narrator. Divided into two parts, the novel highlights thetwo inextricably linked processes of history-making – the move-ments of “going away” and “coming home.” The first movement,“going away,” looks out on the world, collecting and classifying,

mapping, conceiving of geographies, which the unnamed narratorrecords through an obsessive will to remember. This is an individu-ated spatiality, organized by the structure of a private re-collection.

2 This refers to the1964 riots in East Pakistan and India (in cities like Khulnaand Calcutta) which were sparked off in response to the disappearance of thehair of the Prophet from the Hazratbal Mosque in Kashmir. Interestingly, Kash-mir itself remained relatively peaceful.



164 SUJALASINGH

ISet up as a compendium of family tales, the narrative line ofThe

Shadow Lines is a reconfiguration of ‘given’ materials. The narratorself-consciously and painstakingly jigsaws together reported eventswhich are cited from various sources and carefully shuffled,whether over the limited space of a paragraph or a page or evenseveral pages. Here, I will discuss two examples that highlight thedeliberate narrative ploys of inconsistent reportage, confusing asthey do the role of citation in the re-collecting of personal historiesthat are so crucial to the development of the story. As it erases thespecificity of voices by doing away with quotation marks, the narra-tive voice slips seamlessly in and out of others’ voices, memoriesand idiosyncrasies, and the linear perception of time is chopped up.The reader has to confront not only the disruptive, disjointed timesequence and the multiple spaces rapidly spliced together, but alsothe uncertainty of who is reporting, from where, and to whom.

Here is an example of the narrator remembering the crystalliza-tion of Justice Chaudhury’s table from a cloud of dust:

Yes, she cried in triumph, pointing to a vast, sheet-covered mound.It is still here. Help me pull of the sheet, come on.

I caught hold of one end of the sheet and she of another. Wetugged, but instead of coming off, the sheet seemed to atomise in

our hands, and for a moment everything vanished into a cyclone ofdust.I can still see it, taking shape slowly within that cloud of dust.Like a magician’s rabbit, laughed Ila.Nothing as simple as that, said Robi wryly. No, at least a castle on

a misty mountain top.But in my memory I see it emerging out of that storm of dust like

a plateau in a desert. (47 )The straightforward narration of a few pages is suddenly interrup-ted, broken by voices providing nostalgic interpretations. While “Ican still see it” indicates a shift in time, the move is almost imper-ceptible until one wonders about the narrator’s cousin Robi’s nos-talgia for an event in which he did not participate. A paragraph

later, the narrative moves to another arena, another time-frame,



The Routes of National Identity: Amitav Ghosh 165

another perspective. This time May, the visitor from London, is thespectator: on seeing the huge, expensive table, imported from Eng-

land and then packed away in disuse, she blurts out her outrage atthis sign of colonial collusion and class politics, “Why did he bringthis back for heaven’s sake? Why this worthless piece of England;why something so utterly useless?” (48 ). Her politically correct ex-clamation undermines the magical reconstruction that the othersindulge in, even as adults. Thus, while Ila and Robi’s interjectionsserve as comments on a story line, they are immediately contextual-

ized within the parameters of another kind of response, thus raisingthe question of responsibility for one’s own nostalgia.If the narrative trajectory in the above example lays itself bare

and invites the reader to participate in the process of story-building,there are also points in the novel when the narrative seems to giveall of its sources the slip, sliding into an assumed omnipresence,usually when describing scenes in which Tridib is present. In con-

trast to the painstaking adherence to principles of reportage –where every source is provided, every witness located – in the pass-ages that provide descriptions of scenes in wartime London, onegets a bird’s-eye view of the proceedings in the kind of detail thatraises the question of how the narrator could have access to them.This omnipresence is the most tellingly evident in the reporting ofTridib’s pornographic letter to May. In contrast to the example of

the table, the narrative lapses into a linear, straightforward, third-person narration as it breathlessly and voyeuristically recounts“his” sexual fantasies over a number of pages without any interrup-tions or interpretations. In a text that is otherwise so carefully cited,and where all the stories seem to stem from individual experiencethat have been recounted to the narrator, this slippage into a pan-optic, overseeing narration is significant. Twenty-seven pages later,

almost as a casual aside, we are informed that it was May who,while sitting in a sandwich bar in London, told him (the narrator)“about his [Tridib’s] letter, the letter about ruins” (171). But the sex-ually charged language of the narration could hardly have comefrom May, nor the voyeuristic details of the sexual encounter be-tween a uniformed man and an older woman in a bombed-out cine-ma hall that were contained in the letter. The narrator’s construc-

tion of story-lines almost always builds upon the careful demarca-



166 SUJALASINGH

tion of reference and referents, of reporter and reported. Here, how-ever, he dissolves these demarcations in his slide into meta-narra-

tivity, and this rides on his identification with Tridib. He mediatesthis transcendence within the space of desire, and intercepts Tri-dib’s desire for May. At the end of the novel, upon the resolution ofthe mystery of Tridib’s death, this desire is finally consummated.After May provides the narrator with the details of Tridib’s lastliving moments, the novel ends with the narrator and May lying “ineach other’s arms quietly, in the night” (246 ).

The process of storytelling in the above examples highlights therole of point of view and desire in the construction of narratives.One technique consistently used is the splicing together of non-successive time-sequences which draws attention to the temporaldevelopment of the story-line. Even as the narrative attempts toerase the specificity of voices, the identity of the speaker is carefullyacknowledged throughout the novel. However, the technique of

pinning down events via reportage vies with breaches into meta-narration and eases open spaces within the woven text of the story.These are also the moments that point to the investment of desire inthe construction of narratives.

IIIn this section, I discuss how narrative ploys affect a commentaryon historical meta-narratives as private and public events intersect.Michel de Certeau’s analyses of the power relationships withinwhich narratives are enunciated, their grammar inherited andorganized, is a useful means by which to explore the assessment ofhierarchized histories inThe Shadow Lines. Central to de Certeau’sexposition is the distinction he draws between “strategies” and“tactics.” A strategy is the rationalization of the mechanisms of con-trol exercised by an agency with power – “a business, an army, acity, a scientific institution.”

As in management, every “strategic” rationalization seeks first of allto distinguish its “own” place, that is, the place of its own powerand will, from an “environment.” A Cartesian attitude, if you wish:it is an effort to delimit one’s own place in a world bewitched by the




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

Also, he emphasizes that these strategies of establishing and hold-ing on to power reflect on the “power of knowledge” as the “abilityto transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces.”However, it takes an institution already possessing the power toestablish these narratives to render this “knowledge possible and atthe same time determines its characteristics” (36 ).

A tactic, on the other hand, is a non-localized activity with no setdemarcation of the other’s territory. In fact, “the space of a tactic isthe space of the other” (37). These narrative devices attain their effi-cacy by the very different ways in which they are structured inspace and in time. Strategies operate by establishing a central locusof power, and also a theoretical framework wherein physical spacesare situated and narrated, and where the mechanisms of control are

set into effect within these spatial frames. Thus, according to deCerteau, strategies

attempt to reduce temporal relations to spatial ones through thecombinatory organization of the movements specific to units orgroups of units. (38 )

Tactics, on the other hand, rely on the opportunities thrown up bythe particular moment to ensure the efficacy of their “guilefulruses” – tactics utilize time.

Let us look at some of the narrative ploys that work within, andundermine, strategic outlines inThe Shadow Lines. The circum-stances around Tridib and May’s relationship and Tridib’s deathprompt the narrator to stage a ‘tactical’ utilization of different tem-poralities to undermine the strategic spatial delimitations that ‘pub-lic’ histories of the subcontinent have instituted. The public andprivate spheres get agonizingly intertwined as he begins to uncoverthe events which set the stage for Tridib’s death. History ceases tobe a distant date provided in a book, as he is confronted with the

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



168 SUJALASINGH

process of history making, where singular events get organized,edited and catalogued in official documentation and in public

memory.While his friends remember the1962 war with China and the1965 war with Pakistan, and ask him “What were the riots of1964 ?”(220 ), the narrator is called upon to search for an official record tocorroborate the Calcutta riots of1964 imprinted in his memory.Seated in the safe space of a library, where the fire and frenzy ofriots have been catalogued and organized within the “readable

spaces”4

of its cool, air-conditioned interior, he rummages throughold newspapers to find his haunting memories ratified innewsprint. When the jubilant narrator and his friend Malik, aidedby a piece of cricket trivia, manage to find an entry, “Twenty-ninekilled in riots,” the latter points out:

Didn’t you say the riots happened in Calcutta? […] That’s strange,

he said, tapping the open newspaper. Because these riots here hap-pened in Khulna, in East Pakistan, across the border from Calcutta.(219 )

Not only does the narrator’s triumph appear misplaced, the curiousdisplacement of the reported event from the site of his memoryinduces a sense of infringement of spatial regulation, an uncannytelekinesis. This writerly ploy, of juxtaposing after the event thememory of a Calcutta riot with a newspaper report of the Khulnariots, is a ‘tactic’ – “the space of the tactic is the space of the other.”5 The dividing line between India and Pakistan was drawn along reli-gious lines attempting a dissociation of self from the other. Theassociation of the memory of one conflict uncited in the records ofthe state, with the reports of another in the site of the other’s terri-tory serves to unsettle the established strategies of managementthat seek visibly to cordon off a space:

They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the en-chantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched theirborders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from

4 Michel de Certeau,The Practice of Everyday Life, 36 .5 The Practice of Everyday Life, 36 .




each other like the shifting tectonic plates of the prehistoric Gon-dwanaland. (228 )

A persistent memory seen to be situated in ‘enemy’ territory under-mines the demarcation of self-othering divides that were central tothe establishment of the identities of the two nations. Such a “guile-ful ruse” “poaches” on the “surveillance of the proprietarypowers.”6

The compression into a narrow time-slot of symmetrical events,mirroring each other across the border, is a ploy utilized in the nar-rative to indicate how any carving-out of a notion of a communal ornational identity is haunted by the spectre, the reflection, of the con-stitutive Other. This is exemplified in yet another tactical imple-mentation of the ruses of memory in the novel. In Robi’s recurringdream-sequence of the death of Tridib, he is haunted by the imageof vacant, deserted streets, even though, at the time of Tridib’s

death, rioting crowds flocked the streets of Dhaka. Deserted streets,on the other hand, featured in the schoolboy narrator’s recollectionof riot-hit Calcutta.

It is in dreams and memory, and in the particular arrangement oftheir narratives, that the silences in the discourses of the publicspheres are prised open by the juxtaposing of spaces and the freez-ing of time, in parody of the ways in which the newspapers seek to

do the same. It is this symmetrical alignment of parallel events thatinvokes the plethora of mirror-metaphors in the text, emphasizingthe beguiling links across spaces that the expressions of communalbelonging and alienation forge. For example, when the narratorconsiders the destructive eruptions of communal feeling that renderfamiliar spaces fearful, he characterizes the people of the subconti-nent as possessing “the special quality of loneliness that grows out

of the fear of war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror”(200 ). Elsewhere, he describes Calcutta and Dhaka, cultural centresof Bengali culture, one in predominantly Hindu India, the other inMuslim Pakistan:

6 The Practice of Everyday Life, 37 .



170 SUJALASINGH

each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irre-versible symmetry by the line that was to set us free – our looking

glass border. (228 )The recurrent memory of the geographical space of East Pakistan/Bangladesh is in evidence in much of Ghosh’s work. Here, too, theimposition of a memory is deployed in a key ‘tactical’ manoeuvre.The signs and effects of religious and national identity are shown tospill over the constraints imposed by the agencies of power thatendeavour to cordon off a space as its own. Such an undermining ofthe strategies by which territories are marked up for control (in themode of strategic management as spatial) is achieved by the speci-ficities of historical events. Instead of reading from the map a de-marcation of separation, the so-called Radcliffe Award,7 the narra-tor is struck by a curious irony:

the irony that killed Tridib: the simple fact that there had never beena moment in the4000 -year-old history of that map when the placeswe know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to eachother than after they had drawn their lines…. (228 )

There is a key temporal moment here captured in the figure ofnarratorial irony – Tridib’s fate emerges through the invocation of afour-thousand-year-old history that frames this singular confluence;the rupture of that history manifests itself as an enforced intimacy.This is posited so that the past frames and legitimizes the singularpresent, and the divisions of the present provide a suitable foil forthe invocation of a mythic past. According to Paul de Man,

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that ispure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a

relapse within the inauthentic.8

7 The specification of the border between Indian and (East) Pakistani territorywas decided on12 August 1947 by the Bengal Boundary Commission, appoin-ted by the Governor-General, and is called the “Radcliffe Award” after thechairman of the Commission, Sir Cyril Radcliffe.

8 Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Allegories of Reading (NewHavenCT: YaleUP, 1979 ):211.




Elsewhere in Ghosh’s work, the categories of space and time thatfashion historical experience and reflection can be traced explicitly

in In An Antique Land , where he writes about the removal of docu-ments stored in the Geniza, in Cairo, by orientalist scholars whotook them to countries which would have destroyed the Genizahad it been part of their own history:

It was as though the borders that were to divide Palestine severaldecades later had already been drawn, through time rather thanterritory, to allocate a choice of Histories. (95 )

It is a conceptualization of both the temporal and the spatial frame-works that are intended to manage people’s lives that we are led toregard as susceptible to rupture and “harassed forever” by the “in-authentic.”9 It is the act of partitioning identities that forever imbuesthe polity with the potential for the violent eruption of sectarianclaims of belonging.

In de Certeau’s categories, the subversive power that ‘tactics’wielded was acquired from the temporal possibilities that had thepotential of undermining a spatial, strategic regimentation. The nar-rator’s claim of an irony in Tridib’s death suggests the underpin-nings of the logic of temporality in the narrative, destabilizing theinstitutions of history that have strategically marked out theirspaces and their borders. The narrator’s invocation of a mythic pastto bring out the irony of Tridib’s death is framed within the proli-feration of mirror metaphors in the text. These emphasize the parityof the religiously divided worlds in the subcontinent. It is temptingto apply the mirror instead to the formal characterization of thetemporal organization that the irony relies upon in narrative. Paulde Man has characterized irony and allegory as sharing a common“temporal predicament,” the temporal structure of irony being themirror image of allegory, which is

the tendency of language towards narrative, the spreading outalong the axis of an imaginary time in order to give duration towhat is simultaneous with the subject.10

9 Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality.”10 “The Rhetoric of Temporality,”225 .



172 SUJALASINGH

The setting-up of Tridib’s death, a crucially significant event notonly in the narrator’s life but also in the organization of the entire

novel, thus invites us to read off an allegory of sectarian nationalistidentity in post-Partition India.Ghosh’s text repeatedly veers towards the organization of times

and spaces in its narrative. In this context, extensive ruminations onwhat constitutes a national subject, on a sense of space as home atany given moment, and on that outpouring of signifiers adopted bythe discourses of communal belonging, all lead us to ask one key

question. Along with the narrator/author ofIn an Antique Land , weare drawn to ask whether the time–space manoeuvres to which nar-rative resorts time and again may be read as “the sly allegory on theintercourse between power and the writing of history” (82 )? It is inthese spatio-temporal frameworks that the narrative inThe ShadowLines essays a commentary on the modes of organization that arecentral to historiography. It is also at the margins of such frame-

works that the violence of foreclosure of such narratives is latent.IIIThe metaphors of space – whether utilized in the discourse of selfand Other, in the demarcation of a centre for strategic purposes, orin the domestic or global modes of describing and living in particu-lar habitats – are key elements of the narrative inThe Shadow Lines.The trajectories of the stories that are woven together in the text

traverse and organize places; they select and link them together;they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatialtrajectories.11

In The Shadow Lines, the narrator highlights the interlocking ways in

which urban spaces and social lives are connected. He recountshow his mentor Tridib had told him a story about the sloping roofsof his aunt Queen Victoria’s bungalow. Tridib had directed him tothe awareness of how a sloping roof could change familiar patternsof his life – “no place to fly kites, nowhere to hide when one wantedto sulk, nowhere to shout across to one’s friends” (29 ).

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




The concrete spatial categories that frame the urban landscapesnot only affect rituals of play for individuals; the narrator also high-

lights how they regulate class divisions. During a visit to some dis-tant relatives in a far-off neighbourhood at the extended margins ofthe accretionary metropolis of Calcutta, he accidentally sees the un-seeable – the social peripherals made invisible. From the balcony ofthe house he visits, he notices among the piled garbage-heaps thebarely discernible figures of those who collect potential recyclablesfrom among the refuse of the city. These are the margins that must

remain unnamed, unnoticed, and he is reprimanded for even seeingthem, and pulled away from the balcony. “I went willingly: I wasalready well-schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility”(131). What the narrator as child exposes, or is exposed to, are boththe hierarchies of class structures and the bourgeois mechanism ofsuppressing them, rendering them invisible. Conscious of his “ownsmall puritanical world, in which children were sent to school to

learn how to cling to their gentility by proving themselves in theexamination hall,” (23 ), he muses on the apparatuses of educationalsystems. These are the lessons that he must learn in order to claimthe bolster of class that the classroom promises:

I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failedexaminations to put me where our relative was, in permanent

proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand thatseethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was the sludgewhich gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy. (132 )

The association of “jungle-craft” and “fine edge of frenzy” with“gentility” brings to the fore the violence underlying the complici-tous silencing – even his poor relative does not want him to see thesigns of class hierarchies.

The spaces of the educational apparatus not only demarcate thesafety of class-drawn enclosures, but in the novel they are also con-trasted with the dangers of communally charged violent spaces inthe description of the riots in Calcutta. The narration describes thepolice protection accorded to the school premises amidst the swirlof riot, and the passage to and from school through the tension-laden streets. The demarcation of spaces to designate the confines of



174 SUJALASINGH

community is reflected in the utilization of the metaphors of mobil-ization and separation filtered through the palpable ambiance of

violence as the schoolchildren are driven home in a schoolbusthrough the deserted streets. A rickshaw left at an awkward angleacross the mouth of a lane rivets their attention. It reads as a porten-tous divide: “had it been put there to keep Muslims in or Hindusout?” (199 ). On the same day in Dhaka, and in a different place inthe novel, another rickshaw is shown to carry the horrors of com-munal discord. The character with whom I began this essay, the

Jethamoshai, rides on a rickshaw operated by his Muslim caretaker,after being convinced by his rescuers to uproot himself and effect apassage to a Hindu space. In that attempted movement, the literalvehicle for an impossible transition becomes a metaphor for theviolence of communal riot. Michel de Certeau has noted that inmodern Athens, modes of transport are calledmetaphorai. Here, thefigure of the rickshaw enacts the dual mechanisms of delineating a

space – in the first place, by demarcating its borders, and secondly,in its mobility opening up metaphors of communication and ex-change that bind a coherent space:

Social space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural andsocial, including the networks and pathways which facilitate theexchange of material things and information.”12

Both of these mechanisms emerge in their violent element. Yetagain, we find the narrative ruse of using symmetrical frames in thespaces divided by the claims to religious identity. The self-otheringlines that are drawn are imbued with a tangible violence, as is thepossibility of border crossings.

The description of a bus-ride through the riot-hit streets of Cal-cutta also touches on the key spatial markers of demographic de-marcation. The passage through Park Circus and the potentiality ofviolence become significant in the light of the knowledge of a largeMuslim population in that locality. Even the safe interior of the busis not without the awareness of dangers, of the otherness of one’sfriends. Montu, a young Muslim boy, is the narrator’s best friend,

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




but in this context even the genealogy of his name takes on a parti-cular significance:

His name wasn’t really Montu. It was Mansoor and he was fromLucknow […] when they’d moved to Gole Park from Park Circus,someone had shortened his name to Montu. (115)

Mansoor is an obviously Urdu, hence Muslim name, but the Ben-gali nickname Montu does not pinpoint a particular religious iden-tity. While Park Circus has a large Muslim population, Gole Park,by contrast, is predominantly Hindu. Montu’s religion had seemedirrelevant to the narrative until that morning in the schoolbus whenthe narrator hopes that he wouldn’t show up to take the bus toschool. Montu’s absence unleashes the rituals of cleansing – empty-ing out the water bottles poisoned by the rumour of contamination– “they had poured poison into Tala tank [...] the whole of Calcut-ta’s water supply was poisoned” (195). Unspecified and unnamed,the identity of who “they” were is still tacitly understood. In amoment pregnant with claims to a sense of belonging that is sharedby a busload of young schoolchildren, the quiet movement of com-munal consensuality emerges in the narrative.

IV

The tacit acceptance of a narrative as having an intrinsic “of-course-ness” or “naturalness” is what characterizes “common sense as acultural system” according to Clifford Geertz:

Common sense seems left over when [the] more articulated sort ofsymbol systems have exhausted their tasks, […] it lies so artlesslybefore our eyes that it is almost impossible to see.13

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

13 Clifford Geertz,The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson,1975 ):92 .



176 SUJALASINGH

of “correspondence between the objective order and the subjectiveprinciples of organization”:

Because the subjective necessity and self-evidence of the common-sense world are validated by the objective consensus on the sense ofthe world, what is essential goes without saying because it comeswithout saying…14

It is in these divisions between the seen and the unseeable, betweenthat which is articulated and that which is not, that the narrative (ofcomings and goings) chalks out the key centres of identity-forma-tion and patterns of communal belonging as entrenched in the com-mon sense of a common identity. After Tridib’s death, the narrator’sfather made him promise that he would not mention Tridib’s deathto anybody, that he had died in an “accident” in Dhaka. Years later,when he discovers that Tridib must have left for Dhaka the daybefore communal violence erupted in East Pakistan, he wonderswhy his father, a “practical,” “cautious” man, did not prevent himfrom leaving. Looking through the newspapers immediately beforethe day of the riots, he finds no trace of the forthcoming tragedy inthe Calcutta papers, even though he remembers his father sayingthat he was glad they had gone away from Calcutta, for there was“going to be trouble” there (189 ). When he asked his father aboutthe nature of the “trouble,”

My mother gave him a frown and a quick shake of the head, so heturned me around, pointed at the plane and said: Nothing. Nothingthat you would understand. (189 )

Poring over the newspapers, he finds that “the stirrings of thesilence” that his father had known have been censored from their

pages, that beyond the descriptions of the events of the riots there isno mention either before or after the event. It is only the “otherevents, party splits and party congresses and elections,” that news-paper columns speak of, and as for the narratives of “trouble,” they,like the narrator of Tridib’s death, “do not have the words to give it

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




meaning” (223 ). Why does the narrator highlight the centrality ofsilence that overpowers his narration, his desire to create stories?

“Every word that I write about those events of1964 is the productof a struggle with silence” (213 ). Are we to juxtapose, to readagainst each other, alongside each other, the outlining of the opera-tions of silencing and the workings of silent, tacit reinforcement ofmeanings that can locate “them” and thereby produce “us”? Whydoes the narrative stumble on and stage the stumbling on the rockof silence? And, most significantly, as the narrative insistently asks,

what must be allowed to escape articulation in order to be allowedfree and tacit circulation?In trying to overcome the barriers of the silence that marks Tri-

dib’s death, the narrator takes recourse to narration “in a secondhand manner,” a manner portrayed, with great deliberation, to beof significance, to be significantly different. In a novel that is almostentirely crafted out of the reports of others, grounded on reportage,

such a “second hand manner” would not be out of place. Why dothe newspaper reports of the events in Kashmir, East Pakistan andWest Bengal that narrate the communal tensions leading up toTridib’s death necessarily get labelled as significantly different, as iftheir “second handedness” made them inadequate descriptions ofevents? As public and private histories intermingle in the novel, dowe then read his narrative tactics of highlighting reportage con-

figured in non-sequential, yet fluent narration as indicative of theways in which national histories adapt, retell and reconstruct situ-ated political events?

The silences that are articulated in Ghosh’s text are the conduitsthrough which a notion of a community gets mobilized, whether interms of ideologies of class-position or of religion. Whether throughthe agonized puzzlement at the newspapers’ silent treatment of the

“stirrings” and unrest that must have been apparent in Calcuttaover the events in Kashmir, or in his recollection of his father’s in-sistence on his complicity in keeping the circumstances aroundTridib’s death cloaked under the normalcy of an “accident,” thenarrator brings to light the desire that forces silences to emerge. Ac-cording to Bourdieu, the most successful ideological effects are“those which have no need of words, and ask no more than compli-

citous silence” (188 ). The correlation between communal identities



178 SUJALASINGH

and nationalisms in the Indian subcontinent indicates the centralityto Ghosh’s text of the silences that form the kernel of a conception

of nation.In his reflections on Georges Bataille’s “general economy,” Jac-ques Derrida writes about the possibility of reaching beyond theclosure of meaning within discourse, of that which must be rele-gated to the silence of the margins, into non-meaning, in order toconstitute the body of meaning, and of the possibility of staging thatsilence:

If the word silence “among all words” is “the most perverse and themost poetic,” it is because in pretending to silence meaning, it saysnonmeaning, it slides and erases itself, does not maintain itself,silences itself, not as silence, but as speech. This sliding simulta-neously betrays discourse and nondiscourse.15

In The Shadow Lines, the production and circulation of silence worksits way not only in demarcating social relations but also in thenewspapers, the agencies of “print-capitalism” that were significantin Benedict Anderson’s conception of the modern nation’s forma-tion.16 According to Anderson, the collating of diverse “national”events on the face of the printed page branded by a fixed momentin time, the calendar-date, served to generate the coherence of anational formation. In Ghosh’s construction of the narrative ofTheShadow Lines, what is emphasized is that the enforced silences in thetext induce the sense of spatial–national cohesion of an “imaginedcommunity.” More significantly, the narrative insists that thesesilences circulate to generate and consolidate a sense both of com-munal belonging and of alienation that are not accounted for in thestrategic model of a national community, but which are in fact atthe root of everyday living.

In the wake of a growing communalization of contemporary In-dian politics, Amitav Ghosh’s novels have returned to the centralityof the question of nationalism. InThe Shadow Lines, the narrative

15 Jacques Derrida,Writing and Difference (Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1978 ):262 .

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




wanders on an elaborate excursion ruminating on the permeabilityof the borders on the map that are supposed to contain the nation.

Just as the narrator muses on silence as it interrupts the symmetri-cal, binary relationships of sense and non-sense, he locates betweenthe nations split along religious lines an ambivalent relationship be-tween friendship and war:

I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that acrossthe border there existed another reality. The only relationship myvocabulary permitted between those separate realities was war orfriendship. There was no room in it for this other thing. And thingswhich did not fit my vocabulary were merely pushed over the edgeinto the chasm of that silence. (214 )

Just as the painful events of his mentor’s death torment him,making any reporting of the incidents leading to his death seem“second-hand” to him, there is “no room” in speech of the “otherthing,” which eludes the narrator’s sense of the space ofarticulation. Just as he cannot find a way of coming to terms withthis “another reality” between nations, the reality of the other, norcan he fathom the expressions of communal belonging and otheringthat resulted in Tridib’s murder. In either case, he has to let silencestand in the place of the articulation of this other reality.

VThe narrative inThe Shadow Lines meanders in and out of familytales, professing a need to invent and fashion narratives and mean-ings across a diverse set of locales and moments. However, the in-spiration guiding the detailed nature of his re-creations seems to beextinguished at his discovery of the circumstances surrounding the

death of the narrator’s mentor, Tridib. But, even as the narrativeenergy is seemingly sapped, there is an emergence in the text of astaged silence – not a silence that emerges as the unsaid, but onethat is volubly expressed as the unspeakable. In a text that is per-meated with spatio-temporal displacements, such silences act outthe demarcation of a domain of intelligibility; they articulate theboundaries of “non-sense” in order to allow a space in which to

articulate “sense.” The extensive usage of spatial metaphors



180 SUJALASINGH

grounds this delimitation in diverse ways, all of which ultimatelyengage with the nature of national and communal identity and the

ways in which they are assumed, mobilized and ‘managed’. Thedetermination and management of the unsymbolizable limits ofsymbolic activity breaks in the narrative, this rupture indicative ofhow the domain of tacit consensus is constitutive of a national orcommunal identity. These ruptures are manifest in the unspeakableviolence that has marked the Partition of India and in contemporarypolitics of the subcontinent. The novel sets up a parallel between

the elusiveness of locating silences within language and the non-containment of a nation within a boundary strategically inscribedinto the text of a map.

WORKSCITED Anderson, Benedict.Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,1991 ).Bourdieu, Pierre.Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: CambridgeUP,1977 ).

Certeau, Michel de.The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Stephen Rendall (L'in-vention du quotidien, vol.1: Arts de faire, 1980 ; Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP,1984 ).

Derrida, Jacques.Writing and Difference (Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1978 ).Geertz, Clifford.The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson,1975 ).Ghosh, Amitav.The Circle of Reason (London: Granta,1986 ).

—— . In an Antique Land (Delhi: Ravi Dayal,1992 ). —— .The Shadow Lines (New York: Penguin,1988 ).Lefebvre, Henri.The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell,1991 ).Man, Paul de. “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Allegories of Reading (NewHavenCT: YaleUP, 1979 ).



Inscribing a Sikh IndiaAn Alternative Reading ofKhushwant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan 1

RALPH J. CRANE

N THE MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS since the end of theBritish Raj in India and the birth of two independent nations,India and Pakistan, a small but significant body of Partition

fiction has been published by Indian and, more recently, Pakistaniwriters. Important among these are Khushwant Singh’sTrain toPakistan (1956 ), Chaman Nahal’s Azadi (1975 ), Bapsi Sidhwa’sIce-

Candy-Man (1988

), and Shauna Singh Baldwin’sWhat the BodyRemembers (1999 ). Of these, Khushwant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan remains, over fifty years on, the seminal Partition novel. In parti-cular, the novel rewrites the railway, once a symbol of imperialpower, as a leitmotif for Partition violence and the communalnationalism that followed the political homogenization of India andIndians during the independence struggle.

Khushwant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan (1956

) is set in the small Pun- jabi village of Mano Majra close to the border between India andPakistan. During the course of the story, the village, which has apredominantly Sikh and Muslim population, is drawn into the bru-tal conflict which marked the Partition of the subcontinent. Initially,

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

I



182 RALPH J . CRANE

the peace of the village – an unsustainable image of national har-mony – is disturbed by the robbery and murder of the Hindu

money-lender Lala Ram Lal by Malli and his band of dacoits. Iqbal,a communist agitator, recently arrived in the village, and JuggutSingh, a localbudmash, are both arrested for the killing. The life ofthe village is then further shattered by the arrival from Pakistan of atrainload of corpses – a defining image of Partition fiction. When asecond trainload of bodies pulls into Mano Majra the Sikh inhabi-tants are persuaded by outsiders to take their revenge on a train

carrying Mano Majra Muslims to safety in Pakistan. The magistrate,Hukum Chand, unable to control the worsening situation, releasesboth Iqbal and Juggut Singh from prison in the hope that one ofthem will be able to prevent the train being attacked. Juggut doessave the train, but at the cost of his own life. The apparently straight-forward, historical-realist plot is complicated by Juggut Singh’saffair with a Muslim girl from the village and Hukum Chand’s

liaison with a young Muslim prostitute. The treatment of Muslimwomen thus becomes a means of measuring Sikh and Hindu com-munal nationalism.

To date, most critics2 have approachedTrain to Pakistan as a real-ist historical novel, though opinions about the success or otherwiseof the novel in those terms differ widely. While critics like M. Tari-nayya praise the novel for its “extraordinary detachment,”3 others,

like K.C. Belliappa, seeTrain to Pakistan as “at best a successful re-creation of the event of Partition in terms of the evocation of atmo-sphere, the historical details and the authenticity of the locale.”4 When Belliappa describes the book as a “work of superior journal-ism,”5 he is being kinder than C. Paul Verghese, who believes itdoes not “rise far above the standard of sensational journalism.”6

2 Myself included; see Ralph J. Crane,Inventing India: A History of India inEnglish-Language Fiction (London: Macmillan,1992 ):143 –51.

3 M. Tarinayya, “Two Novels: Khushwant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan and Bha-bani Bhattacharya’sSo Many Hungers! ” Indian Literature 13.1 (1970 ):113.

4 K.C. Belliappa, “The Elusive Classic: Khushwant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi,”The Literary Criterion 15.2 (1980 ):66 .

5 Belliappa, “The Elusive Classic,”66 –67 .6 C. Paul Verghese,Problems of the Indian Creative Writer in English (Bombay:

Somaiya,1971 ):119.



Inscribing a Sikh India: Khushwant Singh 183

While it is certainly appropriate to treat the novel as a (realist)historical novel about the horrors of Partition, it may also be

instructive to consider the possibility of other, more overtly politicalagendas inTrain to Pakistan . What happens if we critique the novelin terms of religious/communal bias and the apparent preoccu-pation with gendering in the text? In this essay I would like to lookat the way Khushwant Singh’s text appears to inscribe a distinctlySikh-centred India.7 It does this primarily through the overtly sex-ual symbolism which Singh employs to re-inscribe a well-worn

binary opposition. Thus not only does Singh portray the horror ofPartition in a realist historical mode, but his text simultaneouslypromotes the image of the Sikhs as the dominant community.Rather than searching for national harmony within the already frac-tured nation of post-Partition India, the novel instead appears tosubscribe to a form of the successful divide-and-rule or commu-nalism philosophy of the British colonial power which is employed

to further a distinct agenda. As Peter Morey observes, “after thedemise of colonial power ‘on the ground’, the drive to control thebody in space becomes an issue of establishing and defendingnational borders, a project often requiring the kind of direct physi-cal intervention previously associated with the former ruler.”8 Theborders Khushwant Singh sets out to establish and defend inTrainto Pakistan are, as I will show, communitarian, and as a result the

novel can be read as a challenge to any notion of a homogenizedpost-Independence Indian nation.Prior to Independence, the Indian subcontinent was a colonized

construct known as the British Empire in India or British India –labels which accurately (though unintentionally) demonstrate thebinary opposition that is inevitably a condition of colonization. Brit-ish India was a geopolitical construct in which the colonizing power

occupied a clearly defined male or dominant position of power,7 This agenda is quite distinct from Sikh demands for Khalistan. Singh’s

agenda depends on the presence of a binary opposition between Sikhs and Hin-dus, which would not be possible in Sikh Khalistan, which, as Faisal FatehaliDevji points out, is “a synonym for Muslim Pakistan (they both mean ‘Land ofthe Pure’)”; “Hindu/Muslim/Indian,”Public Culture 5.1 (1992 ): 1.

8 Peter Morey,Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh: EdinburghUP, 2000 ):163 .



184 RALPH J . CRANE

while the colonized people – the homogenized Hindus, Muslims,and Sikhs – collectively occupied a female or subaltern position.

Independence and the withdrawal of the British left the domi-nant position in that binary opposition untenanted. What I want toargue here is that in the India ofTrain to Pakistan Khushwant Singhshifts the Sikhs into the position of power vacated by the colonizers,a position which he clearly presents as bound up with virility. Oneonly has to look at any number of Anglo-Indian adventure novels,such as those written by John Masters, to see this at work; the mas-

culine traits previously applied to the British – inBhowani Junction (1954 ), for example, where Rodney Savage rather than Patrick Tay-lor or Ranjit Singh Kasel is the dominant male – are now employedin the service of the Sikhs. The Hindus, on the other hand, are un-equivocally located in a subaltern or female position, as they hadconsistently been by the British, too (as in any number of RudyardKipling’s stories, for example). However, while in the British colo-

nial image of India Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs together made upthe subaltern group in the binary opposition, within the constric-tions of that position the Muslims and Sikhs were also perceived as“martial races”9 and frequently occupied a position that, while in-ferior to the position occupied by the British, was neverthelesssuperior to that occupied by the Hindus. This ‘elevation’ of theMuslims and Sikhs was, of course, part of a larger design to aggran-

dize the colonizers by valorizing, to a carefully controlled degree,their ‘rivals’. Following this pattern, Singh places the Muslims inTrain to Pakistan in a position that, while below that of the Sikhs, isabove that of the Hindus. The effect of this, as I shall demonstratelater, can be read as promoting a Sikh hegemony.

Symbolism in this novel is extraordinarily important, particularlyif the text is read as a Sikh-centred narrative. Beyond the level of

realism the novel also functions on an entirely symbolic level,where characters like Juggut Singh become symbols of their com-munities, and moments such as Juggut’s liaison with the Muslimgirl Nooran10 or the slaughter by Muslims of a bus-load of Sikhs

9 This is also reflected in the Hindu imaginary, where Muslims were seen ascruel, while Sikhs were seen as protectors of the Hindus.

10 Juggut’s love for Nooran highlights a recurrent theme in Punjabi/Hindi




and Hindus, take on a symbolic importance far beyond their signifi-cance in the furthering of the actual plot of the realist historical

novel.The sexual, predominantly masculine, symbolism Singh uses tolocate the three Indian communities in the novel is redolent of thetheory examined by George Mosse inNationalism and Sexuality –that only men, masculinity, and heterosexuality can coexist with anation.11 I want to suggest that by emasculating the Hindus inTrainto Pakistan, Singh effectively contests their right, both as individuals

and as a religious/cultural group, to inherit the nation of India, andin doing so challenges the notion of an exclusively Hindu India.Although Hindus are the majority community in India, their role

in this novel is a peripheral one (even allowing for the fact that thePunjab was largely dominated by Muslims and Sikhs, not Hindus).From the beginning ofTrain to Pakistan , Singh sets out to emasculatethe few Hindu characters who appear in the novel, symbolically

feminizing and thus marginalizing all Hindus. In effect, Singh goessome way towards creating a negative stereotype of Hindus by pre-senting his Hindu characters in situations where they are forced toact in a ‘typically Hindu’ way. This is perhaps a significant step intandem with the essentialized, stereotypical portrait of the Hindu asan effeminate vegetarian, or as a ‘babu’ which had been (and still is)common in much Anglo-Indian fiction, notably in Kipling’sKim

(where, unusually, the stereotype is also subverted, as HurreeChunder Mookerjee repeatedly demonstrates his courage even ashe performs to the stereotype). In other words, Singh is relying onand endorsing the colonial model, while also interacting with thePunjabi representation of the Brahmin or Banya. By presenting theHindus as incapable of any authority, moral or otherwise, he re-presents them as a people who need to be ruled.

fictional narratives, including films such as Randhir Kapoor’sHenna (1991 ) andAnil Sharma’sGadar (2001 ), where the Muslim girl is the object of desire for theSikh/Hindu male. Bapsi Sidhwa’sIce-Candy-Man, of course, reverses this at-traction, as does Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi novelPinjar (1970 ; which KhushwantSingh later translated into English), where the Hindu female is the love interest.

11 See, in particular, the chapters on “Manliness and Homosexuality” (23 –47 )and “Fascism and Sexuality” (153–80 ).



186 RALPH J . CRANE

In what is almost the opening scene of the novel, the Hindumoneylender, Lala Ram Lal, is seen attempting to hide behind the

two women in his house when Malli and his gang of dacoits cometo rob him.

“Open you son of fornication, or we will kill the lot of you,” heshouted.

A woman’s voice answered. “Who is it who calls at this hour?Lalaji has gone to the city.”

“Open the door and we will tell you who we are or we willsmash the door,” the leader said.

“I tell you Lalaji is not in. He has taken the keys with him. Wehave nothing in the house.”

The men put their shoulders to the door, pressed, pulled backand butted into it like battering-rams. The wooden bolt on the otherside cracked and the doors flew open. One of the men with a gun

waited at the door; the other four went in. In one corner of the roomtwo women sat crouching.12

And although, after he is found hiding under a charpoy in an up-stairs room, he dies without handing over the keys to his safe, theimpression the novel creates in the minds of its readers is of a manwho hides behind a sari, a man who is unable to protect himself orthe women in his house. This short scene has gone a long way to-wards re-creating the Punjabi stereotype of the Hindubanya, whichalso appears in much Anglo-Indian fiction. What obstinacy LalaRam Lal has shown by refusing to hand over his keys appears to bemotivated by greed rather than bravery or even a desire to protecthis family.13

The magistrate and deputy commissioner of the district, HukumChand, who is presented as crafty and conniving, the opposite ofPunjabi Sikh honesty, also conforms to this negative stereotype of

12 Khushwant Singh,Train to Pakistan (1955 ; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal,1988 ):16–17. Further page references are in the main text.

13 Moreover, the scene embodies the caste divisions, hierarchies and frictionswhere the trader caste is held in contempt by Punjabis. Iqbal, as a symbol of theeducated class, is held in contempt by the working classes in a manner similarto the attitude towards the Brahmin in the Punjabi imaginary.




the Hindu. He too is presented as impotent in the face of violence.On a literal level he is unable to consummate his liaison with the

Muslim girl prostitute, Haseena, which in turn reflects his inabilityto do anything to stop the train carrying Mano Majra Muslims toPakistan from being attacked. Instead of acting decisively himselfhe evades responsibility by releasing Juggut Singh (a Sikh) andIqbal (probably a Sikh) from prison in the hope that one of themwill be able to prevent the impending massacre he is powerless toprevent himself. And while it can be argued that Hukum Chand’s

strategy does work – that the liberated Juggut Singh saves thepassengers on the train – his indecision emphasizes the point that,like Lala Ram Lal, he hides behind others.

The only other Hindu male of any consequence in the novel isMansa Ram, the husband of Sundari, the daughter of HukumChand’s orderly. His story or, more particularly, the nature of hisdeath is recalled by Hukum Chand towards the end of the novel:

[Sundari] stopped daydreaming as the bus pulled up. There werelarge stones on the road. Then hundreds of people surroundedthem. Everyone was ordered off the bus. Sikhs were just hacked todeath. The clean-shaven were stripped. Those that were circumcisedwere forgiven. Those that were not, were circumcised. Not just theforeskin: the whole thing was cut off. She who had not really had a

good look at Mansa Ram was shown her husband completelynaked. They held him by the arms and legs and one man cut off hispenis and gave it to her. The mob made love to her. (203 )

Leaving aside the ironic euphemism of the final sentence, it is clearthat this passage is designed to show the inhumanity of mob viol-ence. But, significantly, it can also be read as part of a carefully con-structed Sikh–Hindu binary opposition. Whereas Sikhs are “justhacked to death,” Hindus are once again emasculated. In otherwords, the Sikhs are allowed to die like martyrs, as Khalsas, withtheir masculinity intact, while the Hindus are first feminized, withall the attendant loss of power that this entails.

In his lecture on “Femininity,” Freud discusses at some lengththe nature of what he calls the castration complex, which in girlsmanifests itself as penis envy, while in boys it appears as fear of



188 RALPH J . CRANE

castration. The substance of his argument is that women are imper-fect because they are created already castrated. Freud’s lecture, with

its focus on the penis, is apposite to this binary opposition and thepresentation of India as “the home of phallic worship” (58 ):

there is one object that all Mano Majrans – even Lala Ram Lal –venerate. This is the three-foot slab of sandstone that stands uprightunder a keekar tree beside the pond. It is the local deity, the deo towhich all the villagers – Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or pseudo-Christian –repair secretly whenever they are in special need of blessing. (10–11)

This sandstone lingam or phallus, worshipped by Hindus as a sym-bol of Shiva, also operates in the novel as a straightforward symbolof power. Freud’s ideas about the fear of castration help explainSingh’s use of phallic symbolism, particularly his use of the castra-tion and circumcision metaphors in the text. In effect, Singh has(either literally or symbolically) castrated the three Hindu men inthis novel, thus rendering them, and by extension all Hindus, im-perfect and powerless. Moreover, the horror of the treatment metedout to Mansa Ram and Sundari (whose body is inscribed with thepower of the mob) is suffused with a sense that it is the essentialweakness of the Hindus that has allowed this indignity to be car-ried out. Ironically, what amounts to the Muslim racism (in a pole-mical sense) played out here on the Hindu body is not far removedfrom that which Singh employs on behalf of the Sikhs in the novelas a whole.

With the Hindus thus castrated and located in the female orsubaltern position, the way is almost clear for Singh to complete theequation and establish the Sikhs in the male or dominant position inhis new, age-old binary opposition. First, though, he must positionthe Muslims.

As I indicated earlier, Singh’s treatment of the Muslims in thisnovel is more complex than his straightforward consignment of theHindus to the margins of both text and society. Whereas the Hinducommunity has been simply feminized by Singh, in line with Pun- jabi stereotypes, the Muslims, while being at least partly feminized,must maintain enough masculine traits to function as worthy rivalsto the Sikhs. This, of course, is largely due to the circumstances of




Partition, which pitted Sikhs against Muslims. But it also serves thenovel’s Sikh agenda to present the conflict between the Sikhs and

Muslims as one between two masculine forces each striving todominate the other. One reason for this is that the dominant posi-tion of the Sikhs has more meaning if ‘worthy opponents’ havebeen overcome. In other words, Singh’s apparently objective treat-ment of the Muslims is designed to enhance his portrayal of theSikhs. So, while the central conflict of the realist historical agenda ofSingh’s novel is played out between the Sikhs and Muslims, the

Muslims actually play only a very minor role in the Sikh-focusedagenda ofTrain to Pakistan . In a sense, the circumstances of Parti-tion, which see the Mano Majra Muslims leaving for Pakistan, effec-tively locate them outside the present Sikh–Hindu equation.

However, the realist historical treatment of Partition – indeed, thevery fact of Partition – also functions as a reminder of the failure ofIndian nationalism. As Faisal Fatehali Devji asserts,

in the history that the Indian state obsessively re-enacts, the Muslimseparatist is nothing more than the original sign of its failure. TheMuslim, in other words, represents a fundamental anxiety of nation-alism itself: of the nation as something unachieved.14

Singh uses this failure of Indian nationalism as an opportunity topromote what amounts to a form of Sikh nationalism based oncommunalism.

While all the Hindus in the novel appear to conform to the nega-tive stereotype outlined above, Singh’s presentation of his Sikhcharacters is not so one-dimensional. Some Sikh characters, likeMeet Singh, thebhai of the gurdwara (Sikh temple), have little appe-tite for battle, but a degree of strength is seen in their humanity.Others, like the outside agitators who persuade the Mano MajraSikhs to attack the train – and whose behaviour may conform tocertain codes of masculinity – attract little sympathy. But none ofSingh’s Sikh characters is ever emasculated in the manner of hisHindu characters.

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



190 RALPH J . CRANE

Central to Singh’s presentation of the Sikhs is the character of Juggut Singh, abudmash, who is used as the symbol of Sikhism

through which Singh locates the Sikhs in the dominant position ofthe binary opposition he creates.15 Early in the novel we see an attempt to emasculate Juggut Singh

when one of Malli’s dacoits throws a package of glass bangles overthe wall into Jugga’s courtyard:

“O Juggia,” he called in a falsetto voice. “Juggia!” He winked athis companions. “Wear these bangles, Juggia. Wear these banglesand put henna on your palms.”

“Or give them to the weaver’s daughter,” one of the gunmenyelled.

“Hai,” the others shouted. They smacked their lips, making thesound of long, lecherous kisses. “Hai! Hai!” (19–20 )

Here the direct challenge to Jugga’s authority is made on twofronts. First, Malli and his gang have challenged Juggut Singh’sauthority by robbing and murdering in his village. As Juggut ex-plains to the police when he is accused of the murder, he was out ofthe village at the time, “otherwise do you think anyone would havedared to rob and kill in Mano Majra?” (91). Secondly, Juggut is chal-lenged directly by the taunts with the bangles, which seek to renderhim feminine and declare his lost power, or, in the Freudian terms Ihave been discussing, to castrate him.

We also see Juggut’s clear fear of castration when he is threat-ened by the police after his arrest:

Jugga winced. He knew what the sub-inspector meant. He had beenthrough it – once. Hands and feet pinned under legs of charpoyswith half a dozen policemen sitting on them. Testicles twisted and

15 While it is important to see Juggut Singh as a symbol of Sikhism for thepurpose of this reading of the novel, it is also true that as a peasant (Jatt) ordacoit he can be appropriated as a hero by all Punjabi communities. His nameechoes that of Bhagat Singh, a symbol of active resistance to the British, whereasHukum Chand symbolizes passive resistance and the exploitation of leaders ofthe active resistance by leaders of the passive resistance movement.




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

Here the fear of torture, of pain, is apparent. But it is significant thatout of the repertory of tortures used by the Indian police, Singhspecifically chooses to highlight damage to the testicles, which canbe read as a threat of emasculation/castration, as part of Jugga’sfear.

These attempts to emasculate Juggut Singh are not destined tosucceed. Their purpose is to emphasize his masculinity, specificallyhis potency. Indeed, early in the novel he is described as a “very bigfellow. He is the tallest man in this area. He must be six foot four –and broad. He is like a stud bull” (33 ). The reference to the stud bullis again relevant to Singh’s use of phallic imagery. A stud bullspecifically signals both strength and potency.

This potency is further emphasized in his relationship with

Nooran, whose father is the mullah of the local mosque. As thedaughter of the mullah, Nooran functions as a symbol of the Mus-lim community. The obvious power Juggut has over Nooran is seenin an early description of one of their liaisons:

Juggut Singh crossed his arms behind the girl’s back and crushedher till she could not talk or breathe. Every time she started to speakhe tightened his arms round her and her words got stuck in herthroat.

[…]She was defenceless.[…]The girl continued to wriggle and protest.“No! No! No! Please. May Allah’s curse fall on you. Let go my

hand. I will never meet you again if you behave like this.” Juggut Singh’s searching hand found one end of the cord of her

trousers. He pulled it with a jerk. (22 –23 )

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



192 RALPH J . CRANE

no means benign; indeed it frequently elicits pleasure in the shapeof rape fantasy.”16 Thus the seductive power of the Muslim woman

is broken by an act of aggression; it is not Nooran’s sexual attrac-tiveness that stays in our minds, but Juggut’s (masculine) power,the power of the Sikhs over the Muslims, the power to rape if hechose. There is a deliberate contrast here between Juggut’s success-ful conquest of Nooran and Hukum Chand’s unsuccessful attemptto consummate his liaison with the Muslim prostitute Haseena, agirl young enough to be his daughter. (And, of course, the possi-

bility of incest is introduced to further denigrate the Hindus.) It ispertinent that the only proof of potency in the novel is the fact thatwhen Nooran leaves Mano Majra she is carrying Juggut Singh’schild. This testimony to Jugga’s potency also betokens the power ofthe Sikhs over their rivals for the dominant position in the binaryopposition, insinuating a means of displacing the Muslims, whohave been ‘contaminated’. When Nooran has her child (or Juggut’s

child, to continue with the language of the novel’s discourse) it willbe seen as a Sikh child, as she herself recognizes (152).When Juggut Singh cuts the rope stretched across the bridge and

over the railway line, and in so doing saves the train from derail-ment and attack, it is not necessarily to save Nooran or the child sheis carrying; his potency has already been proved by the very factthat Nooran is pregnant. Rather, this is another, final, symbolic act

to show Juggut’s power and potency, the power of life and death hehas over the Muslims who are fleeing to Pakistan, a moment whichexpels the Muslims even as it saves them. And within the frame-work of George Mosse’s thesis this makes him, and the Sikh com-munity he symbolizes, ideally suited to coexist with a nation, India.Further, in defending the railway in this way, Khushwant Singhmoves Juggut once more into the position abandoned by the imper-

ial power, the builders of the railways which were used to controlIndia.Khushwant Singh’s realist historical novel, frequently praised for

its objectivity and detachment, incorporates a symbolic sub-textwhich inscribes the Sikhs as inheritors of the hegemonic positionquit by the British when they left India.

16 Devji, “Hindu/Muslim/Indian,”9 .




In this (re-)reading ofTrain to Pakistan I set out to highlight theway Khushwant Singh locates the Sikh community in relation to

the Hindu and Muslim communities, thereby underscoring andmaintaining (racialized) purity. To achieve this, Singh consistentlygenders his characters along communal lines, and while the specificissue of gendering was not my primary concern I nevertheless wantto draw my essay to a close by considering a broader questionabout Partition fiction: Why is Partition seen as analogous with gen-der difference?

It seems significant that the preoccupation with gendering whichcan be traced throughTrain to Pakistan occurs in other Partitionnovels as well, notably in Bapsi Sidhwa’sIce-Candy-Man (publishedas Cracking India in theUSA) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’sWhat theBody Remembers. Both writers employ all the familiar leitmotifs ofPartition fiction – a trainload of butchered corpses, and so on; andboth writers, like Khushwant Singh, are concerned with gendering

the religious/communal groups in their work.Sidhwa’s novel is interesting not least because it is a Pakistaninovel written by a Parsee author who must contend with the prob-lem of how to locate her own community within the new nation-state of Pakistan. As Ambreen Hai explains, at the centre ofIce-Candy-Man is the Hindu Ayah (named only once in the novel)“who is abducted, gang-raped, and forced into prostitution by an

erstwhile Muslim admirer, and who becomes the sole representa-tive figure of female violation in this text,” and who by the end ofthe novel “becomes the ground upon which the text can forge aParsee–Muslim alliance.”17 Ayah, like other characters in the novel,comes to be defined by her community. As Lenny explains,

It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves – and the next day

they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindlinginto symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah –she is also a token. A Hindu.18

17 Ambreen Hai, “Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism andthe Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa’sCracking India,” Modern Fiction Studies 46 .2 (2000 ):390 , 391 .

18 Bapsi Sidhwa,Ice-Candy-Man (1988 ; New Delhi: Penguin India,1989 ):93 .



194 RALPH J . CRANE

It is the Hindu woman, Ayah, whom we see violated, the Hindumen who are emasculated – like Hari, who is figuratively emascu-

lated by the attempt to pull off hislungi, or the Hindubanya who isliterally emasculated when he is ripped apart between two jeeps:

The processionists are milling about two jeeps pushed back to back.They come to a halt: the men in front of the procession pullingahead and the mob behind banked close up. There is a quickeningin the activity about the jeeps. My eyes focus on an emaciated Banyawearing a white Gandhi cap. The man is knocked down. His lips aredrawn away from rotting, paan-stained teeth in a scream. The menmove back and in a small clearing I see his legs sticking out of hisdhoti right up to the groin – each thin, brown leg tied to a jeep.Ayah, holding her hands over my eyes, collapses on the floorpulling me down with her. There is the roar of a hundred throats:“Allah-o-Akbar!” and beneath it the growl of revving motors. (135)

In such a critical reading of the text, the Muslims are clearly estab-lished as the dominant culture, while the Hindus are gendered andsacrificed by Sidhwa in order to locate the endangered Parsee com-munity alongside the Muslims within the nation of Pakistan.

The great set piece of violence in Shauna Singh Baldwin’sWhatthe Body Remembers is not a public moment, but the intimate, almostsurreal story Major Jeevan Singh tells his sister Roop, of his discov-ery of his wife’s body when he returns to the village of Pari Darvazain search of his family:

A simple white-clad mound lay at his feet in the centre of the room.[…] He lifted the corner of the sheet closest to him. […] A woman’sbody lay beneath, each limb severed at the joint. This body wassliced into six parts, then arranged to look as if she were wholeagain. […] This woman’s body – he began to disbelieve his eyes, itcould not be Kusum – was also cut just below the ribs. […] Hereceived the message. Kusum’s womb, the same from which histhree sons came, had been delivered. Ripped out.

And the message, “We will stamp your kind, your very speciesfrom existence. This is no longer merely about izzat or land. This is awar against your quom, for all time. Leave. We take the womb so




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

The mutilation of Kusum’s body carries a message similar to thatinscribed on Mansa Ram’s body inTrain to Pakistan . But the hatredof the Muslims is not the only story Kusum’s body tells. It alsoconveys what (Sikh) women have suffered at the hands of theirown menfolk, who, like Kusum’s father-in-law, believe that, “for agood-good women, death should be preferable to dishonour” (458 );before the Muslims desecrated her body, Papaji had killed her forizzat.

Kusum’s body is a powerful metaphor for the relationship ofwomen with their fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, and betweengender and the nation-state. In the same way, inTrain to Pakistan the bodies of Juggut Singh, Nooran, and Sundari and her husbandMansa Ram act as potent metaphors for the position of the various

communities in the new nation-state.

WORKSCITED Baldwin, Shauna Singh.What the Body Remembers (London: Doubleday,

1999 ).Belliappa, K.C. “The Elusive Classic: Khushwant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan

and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi,”The Literary Criterion 15

.2 (

1980):

62–

73.Crane, Ralph J.Inventing India: A History of India in English-Language Fiction

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

18 .Freud, Sigmund. “Lecture XXXIII, Femininity,”The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. and ed. James Strachey,vol. 22 (1932 –36 ) New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other

Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,1964 ):112–35 .Hai, Ambreen. “Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism andthe Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa’sCracking India,” Modern Fiction Studies 46 .2 (2000 ):379 –426 .

19 Shauna Singh Baldwin,What the Body Remembers (1988 ; London: Double-day, 1989 ):449 –59 .



196 RALPH J . CRANE

Morey, Peter.Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh: EdinburghUP, 2000 ).

Mosse, George.Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexual-ity in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig,1985 ).

Sidhwa, Bapsi.Ice-Candy-Man (1988 ; New Delhi: Penguin India,1989 ).Singh, Khushwant.Train to Pakistan (1955 ; New Delhi: Ravi Dayal,1988 ).Tarinayya, M. “Two Novels: Khushwant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan and Bha-bani Bhattacharya’sSo Many Hungers! ” Indian Literature 13.1 (1970 ):113–21.

Verghese, C. Paul.Problems of the Indian Creative Writer in English (Bombay:Somaiya Publications,1971 ).



No Passports, No VisasThe Line of Control Between India and Pakistanin Contemporary Bombay Cinema

SHARMILASEN

Hamara Bharat Mahan/Long Live PakistanN A POSTCOLONIAL THEORY WORKSHOP in Dhaka a fewyears ago, I asked a group of Bangladeshi academics what theEnglish word ‘border’ signifies to them at the present time.

We spent some time arguing over the border between India andBangladesh, between East and West Bengal, between East and WestPakistan, between the Jumma tribes of the Chittagong Hill Tractsand ethnic Bengalis. Then, Shamsad Mortuza, a professor of Englishliterature, said with some exasperation, “Border, Sharmila, is afilm.” Indeed, my interlocutor was absolutely correct in more thanone sense.Border (J.P. Dutta,1997 ) is a recent Bombay film about the1971 India–Pakistan War. Moreover, the borderland between Indiaand Pakistan, as depicted in the recent spate of Bollywood borderfilms, persistently refers to its own filmi-ness.1 The borderland is an

1 Filmi, literally ‘film-like’ in Indian slang. InCinema India (London: Reaktion,2002 ): 30 , Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel suggest that the term ‘filmi’ carriesconnotations of something “derogatory, something cheap and trashy.” I wouldadd, however, that in recent years, ‘filminess’ might be understood as an aes-thetic that is neither cheap nor trashy. Events such as the auctioning of Bolly-wood posters in India, or the Bollywood exhibitions at such high-brow Westernmuseums as the Tate Modern (“Century City,” Spring2001 ) or the V&A

I



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uncanny space: it is representative of “us” and yet is also not quite“us.” In recent times, the Bollywood borderland has come to re-

present the nation and its commodified others.This essay focuses on representations of the border between In-dia and Pakistan in contemporary Bombay cinema. During the lastdecade of the twentieth century, Bollywood filmmakers increasing-ly turned to the border – or, more specifically, to the borderland –that is the Radcliffe Boundary Commission’s notorious legacy to theIndian subcontinent. This discussion of Bollywood borders con-

siders the following popular films:Henna (Randhir Kapoor,1991 ),Border (J.P. Dutta,1997 ), Dil Se/From the Heart (Maniratnam,1997 ),Refugee (J.P. Dutta,2000 ), Fiza/Air (Khalid Mohammed,2000 ), Mis-sion Kashmir (Vidhu Vinod Chopra,2000 ), Gadar: Ek Prem Katha/Traitor: A Love Story (Anil Sharma,2001 ), Pinjar/The Cage (Chandra-prakash Dwivedi,2003 ), and LOC: Kargil (J.P. Dutta,2003 ). Thesefilms fall into roughly two generic categories: the historical drama

and the contemporary terrorist film.Border , Refugee, LOC , Gadar ,and Pinjar , for instance, focus on events such as the India–Pakistanwar of1971 or 1999 or the Partition of1947 . Dil Se, Fiza, and MissionKashmir are thematically concerned with the making (or unmaking)of terrorists. As a love story, albeit one with a self-contradictorymessage of India–Pakistan/Hindu–Muslim peace,Henna is the onlyfilm in this group that belongs to an earlier genre of romantic films

shot in Kashmir.In border films, the borderland is not only an important locationwithin the structure of the cinematic plot, but it also functions as thecentral trope that cuts across multiple registers of the diegetic andextra-diegetic narratives. While this analysis is largely focused onthe filmic representation of the borderland between Indian andPakistani territory, the borderland under discussion is never con-

vincingly relegated to the margins of the nation. As the recent cropof terrorism and Partition-related films evince, the LOC (line ofcontrol) at the edges of the nation can never clearly be demarcated

(“Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood,” Summer2002 ) suggest that the ‘filmi’is indeed gaining some cultural capital these days, albeit with attendant compli-cations such as latent nostalgia or commodification of an ‘exotic minority’culture.



The Line of Control in Contemporary Bombay Cinema 199

from the LOC at the heart of the nation. The line between India andPakistan at Wagah–Attari, then, re-appears on the Bollywood cine-

ma screen as the line between a Hindu–Muslim couple (Henna), asthe line between a Kashmiri Muslim inspector and his terroristfoster-son ( Mission Kashmir ), as the line between a Hindi-speakingradio-programme officer and his terroristajnabi/ maashuq (stranger/beloved) from the embattled northeast (Dil Se). Concomitantly, thesigns – the Kashmiri picturesque, the Rajasthani exotic, and the Sufimystic – used by filmmakers to denote one side as “ours” and the

other side as “theirs” are also the secret sharers of national hege-monic culture.That this analysis considers mainly Hindi films does not imply

that these films are the sole representatives of Indian popular cul-ture. Although the Tamil film industry provides the Hindi filmindustry with stiff competition in terms of sheer volume of output,Hindi films continue to be most widely circulated in India and its

diaspora. Even Hollywood productions, which are usually success-ful in capturing global markets elsewhere, cannot provide seriouscompetition for Hindi films in India.2 Bollywood productions havecome to occupy the status of ‘national’ films at the expense of alarge number of so-called regional language productions. WhileBengali, Punjabi, Tamil, or Telegu films are regularly groupedunder the rubric of regional films, Hindi productions are supposed

to supersede regional specificity and constitute the ‘national’ nor-mative. Yet, as Ravi S. Vasudevan reminds us, “the opposition be-tween hegemonic national cultures and resistant – or at leastdivergent – local languages and cultures [is] hardly straightfor-ward.”3 In fact, local/regional media in India often relies on dub-bing Hindi TV serials, while Bollywood has since its early daysbeen well-known for producing ‘remakes’ of hit Tamil, Telegu, or

Bengali films. In border films, moreover, there is a crucial negotia-tion between the ‘national normative’ (North Indian, Hindu, uppercaste) and the attendant ‘local/regional’ minority – the borderland

2 Ravi S. Vasudevan, “National pasts and futures: Indian cinema,”Screen 41:1 (Spring2000 ):123 .

3 Vasudevan, “National pasts and futures,”122 .



200 SHARMILASEN

figure who both represents the subject and is consumed by the subject as its Other.

Just as importantly, Bollywood border films are themselves con-summate border-crossers. In Pakistan, for instance, Hindi filmshave been officially banned from cinema halls since the secondIndia–Pakistan war. Yet satellite cable channels and technically il-legal (and often pirated)VHS and DVD copies continue to supplyeager Pakistani audiences with their Bollywood extravaganzas. In-creasingly, Indian audiences are also becoming familiar with Lolly-

wood (Lahori film industry) stars. The April2004 edition of theBollywood fanzine Moviemag, for instance, features a gushingarticle on the arrival of Pakistani actress Reema (dubbed Pakistan’sAishwariya Rai) in Mumbai. In a related piece titled “The HugBug,” popular Bombay actors weigh in on the potential of cross-border filmmaking. While Bombay actors seem to relish their cele-brity status across the border, “The Hug Bug” goes on to reveal,

they are also aware of potentially alienating Pakistani audienceswith egregiously anti-Pakistan rhetoric, as spouted in some recentfilms.4 In parts of the South Asian diaspora, Hindi films are con-sumed without so many conflicting feelings of patriotism andtreachery. In Trinidad and Guyana, for instance, Bombay films havebeen screened with much success since the1930 s. These films, andtheir distribution networks, are arguably some of the earliest and

most consistent border-crossers within the South Asian diaspora.Although the reception history of Bollywood border films in all theSouth Asian nations and their diasporas is beyond the scope of thisessay, it is crucial to abandon from the start any preconceptionsabout a monolithic, nationally circumscribed audience for Bolly-wood films. This essay is more concerned with how a certain view-ing position, regardless of the actual location of the viewer, is

4 See Moviemag (April2004 , North American edition):45 –51. At least onePakistani scholar, Ayesha Jalal, noted in a private conversation that outlandishdemonization of Pakistan in some Bollywood films, in fact, make them morepalatable for Pakistani audiences. Bollywood seems to get it so wrong, she sug-gests, that its portrayal of Pakistan can no longer be seen as a remotely realisticone. In this way, some Pakistanis can actually laugh off Indian popular cine-ma’s extreme jingoism and continue to enjoy the films from across the borderwithout too much discomfort.




reinforced by the filmic representation of the border. In fact, as weshall see, border scenes almost always push the viewer a little out of

place.At this writing, the Wagah–Attari checkpoint in Punjab is theonly place where one can legally cross the India–Pakistan border byfoot. Wagah (in Pakistan) and Attari (in India) are two villages thatstand at the limits of their nations. They are also surprisingly closeto the important urban centres of the region known as Punjab onboth sides of the border. From the centre of Lahore it takes about

half an hour by car to get to Wagah. After crossing the checkpoint,another half an hour by car takes one from the village of Attari toAmritsar. Tourists from both countries crowd into Wagah andAttari, especially on Sundays, to watch the polite ceremony of flag-lowering.5 The Indian and the Pakistani flags are lowered exactly atthe same time, something oddly reminiscent of the synchronizedswimming event at the Olympics. A cheer rises from the crowd if

the wind unfurls one flag a bit more impressively than the otherone. Families with children buy snacks and enjoy an outing;teachers escort schoolchildren on fieldtrips; few pass up the photo-op at the pillar marking no-man’s-land. On most Sundays, the arearesembles a park, or a fairground. Of course, neither Indian norPakistani citizens are normally allowed to cross the border at thischeckpoint. So, people come to gaze not only upon “their” flags,

and the military personnel guarding “their” land, but also uponthose other people across the line that cannot be crossed. Standingat the Wagah–Attari checkpoint at these moments, it seems asthough the people across the border were indeed a nation of starers.The gaze is symmetrically reflected from both sides. Bodies crusheach other as hundreds of eyes lock into hundreds of other eyes.

What do see when we look across the border? What do we see,

that is, other than the faces of those who are looking at us? Im-probable gates stand amidst the divided fields of Punjab at theWagah–Attari border. If one stands on the Pakistani side, this is

5 For more on tourism at the Wagah-Attari checkpoint, see Virinder S. Kalra& Navtej K. Purewal, “The Strut of the Peacocks: Partition, Travel and theIndia–Pakistan Border,” inTravel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary CulturalPolitics, ed. Raminder Kaur & John Hutnyk (London: Zed,1999 ):54 –67 .



202 SHARMILASEN

what meets the eye: The Pakistani gate reads (innastaliq) “PakistanPaindabad” (May Pakistan Live Forever). Framed through this gate,

a little distance ahead, we can see the Indian gate that proclaims (inroman) “Swagatam” (Welcome). From the Indian side, the messagesare slightly different. Standing here, one sees the other side of theIndian gate (the one facing India, as it were) that bears a sign (indevnagari) “Hamara Bharat Mahan ” (Our India is Great). Furtherahead, we can see through to the Pakistani side. The other side ofthe Pakistani gate, the side facing India, reads (in roman) “Long

Live Pakistan.” A mixed message innastaliq and roman, or indevnagari and roman, awaits us at the Wagah–Attari border. Bending tothe regime of the built environment, the jingoistic borderlandproclamation of India’s greatness is necessarily coupled with anannouncement of the ‘enemy’ nation’s endurance.

The Looking-Glass BorderIn a recent essay on political borders, the French political philo-sopher Étienne Balibar writes that the term ‘border’ is

profoundly changing in meaning. The borders of new politico-economic entities, in which an attempt is being made to preserve thefunctions of the sovereignty of the state, are no longer at all situatedat the outer limit of territories: they are dispersed a little every-

where, wherever the movement of information, people, and thingsis happening and is controlled – for example, in cosmopolitan cities[…] the zones called peripheral are in fact the ground upon whichcitizenship is formed […] border areas – zones, countries, and cities– are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but ratherare at the center.6

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

6 Étienne Balibar, “World Borders, Political Borders,”PMLA 117.1 (January2002 ):71–72 .




and border art.7 Sir Cyril Radcliffe might have been sent from Eng-land to draw lines on the map of Punjab in1947 . But, unlike the

fixity of that line in an Indian schoolchild’s geography text, the ideaof the borderland in popular Bollywood cinema resembles some-thing closer to a function as it approaches its limit.

In addition to interrogating the fixity of borderlands, the putativedivisiveness of borders requires further attention. In recent years,one of the more powerful critiques of national borders has notfocused on the power of borders to divide – you from me, Muslim

from Hindu, the self from the Other, India from its neighbors.Instead, that critique has turned our attention to the power of bor-ders to join two sides in a mutual embrace of violence. Here is thatcritique as articulated by the unnamed narrator in Amitav Ghosh’sThe Shadow Lines (1988 ). In this passage, the narrator meditates onthe borders that bind Calcutta and Dhaka across the India–Pakistanborder during the1960 s:

there had really been a time, not so long ago, when people, sensiblepeople, of good intention, had thought that all maps were the same,that there was a special enchantment in lines […] They had drawntheir borders, believing in that pattern, in the enchantment of lines,hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon themap, the two bits of land would sail away from each other […]

What had they felt, I wondered, when they discovered that they hadcreated not a separation, but a yet-undiscovered irony … there hadnever been a moment in the four-thousand-year-old history of thatmap, when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were moreclosely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines –so closely that I, in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be inDhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the

other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by that line that was toset us free – our looking-glass border.8

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

7 Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelsen & David E. Johnson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1997 ).

8 Amitav Ghosh,The Shadow Lines (Delhi: Ravi Dayal,1988 ):233 .



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Radcliffe’s legacy is not only of Partition but also of new – andequally violent – affiliations should not be forgotten in any quick,

fashionable condemnation of borders. As Bollywood shows us, theporousness and the impermeability of the line of control are bothequally problematic. The cartographic line between India and Paki-stan, then, is truly endowed with cleaving properties: it can bindand divide the two nations.

Border LoveOn the Indian movie screen, the borderland is frequently alocusamoenus. If Bollywood border films were Hollywood teen movies,then the borderland would be a lover’s lane, a makeout point, or amoonlit beach during spring break. Cross-border violence may bedepicted as avoidable; but cross-border love is a Bollywood inevita-bility. While the anti-communal, progressive political rhetoric ofSouth Asia has always been based on a notion of filial love (whetheremployed at the time of Indo-China conflict, or during Partition, oreven in the context of Kashmir), filmic representations of the na-tional border repeatedly turn on erotic, transgressive love. Nodoubt the erotic desire for the stranger is a popular trope in manyother sub-genres of Bollywood cinema. Yet Maniratnam’s treatmentof the figure of the erotic stranger inDil Se offers some importantinsights into the conflation of the romantic plot and the nationalistnarrative of border security.The opening sequence ofDil Se is a self-conscious re-enactmentof Bombay cinema’s penchant for love before first sight. On a melo-dramatically stormy night, while Amar (Shah Rukh Khan), a pro-gramme officer for All India Radio, is waiting on a railway plat-form, he spots a figure huddled at the far end of the station. Hemistakes the figure for a man, until a helpful gust of wind uncoversthe heroine, Meghna (Manisha Koirala), under the shawl. Amar,like a moth drawn to a flame (ashamma to a parwana), almost has nooption but to fall in love with the stranger. Carrying this borrowedtrope (from Urdu poetry) to its logical conclusion,Dil Se eventuallyleads Amar into Meghna’s bomb-strapped body to end the filmwith a conflagration. From his first encounter with theajnabi lover,Amar is aware of himself as a Bombay cliché. He offers to conquer afortress for his damsel, but Meghna settles for a cup of tea. He re-




turns with the tea, only to find her train pulling out of the station.“This must be the world’s shortest love story,” a rain-soaked Amar

comments to himself as the train moves away. Distance betweenthe two would-be lovers – physical, linguistic, ideological – formsthe subject of the film. In a later sequence, Amar tells Meghna whathe likes least about her: “Yeh doori” (this distance). And then, as hegoes on to list what he likes best about her, he says: “Yeh doori.”

“This distance,” Amar-as-the-Indian-state whispers to Meghna-as-the-secessionist-terrorist, “gives me the excuse for coming closer

to you.” InDil Se, thisdoori, or distance, between the two – the stateand the terrorist, Amar and Meghna – is eliminated in the finalexplosive embrace between the suicide-bomber and her lover.Border-crossing, in this sense, is a deadly act.Dil Se asks us to lookat the national border through the prism of a stalker/love story.9 The film, however, does not align its audience with one clear line ofsympathy. Do we support Amar in his pursuit of Meghna? Can

Meghna, borrowing from Faiz Ahmed Faiz, claim the revolution asher new beloved?

Don’t ask me for that love again …There are other sorrows in this worldcomforts other than love.10

The doori between the Indian nationalist and the secessionist is anecessary precondition of both their existences. Furthermore, as thefilm warns, if thatdoori were erased solely on the insistence andterms of the nationalist (Amar), then the result would be the deathof Amar, Meghna, and the narrative itself.

Meghna and her group attempt to carve out their own indepen-dent state in the northeast from the hegemonic Indian state. In a

9 It would be informative to see Shah Rukh Khan’s role as a lovelorn stalkerin such films asDarr / Fear or Anjaam/Consequence as an inter-text toDil Se.While border films were rising in popularity in the1990 s, so were stalker films.Stalker films often featured a famous star associated with the figure of a roman-tic hero in, to use Bollywood parlance, a “negative character.”

10 Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “ Mujhse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob nah mang” (“Don’tAsk Me for that Love Again”), inThe Rebel’s Silhouette, tr. Agha Shahid Ali (SaltLake City: Peregrine Smith,1991 ):5.



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clever revision of the standard nationalist narrative of the maternalnation-state and its errant children (Mother India and her trouble-

some secessionist minorities), the character that wants to addanother national border to the map of India is a woman. Further-more, a love-struck male stalker, not a nurturing mother, representsthe nation in Maniratnam’s film. Can the stalker-state bring theobject of its obsession effectively within its own boundaries? IfAmar-as-the-state lives in incomplete pieces (according to one ofthe songs of the film),11 then the forceful filmic unification of the

pieces, of the northeastern secessionist and the North Indian nation-alist, results only in further carnage as unseen body parts fly in thefinal frame of the film. Of all the1990 s films that focus on borderlove,Dil Se is perhaps the most complex and sophisticated. It dis-plays an awareness of the limits of the genre while still exploringthe powerful erotic pull of borders, and ofdoori.

Even asDil Se offers an important revision of the love story be-

tween the nation and its internal others, it continues the tradition ofgendering the (desirable) other as feminine. Indian and Pakistanipopular cinema’s predilection for producing border love as aromance between “our” men and “their” women may be histori-cized in at least a couple of different ways. There are at least twoseparate historical events that inform Amar’s pursuit of Meghna.The repatriation of abducted women in the months following the

partition of the subcontinent in1947 is an event that casts itsshadow on Amar’s relentless pursuit of the errant Meghna. Therape, mutilation, murder, and abduction of women from so-calledrival communities marked the unprecedented exchange of popula-tion in1947 . The newly independent nation-states, India and Paki-stan, were deeply invested in the re-patriation of women as a meansof consolidating the power and honour of the patriarchal state.

11 Amar recounts his first encounter with Meghna on his radio programme ashe plays a song, “E Ajnabi” (“O Stranger”). The refrain of the song goes some-thing like this: “O stranger, please respond to me. I am living here in pieces.And you too are living somewhere in pieces.” The song itself is further chop-ped into pieces as it re-appears in the background in subsequent sequences. Iam grateful to Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s insights into this part ofDil Se in anunpublished essay, “A Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Allegories ofDemocracy and its Discontents inDil Se.”




Amar’s pursuit of Meghna, then, may be also seen as the malestate’s pursuit of the ‘lost’ woman across the border. The second

historical inter-text to Amar and Meghna’s story is a somewhatolder, though no less important, Indian national myth. In the song,“E Ajnabi” (“Oh Stranger”), the pieces (tukro) that are symbolic ofAmar’s fragmented self might also be the pieces of the once unifiedIndia (akhand Bharat), sundered by the Muslim League’s demandfor Pakistan.Dil Se revises the Indian National Congress’s depictionof Partition as secession from the imagined whole (the idea of eter-

nal India fused with the colonial structure of the Union of India)12

into a romantic plot involving an errant lover. The dialectical ten-sion between these two historical allusions lies precisely in the posi-tioning of the woman in a heterosexual love story. Does the malestate rescue the lost female citizen across the border? Or, does thefemale state claim her prodigal son? To put it another way, whopulls whom across which border? In Maniratnam’s film, from the

opening railway-station scene until the final bomb-blast, anyanswer to this question remains necessarily ambivalent.Although Dil Se confounds the question of border-crossing by

presenting the viewer with multiple, partially overlapping borders,a number of Bollywood and Lollywood productions exploredcross-border romance in the decades immediately following Parti-tion in more straightforward ways. The plot of many of these films,

as expected, turned on the event of Partition, the largest exchangeof population in peacetime in recorded history. Manmohan Desai’sChhalia (1960 ), for instance, follows the story of a woman who cros-ses the border after Partition in1947 to reunite with her Hindu fami-ly. More recently, Randhir Kapoor’sHenna (1991 ) re-introduced theIndia–Pakistan love story to Bollywood only to leave the epony-mous Pakistani heroine dead at border.Henna is an important pre-

cursor to Bollywood’s turn to the borderland following the destruc-tion of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December1992 and the

12 Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, PoliticalEconomy (London: Routledge,1999 ):188 . Bose and Jalal make the point that theIndian National Congress represented the formation of Pakistan as an “optingout” of the imagined whole that is the Union of India. Thus,1947 did not seethe transformation of India into Hindustan and Pakistan, but into India andPakistan.



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subsequent communal riots of1992 –93 . The location of the film inKashmir, the transgressive border-crossings, the focus on a Hindu–

Muslim romance, and the self-sacrificing Muslim character whosecures a peaceful conclusion to the narrative are all important ele-ments in later border films. Henna-as-Pakistan, according to thelogic of the film, must sacrifice her desires – indeed, her life – inorder to save Chander-as-India. In the final sequence, Henna’s deadbody marks not only the line between India and Pakistan but alsothe line between the pacifist rhetoric of a transnational family ro-

mance and an erotic, transgressive love for the Other.Henna dies at the border between India and Pakistan, echoingperhaps the famous literary death of Toba Tek Singh in SadaatHasan Manto’s Urdu short story of the same name.13 Yet the conclu-sion toHenna has another important inter-text, perhaps less familiarto an Indian audience (but not to a Pakistani audience) – the earlierLahori filmLakhon mein Ek/ One in Thousands , which concludes with

the death of its Hindu heroine, Shakuntala, at the border. A closerlook at this Pakistani film, which is largely ignored in South Asianfilm scholarship, reveals the eerily symmetrical construction of thenation-as-woman and the national-border-as-female-body in bothPakistani and Indian popular cinema.Lakhon mein Ek posits a Hin-du woman as a symbol of the Indian nation. But the effects of suchsymbolic investment are quite different from the outcome ofHenna.

Raza Mir’s post-Independence film begins in Azaad Kashmir andfollows the lives of two friends, one Hindu and one Muslim. After ahasty escape to India, and a misplacement of children due to chaot-ic conditions, the Hindu girl, Shakuntala, is left behind in Pakistanin the care of her father’s Muslim friend. Young Shakuntala israised as a Hindu and uses a language spiked with Hindu religiousvocabulary in a wholly Muslim community. She is allowed to visit

temples and her foster father zealously guards her from Muslimlovers. The message is clear: different religious communities maylive together peacefully but never marry each other. Turning therhetoric of Hindu–Muslim filial love on its head, Shakuntala falls inlove with her foster-brother, Mehmood. In the upheaval that

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




follows, her biological father returns from India and carries herback across the border, where conniving Brahmins await.

Much of the plot after this point is only too familiar. From thereports of the rehabilitation committees set up in the years follow-ing Partition to more recent commemorations of the fiftieth anniver-sary of the historic events of1947 , there have been numerous ac-counts of Hindu girls returned from Muslim communities and re-fused by their orthodox kin as polluted.14 Shakuntala’s tale is, nodoubt, somewhat unique because her stay in Pakistan is entirely

voluntary. Shakuntala’s father, while denouncing Hindustan asnarak (hell), continues to believe that it is still the most appropriateplace for them. Shakuntala, by contrast, wants to return to Pakistan,her true home. She prefers the kind Muslim community over thetreacherous, corrupt Hindu one.

On the diegetic level ofLakhon mein Ek, good Hindus prefer tolive in Pakistan. On the extra-diegetic level, however, there is no

place for them beyond the borders of Hindustan. While attemptingto flee from India, Shakuntala dies at the border, her white sari tornby the barbed-wire fence erected between two countries. This is ascene repeated years later in Randhir Kapoor’sHenna. The femaleprotagonist, Henna, is shot dead at the line of control and dies adramatic death replete with multiple high-key-lit close-ups. As shelies dangerously close to Hindustan, her dying words affirm her

religious alliance: there is no God but God and Muhammad is hismessenger. The salient political point ofLakhon mein Ek is the un-viability of Hindustan. According to this film, the lecherous, cor-rupt Hindus will eventually drive the good women of their owncommunity to deaths such as Shakuntala’s. According to the film,then, Muslim men best protect Hindu women’s chastity. In thispeculiar denial of sexual violence perpetrated upon Hindu women

by Muslim men during Partition,Lakhon mein Ek both appropriatesresponsibility for a Hindu woman and kills her at the border. IfShakuntala is a symbol of India, at least of the better side of it, thento destroy her is a significant cinematic move indeed. The tornwhite sari fluttering upon the barbed wire is a contradictory image

14 See, for instance, Urvashi Butalia’s excellent study inThe Other Side ofSilence: Voices from the Partition of India (DurhamNC: DukeUP, 2000 ).



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of violence done to woman, of an aborted peace between twonations, and of a failed India.

Henna, too, invests a woman with nationhood and leaves herdead at the end of the narrative. In this1991 Indian film, the deadPakistani woman sacrifices her body as a symbol of her unrequitedlove for a Hindu man, Chander. At the conclusion of the film,Chander stands over Henna’s corpse and delivers a didactic lecturetypical of R.K. Studio’s films: he asks whose bullet killed Hennaand questions the basis of a militarized society. Significantly, the

film refuses to ask why a Pakistani woman’s body and not an In-dian man’s body lies dead in no-man’s-land. Much likeLakhon meinEk, this film assumes a superficially liberal tone that allows for thepossibility of a transnational alliance, romantic or otherwise. In bothfilms, however, the woman from across the border who has trans-gressed religious and national lines and come to woo “our” man iskilled off before the curtain falls: national borders are hermetically

sealed over the corpses of the female Other in bothLakhon mein Ek and Henna. In fact, the sexual (un)availability of these women con-stitutes the definitive contours of Indian and Pakistani nationhood.

Thirteen years after the release ofHenna, another Bollywoodcharacter, Puro, re-named Hameeda by her Muslim abductor, willrefuse to die on the ‘right’ side of the border. Based on Amrita Pri-tam’s novel of the same name,Pinjar was Chandraprakash Dwi-

vedi’s first directorial venture. The film, though focused on Hindu–Muslim conflicts during the late1940 s, manages to avoid exaggerat-ing the cultural and linguistic differences among Hindus, Muslims,and Sikhs in pre- and post-Partition Punjab. The film resists thetemptation of either demonizing or exoticizing the other. Of course,one could argue that the story would have unfolded quite different-ly if Puro (Urmila Matondkar) was Muslim and her abductor

Rashid (Manoj Bajpai) was Hindu: could a Hindu community ac-cept an abducted Muslim woman into its fold in the same manner?Nonetheless, it is a significant moment for Bollywood cinema whenPuro does not return to Ramchand (Sanjay Suri), her Hindu fiancé,and chooses to stay with her Muslim husband in newly formedPakistan. The overt allusions to theRamayana, in this case, do notpredetermine the conclusion. What if Sita,Pinjar asks us to




consider, chose to remain in Lanka with Ravana? Are the ideas ofhome (Ayodhya) and exile (Lanka) ever interchangeable?

At the end of the film, as the main characters gather at a refugeecamp in Lahore, women of various religious communities are in theprocess of being ‘restored’ to their ‘correct’ nations. This is the bor-derland scene par excellence not simply because of Lahore’s proxi-mity to the border but because of the liminal status accorded to thewomen who are being identified, classified, and ultimately repatri-ated according the new logic of nationhood in an independent sub-

continent. Within this context, Amrita Pritam’s narrative choice ispowerful indeed. In the final scene, Puro-as-Sita says to Rashid-as-Ravana “You are my truth now.” As the trucks carrying Hindusand Sikhs to India pull away from the camp, Ramchand-as-Ramsays, “Don’t make her homeless twice.” The final line of the film isPuro’s voiceover: “Whenever a woman, Hindu or Muslim, returnshome, know that Puro’s soul is at peace.” This seemingly anodyne

sentiment hides within it a riddle. How do we know which home isthe correct one for which woman? Pinjar manages to revise one ofthe most powerful epic narratives of home, exile, and female chasti-ty in a manner that does not leave the female protagonist dead atthe border between nations, between home and exile, between Ayo-dhya and Lanka, between the human and divine. The eponymous

pinjar , or the cage, is ultimately not solely the fate of the abducted,

but also the fate of the abductor. Yet, the cage is not immutable.Borders might shift and transform exile into home, India into Paki-stan, cage into truth.

WhilePinjar allows its female protagonists to survive the makingof a new border in the subcontinent, other contemporary Bolly-wood films re-enact Henna’s death through the death of soldiers inBorder , of a terrorist inFiza, and of a suicide bomber inDil Se. All

these figures die at the border, though in some cases that border ispushed from the edges of the nation in Rajasthan or Kashmir intothe heart of Bombay or Delhi. Although Chander, the Hindu Indianmale protagonist inHenna, can cross (albeit unintentionally) intoPakistan, the Muslim Pakistani female protagonist cannot enter In-dia. These days, border patrolling is hardly so precise. Who cancross the border? Who regulates movement across the border? How

is the borderland represented in the codes of popular Bombay



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

No Passports, No VisasSalman Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai might have been “handcuffed tohistory” due to the accident of his birth at precisely the hour whenIndia became independent.15 But, when another midnight birthtakes place on the Bollywood screen in the new millennium, it isdifficult to ascertain if the baby can claim any history at all. If Rush-die can be accused of lacking subtlety in his handling of allegory in

Midnight’s Children, J.P. Dutta nearly converts the midnight birthinto outright parody inRefugee. Dutta’sRefugee is a follow-up to his1997 jingoistic tribute to the Indian armed forces inBorder . The sec-ond installment, self-proclaimed as a "human story,” returns toIndia’s western border in Rajasthan.

The film opens with a shot of a map of the subcontinent uponwhich a moving red line indicates the migrant family’s journeyfrom Bihar to East Pakistan to Rajasthan. The story proper beginsnear the border in western Rajasthan. It also ends at this borderwhen the heroine, Naaz (Kareena Kapoor), gives birth to a son pre-cisely at the midnight between August14 and August15. The fatherof Naaz’s son is the eponymous Refugee (Abhishek Bachchan), amysterious orphan who helps migrants from India and Pakistancross the desert border illegally. The birth of their child near a Sufishrine, exactly at midnight while both India and Pakistan celebratetheir independence, is a symbolic resolution of the conflict betweenthe two countries. The two military representatives, the PakistaniAshraf (Sunil Shetty) and the Indian Raghubir (Jackie Shroff) in-dulge in a bit of good-natured ribbing as they discuss the citizen-ship of the newborn child. Can the child claim Pakistani citizenshipby invoking matrilineal descent? Or, can the power of patriarchyclaim him as an Indian citizen? The matter is left unsettled. The twomilitary officers, both involved in patrolling the border, uncharac-teristically abandon this question of citizenship in order to proclaimhim a citizen “of everywhere and nowhere.” He will have “no pass-ports, no visas.”Refugee, like its predecessorBorder , is deeply con-

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




cerned with questions of infiltration, border smuggling, and crossborder terrorism. While the first part of the film works to manipu-

late the viewer’s sympathy for border-crossers and implicitly callsfor a more porous border, the second half partly reverses thatstructure. Despite its valorization of the transgressive Refugee, thefilm reinforces the Indian state’s right to regulate the mobility ofpeople, goods, and ideas across national borders.

The midnight baby’s father, Refugee, is an illegal border-crosserpar excellence. Yet, by the end of the film, he enlists with the Indian

BSF in order to secure the border against Pakistani terrorists. Refu-gee, though claiming to have no parentage, no religious or nationalidentity, is implicitly (in the first part) and explicitly (in the secondpart) an Indian Hindu. When the villainous Pakistani RangerTauseef insults “his Hindustani blood,” Refugee responds with asurprising show of nationalistic vigour. Pakistani and/or Muslimidentity operates only in its difference from the normative that is

Indian and/or Hindu. To formulate this another way, Indian citi-zens can always lay claim to a larger subcontinental civilizationalidentity. But, the Pakistani citizen must be monitored closely if heor she attempts the same. The ideal border, in Dutta’s film, operatesmuch like a safety valve that allows only one-way flow.

While the child of an Indo-Pakistani union requires no passportsor visas inBorder , a similar child faces a much different fate in Anil

Sharma’s superhit filmGadar: Ek Prem Katha. Gadar offers a numberof parallels to Dutta’s film. Tara Singh (Sunny Deol) and Sakina(Amisha Patel) are old acquaintances who are thrown into eachother’s company following a Partition-related massacre. They crossclass and religious barriers to marry each other and have a son, Jeet.Unlike Naaz’s son, Sakina’s son has unambiguous religious andnational affiliations. His unshorn hair marks him as Sikh. Further-

more, for this young Indian national, Pakistanis clearly representthe Other.The ‘rescue’ of the ‘re-patriated’ Sakina by her husband and son

constitutes the more egregiously jingoistic section of the film. IfRandhir Kapoor’sHenna concluded with the consolidation of theIndian family (Chander’s) through the death of the Muslim heroineat the border, then Anil Sharma’s melodrama concludes with the

consolidation of the Indian family (Tara Singh’s) through the return



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of the Muslim woman from across the Pakistani border. Onceagain, the ethical need of the Indian protagonist to cross the India–

Pakistan border in order to claim his bride takes precedence overthe immigration laws of the border zone. To borrow Ghosh’s for-mulation inThe Shadow Lines, Gadar and Lakhon mein Ek are joinedin a symmetrical embrace across the looking-glass border betweenBollywood and Lollywood. Sakina and Shakuntala are both womenleft behind in the ‘wrong’ nation by migrating families. Their sub-sequent re-patriation, however, proves unsuccessful as the viability

of the new homeland across the border is brought into question.Gadar , as it turns out, spurred the making of the Pakistani filmChudiyan, a cross-border twin which neatly reversed the Indianfilm’s structure in order to ‘rescue’ a Hindu woman back into Paki-stan.

If one considers both halves ofRefugee, the final line – “No pass-ports, no visas” – remains ominously ambiguous. Does it augur a

future time of free movement across the national borders in SouthAsia? Or does it, instead, echo the official voice of high commis-sions, consulates and embassies denying the petition for a passportor visa? Is the child of Refugee also doomed to be a refugee, anudvastu?16 If this debate about citizenship – and even the birth of acitizen – is located at the border, then the national border betweenIndia and Pakistan not only demarcates the nation but also pro-

duces it.This generative vision of the border is drawn out quite explicitlyin Dutta’s final installment of the borderland trilogy,LOC . In thiswar film, the1999 India–Pakistan war in Kargil is so exaggeratedlypartisan that Pakistanis are barely shown on screen or even named(they are generally referred to as rats). The Indian armed forces arepainstakingly represented as a true microcosm of India in all its

diversity. Furthermore, much likeBorder , LOC also participates in adiscourse that genders the nation as female. That is, the relative ab-sence of actual women (the wives, mothers, and girlfriends of theIndian soldiers appear mainly in a couple of musical interludes) isonly reiterated by the larger-than-life symbolic nation-as-mother. Is

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




the feminized face of the nation a symbol of national strength ordoes it render the nation vulnerable within a patriarchal discourse

of nationalism? And what role does the line of control play in pro-tecting the feminized nation? Indeed, while the diegetic contentasserts the importance of the line of control in maintaining theintegrity of the nation, the extra-diegetic content tell us somethingelse entirely. The title of the film makes use of a graphic image thatrepeats the ambivalence that operates at the heart of films such asthese. The “O” ofLOC first appears on theDVD menu as a circle of

barbed wire on mountainous terrain with a bloody “L” and “C” ap-pearing on either side of it. This barbed wire “O” is then replicatedinto a shifting circular target for an unseen rifle. The circle of barbedwire is a visual clue signalling the apparent ambiguity of linesdrawn across and around nations – does the enclosed circle free usfrom all that is outside or does it imprison us? Moreover, as the titlegraphics mutate on the screen, we are presented with yet another

scenario: the barbed wire, a symbol of the line of control, protectsnational integrity, and simultaneously renders the nation more vul-nerable by turning it into a target of violence.

Border Patrol, Border TouristWho patrols such a productive, fertile borderland? The border-crossing sequences inRefugee and Mission Kashmir , for instance,both place the viewer as border patrol.Refugee’s border-crossingsequences are often filmed using long shots. After panning acrossthe dunes, the camera focuses on his moving body across the undu-lating stretches of sand. This gaze aligns the viewer with gaze ofpatrollingBSF and Rangers’s binoculars. We strain to look for themoving figure, dressed in white to blend in with the environment.Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s film also temporarily positions the viewer asborder patrol during the crucial border-crossing sequence. In

Mission Kashmir , Altaaf (Hrithik Roshan), the prodigal foster-son ofa police officer, disappears across the border and then returns toIndia as a terrorist bent on personal revenge. Altaaf runs away fromhome after discovering that his foster-father had been the officerwho massacred his biological family in a police raid. After anaborted attempt to shoot his father, the young Altaaf disappearsinto the darkness through an open bedroom door. The camera



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follows the gaze of the devastated foster parents. We say goodbyeto the child Altaaf through the parent’s eyes. We encounter the

adult Altaaf through a different gaze.The sequence in which Altaaf returns to Indian Kashmir forms abridge between the two parts of the narrative. His return is the onlysequence in which the India–Pakistan border is depicted. This briefsequence, however, plays a crucial role in the narrative. The borderthat Altaaf crosses is not only the border between India and Paki-stan, it is also the symbolic border between his past and his present,

between a Kashmiri and a terrorist, between an edenic Kashmir anda valley of violence, and between an older type of Bollywood filmand the newer border film.

In the border-crossing sequence, the gaze of the camera, at first,aligns us with a swiftly moving figure. We seem to be crossing theIndia–Pakistan border ourselves. This mode is soon abandoned, asa small running figure covered in a shawl appears. The camera cap-

tures large vistas somewhat unsteadily. The mysterious figure(soon to be revealed as Altaaf) seems to be running nearly out ofeach frame. After sweeping across green valleys and hills, we final-ly rest our gaze upon a small road. The borderland in Mission Kash-mir is a dense green hilly landscape. Nature is uninterrupted by thebuilt environment. We are not, however, in the valley of love,where countless filmsongs have been shot. The respite from the

built environment that in past movies allowed Bollywood lovers animagined escape from societal strictures now becomes an uninha-bited terrain where terrorists break a very different set of laws.From transgressive border-crossers, to ever-vigilant border patrolguards, to touristic sightseers, the border scene in Mission Kashmir allows us to try on a variety of viewing positions.

Starting with its title-sequence, Mission Kashmir addresses Bolly-

wood audience’s historical relationship to the image of Kashmir.Kashmir, for popular Indian cinema, has long been the provider ofpicturesque landscapes, ofshikaras (houseboats) gliding on DalLake, of bejeweled Kashmiri beauties. Yet, that Technicolor Kash-mir now only exists on the cinema screen, or, as the late Kashmiri–American poet Agha Shahid Ali would say, on the postcard in ourmailbox.




The first frame of Mission Kashmir includes the quintessentialshikara floating on tranquil waters. The boat explodes as the title se-

quence begins. The accompanying song, “Dhua dhua” (Smoke,smoke everywhere), is a postlapsarian dirge lamenting the end ofparadise. To whom does the voice of mourning belong? To Kash-mir? To popular film? To honeymooners? This song reappears laterin the film, functioning as a chorus commenting on events as theyunfold. After Altaaf returns to Indian Kashmir from across the bor-der, his childhood sweetheart Sufiya (Preity Zinta) takes him on a

shikara. In the subsequent song, Sufiya asks a traumatized Altaaf tolook at the landscape through her eyes (mere aakhon se dekho zara).As Altaaf “looks through Sufiya’s eyes,” we the viewers lookthrough the eyes of a ghostly genre. Theshikara sequence leads to afantasy sequence that is pure old-school Bollywood. Sufiya andAltaaf sing and dance against backdrops that make no attempt tohide the artifice of a Mumbai film studio. The perky girlfriend flirt-

ing with the traumatized terrorist might equally be an older Bolly-wood genre pleading with the narrative gaze of Mission Kashmir .Altaaf’s border-crossing, then, must be placed alongside this film-song and the opening sequence – all sequences that explicitly in-voke the visual pleasure afforded by the Kashmiri picturesque evenas it withholds that pleasure in order to present a narrative of na-tional integration. The borderland which Altaaf is seen crossing,

thus, can also be seen as the borderland between Bollywood’s Kash-miri romance and Kashmiri terrorism.

Uncanny BorderIf the Wagah–Attari checkpoint is an uncanny space where “Hama-ra Bharat Mahan” and “Long Live Pakistan” are coextensive witheach other, then the borderland also produces what Ranabir Sa-maddar eloquently terms “pangs of proximity”:

[We] know them so much, they also know us. We know our mutualbetrayal, hopes, despair. Thousands of people cross the border andferry news from here to there, there to here. Our rivers, eco-agricultural regions, transportation networks, clan ties, affinallinkages, remain spread across the entire land. Above all, we know

what they write, what they think, how they think, they too know of



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us. To deceive ourselves of the pangs of proximity, we havechanged categories into opposites: migration is infiltration, border

trade is smuggling, empathy is interference, policy prescription isarea studies, neighbourhood is ‘near abroad’.17

In Bombay border films, the borderland is near-abroad, the border-land figure almost foreign. The idea of the uncanny borderland isclearly brought to light in a film such asFiza.

In his first directorial venture, the film critic Khalid Mohammedabandons the romantic plot in order to explore the relationshipbetween a brother and a sister that is ruptured by the communalriots of 1992 –93 . Fiza (Karisma Kapoor) searches for her brother,Amaan (Hrithik Roshan), who has been missing since the riotsduring the first half of the film. After learning through a websitethat someone who resembles her brother has been seen with someterrorist group operating near the India–Pakistan border, Fiza

travels from Mumbai to rural Rajasthan. The subsequent bordersequence fits awkwardly with the rest of the film. While the lower-middle-class Fiza wearsshalwar-kameezes in all the Mumbaisequences, she adopts the dress of a Lonely Planet tourist as shetravels through small Rajasthani towns and villages. Her jeans,sneakers, and backpack seem more in keeping with an upper-class,westernized, urban aesthetic. Even her ‘ethnic’ Indian shawl is

reminiscent of a tourist’s trophy scoured from any one of thousandsof shops catering to foreign visitors all over urban India. Fiza’scostume only serves to further highlight the difference betweenurban India and its rural limit. The Mumbai resident is a foreignerto the Rajasthani borderland. The difference between her Hindi andthe language of the locals (a Bollywood version of Rajasthani Hindi)only heightens the difference between India and its internal Others.

If we are asked to look on the borderland through Fiza’s gaze as atourist, then the song “Mehboob mere mehboob” that is an integralpart of the border sequence further heightens our position as con-sumers of a spectacle.

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




It is an irony of subcontinental geography that part of the India–Pakistan border runs through two regions most hyped as touristic

destinations for both Indians and foreigners alike: Rajasthan andKashmir. The romance of Rajasthan and Kashmir is at the root ofBollywood’s inevitably uncanny border. Since Independence, In-dian tourism discourse has focused on these regions incessantly aspopular destinations for foreign visitors. For foreign tourists, what,other than the Taj Mahal and elephants, can be more evocative ofIndia than the Rajasthani villager in his colorful tie-and-dye turban

or folk dancers in bright ghagra-cholis? Yet let us not forget thatthese images are also used to lure Indians to be tourists in their inown country, to ‘discover India’, as it were. Mission Kashmir andFiza reiterate popular Indian ideas about certain regions. Rajasthanis the land of Rajputs, sand dunes, camels, palaces, and legends.18 Kashmir is a paradisiacal valley, a land ofshikaras and Kashmiribeauties in ornate headdresses. These are the visual and cultural

stereotypes exploited by Bollywood in order to valorize “our” landon “our” side of the border. In a filmsong such as “Mehboob meremehboob” (“Beloved, my beloved”), shot in the Rajasthani desert,the camera’s gaze situates us, viewers in India and its diasporas, asvicarious tourists. “Mehboob mere mehboob” begs the followingquestion: can the eroticized figure of the Rajasthani dancer, in turn,function as an uncomplicated symbol of Indianness?

Fiza follows the female protagonist’s rediscovery of her missingbrother, Amaan, in the aftermath of the1992 –93 riots, and the even-tual death of the brother in the hands of his sister. The film is over-determined in its structure. The conclusion, a flashback to the firstscene, reiterates the circular structure of the film. Repetition withdifference,Fiza implies, is all one can expect of communal conflict

18 In a public lecture titled “Rajasthan in the Indian Imagination” held at theHarvard South Asia Humanities Seminar on8 February2002 , the literary criticMeenakshi Mukherjee argued that Bengali writers in the nineteenth centuryoften made use of quasi-historical accounts of Rajasthan as a way of inventing atradition of resistance to colonial and/or Muslim political aggression. More-over, Bengali writers often used colonial British chronicles of Rajasthan as theirsource material. Doubly refracted through the British colonial lens and the Ben-gali literary imagination, figures such as the beautiful queen Padmini or thevaliant Rajput warriors became symbols of a past and future “Indian” glory.



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in India. The film’s border sequence, as we shall see, is part of thatstructure of repetition.

The intermission that stands between the two halves of the stan-dard three-hour Bollywood film is a sort of an internal border with-in the filmic narrative. As Lalitha Gopalan astutely reminds us, theBollywood intermission allows for at least two moments of begin-ning in a standard three-hour film. Rather than dismiss the inter-mission as a vestige of an earlier, more primitive, cinema of attrac-tions, Gopalan alerts us to its function as a powerful interrupter of

narrative. The intermission, like the filmsong, ruptures traditionalfilmic narrative. Most filmmakers attempt to arrive at some sort ofnarrative climax before freezing the frame for the requisite break.The intermission itself in an Indian movie theatre, when the lightsare back on and popcorn and soft-drink vendors descend amongthe audience, is a sort of borderland, a checkpoint between one partof the narrative and another. InFiza, the intermission sign is super-

imposed on the image of the heroine uncovering her brother’s face.This configuration of the two figures facing each other will be re-peated towards the end of the film when Fiza and Amaan standface to face with a rifle bridging the distance between the two. Bothof these scenes refer to other famous Bollywood scenes. The unveil-ing of the shrouded male face echoes numerous such unveilings offemale faces by male characters in Hindi films. This is the over-used

wedding-night (suhaag raat ) trope, a marker of male sexual aggres-sion. The concluding scene, quite obviously, is a reference to theending of Mehboob Khan’s1957 classic, Mother India. That film endswith the mother (Nargis) shooting her renegade son (Sunil Dutt) –Mother India kills her errant son to safeguard the nation. InFiza, themother, Nishat Bi (Jaya Bachchan), commits suicide when she real-izes that her son has become a murderer.Fiza is decidedly not a

confrontation between a nation (figured as mother) and its citizen(figured as her son). It is now a confrontation between the citizen-daughter and the citizen-son. UnlikeDil Se, Henna, or Gadar , theconflict between national integration and secessionist movements isnot narrated through a cross-border romance. The terrorist and theloyal citizen share a filial bond.

But how do we understand the unveiling of Amaan by Fiza, a

scene that foreshadows the film’s final allusion to the Mehboob




Khan classic? To understand Amaan’s unveiling in its extra-diegeticcontext, we must first see Fiza’s action as a continuation of a series

of unveilings that take place in the “ Mehboob mere mehboob” songsequence. After all, we catch glimpses of Amaan partly hidden be-hind a black shawl while a dance spectacle unfolds in the border-land. It is at the end of the dance sequence that Fiza finally dis-covers her missing brother.

Fiza and Amaan’s confrontation is, in fact, triangulated by thefleeting presence of a third character, the dancer played by Sush-

mita Sen. If Amaan, the terrorist, does not quite represent alterity inthe film, it does not follow that all differences are somehow evacu-ated from the film. In an older Bollywood formulation, the heroinemight have found her opposite in the vamp. The former Miss Uni-verse, Sushmita Sen, appears as a guest star to perform the hit“Mehboob mere mehboob” dance number that takes place in theRajasthani borderland. This song sequence uses a number of easily

recognizable codes for representing India’s internal Other, the fami-liar stranger, on screen. Up to the1970 s, Bollywood often relied onthe figure of the vamp – a cabaret dancer, atawaif (prostitute), agangster’s moll – to provide musical entertainment of a more sex-ually explicit nature. The heroine might sing and dance, but thevamp wore more revealing clothes, smoked, drank, and sang inbolder terms of sexual desire. The heroine and vamp merged into

one figure from the1980 s onwards when lead actresses increasinglyperformed the ‘vampy’ number in a film. Yet the vamp does notquite disappear from the Hindi screen. In recent years, the vampydance has been replaced by what is called the “item number,” per-formed by popular actresses, models, and beauty queens who onlymake a cameo appearance in the film. An ‘item’, in filmi Mumbaislang, is a sexy woman. Sushmita Sen’s item number inFiza, then,

provides for the older form of entertainment, one that cannot be ex-pected for diegetic or extra-diegetic reasons from the heroine. Fizaas backpacking tourist in search of her brother may not perform asexy dance in the borderland. The guest appearance by SushmitaSen, which seemingly stands outside the narrative, works preciselyat the heart of the film. The veiled woman in the Rajasthani desert –dressed according to Mumbai’s vision of the Middle East, using

lyrics that are coded as Muslim, and echoing the role of such legen-



222 SHARMILASEN

dary screen vamps/dancers as Helen – dances in the space wherethe patriotic citizen will reclaim her terrorist brother. As a dancer

clad in diaphanous harem pants and a veil, Sushmita Sen performsagainst sand dunes in a perfect articulation of what Samaddar callsthe “near abroad.” The borderland dancer is a conflation of thecolonial idea of the nautch-girl, the orientalist fantasy of the haremgirl, and the urban Indian bourgeoisie’s libidinous vision of the real‘folk’. We consume our internal Other at the very moment we areasked to identify with our national culture.

Women’s bodies (some dead, others repatriated), gyrating Rajas-thani dancers, and lush Kashmiri hillsides represent the borderlandbetween India and Pakistan. Not unlike a proud display of flagsand military rituals at the Wagah–Attari checkpoint, Indian popularcinema represents a borderland ripe for tourism. Or, in some cases,it represents a borderland that was once ripe for tourism but cannow only be enjoyed and remembered on screen. Instead of a con-

solidation of Indianness at the LOC, such nostalgic consumptions ofthe nation’s internal Other at the borderland only serves as a re-minder that the line between home and elsewhere is irreduciblybuilt upon internal lines of difference. Or, to borrow Amar’s wordsfromDil Se, the viewer’s consumption of “ourselves” at the borderdoes not shorten thedoori between “us” that gives one the excusefor pursuing another. Instead, such a consumption conveniently

maintains – even reinforces – the difference, or thedoori, betweenAmar and Meghna, between the citizen/viewer and the border-land, between an older genre of Bombay cinema and the newerfilms produced by Bollywood.

WORKSCITED Aggarwal, Ravina. “At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politicsof Location in an Indo-Himalayan Village,” American Ethnologist 28 .3 (2001 ):549 –73 .

Anzaldúa, Gloria.Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:Aunt Lute,1987 ).

Balibar, Etienne. “World Borders, Political Borders,”PMLA 117.1 (January2002 ):71–78 .

Barnouw, Erik, & S. Krishnaswamy.Indian Film (New York: OxfordUP,1980 ).




Bose, Sugata, & Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, PoliticalEconomy (London: Routledge,1999 ).

Butalia, Urvashi.The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (DurhamNC: DukeUP, 2000 ).

Calderón, Héctor, & José David Saldívar, ed.Criticism in the Borderlands:Studies in Chicano Literature (DurhamNC: DukeUP, 1991 ).

Chakravarty, Sumita S.National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947 –1987 (Austin:U of TexasP, 1993 ).

Dwyer, Rachel, & Divia Patel.Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (London: Reaktion,2002 ).

Faiz, Faiz Ahmed.The Rebel’s Silhouette, tr. Agha Shahid Ali (Salt Lake City:Peregrine Smith,1991 ).

Ghosh, Amitav.The Shadow Lines (Delhi: Ravi Dayal,1988 ).Gokulsingh, K. Moti, & Wimal Dissanayake.Indian Popular Cinema: A Nar-

rative of Cultural Change (Hyderabad: Orient Longman,1998 ).Gopalan, Lalitha.Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary In-

dian Cinema (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 2003 ).Hazarika, Sanjoy.Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, In-

dia’s East and Bangladesh (New Delhi: Penguin,2000

).Kaur, Raminder, & John Hutnyk, ed.Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contem- porary Cultural Politics (London: Zed,1999 ).

Manto, Sadaat Hasan.Kingdom’s End and Other Stories , tr. Khalid Hasan(London: Verso,1987 ).

Michaelsen, Scott, & David E. Johnson, ed.Border Theory: The Limits of Cul-tural Politics (Minneapolis:U of MinnesotaP, 1997 ).

Moviemag (April2004 ; North American edition).

Nandy, Ashis, ed.The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability andIndian Popular Cinema (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 1998 ).Prasad, M. Madhava.Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 2000 ).

Samaddar, Ranabir, ed.Reflections on Partition in the East (Calcutta: CalcuttaResearch Group,1997 ).

Valicha, Kishore.The Moving Image: A Study of Indian Cinema (Hyderabad:Orient Longman,1988 ).

Vasudevan, Ravi S. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: OxfordUP, 2000 ). —— . “National pasts and futures: Indian cinema,”Screen 41.1 (Spring

2000 ):119–25 .



Afterword

LTHOUGH THE TEXTS UNDER SCRUTINY in this bookare testaments to a situation in which communal identi-ties have taken on added, and often dangerous, resonance

in contemporary India, they also bear witness to the durability –indeed, the inevitability – of connection, transgression and differ-ence. As has often been noted, the appeal of communalism is dis-tinctly limited. Not only are there logical shortcomings, but thecasteist and regional profile of Hindu nationalism has meant thatthere have always been areas, both geographical and emotional, ithas been unable to reach. Commentators have remarked on its fail-ure fully to extend much beyond the Brahmin and Kshatriya castesor to spread far beyond its power bases in northern India.1

Similarly, although economic benefits may have accrued fromthe liberalization of India’s economy in the1990 s – presided over byCongress andBJP governments alike – they have in no way beendistributed evenly, a factor seen as in large measure responsible forthe BJP’s surprise defeat in the general election of2004 . Of thiselection result Arundhati Roy has commented that “It cannot but beseen as a decisive vote against communalism and neo-liberalism’s

economic ‘reforms’.”2

Moreover, the move to embrace global cap-italism has exposed the paradoxes at the heart of Hindu nationalist

1 Stuart Corbridge & John Harriss,Reinventing India: Liberalism, Hindu Nation-alism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity,2000 ): 193 . See alsoThe BJP and the Compulsions of Politics in India, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen & Christophe Jaffrelot (New Delhi, OxfordUP, 1998 ).

2 Arundhati Roy, “Let us hope the darkness has passed,”The Guardian (May14 2004 ).

A



226 ALTERNATIVEINDIAS

attitudes to aspects of ‘modernization’ which, while not in essenceIndian, might operate to the benefit of certain strategically useful

interest-groups.3

Always an acute observer of double standards,Roy has made searching connections between India’s increasedopenness to global multinationals and the rise of communalist poli-tics. The recourse to religious identity seems to palliate the “culturalinsult” of a colonial history while at the same time obscuring India’snew neocolonial relationship with foreign companies. As she pointsout, the Bal Thackeray who proscribed birthday parties and Valen-

tine’s Day as attacks on Indian culture was also the signatory of athirty-million-dollar deal with Rebecca Mark of Enron;

Indian intellectuals today feel radical when they condemn commu-nalism, but not many people talk about the link between privatisa-tion, globalisation and communalism. I think [privatisation andcommunalism] have to be addressed together, not separately. They

are both two sides of the same coin. Growing religious fundamen-talism is directly linked to globalisation and privatisation. TheIndian government is talking of selling its entire power sector toforeign multinationals, but when the consequences of that becomehard to manage, the government immediately starts saying ‘Shouldwe build the Ram temple in Ayodhya?’ Everyone goes off baying inthat direction. Meanwhile contracts are signed.4

Inequalities remain stark, for all the celebration of India’s econo-mic, technological and military achievements. As Aijaz Ahmad hasremarked, Hindutva lacks that “class radicalism […] which couldoffer the immiserated anything more substantial than the intoxi-cants of religious ideology and fascist spectacle […] Hence its con-centration on symbolic politics and its floundering on the substan-tive issues.”5 Now that the language of communalism has enteredthe political mainstream, it is too much to hope that it will be put to

3 See Thomas Blom Hansen, “The Ethics of Hindutva and the Spirit of Cap-italism,” inThe BJP, ed. Hansen & Jaffrelot,291 –314 .

4 Arundhati Roy,The Chequebook and the Cruise-Missile (London: HarperPerennial,2004 ):29 .

5 Aijaz Ahmad,Lineages of the Present: Political Essays (New Delhi: Tulika,1996 ):305 .



Afterword 227

rest simply by a change of government, not least because of theCongress Party’s well-known forays into divisive politics and its

penchant for the politically expedient.In the end, despite the communalist vision, Indian society re-mains both heterogeneous and heterodox, and there is no naturallink between diversity and ethnic or cultural antagonism. Freshreasons for suspicion of the ‘Other’ will undoubtedly continue to becirculated in a global climate where the so-called ‘War on Terror’has made every neighbour a potential enemy and where India’s

Prevention of Terrorism Act has increased the legal cover forhuman-rights abuses of all kinds. However, India is not alone infacing the modern dilemma of rights versus security. It is to behoped, however, that those particular pressures that are alwayspresent in the wary stand-off between the nuclear neighbours inSouth Asia can be creatively sublimated in the cultural arena atleast, and that the kinds of multiplicity everywhere apparent in art

and literature can continue to find expression in the work of India’swriters, whatever their ethnic or religious background.



Notes on Contributors

ASHOK BERY is Senior Lecturer in English at London MetropolitanUniversity. He is a contributing editor toWasafiri and co-editor ofCom- paring Postcolonial Literature (Macmillan,2000 ). His monographPostco-lonial Poetry and Cultural Translation: Reflexive Worlds will be publishedby Palgrave in2006 .ELLEKEBOEHMER is the Hildred Carlile Professor in Literatures inEnglish at Royal Holloway College, University of London. She haspublished three well-received novels,Screens Against the Sky (1990 ;shortlisted for the David Higham Prize), An Immaculate Figure (1993 )and Bloodlines (2000 ), as well asColonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford University Press,1995 ), and the monographEmpire, the National and the Postcolonial (Oxford University Press,2002 ).She has edited the anthologyEmpire Writing, 1870 –1918 (1998 ) and the

UK bestsellerScouting for Boys(2004 ), as well as Cornelia Sorabji’s1934 India Calling (with Naella Grew; Trent Editions,2004 ). In2005 , EllekeBoehmer’s new monographStories of Women: Gender and Narrative in thePostcolonial Nation (Manchester University Press) will be published, aswell as an expanded10 th anniversary edition ofColonial and Postcolo-nial Literature.SHIRLEYCHEW is Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds. She

has published widely in the field of postcolonial literature and is thefounding editor of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writing , thefirst issue of which appeared in2001 . Her work in progress includesthe Blackwell History of Postcolonial Literature.RALPH J. CRANE is Associate Professor of English and Head of theSchool of English, Journalism and European Languages at the Univer-sity of Tasmania, Australia. He has published widely in the field ofcolonial and postcolonial literatures and is currently editing a series of




Raj novels for Oxford University Press India, the first of which areLoveBesieged by Charles E. Pearce (2003 ) and Lilamani by Maud Diver(2004 ). Since2004 he has been co-editor of theNew Literatures Review. ANSHUMANA. MONDAL is Lecturer in Modern and ContemporaryLiterature at the University of Leicester. He is the author ofNationalismand Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (Routl-edge Curzon,2003 ) and Amitav Ghosh (Manchester University Press,forthcoming).PETERMOREY is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the School

of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of EastLondon. He is the author ofFictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edin-burgh University Press,2000 ) and Rohinton Mistry (Manchester Uni-versity Press,2004 ), as well as various essays and reviews. He special-izes in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory, with a particularinterest in South Asia.SHARMILASEN is Assistant Professor of English at Harvard Univer-sity. She specializes in anglophone literatures from Africa, the Carib-bean and South Asia.SUJALA SINGH teaches postcolonial literature at the University ofSouthampton. She has published several articles on South Asian litera-ture and popular culture and is completing a monograph titledPost-colonial Children: Representing the Nation in South Asian Literature .ALEXTICKELL is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the Univer-sity of Portsmouth. He has published widely on colonial and postcolo-nial literature, and is the editor ofSelections from Bengaliana, a collectionof writing by Shoshee Chunder Dutt, (Trent Editions,2005 ). His workin progress includes a study of Arundhati Roy’sThe God of SmallThings, to be published by Routledge in2006 .AMINA YAQIN lectures in Urdu and postcolonial studies at theSchool of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her re-search interests are in gender and women’s writing. She has written onfeminist Urdu poetry, culture and ideology in contemporary Pakistanand her work in progress includes a monograph on gender and inter-textuality in Urdu poetry.



Index

NOTE: Proper names have been indexed under the final element ofthe name, regardless of language of origin.

1857 Rebellion 6 1975 –77 State of Emergency xvii1992 –92 riots 218 –19; see alsocom-munal violence1999 India–Pakistan war, represen-

tation in film 214

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

226 Alvi, Mohammed xxvAnand, Mulk Raj29 Anderson, Benedict xxi,40 , 95 , 178 Anderson, Perry 55 Andrade, Susan 59 antisecularism xix–xx, xxii,2; see also

secularism

antisemitism 19 Anushilan Samiti 46 Army of Shiva see Shiv Sena Arya Samaj xiii, xiv,26 , 34 –35 Aryan Hindu, perception as origin of

India identity 124 Aryanism xiii–xiv,30 , 34 –45 Aryavata 15–17, 25 –50 , 120 autobiography see life-writing

Ayodha, demolition of Babri Masjidix, xxii,62 , 95 , 141, 207 –208 ; literary

representations of xxiv–xxv,61–63 ,65 , 67

Babri Masjid see AyodhaBakhtin, Mikhail123 , 126 Bal, Mieke71–72 , 87 Baldwin, Shauna Singh181, 193 –95 Balibar, Étienne202 –203 Banarsi, Rashid93 –94 Banerjea, Surendranath12 Bangladesh 169 –70 , 174 , 176 Bankim see Chatterjee,

BankimchandraBano, Shah xviiiBengal Renaissance xxi,13

Bengali nationalism xii–xiii; see alsoBankim; Bengal RenaissanceBhabha, Homi xxi–xxiiBhagavad-Gita 152 Bharatiya Janata Party xi, xvii, xviii,

xxiii,21, 42 , 141–42 , 146 , 225 Bharatiya 38 bhasha literatures xxvii–xviiiBhatt, Chetan 28 –29 , 33




Bhindranwale, Sant Jarnail Singhxvii;see alsoSikh separatism

biography see life-writingBJP see Bharatiya Janata PartyBluntschli, Johann Kaspar44 Bollywood see Indian cinema; In-

dian film industryBombay riots 73 , 95 , 141 ,146 , 207 –

208 , 218 –19; see also communalviolence

Bombay 73 , 141–42 , 146 –48 ; literaryrepresentations of81–88 , 143 Border 197–98 , 211, 212 , 214 Bose, Subhas Chandra1 Bourdieu, Pierre 175–77 Brahmo Samaj 34 Buddhism, viewed as offshoot of

Hinduism 42 –43

Calcutta, literary representations of163 , 168 –70 , 173–77

Cama, Madame Bhikaiji27 capital, transnational53 , 55 caste 45 –46 , 119 Certeau, Michel de166 –67 , 171, 174

Chandra, Satish xxiiiChandra, Vikram xxvii–xxviiiChatterjee, Bankimchandra xii, xiii,

1, 65 ; Anandamath xiii,32 –33 ; elitenationalism 46 ; Krsnacaritra 33 ;use of Puranic myth34

Chatterjee, Partha xii, xviii–xix,1–2 ,32 , 46 , 116–17, 120

Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra seeChatterjee, Bankimchandra

Chaudhuri, Amit xxvi,82 Chhalia 207 Chopra, Vidhu Vinod, Mission Kash-

mir 198 –99 , 215–17, 219 colonial cartography13

colonial policy: educational and ad-ministrative xii; linguistic policy96 , 98 ; religious 6–7

colonialism: use of Aryanism to justi-fy 36 ; use of communalism xv,xxix,14, 183

communal violence ix–x, xxii,21–22 ,62 , 73 , 95 , 141, 146 , 162 –63 , 168 , 173 ,180 , 208 , 218 –19; following Parti-tion xvi–xvii,56 , 206

communalism: definition of4; op-posed to nationalism2 , 26 ; politicsof 142 ; and Sikhism 183 ; use of bycolonialism xv, xxix,14, 183

communalist nationalism189 communalization of contemporary

Indian politics 178 Congress Party xiii, xv, xvi; and

communalism xvii,227 ; Congressnationalism 50 ; and inter-commu-nal tolerance, xvi; nation as terri-torial concept, xxi; and secularism,xvi, xviii,63 ; Surat split of xiii

Constituent Asssembly1946 xviCorbridge, Stuart & John Harriss

xix–xxcultural memory 71–72 , 90 –94 cultural nation, location in private

female space 65

Dangarembga, Tsitsi62 , 66 Dā simayya, Dē vara 121 degeneration see race fitnessdemocracy, central to idea of India

94 ‘departure-phase’ nationalism 32 –

33 , 39 –40 Derrida, Jacques178 Desai, Anita:Clear Light of Day 91,

105 ; In Custody 89 –92 , 100 –11; In

Custody, film version 111n.



Index 233

Desai, Manmohan,Chhalia 207 Deshpande, Shashi,Small Remedies

72–88 Dharwadker, Vinay 124 , 127 , 128 ,

137 Dhavan, Rajeev xxivDickens, Charles:David Copperfield

75; Great Expectations 27 –28 Dil Se 198 –99 , 204 –207 , 211, 222 Diver, Maud 30

divide and rule see colonialism, useof communalismdress, and identity 44 Dutt, Romesh Chunder1 Dutta, J.P.:Border 197–98 , 211, 212 ,

214 ; Refugee 198 , 212 –14, 215 ; LOC:Kargil 198 , 214 –15

Dwivedi, Chandraprakash,Pinjar(The Cage) 198 , 210 –11

East Pakistan see Bangladesheducation, and language96 –97 , 99 –

100 , 108 Ek Prem Katha see Anil SharmaEmecheta, Buchi54

English language: Indian literature inxxvi–xxix; role in post-Indepen-dence Indian life xxviii,99 ; what itrepresents in India 123

English literature, relationship withIndian-English literature105

Ezekiel, Nissim82 –83

Fabianism 47 –49 Faiz, Faiz Ahmad90 –91, 104 –105 ,

205 feminism 62 ; see alsoliberation of

women; nationalism, and gender;nation, and female identity; Indiannationalism, female perspective on

feminization of Hindus in literature187 –91

Fiza 198 , 211, 218 –22 folk culture and national identity92 folklore123 Forster, E.M.:The Longest Journey 48 ;

Howards End 59 Foucault, Michel xxiiFreud, Sigmund 187 –88

Gandhi, Indira:1975 –77 State ofEmergency xvii; assassinationxvii; and communalism xvii

Gandhi, Mohandas K. xvi,1; agrar-ian vision of India xix; and dress44 ; as ‘father of the Nation’67 ; onHindi–Urdu debate 98 ; influenceof writings on Indian-English lite-rature 29 ; Ram Rajya 50

Gandhi, Rajiv xviii‘Gandhi-novel’29 Ganguly, Debjani xxvGeertz, Clifford175 gendering of religious groups184 –

95

ghazal form 91; see alsoUrdu lite-rature; Faiz Ahmad FaizGhose, Aurobindo xii,1, 46 –47 Ghose, Barindrakumar46 –47 Ghosh, Amitav:In An Antique Land

171–72 ; and Indian diaspora xxx;literary representations of Bangla-desh 170 , 174 , 176 ; The Shadow Lines161–80 , 203 , 214

Ghosh, Sarath Kumar,The Prince ofDestiny 30 –31, 33 , 38 –39 , 41, 44 –45 ,47 –48

globalization 53 , 55 Golwalkar, Madhav Sadashiv xiv,

xxi; see also Rashtriya Swayamsevak

Sangh




Gopalan, Lalitha220 Grewal, Inderpal 66 Gujarat, communal violence in ix,

xxii,21, 95 Gupta, Jyontirindra Das96 –97 Gurjar, Vasant Dattareya xxv

Hedgewar, Keshav Baliram xiv,43 ;see also Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

Heehs, Peter 46 –47 Henna 198 –99 , 207 –208 , 210 Heuze, Gerard xxiiHindi 95 ; history of 96 –100 ; seen as

Hindu language 99 ; seen as Indiannational language 93 , 99

Hindi–Urdu debate 90 –100 Hindu Mahasabha xiiiHindu myth xx–xxi,121; see also

Bhagavad-Gita; Mahabharata; Rama-yana

Hindu nationalism: Brahminic bias124 ; and caste ideology119; equa-ted to Indian nationalism2 , 5, 18;and Hindu primordialism 32 , 34 –39 , 118; limitations of reach225 ; as

part of Indian nationalism26 ; andschool education xxiii; and physi-cal training xiv, xxii,47 ; resur-gence in recent Indian history115,142 ; as threat to Parsi community142 , 156 –57; see also Hindutva

Hinduism102 Hindus, stereotyping of185 –87 Hindustani music and musicians

74 n.,78 –80 Hindustani 93 , 95 , 98 Hindutva , and secularism in the In-

dian constitution 8 Hindutva xii, xiv, xix–xxii,1–2 , 48 ,

115–16, 118 , 138 , 142 , 146 , 226

historiography xii–xiii,116–18 , 172

history, and nationalism xii–xiii, xv,xxiii–xxiv,10 , 34 , 42 , 128

history-making 162 homoeroticism 55–56 , 60 –65 , 67 homogenization of idea of nation

116–18 Hunter–Wilson, William35 Husain, Intizar 110

idea of nation, communal identities

and 178 Indian cinema 197–222 Indian Constitution of1947 xviii;

linguistic policy98 –99 ; and secu-larism 8 , 116

Indian diaspora, writers of xxx–xxxiIndian economy 225 –26 Indian film industry: regional lan-

guage films,199 ; Hindi films, recep-tion outside India,200

Indian literature, language, xxvi–xxixIndian Mutiny see 1857 RebellionIndian nation: as composite of reli-

gious communities11–12, 16–21; aspolitical concept12–13; as terri-

torial concept xxi,12–16 Indian nationalism: and elitism45 –48 ; female perspective on55 ; fail-ure of 189 ; ‘moment of departure’32 –33 , 39 –40

Indian novel, development of thexxviii,29 –50

Indian tourist industry 219 Indian-English literature: marketing

of xix; and notions of authenticityxxvii–xxviii; othering of xxix–xxx;and race theory 37–38 ; representa-tion of Indianness xxix–xx; repre-sentation in West xix; and Roman-ticism 105 ; use of romance form

30 –31, 58 –59



Index 235

India–Pakistan war of1971 , represen-tation in film 197–98

individualism 61, 64 intermissions, function in Indian film

220 Islam, representation as recent reli-

gion 102 Islam, and Urdu 93 , 99

Jaffrelot, Christophe,38

Jameson, Fredric59 –60 Japan, as exemplar in early Indiannationalism 42 –43

Japanese martial arts47 Japanese militarism43 –45 Johnstone, Harry42 Kant, Immanuel 152 , 155–56 , 158 –59 Kapoor, Randhir,Henna 198 –99 ,

207 –208 , 210 Kapur, Manju 55 –68 ; A Married

Woman 55 , 60 –68 ; DifficultDaughters 55–61

Karmasutra 67 Kashmir xix,162 , 177, 215 –17 Kesavan, Mukul xvi

Khalistan see Sikh separatismKhan, Mehboob, Mother India 220 –21

Khan, Sayyid Ahmad96 Khilnani, Sunil x, xvii,49 , 94 , 118 ,

120 Kipling, Rudyard 184 –85 Knesević , Djurda 54 Kolgaokar, Uttam82 –83 Krishnavarma, Shyamji26 –27 , 28 ,

45 Kshatriya xxii

Lakhon mein Ek 208 –10 language: as carrier of religious iden-

tity and national loyalty95 , 108 ;

comparative philology and racialinterconnectedness35 ; conflationwith religion 100 ; and nationalism2; and print culture 102 –203 ; ques-tion in India,90 , 95 –100

Lelyveld, David97 –98 liberation of women, compared with

liberation from colonialism53 –55 life-writing 49 , 72 , 75–76 LOC: Kargil 198 , 214 –15

Lollywood see Pakistani film in-dustryLyall, Sir Alfred42 Lyotard, Jean–François56 n.

Madan, T.N. xviii–xix Mahabharata xx,31, 87 ; see also Bhaga-

vad-GitaMaharashtrian state elections141–42 Man, Paul de 170 –71 Maniratnam,Dil Se (From the Heart)

198 –99 , 204 –207 , 211, 222 Manto, Sadaat Hasan,Toba Tek Singh

208 masculinity, political power and

183 –84 , 188 Masters, John184 memory and identity 75; see alsocul-

tural identityMerchant, Ismail111n.Mir, Raza,Lakhon mein Ek(One in

Thousands) 208 –10 Mission Kashmir 198 –99 , 215–17, 219 Mistry, Rohinton,Family Matters

142 –59 Mitra, S.M.30 –33 , 38 –40 , 45 –47 Mohammed, Khalid,Fiza ( Air ) 198 ,

211, 218 –22 Mosse, George185 , 192 Mother India 220 –21

Mughal empire 92




Mukherjee, Meenakshi xxvi–xxviiMüller, Friedrich Max35 –36 Mumbai see Bombaymusic see Hindustani music; ghazal

formMuslims: literary representations of

188 –89 , 191–92 ; population in con-temporary India 89 , 96 , 107 , 181;representation as debauched107 ;representation as martial184

Muslim migration, effect on Urduliterature 94 Muslim women, representation of in

literature and film 191–92 , 221 –22 myth, Hindu xx–xxi,121; see also

Bhagavad-Gita; Mahabharata; Rama-yana

Naipaul, V.S. xxxNandy, Ashis xvi–xx,29 , 117 Nasreen, Taslima: exile from Bangla-

desh xxiv–xxv;Lajja xxivnation: analogy with family62 , 67 ,

204 ; and communal identities178 ;and female identity58 , 67 ; role in

world politics 53 national allegory 59 –60 nationalism: and cultural essential-

ism 3; and gender 53 –68 ; and his-tory xii–xiii, xv, xxiii–xxiv,10 , 34 ,42 ; and loss of individual identity59 ; and sexual symbolism183 –84 ,188 , 191

nationalist discourse3 nationalist fiction, village-pastoral

40 nationalist historiography, homoge-

nization of idea of nation116–18 nationalists, progressive v.

conservative 10–12

Nehru, Jawaharlal xv–xvi; An Auto-biography, 26 –28 ; N.’s attitude toearly nationalists 28 , 45 ; The Dis-covery of India 25 –26 ; and Fabian-ism 48 –49 ; and historiography49 –50 ; and multi-lingual admini-stration 98 ; influence of N.’s writ-ings on Indian-English literature29 ; N.’s life-writing26 –28 , 49 ; N.’sliterary taste 27 , 29 ; N.’s model of

Indian identity xv,50 ; and nation-alism 28 ; N.’s rhetoric50 ; andsecularism xv, xvii, xviii,3–4 , 50 ,116; and social utopianism48 –49 ;Western influence on N.’s national-ism64

neocolonialism54 Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat 59 nostalgia: and cultural memory92 ;

and identity politics72

‘othering’ of Indian-English fictionxxix–xxx

Pakistani culture 91

Pakistani film industry200 , 208 –10 ,214 Pakistani literature 181; see alsoUrdu

literaturePakistani nationalism91, 93 Pal, Bipinchandra1, 10 , 16–21 pan-Asiatic alliance42 –43 ; see also Japan

Pandey, Gyanendra xviii,3, 11, 26 ,116–18

Parsi community: culture 142 –44 ,149 , 156 –57 ; literary representationsof 193 –94 ; reasons for decrease157; threatened by Hindu majori-tarianism 144 , 156 –57



Index 237

Partition xvi–xvii,180 , 206 –207 ;effect on idea of Urdu in India94 ;literary representations of56 –57 ,59 –60 , 168 –70 , 181–95 ; representa-tion in film 198 , 207 , 212 –14; viol-ence xvi–xvii,56 , 206

petit récit 56 philology, and claims of racial inter-

connectedness 35 physical training 43 –47 ; see alsorace-

fitnessPinjar 198 , 210 –11 post-independence nation states54 print culture, potential for linguistic

divisiveness 102 –103 Pritam, Amrita 210 –11 Puranas 31, 33

race theory 19–20 , 35 –38 , 44 ; in theIndian-English novel,37–38 ; see alsoAryanism, antisemitism

race-fitness 35 –37 , 41–45 Radcliffe Boundary Commission

198 , 203 –204 ; see alsoPartitionRai, Lala Lajpat xiii,1

Raj see colonialismRam Rajya 50 Ramanujan, A.K.115–16, 118 , 120 –

38 ; concept of reflexivity,122 –26 ,138 ; R.’s syntax133 –37 ; as trans-lator 121, 123 , 136

Ramayana xx–xxi, xxiv,210 –11 Ramphele, Mampele54 Rao, Raja xxvi,29 Rashtriya xivRashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh xiv–xv,

xxiii,43 –44 , 95 reflexivity 122 –26 , 138 Refugee 198 , 212 –14, 215 regeneration see race fitness

regional languages xxvi–xviii,13 ,14,85

regional nationalism30 religious communities and national

unity 11 religious fundamentalism53 , 55 ,

62 –63 , 66 –67 renaming of Indian cities146 representation of Indianness in

Indian-English literature xxix–xx

Romanticism, and nostalgia92 , 105 Roy, Arundhati 56 , 225 –26 RSS see Rashtriya Swayamsevak

SanghRushdie, Salman xi, xxii; literature

in Indian languages xxvi; literaryrepresentations of Bombay82 ; Midnight’s Children 60 , 212 ; The Moor’s Last Sigh xxiv–xxv,142 n.,147n.; responses to in India xxiv–xxv, xxx,147n.

Said, Edward 102 Samaddar, Ranabir 217–18 Sangh Parivar xiv,21

Sanskritists 36 –37 sanatan dharm xiiSaraswati, Dayananda xiii,34 , 46 ;

see also Arya SamajSarvarkar, Vinayak D. xiv,28 , 39 ,

48 , 119 Schlegel, Friedrich35 Scruton, Roger152 , 156 secular nationalism3–4 , 116–17; and

women 56 , 60 , 63 secularism xv,1–22 ; and communal-

ism 4–5; definition of4; and theIndia constitution 8 , 116; see alsoantisecularism

secularization 9

self-fashioning75 , 81




sexuality in Indian culture67 Sharma, Anil,Ek Prem Katha (Traitor:

)

Urdu 89 –111; and education in India99 –100 ; history of 93 , 96 –100 ;

i i i I di

[peter morey

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