Speaking Havoc 0295985577, 9780295985572

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SPEAKING

HAVOC Social Suffering el South Asian Narratives RAMU NAGAPPAN

Who has the right to speak about trauma? As cultural products, narratives of social suffering paradoxically release us from responsibility while demanding that we examine our own connectedness to the circum¬ stances that produce suffering. As a result, the text’s act of “speaking havoc” rebounds in unsettling ways. Speaking Havoc investigates the possibilities for the intervention of literary and cinematic fictions into the politics and reception of social suffering. Amitav Ghosh’s modernist novel The Shadow Lines (1988), Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995), the short sto¬ ries of Saadat Hasan Manto, Salman Rushdie’s post¬ modernist novel Shame (1983), and the “spectacular” films of Maniratnam all bear witness to social violence in South Asia. These works confront squarely the ethi¬ cal dilemmas posed by representations of the catastro¬ phes and innumerable minor tragedies that arise from clashes among religious and ethnic communities. Focusingon central events such asthe Partition 0^947, the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, and more recent religious conflicts between India and Pakistan, Nagappan demonstrates the differing ways that nar¬ ratives engage—often in ambiguous and problematic ways—the political violence that has marked the last fifty years of South Asian history. Is it possible to fully tell the stories of those who have died and those who have survived? Can writing really counter silence? In his compassionate engagement with these concerns, Nagappan establishes the relevance of literature and

LITERARY CONJUGATIONS Richard T. Gray Series Editor

LITERARY CONJUGATIONS The Literary Conjugations series investigates literary artifacts in their cultural and historical environments. Through comparative investigations and case studies across a wide array of national literatures, it highlights the interdisciplinary character of literary studies and explores how literary production extends into, influences, and refracts multiple domains of intellectual and cultural life.

W. C. Sebald

A Critical Companion Edited by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead

Speaking Havoc

Social Suffering e[ South Asian Narratives Ramu Nagappan

SPEAKING

HAVOC SOCIAL SUFFERING el SOUTH ASIAN NARRATIVES

RAMU NAGAPPAN

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS SEATTLE

LONDON

This publication is supported in part by the Donald R. Ellecood International Publications Endowment.

© 2005 Printed in the United States of America Designed by Ashley Saleeba 12 1110 09 08 07 06 05

54321

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Press PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145 www.washington.edu/uwpress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nagappan, Ramu. Speaking havoc : social suffering and South Asian narratives / Ramu Nagappan. p.

cm.— (Literary conjugations)

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-295-98488-0 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. South Asian literature—20th century—History and criticism. pictures—India—History. in literature.

3. Suffering in literature.

5. Suffering in motion pictures. PK5410.S63N34

2. Motion

4. Communalism

I. Title.

II. Series.

2005

809'.933556—dc22 2004029560

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and 90 percent recycled from at least 50 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi Z39.48-1984. ©@

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Who Owns Suffering? 1

Writing and Redemption

23

2

The Argument of Fiction

75

3

Murderous Fictions

3

119

The Momentary Pleasures of Reconciliation

Coda

193

Notes

2oi r

Bibliography

Index

238

226

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I happily recognize the intangible gifts of my friends and fam¬ ily: long dinners, local outings, and other little diversions will serve as my happiest memories of the time when this book was in ges¬ tation. My friends and family cheered me on, listened patiently, and always administered just the right dose of kidding. I am thank¬ ful for the fine antics and occasional traces of wisdom of Benj Widiss and Jim Hinch. Thanks as well to Abigail Trillin, Brian Lee, and their little Isabelle; to Chad and Sonali Rammohan for lively movie nights during the writing of this book; and to Katie, Eddi, and Nicholas Vulic—for great meals and weekend outings of all kinds. I fondly appreciate old friends who have supported me from afar: Daphne Nizza, Shubha Pathak, David Arrivee, and Stephen Abseck. For a decade I have been lucky in sharing the win¬ ning conversation, warm company, and rare friendship of Cather¬ ine Mitchell and Paul Chard; and I cannot neglect to mention Isabel Chard, whose amusement, amazement, and bright drawings brought much-needed perspective on the grown-up world. I honor the generosity of my family: my ever-humorous brother, Suresh; my extraordinary sister-in-law, Sarah Jordan; and my par¬ ents, Ramanathan and Sakunthala Nagappan—it is they who once taught me to marvel at the small wonders of South Asia. Finally, a word of special gratitude and love to Nicole, who smiled and sailed into my life at just the right moment, as this book neared its com¬ pletion. Together, she and I plan to speak much joy.

VIII

SPEAKING

HAVOC

The past remains; hut I cannot write academically of past events in the manner of an historian or scholar. I have not that knowledge or equipment or training; nor do I possess the mood for that kind of work. The past oppresses me or fills me sometimes with its warmth when it touches on the present, and becomes, as it were, an aspect of the living present. If it does not do so, then it is cold, barren, lifeless, uninteresting. I can only write about it, as I have previously done, by bringing it in some relation to my present-day thoughts and activities, and then this writing of history, as Goethe once said, brings some relief from the weight and burden of the past. It is, I suppose, a process similar to that of psychoanalysis, but applied to a race or to humanity itself instead of to an individual.

-jAWAHARLAL NEHRU

The Discovery of India

INTRODUCTION Who Owns Suffering?

s

o

India’s first prime min-

ister wrote in 1944 from Ahmadnagar Fort, where he had been imprisoned by the British for the previous year and a half. In The Discovery of India, published in 1946, Nehru undertakes an archaeological project, a cultural-national project of excavating his¬ tories in order to claim a common Iudian past.1 By turns personal and grandiose, he seeks to make the national narrative—a story that stretches back three thousand years—a mythic and meaning¬ ful one for the present. Such a sweeping narrative seeks both to explain the glories and the shame of those millennia and to craft a justification for an independent Indian nation’s existence among modern states. But both the narrative and the “discovery” it entails are bound up with Nehru’s practical sense of place and mission. Written in English, and full of orientalist cultural allu¬ sions, The Discovery of India, like Nehru’s autobiography, would have appealed to Indian nationalists and to the British intelligent¬ sia. No doubt Nehm, during the act of its composition in 1944, hoped that the text would serve as an antidote to communal stirrings— 3

INTRODUCTION

to the seemingly antinational plans of leaders of various sectar¬ ian and local factions. Nehru’s political intervention against communalism in this text is curiously bound up with his use of the term “psychoanalysis.” He suggests that the national past is a source of trauma that must be articulated, “worked through,” and overcome.2 The writing of the past is both a burden, as he says explicitly, and a thrill, for it seems that to treat the past not merely academically, but with an eye to its complexity and its pain, is a paradoxically engaging process. I begin with Nehru’s important work because he so carefully claims ownership of the past and treats it as a burden best allevi¬ ated through narrative. My study of social suffering is rooted in such narrative. It takes the South Asian case to be a particularly illuminating one that may provide some deeper understanding of suffering in all its complex global manifestations. But in pur¬ suing this general truth, we must not lose specificity. We cannot champion generality at the expense of the local histories of suf¬ fering. The investigation of public trauma can take any of a mul¬ titude of forms and may focus on a variety of experiential objects. The anthropologist examines the constitution and breakdown of communities, the textures of social relationships. The clinician examines the nature of disease and its effects on the human body. The economist analyzes routes of exchange, the problems of scarcity and surplus, the price of violence. The human rights lawyer hunts for justice, accounting for the guilty and the innocent. In emphasizing narrative—and particularly literary and filmic narrative—I do not want to discard these valuable perspectives. I seek to place them in adjacency. What these scholars and inves¬ tigators do, what even Nehru’s history does, and what literary crit¬ ics have been loath to do, is prioritize the ethical impulse. We must not be so squeamish as to ignore the ethical underpinnings of our work; the field of Holocaust studies has laboriously and eloquently explained that to us. We cannot denigrate the personal and ethi¬ cal feeling that awakens when we confront the nature of suffering and the reality of atrocity, for it is this ethical feeling that allows us to navigate the thicket of questions. Who has the right to speak about trauma? Whose witnessing is most credible? Can suffering 4

WHO OWNS SUFFERING?

be claimed and owned? Are we who read about and view images of suffering merely voyeurs, trampling the memories of the dead? And what modes of action are open to us to counter social suffer¬ ing? As Susan Sontag writes with regard to our reactions to the photography of suffering, “Sympathy is an inappropriate response. It proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence” (102). I am interested in the ways in which narrative evokes such sympathy— letting us off the hook, so to speak—while at the same time goad¬ ing us to action, demanding that we examine our own connectedness to the political, social, and cultural circumstances that produce suffering. Nehru’s autobiography stands as an eloquent but unacknowl¬ edged ancestral narrative of the texts I will bring under scrutiny, texts that aim to bring into the open discoveries from a traumatic South Asian past. These post-Independence fictions—Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Salman Rushdie’s Shame, and the hugely popular films Roja and Bombay, directed by Maniratnam—also propose a means of “working through” history and seek to intervene politically in the midst of communalist ten¬ sion and social crisis. But none shares the optimism of Nehru’s project, and none claims such a settled relationship with the polit¬ ical world in which it is inscribed; rather, these texts are deeply ambivalent. Mimesis becomes a painful and troubled act of pro¬ duction, counterbalanced by the hope that the recovery of the past will be socially and culturally redemptive. These texts, these fic¬ tions in the guise of history—in addressing the fissures and vio¬ lence among communities in South Asia, in giving voice to those who have endured inhuman violation—seek to bring their audi¬ ences face to face with their own responsibility for the social good. Fictions that represent social suffering and violence enter a per¬ ilous field of public discussion and debate unlike any other arena of cultural reception. It is my central contention in this book that there remains no space of neutrality, no recess for political detach¬ ment, and so the textual project of intervention and recovery is inevitably thwarted. “Decompensation” can be defined as the inabil¬ ity to maintain physiological or psychological defense mechanisms 5

I NTRODUCTION

in response to stress, an inability that results in disturbance, dete¬ rioration, or profound imbalance. I co-opt the term from medi¬ cine and psychoanalysis; I will argue that a text’s act of “speaking havoc” rebounds in unsettling ways, damaging the text’s own mech¬ anisms of representation as well as its contract with its audiences. The term “decompensation” refers to the myriad and still unex¬ plained ways in which trauma wounds language, history, and lit¬ erature. Curiously, however, the text that speaks havoc also offers compensations; that is, in the very moment of decompensation, when the text is threatened with its own undoing, it still manages to provide its audience with spectacle, with the machinations of plot, and indeed with language that is itself an aestheticized object. Fredric Jameson famously asserts that literary modernism is a “symbolic act which involves a whole Utopian compensation for increasing dehumanization on the level of daily life” (Political 42). In taking account of the text that represents social suffering, I would extend this notion beyond modernism to encompass literary real¬ ism and literary postmodernism, and I would suggest that the text’s utopian compensation is an attempt to reestablish its contract with the audience, a contract to which we subscribe because we come to the text wanting to know something about social suffering. The utopian compensation is the attempt to preempt despair in the face of events and histories that consistently defy telling. Our understanding of social suffering, in the South Asian case and in every other, relies deeply on our understanding of what many think of as the most unfathomable experience of the twen¬ tieth century, the Holocaust. We must reckon with the daunting and necessarily large body of work on testimony and narrative in the context of that event. Indeed, narratives of social suffering in South Asia shed light on those of the Holocaust, and vice versa. Historians of the Holocaust have long described the ways in which this profoundly unsettling event paradoxically served as the sacred ground from which the Jewish community’s identity is rebuilt. Holocaust studies have also investigated the complex relationships among survivors, victims, and perpetrators. Primo Levi has pointed to the existence of a “gray zone, poorly defined, where the

6

WHO OWNS SUFFERING?

two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. The gray zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal struc¬ ture and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge” (42). Such a description of the gray zone is particularly useful for the analysis of communal violence in South Asia. Shoshana Felman and Dori Lamb write that the Holocaust sur¬ vivor who testifies to an experience speaks not to empirical truths “but to resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame of death” (62). The interlocutor of this testimony par¬ ticipates in this process and thus enters a unique contract. I intend to explore, in the context of South Asian texts, whether the reader of testimony, or even the reader of histories told at second hand or reimagined altogether, also participates in such a process of resis¬ tance. Felman and Lamb ask important questions: Is the testimony, therefore, a simple medium of historical transmis¬ sion, or is it, in obscure ways, the unsuspecting medium of a healing? If history has clinical dimensions, how can testimony intervene, prag¬ matically and efficaciously, at once historically (politically) and clini¬ cally [9; emphasis in original]? I would ask, further, to what extent do literary or filmic texts allow for healing ? Of particular interest in Holocaust studies are the theoretical frameworks that allow us to rethink narrative itself and the generic conduits by which we represent trauma and its aftermath. In Probing the Limits of Representation, Hayden White claims: The best way to represent the Holocaust and the experience of it may well be by a kind of “intransitive writing” which lays no claim to the kind of realism aspired to by the nineteenth-century historians and writers. But we may want to consider that by intransitive writing we must intend something like the relationship to that event expressed in the middle voice. This is not to suggest that we will give up the effort to represent the Holocaust realistically, but rather that our notion of what constitutes realistic representation must be revised to take account of experiences that are unique to our century and for which older modes of representation have proven inadequate [52].

7

I NTRODUCTION

White valorizes a modernist “middle voice,” that grammatical alter¬ native to the active and passive voices which no longer exists in modern languages. The middle voice enables the speaker to rep¬ resent himself as both the agent and the object of action; it opens a realm of narrative possibilities and combinations, whereas real¬ ism, the connected retelling of events finalized by narrative clo¬ sure, remains insufficient to the task. The middle voice provides for a productive ambivalence, and thus the survivor of trauma dis¬ covers some means of reclaiming and reasserting control over his or her experience. White thus makes problematic our received notions of narrative referentiality. But why direct all our discon¬ tent at realism? Does not every mode of representing trauma thwart us? Dominick LaCapra takes issue with White’s middle voice, argu¬ ing that it “would seem to undercut or undo systematically not only the binary opposition but any distinction, however problematic in certain cases, between victim and perpetrator, as it would seem to undercut the problems of agency and responsibility in general” (26). Indeed, LaCapra calls upon an ethical weighting that allows us to draw on not just the middle voice but any voice, any means of sig¬ nifying, that offers communicative force. As LaCapra further tells us, “One might even speak of the emergence of a traumatic real¬ ism that differs from stereotypical conceptions of mimesis and enables instead an often disconcerting exploration of disorienta¬ tion, its symptomatic dimensions, and possible ways of respond¬ ing to them. One would thus seem to have a complex supplementary relation between literary or artistic practice, related theoretical dis¬ course, and historiography which goes counter to formalistic or sociological conceptions of discrete spheres of activity and instead calls for inquiry into mutual interactions and resistances” (186). My interpretations of South Asian texts—literary, historiographic, filmic—pivot on this understanding of various discourses’ mutual interactions and resistances. But, further, I would insist that these discourses have real creators; to read narrative is to posit the author, the critic, the historian, or the filmmaker as a political agent with a specific interest in proposing solutions to the ongoing crisis of social suffering. In this way, these texts of social suffering force us to open up our worn definitions of intentionality. 8

WHO OWNS SUFFERING?

Richard Rorty offers a compelling definition of intellectual and artistic commitment: “I use ‘ironist’ to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her most central beliefs and desires. . .. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease” (xv). Rorty goes on to suggest that the ironist’s perspective is central to a new form of solidarity. While we have no access to transcendental truths, we do possess con¬ tingent principles that we test and retest. Fictions, Rorty proposes, are an eminent vehicle for such assaying. In this sense, fictions struggle not just to represent social suffering but also to articu¬ late an oppositional politics that gives meaningful authority to those who wish to end that suffering. The writers, historians, filmmak¬ ers, and critics mutually engaged in this project are public intel¬ lectuals in a classic sense: the reoriented Luftmenschen, equipped with the adversarial attitude, unafraid of judgment, committed to a particular version of justice that verges on the universal. Bruce Robbins usefully describes the threats to this public intellectual engaged in a “secular vocation,” asserting that his or her author¬ ity is always “provisional, incomplete, and open to expressions of discontenf (25). In the South Asian case I have chosen to examine, the chal¬ lenge to the public intellectual always hinges on the problems of representation. To put it most simply, representations do matter. The fictional mechanics of representing social suffering are volatile things, engines always on the point of burning themselves out. The fictional text is resolutely self-conscious about its meth¬ ods, about its historiographic embeddedness, and about the potential of critique; but that very self-consciousness becomes the source of a deep anxiety about the ethical and political conse¬ quences of telling. Questions that undo narrative authority begin to proliferate. Can writing really act as a counter to silence? Is it possible to tell fully the story of those who have died and those who have survived? But the fictional mechanics of representing suffering are further subject to external forces, to misrepresenta¬ tion and misreading. The text released into the world of readers, 9

INTRODUCTION

viewers, and consumers overheats in the face of critical vitriol and of the censor’s glare. Textual truth is challenged; authors are damned. What is at stake is nothing less than the right to speak of trauma to the social body. To investigate the sources of that trauma is to face the frustra¬ tions of our critical and historiographic language. Two terms— “communalism” and “social suffering”—are conveniently at hand. They give us a framework within which we may interpret the events themselves as well as the texts that represent those events. But the terms we have are only a beginning. They lead us to a histor¬ ical engagement that is inevitably more personal and more finely textured. That said, communalism can be defined as “collective antagonism organized around religious, linguistic, and/or eth¬ nic identities” (Ludden 12). It refers to the panoply of forces— political and familial, national and local—that lead to violence directed against targeted communities. The long-running cycles of violence in South Asia have seemingly naturalized communal¬ ism, and it has become the task of historians, sociologists, writ¬ ers, and filmmakers to reverse the tendency to see communal rage as a kind of anonymous eruption of the masses. As David Ludden writes further: Communalism is alive in everyday politics that invokes community identity—in the streets, courts, media, elections, religious and cultural institutions, schools, academic research, and intimate conversations— anywhere that people can be influenced to form their own identities and public opinion around oppositional ethnic or religious categories. Its most dramatic moments are massively organized public events— riots, demonstrations, processions, media spectacles, and elections— which in India engage society widely and directly and which animate competitions for power in India’s constitutional democracy [13],

Such a definition is certainly meaningful, but we must also be aware, as Peter van der Veer urges, that “what is recognized as violence and categorized as communal violence is an interpre¬ tive act” (“Writing Violence” 264). In this sense, narrative, criti¬ cism, and historical inquiry all attempt to demarcate, to make communalism knowable and representable. But it is the searing 1 O

WHO OWNS SUFFERING?

otherness of communalism’s violence that makes it so frequently unrepresentable. The term “social suffering,” as I use it here, is the name for an even broader set of traumatic phenomena in South Asia, for the havoc that must but cannot be confronted. In the most general terms, social suffering characterizes a realm of experience painfully familiar from the beginning of the twentieth century forward: the loss and distress that are the consequences of social or political crises. Such loss is widely viewed and read about by people the world over. We see the impoverished cities and the millions who toil under corrupt regimes. We know that social suffering hap¬ pens, but its scale eludes or oppresses us. Social suffering in South Asia thus provokes a set of epistemological crises. It pertains to the sometimes unknowable and innumerable physical and emo¬ tional wounds in the community, to the varieties of distress medi¬ ated by gender, class, caste, and religious affiliation. On the one hand, social suffering begs for quantification: how many people, and how much? On the other hand, it also demands that we put such questions aside and examine the particular and the local. In what form can such histories of social suffering be told? In the oral narrative, in the meticulously prepared statistical document, in the personal essay, in the novel, in the film that acts as docu¬ mentary? In my discussion, these forms of imagining and report¬ ing social suffering are inextricable from a particular geographical locus: the metropolis, the place where such suffering becomes vis¬ ible (through the mass media, and through a variety of scholarly and literary discourses) and invisible (because it is so normalized, transformed into the immutable reality of the non-Western world). As the editors of a volume devoted to the interdisciplinary engage¬ ment with the topic remark, “Social suffering is a feature of cul¬ tural representation both as spectacle and as the presentation of the real. But cultural technologies now exist to fashion the ‘real’ in accord with the interests of power to a degree hardly imagined in the past. What W. J. T. Mitchell calls the gap between represen¬ tation and responsibility is a master moral dilemma” (cited in Kleinman, Das, and Lock xiii). I add a further dilemma: Who “owns” suffering, and who has the right to testimony? Because cultural 11

INTRODUCTION

technologies bring us terrible images in a flash, because we all read the newspaper accounts or hear the survivors on the radio, are we all participants in witnessing ? Do we all, in a sense, own suffering and, in that same sense, remain responsible for it, too? If so, Felman and Lamb’s assertion carries even more weight: “The imperative of bearing witness ... is itself somehow a philosoph¬ ical and ethical correlative of a situation with no cure, and of a rad¬ ical human condition of exposure and vulnerability” (5; emphasis in original). Let me leap to the more recent past. On December 31, 2001, the Indian government announced that it was suspending the Samjhauta Express, the only rail service connecting India and Pak¬ istan. The suspension came to symbolize once again the sever¬ ing of ties between nations, the repartition of nations, communities, and families. Anguished travelers spoke of the border closing as a sure mark of doom. The government’s announcement came on the heels of a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament earlier that month. Indian recriminations met Pakistani denials and coun¬ tercharges. As tensions mounted, as leaders placed their armies on a war footing, the Western press warned direly of the threat of nuclear war. Four times, the papers and news programs noted, had the two nations already battled since their independence in 1947; this time, the press insisted, these nuclear-armed nations were wholly capable of firing their ballistic missiles. International mediation eventually helped defuse the situation, but even seem¬ ingly responsible Western accounts of the crisis opted out of a nuanced reckoning with the history of violence on the subconti¬ nent, in favor of calamitous prediction. It is here, too, that I detect the gap between representation and responsibility. It is here that apprehension overruns the conventional examinations of both social suffering and the calculus behind South Asian leaders’ realpolitik. But unconventional examinations do emerge in fits and starts. The issue of responsibility is central to the influential scholarly and historical investigations of the South Asian communal cri¬ sis. The year 1984 marked a watershed moment for these schol12

WHO OWNS SUFFERING?

arly efforts. In October, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assas¬ sinated by her Sikh bodyguards. In the days that followed, organ¬ ized Hindu vigilantes ruled the streets of Delhi and systematically murdered hundreds of Sikhs. Those riots served as a reminder that the heretofore unimaginable communal violence that occurred after the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan was not safely contained in the past. For almost four decades, sectarian tensions were largely ignored or played down; the Nehruvian idea of the nation seemed secure, and survivors’ stories from the days of Partition held no significance. But in 1984, citizens and scholars alike awoke to the potentialities of the vio¬ lence. Urban riots—mostly Hindu-Muslim—recurred with alarm¬ ing frequency thereafter and have now become a familiar feature of the nation’s life. Since 1984, however, there has also been a steady accumulation of sociological and historiographic work that attempts to explore the political roots of suffering and to give voice to the survivors from 1947 onward whose narratives have thus far been shrouded in silence. In the chapters to follow, I draw attention to a brand of “scholarly activists”—thinkers who are cit¬ izen-agents, too. These historians and anthropologists place a pre¬ mium not just on responsible recovery of truth about violence but also on earnest and personal commitment to the processes of justice and relief for those who have survived that violence. In juxtaposing ambivalent fictions and scholarly activism, in iden¬ tifying the intersection of writing afid action, I consider how different discursive strategies allow us to come to terms with social suffering and to conduct critiques of the institutions that lead to violence. We are always coming to terms, always wrestling with language. Both writing and film also seek to give voice to those who have endured and perhaps continue to endure the unspeakable. They seek to uncover the language that can begin to describe such expe¬ rience. The Nehru who speaks so persuasively of his historical and epistemological quest in The Discovery of India would barely have imagined the burden of writing this recent past, of these years that followed Independence. To confront social suffering is to struggle with silence: both to respect the silence of survivors who 13

INTRODUCTION

cannot speak and to break the political silences that veil social calamity. The silence of survivors, that chilling aporia, points again and again to the desecratory potential of narrative. As LaCapra writes, “Those traumatized by extreme events, as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed a fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it. Part of this feeling may be the melancholic sentiment that, in working through the past in a manner that enables survival or a reengagement in life, one is betraying those who were overwhelmed or consumed by that trau¬ matic pasf’ (22). Faced with this problem of fidelity to trauma, writ¬ ers and artists deploy superlatives and melodrama in the name of heightening awareness and affective force; such melodrama is a strategy of fictionality that allows the author to maintain “faith” with trauma. I use the term “melodrama” not as a pejorative but, following Peter Brooks, to denote the way in which films and nov¬ els turn social conflict into a stark “Manichean struggle,” a drama of morality that also provides for narrative unity (Brooks 20). Melo¬ drama is that ambivalent mimetic mode which both distances us from its subject and reconnects us with it on myriad registers. Any critical response to social suffering—literary, historical, or otherwise—always begins with the ethical feeling I have already described, with an affective connection to the texts, narratives, films, and politics we set out to study. We cannot help feeling first and reflecting later. Coming to terms requires such a dual response. Accordingly, writers and filmmakers have placed a decided emphasis on sincerity, on that truth-to-feeling which renders their work meaningful in a personal fashion. Lionel Trilling has spo¬ ken influentially of the “sincerity” of eighteenth-century texts that attempt to convince their readers of the truth and intensity of the writer's experience. But none of the artists I consider here have direct or personal experience of communal violence; they speak of social suffering from one remove. Here again arises the issue of artistic intention. Despite the literary critical dismantling of intentionality during the past half-century, we cannot simply ignore what writers mean and do. Nor can we ignore the fact that read14

WHO OWNS SUFFERING?

ers have intentions, too. Intentionality on both sides is intimately connected with the ethical charges of reading and writing. Susan Sontag says in a different but entirely useful context that the photographer makes choices, thereby shaping our understanding of an event and our subsequent action: “What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds” (86). I would add that the viewer of the image, like the reader of the text, stipulates, too, choosing, consciously or no, to see certain elements and ignore others. In recognizing the complicated interplay of testimony, sincer¬ ity, and intention, the author who writes of social suffering offers elaborate justifications and explanations of his or her work, as though fictions that enter this most shadowy space of modern life required addenda and qualification. The sincerity of the author is also a projective assertion, and it demands that readers or view¬ ers shoulder some of the burden. That is, the author never allows audiences to be absolved of responsibility. The author is self¬ consciously engaged in the pedagogical task of teaching audiences to see and reinterpret recent South Asian history from outside the confines of familiar discourses about the nation and national unity. In all the texts I consider here, there is a singular contention: reading or watching a text that imagines social suffering is only the first step in reparation and redemption. The text seeks to pro¬ pel its audience back into the social realm where human inter¬ vention can have tangible effects. The authorial belief in the ability of the text to speak persuasively of traumatic experience and to exhort citizens to act compassionately in the face of that experi¬ ence is at root the guiding humanism that animates the novels, short stories, and films I will discuss. Indeed, we must dare to speak again of humanism if we are to understand how these texts circulate in the world. Despite their humanistic perspective—or perhaps, ironically, because of it— many of these texts have come under serious critical and popu¬ lar fire, and I propose to analyze the nature of these controversies. At one level, controversy is a means of establishing an authorial 15

INTRODUCTION

or directorial reputation: works that are productive of scandal can become highly popular commodities: moreover, they seem to secure for the artist the name of “truth teller.” Controversy, and the shock value of the representation that has engendered it, force the issue of social suffering more directly into the space of pub¬ lic debate. It is in the nature of these fictions to offend, and in fact they insist that contention is the only means of assessing the political and social experiences that lie on the fringe of human understanding. Gyanendra Pandey has written of the predicament that troubles any representation of violence and loss: “There is no consensus among us about the nature of Partition. We have no means of representing such tragic loss, nor of pinning down— or rather, owning—responsibility for it. As a consequence, our nationalist historiography, journalism, and filmmaking have tended to generate something like a collective amnesia” (“In Defense of the Fragment’ 33). I examine those fictions that seek to reclaim responsibility without admitting of the possibility of true consensus. They insist on their own provisionality. The text that is provocative opens up critical spaces; the provocative text perversely asks that its audience challenge it. To argue on and on about social suffering is to remember. To argue is to probe the moral dilemmas that envelop remembering. And yet in that argu¬ ing lies a plangent worry that texts do not matter enough in a world of powerful and unstable political forces. Fictions confront escha¬ tology, a fear that those forces will wreak further, unimaginable havoc. As Frank Kermode explains in his classic The Sense of an Ending, apocalypse is “a permanent feature of a permanent liter¬ ature of crisis” (124). Rather than track historical trends in the interest of teleology, rather than propose something even as coherent as a literature of crisis, I focus on five discrete historical moments and five modes of imagining the South Asian experience that squarely confront the ethical and representational dilemmas I have outlined here. In the first chapter, I examine the Delhi riots of 1984 in the con¬ text of Ghosh’s 1988 novel The Shadow Lines, which mines a famil¬ ial and national past for answers to the violence. But the text, at times a modernist exploration of memory and at others an interl6

WHO OWNS SUFFERING?

national romance, remains perplexed about whether the past can ever be adequately narrated. Ghosh’s novel foregrounds several quandaries and leaves them unresolved: Can one act decisively in the social world, and can one write (or narrate) at the same time? Can one escape the preoccupations of the personal? In the same chapter, I turn to the excesses of Indira Gandhi’s regime in the 1970s and to the urban underclass, both of which are loci of con¬ cern in Mistry’s long, heavily plotted 1996 realist novel A Fine Bal¬ ance. The text, drawing on the conventions of social history, offers up innumerable stories of urban suffering that aim to stir a sense of moral outrage. Again, representation founders at the point where suffering becomes overwhelming; the title’s implicit prom¬ ise of “balance” dissolves. In their humane but melancholic con¬ clusions, Ghosh’s and Mistry’s texts both perform an uneasy and curious shift: the narrative of social suffering is displaced by the narrative of desire, guilt, and private life. In the second chapter, I consider Partition, modern South Asia’s originary catastrophe from which the short stories of Manto seek to make impossible any comfortable distance. They fuel outrage in dramatic fashion, but there is no dwelling on the dilemmas of representation. Manto’s realism is not uncomplicated, for it delves into conventions of farce and allegory. Further, these stories from the 1940s and 1950s are resolutely polemical in their critique of language and literary forms that underlie violent social and polit¬ ical systems. Mimesis thus becomes-a means of fictional argu¬ mentation about the sources of social suffering. Although Manto’s work is now nearly forgotten, I reconnect him to South Asian lit¬ erary currents. The ferocity of the debates surrounding Manto’s fiction is a potent example of how external pressures threaten to deform texts. These debates only sharpen in the case of Salman Rushdie. In the third chapter, I shift the focus to Pakistan and to the mordant satire that energizes Rushdie’s ostensibly postmodernist work. Shame, published in 1983, attends to social suffering by exposing the excesses of political and social elites. In this text, as in Mis¬ try’s and Manto’s, we find, along with a cataloguing of injustice, a bleak sense ofhorror, an apocalyptic imagining of the South Asian 17

I NTRODUCTION

future. Shame’s complicated allegory also thrives on the ironic play of speculative gossip. The argument of fiction is here inextricable from the incendiary potentialities of writing. But gossip and argument can also become weapons turned against the writer him¬ self. Rushdie’s project—the opposition to authoritarianism—is perpetually destabilized by its own mode of parody. Rushdie arouses public and critical indignation in the name of contention and political contestation, of opposition to authoritarianism, but the controversy surrounding 1988’s The Satanic Verses points to the possibility that postmodern texts can be radically reread or mis¬ read as murderous fictions. The author himself falls under bodily threat. In the fourth chapter, I arrive at the realm of “Bollywood,” as Hindi popular cinema is sometimes labeled, where the director Maniratnam cultivates both a pathos and a melodrama that spectacularize social suffering. His Tamil films, at once thrillers, romances, and musicals, have crossed South Asian linguistic bor¬ ders more readily than have other directors’ works, and they reach an enormous audience that no literary texts will ever attain. And, unlike virtually all other popular films, they dare to enter the space of social suffering. Maniratnam’s pictures are supremely confident in their ability to speak the truth about public trauma and to pro¬ vide for optimistic solutions. But do these utopian solutions have any value in the world outside the movie theater? Are Manirat¬ nam’s films merely momentary, guilty pleasures? In what may seem a haphazard accumulation of texts and historical moments, I propose to denaturalize our conceptual categories (that is, the categories underlying media accounts like those that followed the crisis between India and Pakistan in Decem¬ ber 2001); I propose to challenge our assumptions about genre, representation, and trauma. To consider these generic modes— modernist, realist, postmodern, and cinematic—in their simul¬ taneity and in the context of narrative ambivalence is to renegotiate our settled schemes of literary critical classification. In the South Asian case, generic modes are not merely schools or styles, and they do not confine themselves to neat periodization. We must speak of multiple “isms”—real, modern, and post—all coexist18

WHO OWNS SUFFERING?

ing, jostling, disrespecting the containers we once chose for them. But, even further, these modes of imagining borrow freely from a range of subgeneric conventions; they deploy, celebrate, and critique the tropes of romance, mystery, social history, farce, and allegory. In this jostling, we find the fruits of decompensa¬ tion, if you will, for here is the way that texts, in exposing their own stresses and strains, in verging on failure, point to their con¬ nectedness with other texts. Decompensation encapsulates the phrase “Yes, these facts are true, and still...

there is always more

to tell. No text is sufficient unto itself, and each must be seen on a larger cultural map. Wendy Brown writes of the profound polit¬ ical disorientation of our times, a disorientation that has arisen from the “destabilization of constitutive cultural and political nar¬ ratives” (3); we are thus left with the task of crafting “partial and provisional orientations for a different inhabitation of the politi¬ cal world” (5). I am, at last, engaged in my own ambivalent act of interpreta¬ tion that aims to identify, historicize, and critique the agitated and agitating project of these texts and films while celebrating what these fictions manage to achieve. At the risk of violating the norms of my disciplinary enterprise, let me say that I am a promoter. My ambivalence is a means of navigating stormy theoretical waters— a survival tactic. I demand that these fictions be read and seen out¬ side our familiar theoretical framework, and so it is here that I mark my break from the scholarshipThat has preceded and nour¬ ished me. We cannot simply subsume the investigation of social suffering in South Asia under “postcolonial” studies; we cannot settle for the theorizing of nations, borders, and boundaries. These texts cannot be hermetically sealed from a wide, sometimes frustratingly diverse set of historical events and historical agents. Homi Bhabha has spoken of ambivalence in the context of the migrant’s counterdiscourse. I quote him at length, given the persuasive and influential nature of his claims:

If the jargon of our times—postmodernity, postcoloniality, post¬ feminism—has any meaning at all, it does not lie in the popular use of the “post” to indicate sequentiality—o/ter-feminism; or polarity— 1 9

INTRODUCTION

anti-modernism. These terms that insistently gesture to the beyond, only embody its restless and revisionary energy if they transform the present into an expanded and ex-centric site of experience and empowerment. . . . For the demography of the new internationalism is the history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of peasant and aboriginal communi¬ ties, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees. It is in this sense that the boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant, ambivalent articulation ofthe beyond that I have drawn out [The Location of Culture 4-5; emphasis in original].

Bhabha thus points to and celebrates the hybrid interventions made possible by the crossing of boundaries, physical and disciplinary. Indeed, the revisionary energy of which he speaks animates exactly the kinds of critical and historical projects we must see more of in the field of South Asian studies. But, in valorizing the post¬ colonial and the migratory, Bhabha misses the specific textures of texts; he misses local contexts and nuances; he misses the links between postcolonial fictions and audiences that have no access to or interest in theoretical formulations; and, finally, he misses the affective energies of the unbearable narratives of loss that accompany those who have survived the forced migrations of South Asian social trauma. Postcolonial theory, then, cannot take us far enough; it hasn’t the patience to wade through the sometimes quo¬ tidian concerns of political life in the neighborhoods and villages where social suffering and social celebration go hand in hand in uneasy and unexpected ways. To some extent, Bhabha is right: we as critics must attend to the margin, to that space where we might fashion alternate his¬ tories and representations, where we seek to renegotiate our pre¬ viously settled relationship with texts, disciplines, and historical agents. In Writing at the Margin, Arthur Kleinman says powerfully: Perhaps it is only at the margin that we can find the space of critical engagement to scrutinize how certain ofthe cultural processes that work behind our backs come to injure us all, constraining our possi-

WHO OWNS SUFFERING?

bilities, limiting our humanity. And perhaps it is at the margin, not the center, where we can find authorization to work out alternatives that can remake our experiences, ours and others’. In that sense, I suppose, the margin may be near the center of a most important thing: transformation. Change is more likely to begin at the edge, in the borderland between established orders [5].

As I read it, Kleinman’s recognition of the potential of the margin is not a fetishizing of the liminal condition. Rather than thinking solely in terms of place, nation, and location, as Bhabha does, Kleinman suggests that our margins may be much more localized and more personal. Our criticism grows alive in hitherto neglected spaces. There, we call upon ourselves to understand differently the nuances of language and critique. Perhaps we cannot find gen¬ uine “authorization,” as Kleinman proposes, but it remains our obligation to work toward transformation, to sweat and optimisti¬ cally propose change. I am not at all the first to say that theory and criticism have a tendency to dwell in an airless vault, but the remark bears repeating. Theory and criticism ought to take their places among a lively constellation of disciplines—anthropology, history, sociology, and medicine; the literary critic must do much more than gesture toward these fields of practice and reflection. It is my aim to make a case for the continued and profound rele¬ vance of this kind of interdisciplinary enterprise, for such work makes vital an important dialogue about injustice and cultural loss. I am thus calling for critics and astute readers to challenge the assumptions and narratives I offer here because it is only such wide-ranging engagement and argument that will keep alive the modern conscience over matters of social suffering. In the end, all our debate and doubt are indeed reduced to this essence: conscience.

21

Nowhere, nowhere is there any trace of blood. Neither on the hands of the assassin, nor under his fingernails, not a spot on his sleeve, no stain on the walls. No red on the tip of his dagger, no dye on the point of his bayonet. There is no sign of blood anywhere.

— Faiz Ahmad Faiz

“No Sign of Blood”

1 WRITING AND REDEMPTION

Q

THE MORNING OF THURS-

day, November i, 1984, the day after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the major New Delhi dailies, The Hindustan Times and Indian Express, registered the national grief in high moral tones— deploring the loss of a mother—while also providing a lurid description of that mother’s execution at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards. The bullets, some thirty that penetrated her chest and thighs, as well as the blood-soaked orange sari, served as acute symbols of betrayal and vehement political reprisal. The motive seemed easy to establish: Beant Singh and Satwant Singh ambushed the woman whom they were duty-bound to protect because four months earlier she had ordered an invasion of the holiest of Sikh shrines, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Over the next four days, as the prime minister’s murder was itself overshadowed by the massacre of hundreds of Sikhs by Hindus in the capital, the news¬ papers reported with a mixture of shock and grisly fascination the torture and incineration of bodies, the rampant looting across the city, and the unchecked street rule of young gangs. The facts and 23

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

figures were highly unreliable; the machinations of the national government seemed shady; speculation was rampant. The reprise of Partition-era brutality shook the foundations of what seemed a cosmopolitan city. Pritish Nandy, editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, appraised the violence and its representation with some urgency a few weeks later: The riots are now over. But who will put out the fires that still burn? Thousands lie dead. Many more are still alive, but destroyed for¬ ever. We all see the victims. And we know who the people responsi¬ ble are. And why they did it. But what are we going to do about it? Let it pass again? Into books of history and old newspapers. As yet another tragic episode to be quickly forgotten, healed with easy char¬ ity. So that we can get back to our comfortable cliches [7].

With his dramatic entreaty, Nandy seeks to rouse the public con¬ science. His words also foreshadow the insistent self-questioning that would mark much of the writing on the events of 1984. Nandy’s comments about forgetting and cliche do not even take the form of rhetorical questions. They are pronounced to be almost the inevitable condition of writing about and remembering violence. The dead figure at the center of these events, Indira Gandhi, was simultaneously the most adored and most vilified of Indian politicians. In her fifteen years of rule, she became the larger-thanlife icon of charismatic state authority. Romesh Tharpar laments the history of those years when “the cult of‘leader,’ of Indira who is India, of dynasty, of mafia mobilisations, of smuggler and gang¬ ster penetrations into the highest echelons of governance, of democracy aborted by massive black money funding” all sterilized the political landscape (60-61). The Emergency period, from 1975 to 1977, crystallized Indira Gandhi’s reputation for ruthlessness and gave rise to a widespread demand for political accountability. Critics contended that it was she who unleashed a new wave of cynicism and corruption, and she who more devastatingly allowed a new communalism to shake India. The prime minister—as national personality, as “maternal” 24

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

authoritarian, as symbol for the reemergence of communal politics—is the subject of a great many vital historical studies. I have begun with this account of her death because the brutality committed against this particular prominent body stands as a metonym for the violence perpetrated by communal rioters against the social body. Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poem “No Sign of Blood,” written earlier and in the Pakistani context, nonetheless resonates in 1984. Moreover, the assassination and riots together formed a significant moment of social suffering during which the idea of the nation was tested, questions about social morality were posed, and human beings were dislocated on a significant scale. Such a moment provokes the writing of history while that history is still alive, contemporaneous, and unfolding. The anthropologist Veena Das would call the assassination and riots a critical event. By “critical events” she means those histor¬ ical instances when “new modes of action come into being,” new political actors arise, and traditional categories are redefined (Criti¬ cal Events 6). She suggests that only by paying attention to the dis¬ ruptions and negotiations that occur during critical events can we truly hear and then understand the victims and survivors of ter¬ ror. But in so doing, we must be aware that suffering is an ongo¬ ing condition of modernity. We tend to focus easily on the most dramatic or spectacular historical instances. While such a focus is useful in reflecting on social transformation, it is worthwhile to pause and acknowledge our scholarly limitations. We must remember that there are other, potentially inaccessible, microhis¬ tories of suffering that we often fail to define, contextualize, or reflect on when we speak of violence. In the immediate aftermath of the violence of 1984, Veena Das, Ashis Nandy, and Manoranjan Mohanty spoke in no uncertain terms of the writer’s obligations, affirming that “the Delhi riots have once again underscored the responsibility of the intellectual community to generate data, [to] act as reliable witnesses to events, and to give voice to the victims” (23). They further charged that neither journalists nor writers of fiction had “tried to pierce through general propositions about Hindu-Sikh animosities and to restore the feel of the real-life suffering of real people, through 25

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

studies of individual families and communities.” Implicit in this demand for giving voice and for producing documentary evidence, and implicit as well in Pritish Nandy’s exhortation to defy cliches, is the belief that writing can indeed promote social healing in the face of public crisis. For my own purposes, then, the events of 1984 provide a frame through which we can read widely differing literary texts like Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Bal¬ ance. I believe we must also consider these novels alongside the sociological and historiographic work of scholars like Das, Gyanendra Pandey, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, who challenge the way we write about localized instances of violence and social suffering. In juxtaposing disparate discursive strategies—the “novelistic” and the “scholarly

I seek to examine what writing attempts to resolve

or to leave unresolved politically, that is, how writing comes to terms with violence and how it conducts its critique of the political and social institutions that lead to violence: How does writing counter silence and narrate history? To be sure, Ghosh’s novel makes no mention of the assassina¬ tion of the prime minister or of the riots that followed, and Mis¬ try’s is a novel of the Emergency, dealing with the assassination only in an epilogue. We do know that Ghosh began writing his novel in the immediate wake of the public tragedy of 1984. Thus the social eruption that marked the assassination became, in the literary field, a reflective moment: it served not just as a catalyst for rethinking the representation of violence but also as a means of building a specific political position that the novelistic text might affirm. For all its horror, then, this eruption also became a moment of possibility and generation. To borrow a phrase from Elaine Scarry, “What is literally at stake in the body in pain is the mak¬ ing and unmaking of the world” (23). I would redeploy her terms, however, for I am not concerned here with the individual body and the individual psyche; nor, in my examination of pain and violence, is something as diffuse as “the world” or “civilization” at stake. I am interested in how violence gives rise to writing, and in how the pain of the social body is then made or unmade by that writ¬ ing. But Scarry does force us to grapple with another inescapable 26

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

issue: “To attach any name, any word to the willful infliction of... bodily agony is to make language and civilization participate in their own destruction” (43). She suggests, then, that to speak of suffering is to become complicit. In my readings of Ghosh’s novel and Mistry’s, I take as my critical challenge the disarming of the terror that language may be wholly tainted, for we can—indeed, we must—reclaim and renew our vocabularies. As mentioned in the introduction, historians and anthropolo¬ gists have provided and probed two related terms, “communalism” and “social suffering,” in their examinations of public trauma and the political matrix in which it erupts. I have already spoken of what W. J. T. Mitchell (cited in Kleinman, Das, and Locke xiii) calls the “master moral dilemma” created by the gap between representa¬ tion and responsibility; and, as the editors of the volume Social Suffering farther assert, “what we represent and how we represent it prefigure what we will, or will not, do to intervene” (Kleinman, Das, and Locke xiii). In the case of the events of 1984, Mitchell’s master moral dilemma is inextricable from narrative: How does one tell adequately the history of those who died and those who survived? How will the reception of this narrative history affect social actions and solutions? Newspaper accounts, like those described at the beginning of this chapter, are less troubled over the dilem¬ mas of telling, given their preoccupation with narrative immedi¬ acy. But histories of social suffering embedded in literary and scholarly (or social scientific) discourses call frequent attention to their own operations, discoveries, and lapses. This self-conscious¬ ness is the starting point for my inquiry into the nature of writing and intellectual labor. Can we call this labor “liberal” and “human¬ ist”? Can we call it “activist” because it involves the forceful inves¬ tigation of communities, motivations, and official and unofficial sources? Does this labor seek to compel others—the public at large—to act in a meaningful way toward the amelioration of social conditions, the promotion of tolerance, and the preservation of memory? The dilemma that besets intellectual labor is powerfully encap¬ sulated by Gyanendra Pandey as he reflects on the variety of responses to the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947: 27

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

There is no consensus among us about the nature of Partition. We have no means of representing such tragic loss, nor of pinning down—or rather, owning—responsibility for it. As a consequence, our nationalist historiography, journalism, and filmmaking have tended to generate something like a collective amnesia [“In Defense of the Fragment” 33].

Of course, Pandey is not calling for any kind of consensus; rather, he believes that the owning of responsibility for Partition lies in continued contention. He charges that intellectuals have been generally guilty of historical evasion and have failed to remain self-critical about their narrative practices. Pandey valorizes the use of the “fragment” to contest an official, homogenized history of communalism in India (29). The fragment is a contingent nar¬ rative, a record that until now has remained unacknowledged or undiscovered. The fragment represents a means of specificity, a pluralistic and workable approach that can—often in a thoroughly personalized way—begin to account for the violence that has too easily passed into the domain of “everyday” life in South Asian communities (42). The crucial work of the intellectual is this resistance against both the “center” and the archive in order to chal¬ lenge master narratives about social suffering that either sensa¬ tionalize or sanitize experiences that cannot be assimilated into a history of nation. Still, what remains vexed is the issue of audi¬ ence: Whom does the intellectual or novelist actually reach? Is it merely an English-educated elite? Literary authors, facing this problem of audience, feel compelled to acknowledge the ways in which fiction remains forever incom¬ mensurate with the suffering it seeks to delineate. Such authors further believe they ought to serve as activists in the social world that lies beyond writing, activists in attending to tangible human¬ itarian work during distinct public crises like the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the riots that followed. In “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,” Amitav Ghosh addresses these issues in a conflicted way, reflecting on both the violence in New Delhi and the nature of authorial responsibility: Before I could set down a word, I had to resolve a dilemma, between being a writer and being a citizen. As a writer, I had only one obvious 28

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

subject: the violence. From the news report, or the latest film or novel, we have come to expect the bloody detail or the elegantly staged con¬ frontation that closes a chapter or effects a climax. But it is worth ask¬ ing if the very obviousness of this subject arises out of our modern conventions of representation; within the dominant aesthetic of our time—the aesthetic of what Karahasan calls "indifference”—it is all too easy to present violence as an apocalyptic spectacle, while the resis¬ tance to it can as easily figure as mere sentimentality, or, worse, as pathetic or absurd [41],

Ghosh problematizes his own eloquence by asking whether elo¬ quent language itself can do social damage by glossing over vio¬ lence and diminishing the possibilities of resistance. “To write carelessly,” Ghosh warns, “can easily add to the problem,” and he then reaches a startling equation: “In such incendiary circum¬ stances [as the Delhi riots], words cost lives” (41). Ghosh suggests that writing lies on the margins of violence. But because it exists in that margin—quavering in the space between the violent event and our own quotidian reality—it becomes the mediating medium, the conduit through which the actuality of cat¬ astrophic experience passes to audiences. Writing is, to put the mat¬ ter most basically, often the only means by which we, those of us who were not present, can know; hence the burden on which Ghosh so carefully dwells. Writing can perpetuate violence—words cost lives—either directly, as may havediappened in the way rumors about Sikhs spread via leaflets in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s death, or less obviously, in the case of writing that sensationalizes, as Ghosh says. Such writing calls attention only to the violence itself, to the perpetrated acts in their fascinating aberration, and not to the contexts of or resistances to that violence. For Ghosh, even the circumspect writer—the ostensibly responsible one who remains aware of the pitfalls of representing violence—obsessively turns again and again to the subject at hand, the violence. Such a writer cannot unequivocally fix language into some dependable represen¬ tational grid. Literary critics and linguists have long argued that meaning always escapes writing, but in the case of writing about suffering, which seeks so urgently to signify and to address tangi29

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

ble social crises, the problem of meaning is magnified. For Ghosh there is perpetually a danger of slipping into the sensational or the irresponsible. Arthur Kleinman offers a means of co-opting this dilemma, and he valuably illuminates the mandate of the writer and critic, the witness to suffering, who grapples with the extraor¬ dinary potentialities of literature and scholarship: “Living and writ¬ ing at the margin of the wider society, whether it is our destiny or not, can be a statement about what is and what is not at stake. Perhaps it is only at the margin that we can find the space of crit¬ ical engagement to scrutinize how certain of the cultural processes that work behind our backs come to injure us all, constraining our possibilities, limiting our humanity” (Writing at the Margin 5). For Kleinman, then, the margin is the space of analytic empowerment, a space the writer chooses, not because the writer wishes to be mar¬ ginalized but because the margin is the place from which an oppo¬ sitional politics can be launched. In Ghosh’s memoir/essay “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” and in his novel The Shadow Lines, written shortly after the events in Delhi, there is an uneasy self-consciousness about such oppositionality. Ghosh weighs the competing demands of representation and responsibility, insisting that the very act of representation cannot live up to the high demands of responsibility to the greater social good. At one level, “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” serves as an adden¬ dum to The Shadow Lines, the essay impliedly correcting, justify¬ ing, and illuminating the novel’s authorial politics and intention. While Ghosh claims (“The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” 41) that his dilemma of being both writer and citizen was resolved before the first word of the novel was written, The Shadow Lines is itself a med¬ itation on the difficulty of narrating, on the impossibility of fully reconciling “telling” and “acting.” The text establishes a silent calamity at its center—the death of the narrator’s cousin—while mining, in the name of recovery, both a psychological interiority and a fragmented historical past. Yet the narrator of the novel also chronicles his own surrender to wordlessness in the face of famil¬ ial and political trauma. We cannot fully know ourselves or our com¬ munities, he insists, because we have no language with which to

30

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

describe the dense network of influences that produces a self or a community. If in this sense Ghosh’s is a modernist novel, Mistry’s A Fine Balance is a realist text that resolves to overcome, at all costs, the difficulty of retelling the stories of social suffering. Here is a nar¬ rative that vociferously resists the surrender to wordlessness, that drains the epistemological blockage, and that refuses a fully developed interiority in favor of social panorama. Calling atten¬ tion to itself as a historical novel of broad sweep and social den¬ sity, the text deals with suffering that goes beyond the trauma of communalism and recounts the struggle of the poor on the streets of Bombay to survive in the face of Indira Gandhi’s imposed Emergency. Beginning with its epigraph from Balzac, A Fine Bal¬ ance very consciously reaches back to an earlier, stable mode of realism, convinced of the availability of indisputable social knowl¬ edge and promising genuine narrative progression and wholeness (in contrast to the narrative strategies of retrospection and frag¬ mentation in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines). Against the claims of many of these novels’ reviewers and crit¬ ics,1 I shall argue that both are less concerned with location, bound¬ aries, and the constitution of nation and more preoccupied with the practices of ethical life and with the redemptive possibility of narrating social suffering.2 In recovering history, both The Shadow Lines and A Fine Balance present secularist or humanist responses to cruelty and to the community’sdbss; both offer “lessons” that induce a readerly skepticism of official narratives. And, finally, both promote models of the writer-intellectual. In The Shadow Lines it is the first-person narrator himself who fills this role, and in A Fine Balance the less central figure of the storyteller, Vasantrao Valmik, becomes the unlikely intellectual. These texts promise to avoid mere entertainment—the prurient spectacle of violence— and seek to construct a version of progressive politics.3 But the narration of social catastrophe may seem to bring aesthetic com¬ pensation with it. Leo Bersani speaks of compensation as the function of a modernist culture of redemption that “produces epis¬ temological detective stories, stories that incite us to a kind of crit-

31

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

ical gymnastics in the discovery of truth, that force the reader to perform the central operation of art—The operation of corrective vision” (114). My readings of the literary texts will explore how conflicted that “corrective vision” actually is. And I propose, fur¬ ther, that there is also decompensation at work here—a constant but curiously enabling peril that threatens narrative and truth alike with irrelevance. I mean to demonstrate that The Shadow Lines and A Fine Balance are problematic novels whose political and nar¬ rative strategies are unstable and often conflicted. Though both insist on a kind of pedagogy, though they seek to “teach” their read¬ ers how to see injustice in the world, they are in fact texts that are deeply apprehensive about telling and about the dangers of con¬ ferring meaning on traumatic events. This anxiety about narratability, about the very place of history in literary discourse, becomes manifest in the novels’ ultimate turn away from that history. In this inquiry, I do not intend to probe the politics of authorial selves; I do not seek to label Ghosh’s or Mistry’s position, since neither is available to us in any transpar¬ ent sense. But I am interested in the nature of narrative author¬ ity: What strategies do these texts employ to convince us that they are indeed “serious” or “historical” enough and not simply “aes¬ thetic” objects? And how is this narrative authority undone? In their humane but melancholic conclusions, the texts perform an uneasy and curious shift: the narrative of social suffering is dis¬ placed by the narrative of desire, guilt, and domesticity. In The Shadow Lines, the disengagement of the intellectual is manifest in the narrator’s final preoccupation with sexual experience and romantic consolation. In A Fine Balance, the retreat into the pri¬ vate is announced by the curious narrative plunge into the lan¬ guage of despair; the storyteller’s optimism seems misplaced in the face of unrelenting private tragedy.

Activist Scholarship What I call “activist” scholarship is writing that presents a vari¬ ety of explanatory models of, and self-conscious vocabularies for discussing, the challenges of South Asian modernity. Such writ32

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

ing is not necessarily the work of professional scholars, for at times it can be the prescriptive and investigative work of concerned cit¬ izens.4 A few weeks after the riots in New Delhi, a small, galva¬ nizing report in the form of a pamphlet titled Who Are the Guilty? was jointly published by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. The report offers a series of damning conclusions about the violence. Its appendices offer additional chronological and nominal corrob¬ oration: times, dates, and locations are attached to the specific people in the community who perpetrated criminal acts. Who Are the Guilty? is both indictment and narrative. Its central assertion, that communal attacks against the Sikhs “were the outcome of a well-organised plan marked by acts of both deliberate commis¬ sion and omission by important politicians of the Congress . .. at the top and by authorities in the administration” (i), becomes the story of a conspiracy among the police, city officials, and the uprooted male poor. In such an account, the very word “riot” becomes inadequate to describe the calculated genocide that actu¬ ally occurred. In describing the camps for the homeless, the report also invokes a nagging desire to hear the voices of those who survived, a desire for alternate narratives. Here and there we catch the words of the women who watched and subsequently mourned, but the report implicitly demands that more of these voices be recovered. In the wake of the riots, a range of activists and committed intel¬ lectuals did perform the work of transcription. A large volume of such interviews was published three years later, not only as an act of memorializing but also as a means of “presenting] an alternative to the formal version of the November riots which will certainly find its way into the public archives” (Chakravarty and Haksar 8). In this context, the archive exists as the textual and public preservation of memory: it is the body of evidence that seems authenticated and categorized by various specialized knowledges. The work of scholars like Veena Das, Gyanendra Pandey, and Dipesh Chakrabarty is, at one level, deeply suspicious of the archive as such.5 While their research is obviously informed by com33

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

plex bodies of evidence, they suggest that writing is also an over¬ turning of the archive, a skeptical and self-critical examination of the languages deployed by those authenticating knowledges. Their writing also points to the fragile way that intellectuals balance the theorizing of narrative in the wake of communalism and the more personal commitment to the ongoing processes of justice and relief. Veena Das worked extensively with women who survived the vio¬ lence in Delhi, declaring that she did not want to play the role of “researcher.” Of course, she must inhabit this role nevertheless.6 Das concedes that social suffering is always marked by its nonnarratability (“Our Work to Cry” 345); the individual survivor must retell her story again and again. Accordingly, the intellectual’s act of listening becomes a deeply personal one. There is always, in Das’s wide-ranging work on the subject of social suffering, a kind of insistent doubleness. She sets out to critique the pathologies of modern society from an exacting theoretical standpoint and to recover the metaphors of violence and the disappointment with language that only the survivor can articulate. The pathologies are best seen in light of the so-called micropolitics of a community. Consequently, Das painstakingly reconstructs the political fac¬ tions within the neighborhoods hardest hit by the Delhi riots. While contributing to the relief effort, she conducted very specific sur¬ veys of the affected populations in order to juxtapose survivors’ testimony and the local structures and practices that allowed for the “gory rituals of revenge” (“The Spatialization of Violence” 195). But she is keenly aware of the dangers of such a method: It is often considered the task of historiography to break the silences that announce the zones of taboo. There is even something heroic in the image of empowering women to speak and to give voice to the voiceless. I have myself found this a very complicated task, for when we use such imagery as breaking the silence, we may end by using our capacity to “unearth” hidden facts as a weapon. Even the idea that we should recover the narratives of violence becomes problematic when we realize that such narratives cannot be told unless we see the rela¬ tion between pain and language that a culture has evolved [“Language and Body” 88],

34

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

Again, Das alludes to, indeed agonizes over, the interpretive dilemma of the anthropologist. She has written elsewhere that “the expression of pain is an invitation to share”; this sharing is formed out of both linguistic and bodily expression (Critical Events 194). She seems unable to reconcile the breaking of silence as sharing and the breaking of silence as weapon. But if sharing is an aggressive act, an arming of the survivor, then it is perhaps a sure means of avoiding what Das also fears: the revictimization of that survivor. Elaine Scarry suggests that “to acknowledge the radical sub¬ jectivity of pain is to acknowledge the simple and absolute incom¬ patibility of pain and the world” (52). Indeed, Das struggles with an anthropological dilemma that is bound up with this absolute subjectivity of bodily trauma. Scarry has further argued that the very attempt to explain pain and suffering in language is to col¬ lude with the forces that have caused that suffering: “To attach any name, any word to the willful infliction of this bodily agony is to make language and civilization participate in their own destruction” (43). But such a claim threatens to undermine the anthropological project of recovery and resistance. If we dare not speak of pain for fear of aggravating the crisis (a fear at which Ghosh hints, too), then how are we to document, remember, or prevent the violence? And does it not matter who is speaking, and who attaches the name to agony? For Das, “civilization” is founded upon the triumph of language over force. But she equally recog¬ nizes the possibility of collusion; hence the need to rely on a vari¬ ety of languages and discourses. Interestingly, Das places more emphasis on literary narrative than on testimonial or on giving voice. “Some realities need to be fictionalized before they can be apprehended,” she maintains (“Language and Body” 69). In turn¬ ing to these fictionalized realities, Das turns away from the “his¬ torical record,” the archive, and the documentation of suffering, in order to probe the silences that suffering begets. Das’s critique draws repeated attention to a series of unresolved dichotomies: theorizing violence versus giving voice; finding an appropriate language versus recognizing that language itself can become the

35

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

means of violence; analyzing social suffering versus providing a forum in which individual anguish can be explored. Gyanendra Pandey is less interested in the problems of language and voice, seeking instead to situate social suffering in a histori¬ ographic framework. He asserts, “Part of the importance of the ‘fragmentary’ point of view lies in that it resists the drive for a shallow homogenization and struggle for other, potentially richer definitions of the ‘nation’ and the future political community” (“In Defense of the Fragment” 28). Like Das, Pandey has been involved with community efforts for relief and recuperation after urban riots. He was part of the team organized by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights to investigate the severe Hindu-Muslim riots in Bhagalpur in October 1989. Thus he also invokes the personal in his theoretical claims about recent history, though he seems uneasy with the personal and apologizes for its inclusion. The work of social recovery that lies beyond writing and intellectual labor is both valorized and curiously downplayed. Pandey, as a member of the Subaltern Studies group and editor of some volumes in the series, has been engaged in the project of producing new historiographic models to explain social trans¬ formation. These models attempt to do away with the conceptual naturalness associated with “India” because the name assumes a unity that elides the multivocal nature of histories of suffering. Pandey further worries that the standard writing of the history of independent India represents communal violence as an aberra¬ tion within the national project. For Pandey, such violence is in fact inherent in the repressive and homogenizing tendencies of the modern state. He seeks to restore a specificity to the discus¬ sion of communalism, for to do otherwise is to essentialize the riot, defining it only by abstract context. He writes, “One advan¬ tage, or if you prefer consequence, of such narrativizing is that we are able to escape the problem of representing pain. This is a sanitized history with which we are relatively comfortable. In it, violence, suffering, and many of the scars left by their history are suppressed” (“In Defense of the Fragment” 41). Pandey contends that the urban newspapers are especially complicit in such sani¬ tizing because they simultaneously overdramatize the violence and, 36

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

within a matter of days, push violent events to their back pages once they have been digested and normalized in the context of a larger political development (such as the rise of ideologically charged sectarian parties). In the face of such problematic narratives, Pandey recommends the fragment, something like “a weaver’s diary, a collection of poems by an unknown poet” (50). Narratives of this sort challenge the state’s construction of history and expose the latent contradic¬ tions in public discourse, but they always remain conditional. In this way, Pandey’s work complements that of Dipesh Chakrabarty, who further problematizes Western historical narrative and seeks to conduct a thoroughgoing critique of modernity: “What is effectively played down ... in histories that either implicitly or explicitly celebrate the advent of the modern state and the idea of citizenship is the repression and violence that are as instrumen¬ tal in the victory of the modem as is the persuasive power of its rhetorical strategies” (“Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History” 21). For Chakrabarty, then, history must be written against the grain of Western scholarship. Like Pandey, he suggests that writing must also counter repression, actively distancing itself from those rhetor¬ ical strategies that seem to perpetuate violence. But Chakrabarty is himself unable to resolve the knotty problem of writing in a West¬ ern theoretical idiom. He does concede, however, that the writing of history cannot involve the “simplistic, out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universal?,'science, reason, grand narra¬ tives, totalizing explanations, and so on” (20). Such values, he sug¬ gests, are to be contested and reworked in the continual struggle to define and reconstitute “human solidarity” (23). Despite the differences among them, the South Asian schol¬ ars I have discussed all turn to narrative in the name of recon¬ struction and recovery of South Asian “realities,” but they suggest that narrative is to some extent an imposition of form, defining what is knowable and what is worth knowing. Narrative has the potential for repressing stories, motives, and the non-narratable knowledge of the community. Narrative can too easily departicularize instances of violence and social suffering by implicitly mak¬ ing large claims about the “nature” of South Asia. What these 37

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

scholars have yet to do is forge links to wider studies of trauma. The work to be done thus involves an iterative process, an inter¬ disciplinary investigation that moves between local, South Asian contexts and global histories of social suffering. These scholars might draw, for example, on the work of Kali Tal, who writes per¬ suasively of the strategies of cultural coping in the face of trauma. She notes, “Traumatic events are written and rewritten until they become codified and narrative form gradually replaces content as the focus of attention. For example, the Holocaust has become a metonym, not for the actual series of events ... but for the set of symbols that reflect the formal codification of that experience” (6). How, then, do we demystify such narratives? Is it possible to “com¬ pare” experiences of suffering? Is fiction as much a means of cul¬ tural coping as is scholarly intervention? In the South Asian case, it is tempting to place the writing of Das, Pandey, and Chakrabarty on one side of the critical table and, on the other, situate humanist fictional texts like The Shadow Lines and A Fine Balance that make individual interiority central and evoke a secularist, tolerant ideal of human community. But I seek to avoid the establishment of an unyielding boundary between non¬ literary and literary discourses, between the analytic and the aes¬ thetic. Instead, I intend to probe the way in which novelistic writing and scholarly writing are in fact enmeshed in similar problems of history and narrative practice.

Ghosh’s Modernism Though he has published four novels to date, Amitav Ghosh has been better known in the United States as an essayist of ethnog¬ raphy and travel. Ghosh, trained as a social anthropologist, received his Ph.D. from Oxford in 1982. His reviewers, includ¬ ing cultural critics like James Clifford, have applauded his ability to roam across discursive boundaries and to narrativize the idea of “dwelling-in-travel” (“The Transit Lounge of Culture” 7). Clifford is basically right when he points to the importance of the intercultural “roots” and “routes” represented in a work like Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, but in approaching this text I would not set38

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

tie for a straightforward reading of borders, interstices, and exile. It is more productive to think about this historical narrative and the novel The Shadow Lines in terms of a methodology and an ana¬ lytic rigor that draw on a particular anthropological perspective. To consider the scholarly roots of Ghosh’s work is to avoid the glib tagging of his work as “diasporic” or “postmodern.” In an Antique Land, an excerpt of which was published in a vol¬ ume of the Subaltern Studies series, joins a particular kind of nar¬ rative project: a reconstruction of history that involves the recovery of a subaltern subjectivity and agency. In an Antique Land con¬ tains two narratives: the first, the story of a twelfth-century Indian slave, Bomma, whose Jewish master takes him to the Middle East; the second, the recounting of Ghosh’s own journey between India and Egypt during the Persian Gulf war of 1990-91. Ghosh, hav¬ ing recovered the fragmentary remains of letters written by Bomma’s master, reconstructs a history of migration and seeks to evoke the medieval “map of knowledge” in order to juxtapose it with the modern one. The text thus explores the relationship between historical imagination and historical materiality. In attending to the archive, Ghosh also undertakes a kind of rever¬ sal of the tradition of orientalist scholarship in the search for the slave’s consciousness and for the texture of everyday life. The sub¬ altern subjectivity is thus the set of experiences, attitudes, and moral perspectives with which the socially or economically mar¬ ginalized individual sees himself of herself. The Subaltern Stud¬ ies series focuses on the histories of people who until recently were ignored by the producers of historical narratives. In embarking on such work, Ghosh insists on the value of rigorous field research and on recuperation of the textual traces of ethnic and class iden¬ tities in order to discover the channels through which modern knowledge operates and the imaginative and political uses to which that knowledge can be put. While The Shadow Lines does not rely so explicitly on research, it is very much a text that foregrounds acts of intellectual discovery and recovery. Ghosh is particularly interested—and vexed—by the problem¬ atic relationship between this knowledge and tangible social action, between textual feats of detection and measurable acts of 39

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

assistance. In “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” he narrates a scene of urban turmoil and describes his own experience as an observer at the margins who finally decides to act. The essay is also an account of generosities on the part of ordinary citizens of Delhi. Ghosh insists that the essay, written eleven years after the events it describes, is the product of a struggle with inhibitions. He believes that there are as many reasons not to write explicitly about such an event as there are to do so (though Ghosh of course wrote a great deal else in the meantime). In the place of writing must come citizenship itself; the latter entails duties like joining the peace marches that Ghosh took part in or distributing supplies in the neighborhoods worst hit by the rioting. Moreover, a pam¬ phlet like the People’s Union for Democratic Rights’ Who Are the Guilty? is for Ghosh one of the most crucial weapons of the con¬ cerned citizen, an essential means by which “society asserts itself against a state that runs criminally amok’ (“The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” 40). Ghosh points out what he, as a citizen-writer, was incapable of doing: devoting himself fully to the cause of relief. He names the professional women, all intellectuals (among them Veena Das), who gave up their careers for months or years in order to maintain the refugee camps. Ghosh himself decided not to join the team that produced Who Are the Guilty? out of a belief that “the politicians capable of inciting violence were unlikely to heed a tiny group of concerned citizens” (“The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” 40). He acknowledges his mistake in his essay. Though the pam¬ phlet did not bring about legal resolution for many victims, it was widely disseminated and became the model for future investiga¬ tions. For Ghosh himself, literary discourse—defined by its “aes¬ theticism,” by its inability to effect change in a resolutely political space, the way a pamphlet can—subsequently falls under suspi¬ cion. Of course, Ghosh’s view begs the question of whether the author must settle for “either/or”: writing or citizenship, the aes¬ thetic or the political. In defending writing itself, Ghosh refers to a sincerity that derives from frankness about authorial experience. Hence “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” frequently invokes the author's sense of awe, obligation, and fear. Such sincerity ought 40

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

to be a bulwark against the profane, against the aesthetic of indifference or the “conventions of representation” to which Ghosh repeatedly refers. Sincerity is also inextricable from the intentionality of “joining”: “Writers don’t join crowds—Naipaul and so many others teach us that. But what do you do when the constitutional authority fails to act? You join and in joining bear all the responsibilities and obligations and guilt that joining rep¬ resents” (“The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” 41). Perhaps strangely, then, the narrator of The Shadow Lines remains unable to join, in the sense that Ghosh valorizes. The novel follows the form of the bildungsroman but thwarts at every step its own “coming of age” trajectory. In fact, no trajectory seems possible for the narrative; its deconstruction and evasive recon¬ struction of chronology and space make impossible the straight¬ forward plot of education and maturity. The novel’s crucial narrative moments occur in 1939,1964, and 1981. The unnamed narrator nostalgically recounts his childhood in Calcutta and describes his boyish fantasies. He is at once astonishingly wise and self-conscious but also oddly ignorant of human motivation and sometimes especially blind to his own motivations. His is the story of strong personal and familial attachments. The first of these attachments is to his older cousin Tridib, a man of the world and an intellectual who encourages and instructs the narrator’s his¬ torical and geographical imagination. Tridib, as loquacious story¬ teller, teaches the narrator to “see” the' world with precision in order to free himself from other people’s “inventions.” Not only does Tridib thus serve as the ideal “author” to whom the narrator aspires, he also provides the young man with the means of narrativizing the joys and pain of sexual desire. Until the second half of the novel, there is only a suggestion of the narrator’s grief; there are only bare hints of the loss that actually stands at the novel’s core: the murder of Tridib by a mob in Dhaka during a communal riot. The narrator’s second attachment is his libidinal devotion to his cousin Ila, a cosmopolitan herself, schooled in England and full of stories about the boys who adore her. His desire for Ila echoes Tridib’s love-across-borders for the Englishwoman May Price, whose family has long been friendly with Tridib’s. Ila, however, 41

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

remains forever unavailable. Ultimately, the narrator consummates a romantic relationship with May, thereby discovering what he believes to be truths about human intimacy. The narrator’s paternal grandmother, Tha’mma, is the third crucial figure in his life. It is she who “sees” through his desires and pretensions during his young adulthood and who both entertains and disturbs him with stories of the Independence struggle. His grandmother has no patience with Ila, the cosmo¬ politan who refuses to abide by traditional roles. Ultimately, the narrator rejects his grandmother’s notion of belonging and local rootedness. The novel’s two sections, “Going Away” and “Coming Home,” foreground what seem to be the narrator’s chief preoccupations: cultural crossings among England, India, and East Pakistan (Ban¬ gladesh). He begins his story in 1939, thirteen years before he is born, when his great-aunt, Mayadebi, leaves for England with her diplomat husband and her second son, the narrator’s cousin Tridib. There, as the bombings of World War II devastate London, the family befriends the Prices, who have colonial ties to India. The narrator is the absent observer of these events. He reconstructs them, and indeed he obsesses over them, solely through the nar¬ ratives of those, like Tridib, who have actually lived through a past that entirely colors the present. The novel’s modernism lies in the narrator’s fractured reconstruction of familial and national histo¬ ries and in his foregrounding of the unstable and contingent act of interpreting those histories. I offer here a brief detour as a way of better gauging Ghosh’s modernism: Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s 1884 work Anandamath, arguably the most influential nineteenth-century Indian novel. Anandamath bears no formal resemblance to The Shadow Lines, but it has served as a foundational text for the literary imagining of Indian nationalism. The version most available to us today is largely shorn of its revolutionary quality and its Hinducentrism. As Janita Sarkar argues, Anandamath is the quintessential patri¬ otic novel, and in its earlier version, Bankimchandra Chatterjee “bestowed on the Muslim an unprecedented centrality in the his¬ torical and political scheme” (179). It thus informs and is informed 42

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

by nineteenth-century Hindu revivalism.7 The novel, a historical romance set during a major Bengali famine in the 1770s, tells the story of the rebellion of the sanyasis (mendicants sacred to Hin¬ dus). In the mythic register of the novel, the sanyasis conduct noble sacrifices to defeat the British colonial authority. Perhaps Anandamath’s most lasting significance is the song and mantra “Bande Mataram” (“Hail Motherland”) that stands at its charged center. In one sense, the novel is a ringing answer to British rule, an affirmation of the “sacred geography” of India, or of Bengal more specifically.8 The reality of borders is potently established, for it is only the belief in such lines, the absolute belief in difference— and indeed in cultural superiority—that enables the ascetic war¬ riors to sacrifice themselves. Of course, The Shadow Lines subverts the kind of dramatiza¬ tion of heroic action that drives the plot of Anandamath; Ghosh’s novel seeks to construct a thick interiority (the narrator’s) and a web of significances that might adequately respond to the social suffering unleashed by the unwavering belief in the reality of lines and borders between communities. The text establishes the “imagination”—that which Tridib believes to be emancipatory— as the counterweight to an old and unyielding nationalism. The narrator insists: I tried to tell I la and Robi about the archaeological Tridib, the Tridib who was much more contemptuous offairylands than she would ever be ... , the Tridib who had said that we could not see without invent¬ ing what we saw, so at least we could try to do it properly. And then, because she shrugged dismissively and said, Why? Why should we try, why not take the world as it is?—I told her how he had said that we had to try because the alternative wasn’t blankness—it only meant that ifwe didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free of other people’s inventions [31]. For the narrator, those “inventions” of other people consist above all in the divisions between communities and nations. To rein¬ vent the world for oneself entails a critical consciousness, a skep¬ ticism about “fairylands” and other, more serious cultural deceits. 43

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

Our own readerly participation in The Shadow Lines’ narrative project, in its archaeology of the recent past, widens the poten¬ tiality of that imagining—and it is this characteristic that makes the text so modernist. It hands the reader an interpretive agency that Anandamath denies, for the latter must rigorously define (and defend) its symbols while carefully managing the inherited his¬ torical past. For the narrator of Ghosh’s novel, we are all charged with representing the world. The narrator insists that we invent a language precise enough to reconsider the past and to describe our complex twentieth-century comings and goings in some mate¬ rial way. The text’s central narrative features—its nonlinearity, its digressiveness, its fissured interiority—are part and parcel of a strategy of political skepticism and contingency.9 Theodor Adorno speaks of a modernism that provokes a gulf between “the over¬ whelming and unassimilable world of things, on the one hand, and a human experience impotently striving to gain a firm hold on it, on the other’’ (Minima Moralia 163). Such a modernism, operating as a means of coping with traumatic experience, places a great deal of responsibility on its audience. A classically mod¬ ernist text such as James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, like The Shadow Lines, also produces a web of significances, and it forces us to rec¬ ognize our own readerly practices of acclimatization and order¬ ing; we are truly aware of ourselves striving to gain a firm hold. The significances consist of references to a series of specific urban locales (neighborhoods, streets, particular houses and institutions) and to crucial points in time, which eventually gather narrative weight. Thus both novels, Ghosh’s and Joyce’s, return again and again to important narrative ground (an individual’s past) in order to produce “character” and the verisimilitude of interiority. One critic of Ulysses, Fritz Senn, speaks of multiple acts of “right¬ ing” the text: characters in the novel amend their perceptions and practices; Joyce himself repeatedly revised his work and corrected errors that crept into the printed text; the reader must constantly reconsider textual materials and reading strategies; and the book corrects itself, clarifying what seems opaque in the lives of its char¬ acters (Senn 107). As readers, we must retrospectively understand 44

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

both texts’ associational devices. We must cover old ground, reread strategically, in order to sort through the private histories we encounter. Only then do we make sense of the thoughts and logic of the protagonists. We participate in the archaeology of mem¬ ory because we are in fact impelled to join the narrative project. Thus The Shadow Lines derives its narrative authority by author¬ izing its readers. Our participation and the textual construction of conscience, morality, and social optimism point to a political pluralism. This pluralism ought to stand as an all-important chal¬ lenge to hegemonic ways of thinking about and reacting to the world. The text describes a particular political commitment that grows out of sensitivity toward the future, toward institutions, and toward the problems of inequality and suffering in the world. But pluralism is itself susceptible to the charge of powerlessness. Here arises the somewhat familiar charge against a postmodern human¬ ism: If the intellectual is left only with multiplicity of discourse or with a variety of competing narratives, if the intellectual is merely an interpreter, what kind of meaningful engagement or decision making is possible? The objection can be further summarized: “Once the claim (or pretension) to universality has been stripped away, the oppositional function of the intellectual becomes difficult to sustain. All disputes are purely local in character and all truthclaims are discredited. We are left only with discourse” (Jennings and Kemp-Welch 17). One can locate the roots of such a critique in Georg Lukacs’s complaint about modernism: it strips histori¬ cal “reality” of perspective and of meaningfulness, thereby mak¬ ing a “mockery of action” and fostering a mood of “impotence” that results in an “angst-obsessed vision of life” (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism 37). This argument, despite its tone and seeming obsolescence, cannot be dismissed out of hand,10 for one might say that when a modernist text like The Shadow Lines responds to a powerful though chauvinistic political imagining like that of Chatterjee’s Anandamath, it offers only the ironizing of commitment, but no new and lasting political commitment of its own. In The Shadow Lines the narrator cannot always condemn or reject what he in fact believes to be terrifying or retrograde; he can only mediate, compromise, and reimagine.11 45

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

The bloodlust of Chatterjee’s Anandamath finds startling expres¬ sion in The Shadow Lines, in the person of the narrator’s grand¬ mother, an upstanding schoolteacher who makes frequent aphoristic pronouncements. For Tha’mma, the cosmopolitan life—the plu¬ ralistic life without belonging—is empty and wasted because it is a life in which the individual forsakes any claim to truth. She, in vivid contrast to the narrator, firmly believes in the reality of bound¬ aries. During her final illness, she speaks to him of the British: It took those people a long time to build that country; hundreds of years, years and years ofwar and bloodshed. Everyone who lives there has earned his right to be there with blood: with their brother’s blood and their father’s blood and their son’s blood. They know they’re a nation because they’ve drawn their borders with blood.... War is their religion. That’s what it takes to make a country. Once that happens people forget they were born this or that, Muslim or Hindu, Bengali or Punjabi; they become a family born of the same pool of blood. That is what you have to achieve for India, don’t you see [78]?

Tha’mma valorizes the achievement of loss with her dogged rep¬ etition of the word “blood.” Nation building is for her dependent on the uncompromising reality of that loss. The “pool of blood”— the mark of suffering—also becomes the source of transcendent family. If we think of Indira Gandhi haunting The Shadow Lines (since her death marked the moment of its writing), then she might do so through the figure of Tha’mma. In lieu of the prevailing and stern “Mother Indira,” the novel offers the outspoken grand¬ mother who mesmerizes her loyal listener. More crucially, Tha’mma affirms the need to make India a political and emotional reality: its borders must be knowable and enforceable. Indira Gandhi, too, was famous for her rhetoric of sacrifice in the name of the nation. In her last moment, Tha’mma charges her grand¬ son with the duty of suffering and of giving himself up to India. Only much later do these pronouncements have another signi¬ ficance for the narrator. When he discovers the truth about Tridib’s death, he begins to understand how the dying woman would have labored to make sense of that murder. In the face of Tha’mma’s ideas about blood and borders, the 46

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

narrator s sense of affiliation seems to pale. He chooses to devote his adult life to an intellectual labor (his Ph.D. thesis on the tex¬ tile trade between England and India) and frees himself from the obligations of community. He cannot accept his grandmother’s charge to “make” India, nor does he willingly accept any notion of solidarity. His cousin Ila fervently celebrates the latest causes to which she subscribes, the Fourth International and the AntiNazi League. May Price is the emblem of selfless activism, per¬ forming the dull legwork of charity that the narrator cannot quite understand (163). But he himself resists the act of joining and believing. He avoids the most dramatic political cause of his young adulthood—the radical Naxalite movement in West Bengal— saying to himself in response to Ila, who claims that he has led a safe middle-class life, “I had known people of my own age who had survived the Great Terror in the Calcutta of the sixties and sev¬ enties, and I thought I had at least a spectator’s knowledge of their courage” (105). Of course, this is no answer to Ila’s charge. To be a spectator is to be a reader of others’ actions. Instead of accepting responsibility for his community, he is continually worrying over the meaning of that responsibility. Through all this, the narrator also asserts epistemological priv¬ ilege. He establishes himself as the conduit across borders. He becomes the self-appointed carrier, sui generis, of a metanarrative about the nature of community and its breakdown. The narrator commits himself to crossings—cultural, geographical, and tem¬ poral. The recovery of the past is in this sense a vocational activ¬ ity through which the narrator wishes to uncover the nature of South Asian modernity, or, more precisely, to reveal the truth about the “lines” that demarcate nations and communities within the sub¬ continent. Though rooted in Calcutta, he fashions himself as the ideal traveler, the diasporic individual who crosses boundaries not only in physical acts of movement but also in imaginative acts of sympathy. In short, the narrator enacts what Salman Rushdie cel¬ ebrates as a migrant sensibility: “The migrant suspects reality: hav¬ ing experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier” (“The Location of Brazil” 125). 47

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

But it is just this kind of acclamation of liminality that Ghosh wants to subject to critical scrutiny.12 Ghosh does not believe unequivocally that exile or homelessness permits the writerintellectual to see things quite so plainly as Rushdie might have it. The Shadow Lines ironizes the figure of the narrator who, think¬ ing himself privileged, insists that he has extraordinary insight into his own character and into the lives of others. His education and his growing awareness of the political conditions in which he exists both offer him the sense of mastery. He shows off by demonstrating to family members the powers of his memory: he recalls his exploits with Ila when they were children, and he knows almost precisely the streets of London though he has never been there. In his ability to remember, he considers himself superior to the irresponsible migrant Ila, for whom places in the world are a “string of departure lounges” (20). For him, places remain the source of freedom and knowledge, particularly self-knowledge. He laments, “I could not persuade [Ila] that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s imagination; that her prac¬ tical bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more nor less true, only very far apart” (21). As I have already suggested, in his radical idealism the narrator privileges invention—the action of the subjective mind creating the world in granting phenome¬ nological reality through language and narrative. Yet in that very privileging he makes us continually aware of the disjunction between narrative and experiential reality. Narra¬ tive cannot do enough, and the narrator worries that in his voca¬ tion of telling he has opted out of acting, believing, and choosing. His concern echoes Ghosh’s own meditation on his predicament as citizen-writer. But, then again, what permits us to make this leap from narrator to author? In his critical examination of mod¬ ernist aesthetics and politics, Leo Bersani calls Proust’s A la Recher¬ che du temps perdu a “nonattributable autobiographical novel” and points to the means by which a literary text attempts to produce a redeeming authority out of the “real” experience of the artist. As Bersani would have it, “in an aesthetic of reparation, the artist’s life—a life at once ‘translated’ and made ‘more real’—is the only legitimate subject of art” (20-21). Art thus refracts the events of 48

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

history, refracts even social catastrophe, through the prism of the artist’s personal history in order to construct a “moral monumentality” (22). The text must win us over to the idea that we are being told truths. Bersani systematically critiques “a [modernist] ten¬ dency to think of cultural symbolizations as essentially repara¬ tive,” a tendency that “persists in our time as the enabling morality of a humanistic criticism” (7). In a lament that echoes Walter Benjamin, Bersani also suggests that the imagination of experience—the life within the book—replaces the actuality of experience. Bersani’s argument loses its force when we recognize that no such clear-cut sundering of representation and experience really occurs in any modernist text. While Ghosh’s narrator does indeed posit narrative itself as reparative, he is acutely aware of his lack of experience. The text never affords him an authority that guar¬ antees the truth value of his claims. And precisely because the text meditates so self-consciously on both experience and narra¬ tion, the figure of the author, Ghosh, remains elusive. We cannot read so easily with an eye toward the autobiographical as Bersani does.13 Moreover, Bersani neglects the capacious role of irony in the modernist text, an irony that complicates the humanism he critiques. The “corrective vision” (Bersani 114) operating in the modernist text is no such thing; the text does not serve as an “enabling morality” (7) that salvages the catastrophes of history through its aesthetic maneuvers, nor does the text unambiguously commit itself to the idea that novelistic language is always epis¬ temologically trustworthy, as Bersani says of Ulysses (167). Any reparative gesture in such a text is undercut by its own self-ques¬ tioning; art only partially redeems because it offers constant reminders about what it cannot contain and what it remains inca¬ pable of representing. Modernist irony is an exhortation to the reader who must himself or herself continue the reparative act. If in Ulysses or in The Shadow Lines the reader is engaged in a process of “righting” the text, the novel also rather idealistically encourages that reader to move outward from the aesthetic, to engage in the righting of the world. This irony, however, also becomes the locus of what I have already alluded to: decompen49

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

sation, or damage to narrative itself. And, as I shall explain, the text’s compensations ultimately take a form rather different from the one Bersani has proposed.

Suffering, Silence, and Desire I have thus far, in an admittedly contradictory way, both rejected and recuperated the reading of the “shadow lines” as metaphor for the boundaries among communities, nations, and individu¬ als. Indeed, the vast majority of critics who write about this novel speak only of its discourses and counterdiscourses about the nation.14 But I maintain that the novel is less concerned with nationalism and borders, less concerned with cosmopolitanism and the epistemic space of Western metropolitan authority, as R. Radhakrishnan would have it (“Derivative Discourse and the Problem of Signification”). Instead, the shadow lines are in fact the marks of writing itself, accounting for the modernist irreso¬ lution between art and experience that I have just touched upon. I asserted early on that writing lies on the margins of violence; it struggles to poeticize experience and to formalize the “civilized, willed response” to violence, as Ghosh claims (“The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi” 41). But writing also fluctuates between recovery and silence; hence its shadowy and spectral status. Like the narrator who is nameless and without experiential weight, writing itself has no certain presence. Interestingly, as I remarked earlier, Indira Gandhi as political legend has a similar status: she haunts (the title of Ghosh’s essay makes this haunting self-evident). If she represents, metonymically, a social eruption, then that entire event remains shadowy, persistent, and unresolved. And writing, which attempts to engage with the historicity of violence, cannot bring it fully to light. The narrator of The Shadow Lines emphasizes the idea that writ¬ ing always makes its reader aware of absence. Metaphoricity, he suggests, is a futile process of evaluation; the metaphor attempts to represent suffering in all its complexity, but the true state—an essential and essentialized set of emotions, contradictions, and memories—always “escapes” (96). Writing can only present 50

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

vague imitations of what individuals actually experience. The nar¬ rator’s attempt to understand Tridib’s death also veers between recovery and silence. The text implies that narrating, and conse¬ quently writing, is necessarily refracted and indirect. In the face of trauma—and trauma experienced at one remove, since the nar¬ rator is not present when Tridib is murdered—there is for the nar¬ rator an insistent wordlessness that wholly revises Veena Das’s diagnosis of the epistemic space occupied by the survivor because it prioritizes the special status—indeed, the historical burden— of the survivor who has no experience of violence. Here, then, is decompensation, that medical process by which the body or mind fails to defend itself from exterior stresses and, paradoxically, inflicts damage on itself. It is the narrator who under¬ goes this process, for it is he who further remakes social suffering into individual suffering. His revelation begins: Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a strug¬ gle with silence. It is a struggle I am destined to lose—have already lost—for even after all these years, I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of an imperfect memory. Nor is it a silence enforced by a ruthless state—nothing like that, no barbed wire, no checkpoints to tell me where its boundaries lie. I know noth¬ ing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelli¬ gence, beyond words—that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is nof a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are no words [218].

At its most obvious level, the narrator’s anguish amounts to an assertion of the non-narratability of trauma.15 But also implicit in the narrator’s words is a kind of guilt, for he did not himself suffer or survive. He did not witness, as did Tridib’s brother, Robi, as did May Price and his own grandmother. He does not continue to suffer from nightmares and terrible recollections. If silence is actu¬ ally the foundation of his suffering, it is something whose inten¬ sity he must prove. He himself is not under bodily threat; there is no “ruthless state” to ensure silence; there are no outward symp¬ toms of trauma and survivorship. The narrator suffers at an intel51

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

lectual distance. His trauma is the interior trauma of reconstruc¬ tion and articulation. He is faced with silence, then loses to silence, because he fears he has no right or ground to speak. He at once knows “nothing” of this silence and claims that it lies beyond words, but he has already defined it negatively. It exists in a discrete world over which the narrator has claimed posses¬ sion with the pronoun “my.” Hence he retroactively calls his nar¬ rative a failure and believes he has lost, even before telling the first words of his story. The entire familial narrative seems to unravel with this disclosure, for he admits, in a perhaps disingenuous way, that he cannot in fact narrate. He thus describes an epistemologi¬ cal suffering that is purely individual, or even individualistic, since such a sufferer can make no experiential connection with others.16 Thus caught in a decompensatory apparatus of his own mak¬ ing, the narrator can only acknowledge alienation. A nihilistic despair ensues: “When we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world.... Where there is no meaning, there is banality, and that is what this silence con¬ sists in, that is why it cannot be defeated—because it is the silence of an absolute, impenetrable banality” (218). Like Ghosh in his own essay, the narrator finds his own consternation always couched in the language of sincerity, in that “truth to feeling” of which the nar¬ rator reminds us over and over again. In this way, the narrator’s autobiographical mode—his frankness—becomes his only means of coping with the paradox that Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elis¬ abeth Bronfen speak of with regard to the representation of death: “Representation presupposes an original presence, and in the case of death that is clearly paradoxical. In any representation of death, it is strikingly an absence that is at stake, so that the presentation is itself at a remove from what is figured” (7). The “banality” of which the narrator speaks is exactly this absence, and he readily acknowledges that the unknowability of Tridib’s death can be only partly counterbalanced by his own drama of linguistic and emo¬ tional response. In yet another reversal, however, he goes on to adopt a scholarly and analytic posture that attempts to overcome both absence and banality, for though he says gravely of Tridib’s death, 52

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

“I do not have the words” (227; emphasis in original), he can indeed describe the nature of public events. He confidently possesses the words to explain the specific historical and political circumstances of the riots in Calcutta and in East Pakistan in 1964. The narrator’s search for a new vocabulary begins with the archive. Of course, the narrator’s belief in and reliance upon the archive—as an official and institutional systematization of knowledge—stands in intriguing contrast to the suspicion of the archive invoked by Gyanendra Pandey and Veena Das. For the lat¬ ter, records, libraries, documents, and reports—even narrative itself—are often the highly disputable sites of elision and dam¬ age; reconstruction or historical representation cannot be taken for granted. For these scholars, every intellectual entry into the archive must involve the cautious awareness of the way in which language is manipulated, and of the way in which narratives are put to use by an array of political forces. But the secular and lib¬ eral narrator of The Shadow Lines remains less skeptical. His turn to the archive and to newspapers is the means of affirming and invigorating discovery. “There is nothing quite as evocative as an old newspaper,” he asserts. “There is something in its urgent con¬ temporaneity” (227). The paper evokes a distant time, almost nos¬ talgically, but it is also “replete with the fullness of normalcy” (227). The narrator’s story is charged with neither contemporaneity nor this “fullness,” precisely because he is at pains to distinguish his narrative from those others, like thosq'of the newspaper, that lapse ultimately into silence. And yet, despite their problematic status, the narrator turns to old newspapers to recover the facts of the cascade of events that occurred between December 27,1963, and January 7, 1964. The narrator produces a historical causality, explaining the string of violent events from Kashmir to Kulna to Calcutta and to Dhaka, where Tridib died. His faith in a secularist vision of the subcontinent, this firm belief in systems of knowl¬ edge, lead him to posit a suprapolitical unity in the region. Describing the “irony that killed Tridib,” he points to “the simple fact that there had never been a moment in the four-thousandyear-old history of that map [of the subcontinent] when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each 53

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

other than after they had drawn their lines” (233). In putting it thus, stating the condition as a “simple fact,” the narrator states his deep belief that there are indeed lessons to be drawn here, that, after all, a meaning can be assigned to traumatic events on the social scale. The narrator seeks to imaginatively recover a South Asian whole. His pronouncement about the nature of South Asian violence—his evocation of a “pathological inversion” (203)—falls into the trap Pandey describes: the history of sectarian violence has been treated as aberrational “in the sense that violence is seen as something removed from the general run of Indian history: a distorted form, an exceptional moment, not the ‘real’ India at all” (Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment” 27). The narrator’s analy¬ sis of South Asian violence, of the war between “oneself and one’s image in the mirror,” thus elides the real sources and processes of communalism. But the “indivisible sanity” to which he refers remains his secularist hope. The “struggle with silence” is one that the narrator wishes to lose and to win all at once. He must not give words or meaning to suffering on the small scale, for to do so would diminish loss, framing it in terms that make it humanly comprehensible. Then again, that is precisely what the text does: it provides a form for loss, resolutely defying banality. The narrator seeks to construct a mechanism for political contingency; he simultaneously refuses to give meaning and strives to restore meaning. His conflicted agency recalls Richard Rorty’s description of the “liberal ironist,” the committed individual who yet “faces up to the contingency of his or her most central beliefs and desires.. .. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease” (xv). The iro¬ nist’s perspective is a paradoxical, self-critical stance and a mode of opposition to dominant ways of thinking. Such a perspective seems to be espoused by Ghosh’s narrator, but only up to a point, for within The Shadow Lines’ narrative politics of contingency, trauma, and wounding lies the potential for retreat, too. There remains a critical shift late in the novel, one that often goes unno¬ ticed. It is a final attempt to defuse the anxieties over writing and 54

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

acting. The narrator seeks to move from the trauma of Tridib’s death to redemption through desire and sexual experience. Such a tra¬ jectory also illustrates the narrator’s attempt to recuperate “expe¬ rience,” that which is absent during his absorption in the shadow lines of writing itself. But experience comes to be wholly defined by desire and sexual awakening. The narration of the historical— the movement outward—gives way to an obsession with the self. The dilemma of “joining” is dispensed with altogether. This shift is a critically psychic one, too. When I speak of decom¬ pensation, I summon Cathy Caruth’s designation of “the wound,” the remnant of trauma at the center of the narrative of “belated expe¬ rience.” She writes, “Far from telling of an escape from reality— the escape from a death, or from its referential force—[the wound] rather attests to its endless impact on a life” (7). This endless impact is marked by an oscillation between “the crisis of death” and “the crisis of life,” between “the unbearable nature of an event” and “the unbearable nature of its survival” (7-8). I contend that decom¬ pensation, and the ensuing damage, occur during this oscillation. And, curiously, it is also during this oscillation and during the nar¬ rator’s telling of it, during his withholding of the truth about Tridib’s death, and then his revelation about it, that he achieves a kind of momentary compensation, too. Telling itself, the fashioning of narrative for an audience, compensates. In Ghosh’s novel, the narrator displaces and renames trauma. Tridib’s death—the destruction of the'narrator’s double before he is even fully aware—becomes psychically linked to the desire for Ila. The loss of the self, Tridib, requires compensation in the other, Ila, who represents the cosmopolitan life for which the narrator has yearned. The fifteen-year “struggle with silence” over Tridib is powerfully intertwined with a twenty-year libidinal attachment to the cousin he can never possess. If, in Caruth’s sense, the wound is the story of interiority and absence, in Ghosh’s novel Ila becomes the source of a second wounding. In the first wound¬ ing, the death of Tridib in the context of public trauma links the narrator to a collective experience of suffering on the subconti¬ nent; the second wounding is much more private, more imme¬ diate in its daily reminders. We encounter here yet another form 55

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

of suffering: superseding the “social” and the “epistemological” are the bodily and the sexual. The narrator turns Ila into a sensual object, watching her inces¬ santly, both to map her body in all its female otherness and to dis¬ cover whether the essence of her personality can be read on that body. As Suvir Kaul has argued about The Shadow Lines, Ila bears all the markers of what is not home (“Separation Anxiety” 128-29). The narrator insists, “She looked improbably exotic to me, dressed in faded blue jeans and a T-shirt—like no girl I had ever seen before except in pictures and American magazines” (85). Her allure lies in sameness (members of the family say they look so alike they might be twins) and in a baffling “mystery of difference” (31). Her experiences are utterly unlike the narrator’s; in her travels she has access to worlds that he only invents. He believes that Ila challenges sexual mores (though she later claims she made up stories to live up to his expectations). By romanticizing her in her familiar for¬ eignness, he attempts to find a language of sexuality and of long¬ ing commensurate to the “need” to which he repeatedly refers. Thus, while the narrator claims not to have the words to give Tridib's death meaning, he faces no such crisis of wordlessness when it comes to desire, for at every crucial moment of frustra¬ tion, he can articulate the disappointment and loss that take on physical manifestation. Desire is both an embarrassment and an unexpected, even transgressive, thrill: There she is .. . her body cradled lazily in the seat, her head flung back over the arm, so that her small pointed breasts have thrust the thin cotton of her T-shirt into two gentle points which harden with her breathing, and then swell away again into dark circles, one of them dotted with a tiny black mole. She flops about in the chair, heedless of her body, childlike, and I, bracing the muscles in my thighs to con¬ tain the dull, swelling ache in my groin, have to roll over on my stom¬ ach and look at a magazine, though that makes the pain much worse, like the throbbing of a tourniquet, as though something were about to burst in my balls. I push myself away from her, along the floor, for I cannot let her see me like this, not for shame, but merely to preserve my friendship with her [8fi.

56

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

The narrator is carefully observant, aware of every texture and color of Ila’s body. She is diminutive—“childlike” in all respects—but she is also a temptation. There are two kinds of swellings here: while Ila is “heedless” of hers, the narrator is painfully aware of his. His own body demands recognition and concealment. Need becomes physically explosive, something he cannot explain to her or reveal. He is reduced to sliding across the floor. While he claims there is no shame in his hiding, shame is written throughout his other encounters with her. He is always rediscovering that “need is not transitive” (44), that his desire for Ila makes them unequal and gives her “power” over him. This discovery, in addition to the physical pain of longing, becomes the source of the suffering that has the form of trauma without trauma’s force or weight. Longing is traumatic because it constantly threatens to extin¬ guish the narratorial self. In the middle of the novel—at the bor¬ der between the two sections—the narrator asserts, “I knew that she had taken my life hostage yet again; I knew that a part of my life as a human being had ceased: that I no longer existed, but as a chronicle” (112). He is utterly textualized; he is made nonhuman and is constituted only by language when Ila spurns him. But desire—precisely because it is traumatic—also redeems. It rep¬ resents the ideal erasure of boundaries. Desire as primal, indi¬ vidualistic urge subsumes public trauma, remembering, and reconstruction. The narrator speaks forcefully of Tridib’s need for an imaginative space free from the burdens of memory and polit¬ ical history: He said to me once that one could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the lim¬ its of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror [29].

Tridib, the consummate intellectual, also valorizes the primitive and the corporeal. Desire is earthbound, but it is also the obverse,

57

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

an imaginative leap to other times and places. Desire becomes an all-encompassing aggrandizement of the self, a movement beyond “limits” toward a union between that self and its other, “the image in the mirror.” Tridib’s notion of ideal desire provides the narra¬ tor a way out: later, when he is tormented by the problem of memo¬ rializing and representing violence in South Asia, he can be “carried beyond” the limits of his mind; he can escape from knowl¬ edge and language themselves. Though his desire for Ila cannot come to fruition, he does find consummation with May Price. His sexual inadequacies are in the last moment of the novel wiped out. And that moment becomes an especially charged triangulation because he has fulfilled a sexual relationship with the woman whom his double, Tridib, most desired. May is, like Ila, a figure of otherness that energizes the narra¬ tor’s sexual imagination. When Tridib was twenty-seven, he began to write letters to May, who was nineteen, and so began the romance across borders. The narrator, by some unknown and unacknowl¬ edged means, is aware of all the details of their courtship. Their romance echoes the legend of Tristan and Iseult, for Tridib him¬ self, as a boy, was told the tale of Tristan—a “very sad story, about a man without a country, who fell in love with a woman across the seas” (186). It is this kind of romance to which the narrator ultimately aspires. Apart from this idealized version of love, the narrator knows the precise contents of Tridib’s fourth letter to May, a detailed (the narrator implies “pornographic”) account of sex¬ ual awakening in London, when Tridib had still been quite young. Tridib described for May the voyeuristic act of watching two adult strangers meet and have sex in a bombed-out theater. We discover that the narrator has borrowed Tridib’s language of sexuality and need, for Tridib, in watching, had felt both a “longing that he couldn’t understand” and a “fierce, bursting pain that was run¬ ning through his body and gathering in his groin” (143). Tridib went on to admit to May that he did know that was how he wanted to meet her, May—as a stranger, in a ruin. He wanted them to meet as the completest of strangers— strangers-across-the-seas—all the more strangers because they knew

58

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

each other already. He wanted them to meet far from their friends and relatives

in a place without a past, without history, free, really free,

two people coming together with the utter freedom of strangers [144],

For Tridib, then, desire occupied a space of purity and primitive¬ ness, untainted by history or by the realities of suffering. May had been simultaneously disgusted and exhilarated by Tridib’s sugges¬ tion, but she later visited him in the belief that strangers could indeed be united. The narrator, believing wholeheartedly in Tridib’s avowed “tor¬ ment of the flesh,” can find no outlet for his own sexual and roman¬ tic urges. As a boy, he could only wonder at the intimacy between Tridib and May when she visited. He claims that there was “a secret between them that 1 would never understand. I was jealous, achingly jealous” (170). Later, even when he is grown, the “secret” between men and women remains inaccessible to him. Of Ila and Nick Price, May’s brother, the narrator says,

“1

wanted to stand at

the bar and watch them, not for a minute but for hours; I wanted to learn the language of their affinity” (99). Without such a lan¬ guage, he has recourse only to imagination and then to bodily impulse. He furtively visits prostitutes in Delhi, and his grandmother is uncannily aware of these trips, castigating and humiliating him from her deathbed. Much later, when he visits London, he forces himself on May when he is drunk, and at that moment his desire belies the thoughtful passivity with which he has characterized himself until then. Wanting to live out the narrative of sexual union Tridib once provided, he asserts, “I could feel the skin, the hair, on my scrotum and my thighs coming alive. It was as though a part of my body had discovered, in my drunkenness, a means of pricking me on to look for a means of mourning Ila’s marriage” to Nick Price (156). Once again, in this physically charged passage, his “pricked” body becomes central, the source of both vitality and frustration. And once again, as in his encounter with Ila, his body dictates action. His uncontrolled advances on May are also the prod¬ uct of grief. Ila, having just married, has become forever unavail¬ able to the narrator; his eruption is a last attempt at compensation. But finally, during the narrator’s last evening in London before

59

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

his departure for Calcutta, May acquiesces. Here the novel reaches a generic shift, moving into the register of compensatory romance. May tells the narrator the entirety of the story of Tridib’s death; she relinquishes the feeling of guilt that she has killed him, saying that Tridib gave himself up in a sacrifice that must remain a mystery; then she and the narrator do make love, and he is enraptured because she has asked him to stay, to be strong, and to be her comfort. To be sure, the text is not at all explicit about their sexual encounter, but from the tone of ease in the narrator’s final sentence, from his very relief, it is clear that he has at last found some kind of sexual solace after the lack and frustration he has frequently recounted. He says, “I stayed, and when we lay in each other’s arms quietly, in the night, I could tell that she was glad, and I was glad too, and grateful, for the glimpse she had given me of a final redemptive mystery” (252). On the most obvious level, this mystery—with its almost spiritual connotation of redemption—refers to Tridib’s death in violent circumstances that exceed human knowing. May, the novel’s most obvious symbol of compassionate and humanitar¬ ian commitment, can absolve the narrator of the guilt he has always borne over Tridib’s death. He is absolved of having to give that death “meaning” as he has so vainly sought to do. He need no longer feel guilty for not seeking the truth, for not struggling against silence. But the “redemptive mystery” is equally a sexual one for the narrator. These lines are the words he leaves us with, words that succeed, indeed supersede, the discussion of Tridib’s “sacrifice.” We do not hear May’s voice here. It is the narrator who suggests that she is “glad” for their union. It is the narrator who rejoices in the long-sought-after intimacy with a woman because the mys¬ tery revealed to him also entails the heretofore unknowable bod¬ ily language between two lovers. May becomes merely the means of completion, the figure through whom the narrator can fulfill the Tristan-Iseult romance. He also discovers the means of defining his masculinity outside the powerlessness he has felt in the face of the trauma of “silence” and the trauma of Ila’s rebuff. Finally, it is through this channel of “completion” that the narra¬ tor’s sense of guilt is relieved. That guilt, as I have been suggest¬ ing, involves more than just Tridib’s death. In its widest sense, it 60

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

envelops the multiple narratives of injustice and suffering with which he has come into frequent contact. In his inability to do more than retell in the face of these South Asian narratives, May provides solace. The moral imperative of just action becomes unim¬ portant once the vocabulary of the private firmly usurps the vocabulary of the public. The narrator’s engagement with the his¬ torical, and with the redeployment of language in the name of political commitment, lead quietly to the language of benign self¬ absorption.

Realism and Its Consolations But back to the political. Shortly before Indira Gandhi’s death, Salman Rushdie and his publisher, Jonathan Cape, were forced to offer an apology to her and to excise an offending passage from Midnight’s Children after a libel case in the High Court at London’s Old Bailey. The prime minister brought the suit in response to one sentence suggesting that Sanjay Gandhi, Indira’s younger son, had accused his mother of causing his father’s death.17 Of course, the novel makes a series of far more damaging assertions about her political offenses, and these no doubt made the rising young writer an enemy of “Mother Indira.” She was dead for more than a decade when Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance was published, and Mistry’s novel, though undeniably distinct from Rushdie’s in form, is perhaps even more unsparing in its critique of her abuses. Needless to say, then, Indira Gandhi has not fared well among South Asian writers. A Fine Balance serves as a valuable counterpoint to The Shadow Lines’ modernist worrying over the narratability of violence. I have rather deliberately placed my discussion of the realist text after the modernist one in order to avoid a literary historical teleology which suggests that modernism reflexively challenges and revises the epistemological bases of realism. In the South Asian case, these literary streams flow simultaneously; they represent con¬ current means of dealing with narratives of public crisis. Rohin¬ ton Mistry is not enmeshed in research and scholarly activity such as the Suhaltem Studies project. He is thus less explicitly invested 6i

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

in the broader questions of the archive and of participatory citi¬ zenship, but he is more interested in allegorizing the process of representation itself. Now residing in Toronto, he still considers Bombay (now Mumbai) his home, and the latter city has been the sole site of his reimagining of South Asian trauma. For such work he has been championed by reviewers in the West for a per¬ ceptive “documentary realism.” Whether we label A Fine Balance realist or naturalist or whether we deem it a historical novel seems less important than examining the way it conducts a social and political critique of institutions long ridiculed by Indian citizens on the street. The text draws on this kind of demotic language and also depends on a Dickensian mode of exaggeration and car¬ icature. Its satire, and thus its critique, relies on the stark juxta¬ position of demonized politicians and victimized, hardworking citizens. A Fine Balance considers political and social events in a much more historically familiar way than does The Shadow Lines. That is, it provides a palpable specificity: all the worst excesses of the Emergency period are catalogued in the context of vast urban squalor. Indira Gandhi herself is not just a figure who haunts this novel but is also the great and implacable force that destroys human lives. In an important sense, A Fine Balance is also a domestic novel, for it describes the evolution of an unusual household, made up of Dina Dilal, a widow who has a contract to sew women’s cloth¬ ing for an export company; Ishvar and Om, uncle and nephew, who work as her tailors; and Maneck, a student who becomes Dina’s boarder. The four together serve as a metaphor for India itself; their harmony is the prescriptive model for communal peace, with each member of the “family” playing an important role in the func¬ tioning of the overall economy. The novel is replete with other char¬ acters, themselves sewn into the narrative’s elaborate machinery of coincidence. Every event is “fated,” and every character stands allegorically for a particular class, caste, or social position. The tailors—untouchables in their native village before they arrived in the city—are never free from the buffeting political forces that ultimately demean and demoralize them. Mistry is also unspar¬ ing in his critique of the Congress Party and its leaders, all of whom 62

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

appear corrupt and grotesque. He thus seeks to extend sympathy to ordinary people who suffer and endure. I would go so far as to say that Mistry attempts to produce a text that is not merely human¬ istic but also humanitarian. The tragedies that occur to individuals are unremitting, and each of these represents the suffering of untold millions; social suffering is indeed the driving force of narrative here. Earlier I cited Goodwin and Bronfen’s assertion that the representation of death is always paradoxical because it is faced with absence. In A Fine Balance, such absence is aggressively denied. Death, loss, and suffering all become an unequivocal presence that must be nar¬ rated over and over. From the story of Om’s father (and Ishvar’s brother), Narayan, tortured and put to death because he is an untouchable who dares to challenge the village political machine, to the story of the work camps where Om, Ishvar, and their other street friends are exiled to the story of forced sterilizations, there is a growing despondency about the Indian future. Maneck, with a middle-class background, serves as the novel’s great conscience and bears the weight of all these tragedies. In the face of the suffering he witnesses, he grows unwilling to listen or endure and finally commits suicide. Though the novel affords moments of humorous coincidence and other moments of sentimentality, it provides no relief from its downward spiral. The novel’s sheer size and scope offer the most obvious contrast with The Shadow Lines. In the latterrfve are always aware of a nar¬ rator’s presence, of a hyperobservant mind at work. In A Fine Bal¬ ance, narration is highly digressive, though the plot follows a careful trajectory in order to emphasize the characters’ destiny. Perhaps even more than we are aware of individuals, we are aware of the city itself, unnamed, though it bears all the marks of Mumbai. This is the place where chance meetings between characters occur and where brutality runs a daily course. The city is indeed, as Raymond Williams would have it, “at once a social fact and a human land¬ scape” (The Country and the City 161). Just as in Dickens’s work, the novel relies on what Williams calls “the power of dramatising a social and moral world in physical terms” (161). The city is the site where, as action develops, “unknown and unacknowledged rela63

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

tionships, profound and decisive connections, definite and com¬ mitting recognitions and avowals are as it were forced into con¬ sciousness” (155). In depicting the city’s marginalized inhabitants, the text reflects on the subaltern, though it relies less on rigorous or specific analysis than on the endless production of story. Vasantrao Valmik, a lawyer whom Maneck meets during his first trip to the city, turns out to be the novel’s important pundit, expounding theories of narration and survival. Valmik insists that everyone has a history to tell, and so the novel is itself at pains to tell every story, to create a kind of simultaneity so that we know what a multitude of characters in the city are doing at critical moments in the recent history of South Asia. The overproduc¬ tion of story thus leads to the mapping of the city, a place Om calls a “story factory” (A Fine Balance 377). The narrative creation of a densely populated space requires a paradoxical maneuver per¬ formed by many realist texts that aspire to describe the “social con¬ dition”: through “story,” characters are individuated, made unique and, above all, entertaining. But, as I have already suggested, char¬ acters also stand for particular groups in order to represent larger categories of experience. In this sense, A Fine Balance seems to approximate Lukacs’s idea of the realist text that depicts man as a social animal: “Every human action is based on the presuppo¬ sition of its inherent meaningfulness, at least to the subject” (The Meaning of Contemporary Realism 36). But unresolved is the ten¬ sion between describing the “social condition” and maintaining the meaningfulness of individual action. In representing the city, A Fine Balance attempts to perform the redemptive activity that Leo Bersani ascribes to the modernist aesthetic: even more directly than The Shadow Lines, and with¬ out the destabilizing irony, Mistry’s novel sets out to redeem the experience of suffering through the force of narrative detail that makes us see again that which is lowest and most degraded. The novel tries to provide aesthetic compensation for trauma. Through the eyes of Om, we see the city this way: Splotches of pale moonlight revealed an endless stretch of patchwork shacks, the sordid quiltings of plastic and cardboard and paper and

64

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

sackcloth, like scabs and blisters creeping in a dermatological night¬ mare across the rotting body of the metropolis. .. . Lampposts and neon fixtures washed the pavements in a sea ofyellow watery light, where slumbered the shrunken, hollow-eyed stat¬ uary of the night, the Galateas and Gangabehns and Gokhales and Copals, soon to be stirred to life by dawn’s chaos, to haul and live and build, to strain their sinew for the city that was desperately seeking beautification [373].

At first reading, this passage may seem to defy all aestheticization, for it describes the city as an unappealing set of remains, an already “rotting body.” But the very use of an extended meta¬ phor in the first paragraph makes us rethink such an assumption because metaphor transforms its object. The city, even in its “chaos,” becomes something understandable, observable, some¬ thing we can reflect on, something over which we can mourn. Here too are the novel’s familiar metaphors of quilt and patchwork: symbols of order, regulation, and destiny writ into artisan work. Granted, the patchwork is “sordid,” but that is precisely what renders it conspicuously worthy of narrative attention. The sec¬ ond paragraph moves away from the physicality of the city to the physicality of its denizens, who are themselves transformed into “statuary”—again, objects of contemplation. The alliterative use of names adds a simpler verbal redemption to the redemptive vision: sound itself soothes. For Mistry, then, the recognition of the subaltern’s humanness—the recognition of his degradation and agonies—also involves turning his experience into something heroic and even poetic. Language itself, like the working bodies of the laborers, “beautifies” the “dermatological nightmare.” Novelistic language is what enables us to see again and see better. In this convergence of the aesthetic and the degraded lies the “balance” of the novel’s title. Valmik, who serves as the novel’s writer-intellectual, speaks of balance and storytelling on three cru¬ cial occasions. In the first instance, after telling his life to story to Maneck, he advises, “You see, you cannot draw lines and com¬ partments, and refuse to budge beyond them.... You have to main¬ tain a fine balance between hope and despair” (228-29). For

65

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

Valmik, the key to survival in India, a place he agrees is full of suffering, is the telling of all sides of the Indian story. He is a sto¬ ryteller in Walter Benjamin’s sense, an antidote to modernity, a counselor who counters the very isolation that the novel form cul¬ tivates; he seems to possess that “epic side of truth, wisdom,” and thus he challenges the way in which “experience has fallen in value” (Benjamin 84). Valmik asserts that “compartments” serve to iso¬ late, to fix people in pessimistic ways of seeing the world. The ideal he so thoroughly champions—indeed, the novel’s ideal, the fine balance—is the perceptive and sensitive recognition of the way people do surmount their suffering. Thus A Fine Balance, always a voluble narrative, insists on jus¬ tice and the maintenance of pathos. After a scene in which a rent collector bullies Dina Dilal, the narrative shifts to the rent collec¬ tor’s perspective, describing his griefs and frustrations. Everyone, the text insists, has a hard life, and thus everyone deserves to be heard. Narrative and the evocation of pathos become a comfort in Mistry’s text. Dina Dilal, who is the second recipient of Valmik’s aphoristic pronouncements, describes his “expert narration” with the metaphor of sewing and design, claiming that it also serves as a “hidden survival weapon, like antibodies in the bloodstream” (555). Her use of a string of metaphors, like those employed by nearly every other character who appears in the novel, also points to what Valmik says implicitly: the poetic and aestheticized use of language is a solace. While metaphor is a false consolation for the narrator of The Shadow Lines, for Valmik, Dina, and others it is the sole con¬ solation, that which ought to provide the sought-after “balance.” Metaphor is the building block of one’s own story, the reminder of who one is. As Valmik says to Maneck near the end of the novel, “One day you must tell me your full and complete story, unabridged and unexpurgated. ... Ah, yes, to share the story redeems every¬ thing” (594). Again, Bersani’s notion of compensation and redemp¬ tion of traumatic experience seems written through the text. To share one’s story and to listen is to fulfill the imperative of justice and sincerity. Valmik adheres to the belief that also underlies a volume like The Delhi Riots, the anthology of interviews with survivors of the anti-Sikh pogrom in 1984. The editors write: 66

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

The experience of narration, even if it is of a single event, is not an isolated act of reconstructing just that specific moment in time but an evocation of feelings and perceptions about everything that has gone into placing that event within the totality of the experience of the nar¬ rator [Chakravarty and Haksar 17],

Valmik, like Mistry in his novel as a whole, also aims for this evo¬ cation of totality. What must be preserved is not merely the indi¬ vidual account but the context in which that account is submerged. To recover such a liberal-humanist context is to link the individ¬ ual sufferer with the matrix of social conditions that produced that suffering, and this diagnosis is the first step in reparative justice. The text seeks to have the one stand for the many, but it never man¬ ages to resolve the tension between representing the individual and representing the collective. Maneck never gets to tell his story, never narrates to anyone, because he is increasingly at a loss for words. When, in the epi¬ logue, he returns to the city after a nine-year absence and sees Dina and the tailors, he is literally unable to speak, overcome by the fact that they have suffered deeply. This loss of language, of the ability to tell, directly precedes his own suicide. In a heavy-handed way, the narrative insistently foreshadows Manecks death. That final tragedy—the destruction of the novel’s heroic conscience—thus points to the overall failure of “balance.” Hope does not fully counter despair as Valmik believes bt can. The last one hundred pages form an arc toward death. The epilogue itself begins as riot¬ ing commences after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. After that public moment, the narrative leads inexorably to Manecks suicide. Long before he chooses to jump in front of the train, he reflects, “What was the point of possessing memory? It didn’t help anything. In the end it was all hopeless.... No amount of remem¬ bering happy days, no amount of yearning or nostalgiaf,] could change a thing about the misery and suffering” (330). He bears witness in the novel, always conscious of the “fatedness” of lives in the city. And after reading newspapers covering the nine-year period when he was out of the country, he begins to realize that the stories and “even the pictures [look] the same” (583). The nar67

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

rative here shifts into mere synopsis of public trauma. Manecks response indicates increasing grief over the incapacity to act in the face of the machinery of modernity. All disasters begin to blur, and, despite the narrative effort of putting faces on the sufferers, suffering itself becomes anonymous, relentless, and unmanage¬ able. The macrocosmic overwhelms the text. The voluble narra¬ tive finally exhausts itself. On the one hand, the text aspires to what Bersani has called “corrective vision” and evokes the city as der¬ matological curiosity, but, on the other, it blurs that vision, implic¬ itly acknowledging that narration cannot do enough to represent the world or to stanch its sufferings. The hazard, too, is that social suffering has become spectacle. Like the slum-dwelling circus performer who “balances” two young children atop his long pole, angering the audience that finally accuses him of exploitation, this narrative of unremitting tragedy—replete with all the stories Valmik insists that people tell and hear—is always in danger of turning into mere entertainment. “Balance” becomes just another theatrical pose. Arthur and Jean Kleinman, in their survey of how images of suffering are appro¬ priated by the modern media, argue that suffering has in fact become the “master subject” of our times (i). The Kleinmans also detect a consumption of such experiences by audiences, mostly in the West, who are subject to various moral appeals to donate, act, or lobby on behalf of the sufferers. But these appeals, what¬ ever their good intentions, essentialize, naturalize, and sentimen¬ talize suffering and ultimately lead to a “moral fatigue” on the part of the viewers (8). If suffering has become spectacle, then what happens to the text’s moral and political appeal ? Does the text’s failure of balance— the failure to provide the promised optimism in its conclusion— also point to the possible breakdown of the novelistic political critique? A Fine Balance directly attacks Indira Gandhi and the national bureaucracy for inhumanity during the Emergency period. The prime minister, then, serves as the novel’s “Big Sis¬ ter,” looming everywhere as the nemesis of all the “ordinary” people with whom the novel is most engaged. In the city, during the enforced “beautification” program, her picture appears every68

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

where on billboards and walls, proclaiming: “Iron Will! Hard Work! These will sustain us!” (181). But the likeness is also grotesque: The artist s ambition of a benignant smile had also gone awry— a cross between a sneer and the vinegary sternness of a drillmaster had crept across the mouth” (181). In the novel’s most vitriolic piece of satire, Om, Ishvar, and thousands of others in the city are rounded up by the police and forced to attend a vast open-air rally for the prime minister. The hypocritical and insensitive rhetoric of the politicians is exposed, and, what is most impressive, an eighty-foot cutout of Indira Gandhi standing next to the stage top¬ ples at the end of the rally, in the turbulence created by the heli¬ copter flown by the prime minister’s son Sanjay, and the massively larger-than-life image of the leader crushes the unwitting people standing below. Most centrally, however, Indira Gandhi is represented as the castrating female. The text never relinquishes an anxiety over impo¬ tence and emasculation: male dialogue is written over with quips about “nussbandhi” (vasectomy); the young men of the novel, Maneck and Om, are frequently subject to sexual humiliation by other men and women, and they themselves speak often of imag¬ ined sexual conquest. Ishvar and Om are ultimately caught in the net of the sterilization program (it was in fact Indira’s son Sanjay who organized the program, but in the popular imagination Indira herself seemed to have masterminded it). Ishvar contracts an infection after his vasectomy, and'his legs are amputated. Om is fully castrated, on the orders of the village strongman who put his father and the rest of his family to death years before. Against the threat of emasculation the men in the novel are powerless. Textual anxiety over the failure of “balance”—the slippage of social suffering into narrative spectacle—is thus linked to this later anx¬ iety over impotence: both point to the loss of authority (or autho¬ rial control). Sterilization represents the end of imaginative freedom and the loss of the power to fully evoke the social world. Indira Gandhi, assuming a “male” authoritarianism, is the force that revokes the power to speak out. Active resistance begins to seem beyond the realm of possibility. There remain only telling and complaint, which threaten to 69

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

test the patience of even the sympathetic listeners in the novel. Speaking to Dina Dilal, Valmik repeatedly grieves over the nation’s political situation. At one point he excoriates Indira Gandhi’s perversion of justice: “The Prime Minister cheats in the election, and the relevant law is promptly modified. Ergo, she is not guilty. We poor mortals have to accept that bygone events are beyond our clutch, while the Prime Minister performs juggling acts with time past” (552-53). Yet he soon returns to optimism, to his belief that hope will compensate for political corruption. Increasingly, however, we suspect that narration itself, storytelling, will not serve anyone but Valmik. He indeed survives; in each of his three appearances he has a different occupation and a differ¬ ent identity. In his final incarnation, when he speaks to Maneck of the redemptive power of the story, he is in the employ of a reli¬ gious quack, writing fictions to satisfy those who send their money to the leader’s foundation. Valmik, then, is no humanistic figure after all. For Maneck, for Dina, and for the tailors, the rhetoric of “balance” provides no relief, and storytelling will offer no resis¬ tance to the inexorable social and political pressures that strip them of home and dignity. Mrs. Gandhi’s regime, after it came to a violent end, first pro¬ duced wonderment (Could it actually have happened in democratic India?), and then forgetfulness. Mistry’s novel, like Ghosh’s, thus returns to the question of whether literary discourse will have any efficacy. Will it counsel, remind, and finally provoke its readers to recover the history of excess and brutality? A Fine Balance con¬ cludes at the point where, Amitav Ghosh tells us, he began his project of writing and recovery: shortly after Indira Gandhi was murdered, the point that Veena Das would call a “critical event,” a time at which remembering ought to begin. The assassination, as all such specifically national moments do, provoked a collec¬ tive political reflection. Salman Rushdie would write immediately after Gandhi’s death: All of us who love India are in mourning today. It is of no importance whether we numbered ourselves amongst Indira Gandhi’s most fer¬ vent supporters or her most implacable opponents; her murder

70

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

diminishes us all, and leaves a deep and alarming scar upon the very idea of India [Rushdie, “The Assassination of Indira Gandhi” 41],

Even as a resolute critic of Mrs. Gandhi, Rushdie is horrified by the brutal manner of her death. But what he finds more disturb¬ ing, and what he goes on to elaborate in the remainder of his essay, is the threat to the “idea of India.” For the Indian nation to make sense, “it must base itself firmly on the concept of multiplicity, of plurality and tolerance” (44). Thus for Rushdie, as for many other writers, the assassination of Indira Gandhi comes to represent a serious danger to secularist and humanist beliefs and to the mod¬ em imagining of nation. In one sense, the struggle over representation is a struggle to articulate an oppositional politics. But it is also a stmggle over the status of writing itself. Representations of social suffering in the texts I have considered here are very much concerned with their condition and position within a modern culture that may in fact have little use for literature. The paradox is this: these texts question the basis of cultural representation because demagogic communalist politics has relied on the skillful manipulation of representation, but the texts also seek ground in which a prop¬ erly humanist representation of political ills can be cultivated. This paradox, in its intractability, is precisely the point at which texts like The Shadow Lines and A Fine Balance undergo decompensa¬ tion, withdrawing into the private, and disengaging from realities both political and historical. Writing finally turns in on itself, diagnosing only epistemic vio¬ lence or the misuse of symbols and systems of knowledge. It skims but cannot delve into the actual violence—physical, intolerable, sometimes unimaginable—that demands more immediate atten¬ tion. As E. Valentine Daniel contends in his study of communal violence in Sri Lanka, “We cannot afford to be unaware of our col¬ lective logocentric inclinations, our privileging of language over labor, words over acts” (199). Words, he further insists, stand at a culture’s center, while violence pushes at that culture’s limits, threatening to become unrecoverable. But Daniel acknowledges, as The Shadow Lines does explicitly and A Fine Balance does implic-

71

WRITING AND REDEMPTION

itly, that we have no choice but to see-saw between writing and acting, between loss and recovery, finally admitting that even nar¬ rating violence always produces “an excess of passion, an excess of evil. The very attempt to label this excess (as indeed I have done) is condemned to fail.... Everything can be narrated, but what is narrated is no longer what happened” (208). This seesawing may induce a kind of vertigo, but it remains our surest means of exam¬ ining the ethical dilemmas of telling and recovering. To narrate is indeed to privilege language over labor. But we do not stop there. To narrate is to call into existence a listening and reading com¬ munity, a community that may find its way toward social solutions.

72

How effortlessly does history sometimes manage to conceal our past from us. Growing up in independent India, glorying in a freedom gained through non-violence, our gift to liberation struggles everywhere, everything that happened pre-ig4rj was safely between the covers of our history books. Comfortably distant, undeniably laid to rest. ... 1984 changed all that. The ferocity with which Sikhs were killed in city after city in north India in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the confusion and shock that stunned us into disbelief and then into a terrible realization of what had happened, dispelled forever that false sense of security. Those who experienced the brutality and orchestrated fury of the attacks recalled that other cataclysmic moment in the country’s recent past—a past they believed had been left behind. But here was Partition once more in our midst, terrifying for those who had passed through it in 1947.

— Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin

Borders and Boundaries

2 THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

originary moment of national trauma: the division of South Asia and the independence of India and Pakistan sparked one of the twentieth century’s great human calamities. The violence of Par¬ tition was not localized or easily demarcated. It demanded, and still demands, superlatives. The violence erupted in the cities, traced its way up train routes, through small towns and villages, and sprung up everywhere Hindu and Muslim communities were being exchanged. The kajilas—the columns of tens of thousands of refugees that stretched for many miles—-were attacked and looted on both sides. Movement and flight were the very sources of danger. Partition, more than any other communal disturbance in the history of South Asia, was an event that made people home¬ less, “unhomed” people, on a vast scale: ten million people cross¬ ing the borders, the estimates run; one million killed; some untold number of women violated or disfigured. But no number, of course, can say enough. Fathers murdered their daughters to “save” them from being brutalized. Neighborhoods once famil75

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

iar, bound up with family histories, became terrifying; hence “the trauma of moving with nowhere to move” (Pandey, “Community and Violence” 2261). This unhoming of families and individuals is precisely the kind of story that for a long time did not find its way into public accounts of Partition, the kind of story that writ¬ ers and thinkers across South Asia have been desperate to recu¬ perate. The short fiction of the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto is central to this project of recuperation and yet thwarts it in curi¬ ous ways. Manto employs fiction for rhetorical ends, rendering impossible any comfortable distance from Partition. We readers are perplexed, if not haunted, by the voices he conjures—voices like that, in the 1949 story “Cold Meat” (“Thanda Ghosht”) of Ishwar Singh, a man who confesses to the rape of a dead woman, a “heap of cold flesh.” Such stories cannot be laid to rest, Manto insists. Narrative thus reminds us that Partition remains a name for the contentious national borders, for the reconfigured com¬ munities, and for the enmities lingering still. But what can a writer like Manto, who himself did not endure trauma, tell us about that experience? Who, exactly, speaks in these narrative of social suffering? And what cultural processes subsequently co-opt or reshape that telling? As Kali Tal usefully explains, “The work of the critic of the literature of trauma is both to identify and expli¬ cate literature by members of survivor groups, and to deconstruct the process by which the dominant culture codifies their traumatic experience” (Manto 18). In 1948, the year after the triumph of Independence and the scarring of Partition, memories of the national trauma were sealed off with startling rapidity. They were collectively repressed, “made comfortably distant,” as Menon and Bhasin put it. Simul¬ taneously, a national community was constituted: in India, Inde¬ pendence became the focal point of a remembrance shaped by the rhetoric of modernity, as popularized by the first prime min¬ ister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The birth of the nation was, in this nar¬ ration, a story of heroism, justice, and anticolonial democracy. But, as Menon and Bhasin also describe, in the year 1984 that story was overturned. Here was the watershed moment when the very idea of national unity was shaken to its core. Violence previously 76

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

dismissed as aberrant or isolated now threatened the liberal polis; it forced the nations middle class to recognize that the entity known as India was itself riven by communal divisions. The memories of Partition could no longer be pushed aside or glossed over. As Gyanendra Pandey writes of the riots of 19 84, “ It is often only when violence and terror touch one’s immediate surroundings that one recognises the ‘reality’ of certain events” (“Community and Vio¬ lence” 2261).1 That “reality” also developed an aura of helpless¬ ness and apocalypse. “They were strange and illogical times,” says the narrator of “I Swear If (“Xuda Qi Kusum”), another of Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories. “I had boarded up all the doors and windows of my mind, shuttered them up. It was difficult to think straight’ (Manto 126). That sense of strangeness and the illogical seems to find an echo in the linking of the years 1984 and 1948 by both numeri¬ cal and historical reversals (a linking even George Orwell, that chronicler of illogic, would have found startling). In 1984, the assas¬ sination of Indira Gandhi, maternal leader, led to the unravel¬ ing of the urban social fabric. Communal hatreds, previously repressed, came to the surface in unimaginable ways. In 1948, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, paternal and visionary leader, had the opposite effect, leading to the suturing of the social fabric. His death unleashed a deep sense of shame and national self-consciousness; Hindus and Muslims alike seemed to wake to the reality of self-destruction. Pandey quotes a reporter of the time who exclaimed, “The fire of sectarian strife that had raged for months, or rather years, died down as if such strife had never occurred. .. . Overnight, such calm was established, such a peace that one could not have dreamed of even a few days earlier” (“Com¬ munity and Violence” 2266). Of course, the animosities did not simply disappear. They only became less publicly visible, and a national ideal—a celebratory historical narrative—took firm root. As I suggested in the previous chapter, I do not seek to trace the large political events or the specific sociological or historical cir¬ cuits by which the death of a leader ignites or defuses public vio¬ lence. Rather, the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and of the Mahatma serve as bookends for an ongoing literary critical inquiry 77

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

into representations of communalism and social suffering in South Asia. The assassinations form the grand public narratives with which common readers and scholars alike are familiar. But the fiction written in the wake of Partition taps into the seemingly unknowable, into sometimes unspeakable “personal” pasts. Recent scholarship that turns to Partition voices an insistent refrain: Until now there has been no dearth of writing on the sub¬ ject, but nearly all of it has addressed “high politics,” the dealings and motivations of famous players like Nehru, Jinnah, and Mountbatten. Historical analysis has tended to dwell on the diplomatic intrigue that led to the creation of the two wings of Pakistan out of India, or on the administrative lapses that allowed the violence to occur. But in the wake of 1984 there has been a steady accumu¬ lation of and attention to other histories, those that are fragmen¬ tary, unofficial, autobiographical, and, of course, literary. Menon and Bhasin make it clear that the task of historical recovery always begins in a very personal way. Like Urvashi Butalia, they started their research with the women in their own families, reconstruct¬ ing an archive of familial stories. As Butalia explains, after 1984 she “could no longer pretend that this was a history that belonged to another time, to someone else” (5). That singular year, then, marks a moment of reclaiming—or recognizing—ownership of the past. The work that followed this moment has evoked powerful and intimate responses: scholars’ examinations of the ethics of mem¬ ory and interviewing is inextricable from moving anecdotes about their own families and about the families they discovered in the course of their labor. Such narratives never fail to startle. Let me say rather baldly that any critical response on our part—literary, historical, or otherwise—always begins with an affective connec¬ tion to the texts, narratives, and politics we set out to study. This affective position may involve the articulation of what some may dismiss as platitudes: Partition remains unimaginable, unspeak¬ able: Partition was the result of absurd political calculations and division; Partition stories chill us. But platitudes themselves are useful starting points. To confront social suffering is to grapple with one’s own precritical responses. This affective position is a 78

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

productive one, and it may lead us away from what Pandey has called analytic “national histories” or “biographies of the nation state” (“The Prose of Otherness” 193), which turn violence like that which followed Partition into just one necessary step in the founding of the modem state of India. Such national histories turn violence into a reflection of political process, into the bumps along the road of progress, aberrational events produced by antisocial, antimodern groups. Stepping away from these official, authorita¬ tive narratives means giving credence to partial, fragmentary, per¬ sonal, sympathetic narratives. As a great many historians have recently pointed out, there has been little consideration of the profoundly unnerving experiences of women during Partition. Suvir Kaul asserts that “sexuality and gender have a constitutive centrality here—as critical axes, they provide an understanding that does not simply supplement more orthodox historiography but interrogates and rewrites it” (The Par¬ titions of Memory 10). The latest collections of oral narrative attempt to address this lacuna while acknowledging that oral history is a deeply contested component of historical discourse. The personal narratives of female survivors recover the “underside” of Partition, for these are stories of social suffering that have not yet been brought to light: stories of men killing their own kinswomen in order to preserve their “honor”; stories of women’s mass suicides; stories of survivors turned away from home and family because they have been violated by those of the “other? "Side. As Menon and Bhasin explain, women have thus far figured only as objects of study in Partition’s official records—they merit attention only in the casu¬ alty statistics. But Menon and Bhasin argue that in the personal narratives they have solicited and in literary texts like Manto’s, “we find women’s voices, speaking for themselves” (12). Partition nar¬ rative continually makes problematic the act of speaking: What voice and what vocabularies are available to the female survivor? How does she speak through the oral narratives transcribed by scholars in recent anthologies, and how does she speak in fiction? Equally crucial, what is the fate of the female body during the process of violent nation-making that Partition represents? Particularly intriguing in the recent scholarly work on Parti79

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

tion is the repeated claim that literature—and, more specifically, short fiction—serves as the true social history of the period. And, interestingly, there are relatively few novels set in the period of Partition. Much of the short fiction was written in the immediate aftermath of the events of 1947-48. For Menon and Bhasin, this fiction “is the only significant non-official contemporary record we have of the time, apart from reportage” (7; emphasis in original). Partition fiction chronicles three stages, as Jason Francisco puts it: rupture, protest, and repair (237). These critics and scholars thus tend to consider such fiction “purposeful” because it can tell us something meaningful and true about Partition and because in its best manifestation it remains neutral, indivisible, and unpartitioned. Implicit in their readings of literary texts is the notion that fiction knows no borders and remains above the fray, “providing] an intense window on the personal experiences of 1947, dramatizing graphically the impact of Partition on everyday lives” (Gilmartin 1069). In sum, such fiction manages to furnish a narrative vessel for the affective attitudes I have described.2 I have turned for two major reasons to the fiction of Partition after having examined literary texts that respond to the events of 1984. First, I seek to retrace the very way in which scholars, crit¬ ics, and even survivors have returned to Partition and its stories— oral, historiographic, and literary—in the wake of the communalism of the 1980s and 1990s. By turning back to Partition, we may avoid the teleological thinking that merely posits the conflagration of 1947-48 as the latent cause of recent conflicts: there is no histor¬ ical inevitability about the violence in South Asia; there is instead a dense and at times dizzying set of causes, results, and losses. And, second, I would like to avoid a literary critical determinism. A defamiliarization of the standard trajectory from realism, as in the short fiction of Manto, to a modernism like Ghosh’s or a neo¬ realism like Rohinton Mistry’s will prove useful in the explora¬ tion of the multiple ways in which literary discourse suggests political, aesthetic, and personal responses to social suffering.3 There is no easy or causal relationship between genre and polit¬ ical engagement, nor is there one between genre and ethical under¬ standing. 80

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Saadat Hasan Manto produced a remarkable body of short fiction in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Manto’s stories seem at first highly “immediate,” offering a kind journalistic realism that makes available, in raw fashion, experiences of dislocation, dis¬ orientation, and bodily distress. But his fictions are more unnerv¬ ing than those of his contemporaries because they do in fact contest the mode of documentary realism. They insist that social suffer¬ ing cannot be contained by the vessel of mimesis. Nevertheless, unlike Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Manto’s stories neither dwell self-consciously on the dilemmas of representation nor ask whether writing can do anything to relieve suffering. There is no attempt here to uncover the reasons for the carnage, no epiphanic probing of those who would commit the atrocities; we find no ref¬ erence even to specific locales, no indications that the violence is connected to the political maneuverings of the Congress Party or the Muslim League. Nor do we find here an aesthetic preoccupa¬ tion with the “redemption” of social experience. Manto’s Partition stories chronicle the actions and reactions of victims and aggres¬ sors both; they provide a home for the displaced, the marginal, the brutalized. As Shashi Joshi claims, these stories “cannot be ‘used’ to ‘explain’ a holocaust—[they] can only be felt as many truths, many fragments of painful reality and of actually lived lives” (146). I believe, however, that the stories nonetheless signify some¬ thing beyond such experiential truth. Manto’s fictions turn frequently to "the marking and definition of communities. What, the texts demand, does it mean to belong ? What psychic resonance lies in the very idea of home? Borrow¬ ing from Freud, we can say that much of the literature of Parti¬ tion attends frequently to the unheimlich, to the complicated story of the “unhomely,” the uncanny, and the unexpected return of the repressed. But to speak of the psychic registers of home also leads us in an altogether different direction, back toward what Butalia has called the “gendered telling of Partition” (13). We seem to encounter in Manto’s fictions, as Barbara Foley might have it, a realism in the service of “telling the truth.” Foley links the documentary novel with an “assertive” or “persuasive” discourse that resolutely connects the Active world with the real 8i

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

one; hence the documentary novel possesses a distinct mode of representation, one that is “characterized by its adherence to ref¬ erential strategies associated with non-fictional modes of discourse but [that] also demand[s] to be read within a fictional Gestalt famil¬ iar to contemporaneous readers” (41). I would like to move beyond Foley’s theorizing of the experiential value of mimetic discourse— and, indeed, further than the work of those historians of South Asia who read Partition fictions as “neutral” recordings of social events—in order to account for the ethically charged nature of rep¬ resentation in Manto’s case. I am not referring here to what Foley herself calls the “ideological saturation” of all literary discourse. Rather, I am calling attention to the way in which Manto’s fiction exceeds mere neutrality or even “persuasiveness” in representing social injustice. Manto’s fictions, in their fragmentariness, in their eccentric¬ ity, cannot be classified as social history or documentary narra¬ tive. They are instead consistently polemical. Manto judges neither the victims nor the aggressors who people his stories; instead, he levels a critique against language and literary forms themselves, and against the social and political systems to which ordinary citizens—indeed, his South Asian readers—subscribe. Mimesis in the short story becomes a means of fictional argumentation and of moral critique. Thus, in an oft-quoted text like “Toba Tek Singh,” Manto deploys allegory in order to reappraise not just the territorial abstractions “India” and “Pakistan” but the social and administrative apparatus that, with its laboring of Partition’s “rules,” drives unhomed citizens to their deaths. “Toba Tek Singh” contains an argument against the modernizing impulses of the civil state. The argument of Manto’s fiction consists of two thrusts: a charge against the Progressive writers, a group Manto denounces for its hypocrisy and its failure to engage with the real social crises of the day; and a larger ethical claim about social suffering. In the latter, Manto insists that the trauma of Partition is one for which every citizen bears responsibility; he thus indicts not just “soci¬ ety” in the abstract but every individual member of society for failing to act with humanitarian decisiveness.4 Given the polemical nature of his fiction, Manto inspires both 82

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

deep loyalty (among historians who are sympathetic to his critique of the social norms that magnified Partition brutality) and disgust (among Progressives of the 1940s and 1950s who are repulsed by his “obscenity,” and among recent feminists who find his repre¬ sentations of the female victims of Partition in stories like “Open If (“Khol Do”) to be violations in themselves). Manto’s fictions pro¬ duce dialogue and conflict—hence their centrality to my project, which rests on the assumption that social suffering demands con¬ tention. As Gyanendra Pandey suggests, there cannot be—indeed, there ought not to be—any easy consensus about Partition. It is a contested event—indeed, even a contested term—and only in debate can we begin to understand the meaning of Partition for those who lived through it. But Manto also allows polemic to be subsumed under a darker evocation of “ends.” Partition always recedes to the horizon of historical understanding and critical feel¬ ing. In “Cold Meaf we find the claim that Partition is apocalyp¬ tic. As Frank Kermode explains, “Although for us the End has perhaps lost its naive imminence, its shadow still lies on the crises of our fictions; we may speak of it as immanent” (6; emphasis in original). In Manto’s work—in his chronicles of unhomed indi¬ viduals and of the degradation of the era’s victims and aggressors alike—lies the most troubling suggestion that Partition is the event from which South Asia can never recover.

Manto and Literary Outspokenness To date there has been no critical biography of Saadat Hasan Manto, despite his stature among South Asian writers of the twentieth century. The biographical sketches that are available tend toward hagiography.5 Leslie Flemming’s Another Lonely Voice: The Urdu Short Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto (1979) is something of an exception, offering a useful outline of Manto’s professional activ¬ ity and political affiliations. In the early and mid-i930S, when Manto, writing his first stories, lived in Bombay, he aligned him¬ self with the Progressive Writers Association. The group, founded in 1933 by Ahmed Ali and Saj jad Zahir, sought to transform Urdu literature and turn it into an active instrument of social change 83

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(Flemming 24). At the formal level, this new literature broke with classical Urdu and its ornate, Persianized aestheticism. Though it was his second language, Manto most directly challenged liter¬ ary Urdu, adopting a vernacular style and taking on the highly unorthodox subject of “ordinary” citizens.6 The Progressive writers were politically committed both to the independence of India and to Marxism; thus they espoused a social¬ ist realism that would reflect “class realities” and lead toward a new India free from poverty and “social backwardness.” From 1938 on, leaders of the movement began to assert an ideological strict¬ ness, narrowing the definition of what constituted proper Progres¬ sive literature. Manto never fully inhabited the role of Progressive writer, not even when he first joined the group, and he remained unwilling to accept party doxa. Leaders of the movement were soon to denounce even his pre-Partition work as pornographic and reac¬ tionary. They detected in Manto’s stories an unhealthy preoccu¬ pation with sexuality and degradation and a lack of interest in social uplift. Sajjad Zahir denounced Manto during a conference in 1944: I once said to Manto myself that his story “Bu” [“Odor”] was a very painful and stupid story, because the portrayal of the sexual perver¬ sions of a satisfied member ofthe middle class, no matter how much reality it is based on, is a waste of the writer’s and reader’s time, and, in fact, it is as much an expression of escape from the most impor¬ tant demands of life as old-fashioned reactionism [Flemming 28].

Zahir and the critics allied with him in the Progressive Writers Association found Manto’s work antihumanistic, indeed incapable of offering hope for positive change. Manto, they insisted, was evad¬ ing his writerly responsibility to the political culture. It was this charge of evasion to which Manto himself would respond most forcefully. His disillusionment with the movement was swift, and even before his critics grew vociferous, he had dis¬ tanced himself from the Progressives, believing them to be hyp¬ ocrites who had failed in their duties both to the nation and to literature. In fashioning himself as the outspoken iconoclast of South Asian literature, he declared famously in a speech at Jogeshwari College that his work was the necessary chronicle of sick84

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

ness: “If you are not familiar with the time period we are passing through, read my stories. If you cannot bear these stories that means this is an unbearable time. The evils in me are those of this era” (Flemming 32). Thus it was Manto himself who first insisted that his fiction would serve as social history, as a true reflection of the daily “obscenities” that made up South Asian life. It was Manto who firmly maintained that the most enduring lit¬ erature ought to be purposeful, realistic, and always impartial. In the same speech, he added, “I am not seditious. I do not want to stir up people’s ideas and feelings. If I take off the blouse of cul¬ ture and society, then it is naked. I do not try to put clothes back on, because that is not my job” (33). In the stories, the metaphor of stripping a woman will recur with variations. Such a bodily image pulls in two directions. On the one hand, Manto employs it to defend his literary objectivity: he shows his readers what has been hidden until then because of social and cultural squeamishness; Manto wants to examine this body in clinical, dispassionate fash¬ ion, without stirring up other feelings. On the other hand, the bod¬ ily image is precisely calculated to titillate and shock. Manto makes us voyeurs of both sex and violence while loudly critiquing the voyeurism that leads to further degradation; to see the denuded body, he insists, is also to become complicit in its violation. Manto remains a highly quotable figure, and in his aphoristic pronouncements about the responsibilities of the writer we find a tension between espousing a neutfal, journalistic fiction and espousing a rhetoric of literary radicalism. He claims that writ¬ ers “diagnose diseases but don’t run a clinic,” and yet he says accus¬ ingly to his readers, “You find my writing bitter and sour. But what has humanity gained from the sweetness that has till now been dished out to it? The leaves of neem may be bitter, but they do purify blood” (Hanfi 197). The writer’s acidity thus reforms “humanity”: far from being content with the mere objective reflection of social conditions, Manto here seeks to produce writ¬ ing that compels change. In short, he constructs his own kind of activism; he seeks to argue with his readers and, as necessary, deflate their assumptions. Manto remained rigorously committed to personal sincerity but 85

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

then seemed unwilling to live according to consistent principle. His life after Partition is a story of sad decline. Though he pro¬ duced a sizable body of fiction in the years after 1947, he remained restless and frustrated in his work. He left Bombay, the city he claimed was his true home, and emigrated to Lahore, despite the fact that he would have no truck with the very notion of a South Asian Islamic state. There he eschewed the Pakistani Progressives and took up with a literary society called the Assembly of the Men of Good Taste, a group dedicated to the idea of art for art’s sake. Manto was frequently criticized for his touchy, egotistic public self, whereas he himself skewered the egotism of public officials. In Lahore, Manto’s alcoholism also became chronic, and there are more than a few anecdotes of his excesses and of his willingness to write for payment in bottles. Manto, suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, died in 1955, but five months before his death he had written the epitaph that continues to speak of his ironic, wry sense of self-importance (Flemming 21): “Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto. In his breast are buried all the secrets and nuances of the art of short story writing. Even now, weighted down by earth, he is won¬ dering if he is the great story writer or God!”

The “Unhomely” In a 1997 article that occasioned a storm of protest among South Asian literary historians, Salman Rushdie makes the remarkable claim that “the true Indian literature of the first postcolonial halfcentury has been made in the language the British left behind” (“Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You!” 50). He goes on to celebrate the flourishing of writing in English—of “IndoAnglian” literature—that is evidently superior to the literatures written in the “vernacular” languages of India. But Rushdie does make a curious concession with respect to Indian literature that lies outside the English tradition: There is . . . one Indian writer in translation whom I would place on a par with the Indo-Anglian. (Actually, he’s better than most of them.) That is Saadat Hasan Manto, an immensely popular Urdu writer of

86

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low-life fictions, whom conservative critics sometimes scorn for his choice of characters and milieus, much as Virginia Woolf snobbishly disparaged the fictional universe of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Manto’s mas¬ terpiece is the short story “Toba Tek Singh,” a parable ofthe partition of India [52].

This “writer of low-life fictions” strikes Rushdie as important because of his innovative subject matter. Manto, to put the mat¬ ter most simply, has the power to shock. It is no wonder that the allegorical story “Toba Tek Singh” is the one Rushdie chose to anthologize in Mirrorwork, the 1997 volume of postcolonial Indian fiction he edited, since it is the story most concerned with the idea that fills Rushdie’s own oeuvre: the idea of home. “Toba Tek Singh” is also, at its most basic level, an absurdist tale, a fiction that smashes political notions with preposterous farce. But it is this very farci¬ cal quality that makes it the most unusual of Manto’s stories. It does not sit easily in any canon of his work that we might con¬ struct, nor does it lend itself to large claims about Manto’s docu¬ mentary realism or about the way Partition fiction serves the purpose of social history. Drawing heavily as it does on the con¬ ventions of farce, “Toba Tek Singh” stands as that rare example of a Partition short story: one that makes its readers laugh. “Toba Tek Singh” describes the fate of the “lunatics” in the asy¬ lums of India and Pakistan. After the Partition of nations and the exchange of populations comes the fictional transferral of the inmates. The narrator says of this movement of patients, “Whether this was a reasonable or an unreasonable idea is difficult to say. One thing, however, is clear. It took many conferences of impor¬ tant officials from the two sides to come to this decision” (Manto 11). The narrator ironizes the political maneuverings behind this ludicrous exchange, situating them in the same register as the his¬ torical events we know well. We are provided a summary of the reactions of the lunatics in the Lahore asylum. In mock-journal¬ istic fashion, the story offers a parodic version of social history. The narrator finally settles on the most outlandish of these char¬ acters, a gibbering Sikh inmate named Bishan Singh, who becomes known as Toba Tek Singh. Singh comes to represent the perplexed

87

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and uprooted individual with no notion of what the distinction between India and Pakistan might even mean. He demands to know where his native village is (that town is also named Toba Tek Singh). No one gives him a proper answer. During the phys¬ ical exchange of inmates across the famous militarized border at Wagha, Singh makes his final stand, rooting himself in the no-man’s-land between nations. And there, after an inarticulate scream, he dies. As a form of political critique, “Toba Tek Singh” explodes the key terms “territory” and “nation” that underlay both the ration¬ ale for Partition and the construction of national consciousness. Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s commitment to Pakistan and his attempt to construct a united Muslim political and moral community arose out of a notion of territorially defined cultural and sectarian iden¬ tity. For Jinnah, the Pakistani cause depended on a set of symbolic attachments that would crystallize a national ideal. Yet, as David Gilmartin argues, that ideal did not inspire automatic devotion; rather, the very idea of a South Asian nation for Muslims did not at first register positively in the popular consciousness. “For most Muslims,” Gilmartin writes, “the meaning of Pakistan did not hinge primarily on its association with a specific territory” (1082). Jinnah’s nationalism also attempted to gloss over the extraordinary diversity and fragmentation within the Muslim community itself. Gilmartin further suggests that for many Muslims the partic¬ ularity and specific texture of place—the locally defined notion of home and community—remained central in the definition of moral order and belonging (1083). Pakistan, then, was a national ideal at odds with the everyday reality of personal, familial, and economic relationships. It is this everyday reality of belonging and place that “Toba Tek Singh” evokes through its protagonist, whose very name is that of his hometown. He has resided in the asylum for years with¬ out concern or coherent desire. But when he is informed of Par¬ tition and of the decision to exchange inmates, home becomes a burning problem, and he makes a futile attempt to challenge the state’s plan to move him. This challenge becomes a metaphor for the predicament of dislocation, citizenship, and national belong88

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ing. The figure of the inarticulate madman who in his longing expresses the need to be home evokes the Freudian concept of the unheimlich. As Freud explains, the word heimlich in German— meaning cozy, familiar, and homelike—has the secondary meaning of “secret.” As such, the heimlich also evokes the unfamiliar and approaches its opposite, the unheimlich—the strange, the uncanny, the unhomelike, the “unhomely.” The phenomenon of the unheimlich, then, is characterized by this utter transforma¬ tion of what was once settled, understandable, and comfortable (Freud 124-31). Bishan Singh, once secure in his notion of home, and still full of nostalgia, is tossed into the tumult of unbe¬ longing. At first only a mild-mannered, chattering father visited by his daughter, Bishan Singh ultimately becomes an immovable object in the no-man’s-land, a “colossus” (Manto 18) whose very body comes to represent the unheimlich. The mechanisms of the state itself, which force him into the no-man’s-land, produce the trauma. Homi Bhabha writes that “the unhomely moment relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence” (The Location of Culture 11). For Bhabha, however, the unhomeliness “that is the condi¬ tion of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations” (9) in fact becomes a source of enabling political intervention. Bhabha thus accounts only incompletely for ambivalences and disenfran¬ chisements that occur in the liminal space of the border between home and the world.

**

If, through this evocation of the unhomely and the uncanny, Manto’s story critiques Jinnah’s version of the nation, it also chal¬ lenges the liberal modernity espoused by Jinnah’s Indian counter¬ part, Nehru, who saw the territorial demand for India’s Partition as a grotesque outgrowth of communalism, and who defined national identity in terms of individual citizenship. Nehru’s “ratio¬ nalist statism” relied on the transcending of religious language and of local moral orders; such a political orientation optimisti¬ cally defined the state as the benevolent arbiter of local disputes and as the paternal provider of social uplift. In the new modern India, even the most marginalized of citizens would feel at home and would be cared for. In the allegory of “Toba Tele Singh,” of course, 89

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rationalist statism has very quickly run amok. Instead of a wellgoverned nation of laws and benevolent paternalism, we find the rule of befuddling bureaucracy and official coercion. The exchange of inmates is the product of an overinflated process of decision making. No doubt the bureaucracy is an easy target of literary satire, but more relevant here is Manto’s use of farce to represent the ludicrous exchange of patients, which draws attention to the grave historical situation of the women, Hindu and Muslim, who were retrieved and exchanged in the late 1940s and early 1950s. During Partition, women were abducted from their homes by men of opposing communities, sexually violated, and carried across borders to become these men’s wives. But the very definition of abduction was an unclear and sometimes unfair one, for women who had freely chosen to go with or marry men of a different com¬ munity were also declared abducted. Once the violence of Parti¬ tion subsided, the governments of India and Pakistan agreed that “abducted” women must be recovered and returned to their proper homes. As a result, even women who had not actually been abducted were once again uprooted and unhomed, once again turned into tokens in the larger struggle to restore the “honor” of the nation. Such state authority involved “new kinds of discipli¬ nary power,” as Veena Das puts it (Critical Events 62). In order to define a woman’s rightful place, her identity was firmly established as either Muslim or Hindu. And, as Das further asserts the state as parens patriae determined where that place would be (67). “Toba Tek Singh” is a powerful critique of the violence that underlies the functioning of the state. The final scene of “Toba Tek Singh”—the actual exchange of the inmates—is one of violent confusion parodied: “Most of the inmates appeared to be dead set against the entire operation. They simply could not understand why they were being forcibly removed, thrown into buses and driven to this strange place. There were slogans of‘Pakistan Zindabad’ [‘Long live Pakistan’] and ‘Pak¬ istan Murdabad’ [‘Death to Pakistan’], followed by fights” (Manto 17). With no understanding of the abstract national entities “India” and “Pakistan,” and with no understanding of either the nation-

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loving or nation-hating slogans, the inmates simply respond fiercely to the violence inflicted on them. And when Bishan Singh refuses to cross into India from Pakistan, the guards over¬ power him and attempt to push him across; here the state’s vio¬ lence becomes a farcical weapon against a man speaking in tongues. The story thus provokes laughter, for how else would we respond to a description of naked madmen and madwomen riot¬ ing at the border? It is precisely this element of comedy that makes “Toba Tek Singh” unique in the corpus of Partition fiction. Vio¬ lence here is not tragic or gruesome; it comes in the form of slap¬ stick. Yet the story never allows us to rest easy with our laughter, for, as I have already suggested, parodic violence always points to and echoes far more serious trauma. The state’s decisions about its citizens, the state’s exercise of power over those who are mar¬ ginalized, return us to the opening of Manto’s story, to that narratorial aside about the plan for exchange: “Whether this was a reasonable or an unreasonable idea is difficult to say” (Manto n). In this understated, ironic way, Manto suggests that “reason” itself is inapplicable to the idea of exchange; “reason,” or rationality— the state’s dictum—in fact plays no role in its decision making. The violence of Partition did not end when the riots and the cycle of revenge finally subsided in January 1948; violence, “Toba Tek Singh” asserts, is continually required to maintain the partition between India and Pakistan. As Gyanendra Pandey and Suvir Kaul have described—and as Amitav Ghosh has fictionally explored in The Shadow Lines— the modern state paradoxically requires the violence it seeks to suppress. Or, rather, the state at least requires the memory of that violence. India and Pakistan must in some controlled way remind their citizens that the other side is capable of unimaginable atroc¬ ities. These memories of violence thus preserve the reality of national boundaries and national difference. The differences between the nations have been continually constructed and recast over the course of half a century, three wars, recent nuclear pro¬ liferation, and a subsequent Cold War-style standoff. Pandey

91

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further suggests that historians of South Asia have privileged the viewpoint of the state, thereby allowing an uncritical narrative of modernity and progress to take center stage: The limits of individual freedom seem to be determined by the (pre¬ constituted and fixed) interests of the state, nation, aspirant nation¬ state. The exercise of individual rights in conformity with state power, actual or incipient, is designated “rational.” Anything not so in con¬ formity is assigned to the realm of unreason. ... [T]he historian needs to struggle to recover “marginal” voices and memories, forgot¬ ten dreams and signs of resistance, if history is to be anything more than a celebratory account of the march of certain victorious concepts and powers like the nation-state, bureaucratic rationalism, capitalism, science and progress” [“The Prose of Otherness” 214]. In this sense, “Toba Tek Singh” might serve as a corrective to nation¬ alist historiography, since it so thoroughly overturns the concepts of reason and unreason. Pandey himself, after his discussion of the state’s violence and the historian’s complicity, draws on “Toba Tek Singh” in order to probe the nature of resistance to state author¬ ity. But all Pandey really asserts is that during and after Partition “it was only the ‘insane’ who retained any sanity” (“The Prose of Otherness” 219). For him, such a reading illuminates the “signs of resistance.” But Manto’s fiction does not provide us with true voices from the margins. It ironizes those voices and muddies the very idea of social documentary. “Toba Tek Singh,” as allegory, as parodic narrative, disallows such illumination of the “signs of resistance.” There is plainly a critique of the state here as well as an argument about the perni¬ cious nature of the state’s violence. But we cannot then go on to read the short story as an unironic account of those who have suffered at the hands of state authority. We see in Pandey’s work (as in the work of many others, such as David Gilmartin and Ian Talbot) an almost desperate need to draw on this story as a his¬ torical resource, as a literary witnessing of very real events.7 In the absence of documentary materials—testimony (which remains scarce even after recent scholarly labors), film, photography, thoughtful journalism, or memoirs—fiction becomes archival. But 92

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this particular fiction, as we have seen, veers abruptly from the historical to the farcical; hence we cannot readily locate Pandey’s “signs of resistance.” Bishan Singh cannot successfully challenge or contest the assumptions of the “aspirant nation-state,” as Pandey would have it. The thematic centrality of homelessness and relocation in Toba Tek Singh” calls attention to Manto’s own position as authorin-exile, one who is able to negotiate these poles of history and farce, to levy an uneven critique against the state.8 Invoking the rhetoric of the uprooted writer, Manto speaks both mournfully and egotistically of his status: You know me as a short story writer and the courts know me as an obscene writer. The government sometimes calls me a communist, and sometimes a great literary figure of the country. Sometimes the doors of livelihood are closed on me and sometimes they are opened for me. Sometimes I am declared a persona non grata and considered an “outsider”; sometimes, when the powers-that-be are pleased, I am told that I can be an “insider.” I am still troubled, as I have often been in the past, over questions like: Who am I? What is my status? What is my role in this country which is regarded as the largest Islamic state? You may call my concerns fictional, but for me the bitter reality is that in my country, which is called Pakistan and is very dear to me, /

have yet to find a place. That is why my soul is restless. That is why I am sometimes in a lunatic asylum and sometimes in a hospital. I have still not found my rightful place in Pakistan. Nevertheless, I know that I am a significant person. My name is of great importance to Urdu lit¬ erature. If I didn’t have that illusion, my life would have been absolutely unbearable [cited in Issar 184; emphasis in original].

In his ironic, even self-deprecating way, Manto calls attention to his literary greatness. His liminality—that “bitter reality”—is in fact the enabling reality of his fictions. Whether he is outsider or insider, great writer or obscene one, Manto creates a stir. His uncer¬ tain status and his placelessness become the ironic sources of his cultural visibility.9 Manto’s appeal for Salman Rushdie is thus no surprise, since Rushdie so valorizes the “migrant sensibility,” the aesthetic and 93

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

political position that allows the author to root himself or her¬ self in “ideas rather than places,” to “suspect” and forcefully cri¬ tique political and economic realities (“The Location of Brazil” 124). “To see things plainly,” Rushdie writes, “you have to cross a frontier” (125). Manto, of course, crossed such a frontier in leav¬ ing Bombay for Lahore.10 For Rushdie, a story like “Toba Tek Singh” is an important text because it constructs an imagined world that lies at an oblique angle to the observable, “real” one. It is a text that exaggerates political realities in the name of “breaking] down our conventional, habit-dulled certainties about what the world is and has to be” (122). And, as Rushdie more emphatically says, “Unreality is the only weapon with which real¬ ity can be smashed, so that it may be subsequently reconstructed” (122). Indeed, Manto's allegory can be read as such a reality-smash¬ ing text. But what Rushdie’s formulation does not take into account is the possibility that political and ethical critique might grow out of radically different texts. What about the short story that does not so obviously foreground the problem of home and belonging, a story that starts not with “unreality” but with a moral judgment about character and history? In Rushdie’s account, and indeed in Homi Bhabha’s theoretical formulation about the space of the unhomely, speaking is taken for granted; voice is never silenced, and the subject readily articulates alternatives to “habitdulled certainties.” But what about the story that attends to the problem of voicelessness?

The Undressed Body To consider the experience of the female survivor of Partition is to confront the irreducible reality of the body and the problem¬ atic recovery of the voice. Urvashi Butalia writes of the linkage between the rhetoric of honor, nation, and womanhood: If the severing of the body of the country recalled the violation of the body of the nation-as-mother, the abduction and rape of its women, [then] their forcible removal from the fold of their families, commu¬ nities, and country represented a violation of their bodies as real—

94

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

not metaphorical—mothers. Each woman who had been taken away was actually, or potentially, a mother [143-44],

In its most gruesome form, the violation of mothers and poten¬ tial mothers came at the hands of men who set out to scar, liter¬ ally, the bodies of women from the other community. Hindu/ Indian slogans were branded or etched into the stomachs of Mus¬ lim women, and Muslim/Pakistani slogans were left as perma¬ nent reminders of violation on Hindu bodies. As Veena Das has further remarked, “The lives of women were framed by the notion that they were to bear permanent witness to the violence of Par¬ tition” (review of Stories about the Partition of India 56). The honor of the community thus lay in protecting its women, or in allow¬ ing them to be “self-martyred,” so that the womb—the site of moth¬ erhood—would not be sullied. After Partition, the recovery of women who had been left unprotected became a matter of national and not simply familial honor. The Indian and Pakistani states went to great lengths to return women to their “homes” and reha¬ bilitate them. For men, the act of recovery was a vindication of their own masculinity, a negating of the shame they had felt in the wake of the dirtying of the bodies of their kinswomen and their nation. Das suggests that breaches of purity norms were “covered by veils of silence” in all narratives of Partition collected by recent researchers: “There came to be an unspoken censorship on speech: this was the means which allowed the community to treat these events as a common disaster, so that kinship norms of purity and honor could be strategically manipulated to allow the women’s re-absorption into traditional networks” (64). Manto’s short story “Open If’11 can be read as an intervention against such censoring. Sakina, the female sufferer at the center of the story, cannot be reabsorbed into the community’s “net¬ works,” for her very silence—her very inability to say a thing— attests unceasingly to her violation. The norms of purity simply cannot be stitched back together. The story begins from the point of view of Sakina’s father, Sirajuddin, who slowly comes to con¬ sciousness amidst a confused crowd. He begins to piece together the events that have occurred the day before, and we are offered

95

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a lurid glimpse of his harrowing train journey. His wife was killed even before they could leave. But Sirajuddin cannot remember what has become of his daughter. He looks for help and finally discovers a group of armed men who have appointed themselves recoverers, who make forays into India to find and return abducted Muslim women. They do find Sakina, but it is they, men of her own community, who rape her (though we are never explicitly told so). The father waits for several days at a refugee camp, hear¬ ing no word, until an unconscious young woman is brought into the camp’s clinic. Sirajuddin enters the clinic and finds a doctor attending to his daughter. The doctor asks him to open the win¬ dow, and suddenly Sakina responds to the command, her hands automatically pulling down her shalwar (pants), exposing her thighs. Sirajuddin shouts for joy, seeing that his daughter is not yet dead. But we are left finally with the image of the doctor break¬ ing into a cold sweat. Manto’s “Open If thus foregrounds the place of the female body and the problem of female voicelessness in the context of Parti¬ tion. But fiction here provokes heated conflict; the charged atmos¬ phere of the story roils interpretive communities as critics seek to determine what Manto means and where he stands. An over¬ riding question emerges: What right does Manto-as-storyteller have to speak for the female survivor? Veena Das speaks of her shift¬ ing response to the story: in her first reading, she placed empha¬ sis on Sakina’s condemnation to a living death; according to this reading, Sirajuddin is deluded, unable to understand the extent to which the “normality” of language has been destroyed for his daughter; she can respond only to sexual imperative. In her sub¬ sequent reading, Das considered the story in light of the notions of purity and honor I have described. According to this reading, Sirajuddin, unlike other fathers of the period, wills his daughter to live; other men may have expected their daughters to die in the wake of such violation. Sirajuddin, with his cry of joy, reestablishes a connection with his daughter through language (“Language and Body” 77). For at least one critic, a reading like Das’s ignores the way Manto’s text denies female agency, constructing only a forlorn victim of 96

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

physical violence. Harveen Mann argues that Manto both sensa¬ tionalizes and reifies female victimization, and she criticizes those who have diligently “fall[en] in line behind Manto, privileg¬ ing and valorizing his masculine critiques of the nascent project of Indian and Pakistani nationalist modernity and neglecting to investigate his reliance upon representations of sexual violence against women to forward his nation-based criticism” (131). In Mann’s account, then, Manto is a failed social critic because his fiction depends solely upon the shock value of sexual violence. Mann draws on the work of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, who in her own study, Real and Imagined Women, has investigated the figure of the raped woman in narrative. For Rajan, the female victim in a text like E. M. Forster’s Passage to India is inserted within a larger allegory of political encounters (71); Forster’s text offers us no true female subject, only a cipher who operates “in an economy of sex¬ ual propriety and property” (73). By extension, Mann argues, the silent Sakina in Manto’s “Open If is “reduced to a metaphor of the horrors of Partition, her story of violation curtailed and exploited so that the story of the nation can be enunciated” (131). Mann further implies that the canonization of Manto as the chronicler of Partition only further submerges the histories of women’s resistance.12 But Mann’s critique fails to acknowledge the ways in which Manto’s narrative ironically deploys and reinscribes the body of the female victim in the name of so'cial critique. Rape does not erase Sakina from the narrative, nor does it function within the narrativization of the nation. In fact, her final inarticulate move¬ ment is not reducible to any kind of message about agency, and her violation stands resolutely outside any history of the nation. In that moment of revealing herself, Sakina is not the symbol of despoiled Muslim womanhood but instead the recovered daugh¬ ter of a suddenly joyous old man. Sakina's body, too, is an irre¬ ducible physical presence, mediating between the story’s audience and the experience that she cannot verbally describe. Instead of testifying to a lack of female agency, Sakina’s silence draws renewed attention to the limits of representing voice. Manto can¬ not “show” us what she has endured, cannot recover the mem97

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

ory of terror, cannot even describe her consciousness; mimetic realism, in this classic sense, is incommensurate to the task. What remains is a demonstrative gesture: the author points to her, insist¬ ing that we seed3 Manto makes no explicit mention of Partition in “Open It.” While there is no mistaking the context and setting, the absence of the words “Partition” and “riot,” the absence even of the geo¬ graphical names “India” and “Pakistan,” seems to permit an alter¬ native space, one that is curiously emptied of political or communal significance. “Open If thus disallows any clear-cut explanation for Sakina’s violation; she does not fit into the discourse of terri¬ torial accounting; the “marking” of her body by men of her own community is unreadable; and there is no redress, no possibility of resistance—hence Manto’s bleak outlook. In place of political judgment, what we discover is a crystallizing of Manto’s moral judg¬ ment. There is no critique of the state, of the ideology of citizen¬ ship, or of the rhetoric of territorial belonging, as we find in “Toba Tek Singh.” Instead, this story about a violated young woman demands that we see her as an individual, not as mere metaphor. And, in so doing, the story also makes a strident assertion about the savagery of men claiming to do their “duty.” The moral judg¬ ment generated by this fiction precludes any attempt to label it “dispassionately realist.”14 The narrative of “Open If consists of melodramatic turns, a series of visual shocks that provoke a readerly disgust. In four brief pages, we are meant to see writ large Manto’s argument about wide¬ spread moral failure. Even before the final unveiling of the young woman’s body, Manto presents the dead mother, as Sirajuddin recalls the events of the previous day; Then it came to him in a flash—the dead body of his wife, her stom¬ ach ripped open. It was an image that wouldn’t go away. Sakina’s mother was dead. That much was certain. She had died in front of his eyes. He could hear the voice: “Leave me where I am. Take the girl away" [Manto, Kingdom’s End 36].

He remembers his wife’s death twice in succession, first with visu¬ ally gruesome intensity and then with melodramatic sorrow as 98

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

he hears again the voice that tells him to go on without her. For Sirajuddin, the image of the disemboweled woman “wouldn’t go away,” and this resonance is one that the story relies on to dram¬ atize relentlessly the nature of killing during Partition. Just as Sir¬ ajuddin becomes “certain” of his wife’s death, just as he sees the event again, so are the text’s readers meant to revisit the site of loss. In this awkward and heavy-handed scene, the wife is meant to die in front of all our “eyes.” The dying body is then replaced by a voice that insists on martyrdom. Sirajuddin is given respon¬ sibility for saving the girl, but he cannot subsequently recollect what has become of her. Readers assume the worst because the story has been told before: Sakina has been attacked and abducted by men of the “other” community. But the story means to drive home the much more potent irony: her attackers turn out to be men of her own community. The young men Sirajuddin asks to recover his daughter are stock sexual vil¬ lains. They are referred to simply as the “young men,” who act and speak collectively. There is no room in the narrative for the individuality of these betrayers, no particular face for the cruelty they represent—the story suggests that such violence is so allencompassing, so widespread, that it cannot be contained by a sin¬ gle name or identity. We never know precisely what they do to her; we see only the disconcerting after-effects. It is in the final scene, the clinical one, that the story makes its argument most forcefully. The moment the light is switched on in the hospital room, the moment Sirajuddin shouts his daughter’s name, is the moment of reaffirmation for the father, but it is a voyeuristic moment for readers. As Sirajuddin joyfully infuses his daughter with life, will¬ fully ignoring the betrayal by the men he trusted, we—like the doctor who breaks into a cold sweat—see that betrayal with even greater clarity. We, like that doctor, do not really wish to witness this reunion. If, in one account of Partition, the violation of the female body by men of the adversarial community represents the attempt to scar and despoil the nation to which that woman belongs, in “Open If the violation of the female body by men of the same community represents the undoing of nationalist fer¬ vor. That is, the Muslims who rape Sakina engage in sexual sav99

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

agery not as a symbolic gesture but for sheer, horrifying grat¬ ification. The story argues that the aggressors of Partition are not interested in territorial or nationalistic claims. Sexual cruelty is never a negotiation of boundaries. Manto requires his readers to recognize that Partition has opened up a space in which unfath¬ omable acts can go unchecked. In light of the ethical charge of this story, I turn again briefly to Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s provocative claim that the literary repre¬ sentation of rape often replicates the very act it seeks to condemn. She writes of Forster’s Passage to India, “The fact that the enact¬ ment of rape takes place in private and secret places requires the author to conduct his readers into the innermost recesses of phys¬ ical space.... Having probed the private, the narrative then seeks to make public, to broadcast the privileged knowledge gained by the incursion” (76). Manto’s “Open It” does not represent Sakina’s rape, but the narrative does lead us under the lights of the clinic where Sakina reveals herself dramatically: “With painful slow¬ ness, she unfastened [her shalwar], pulled the garment down, and opened her thighs” (Manto 38). Here is the voyeuristic aspect of reading to which Raj an refers, and here is the textual representa¬ tion of the most private physical space. Rather than deploring or sanctioning Manto’s representational strategies and their results, I would pursue the question Raj an leaves unasked: To what end does the author probe those private recesses? What, exactly, is the nature of the privileged knowledge that is broadcast? Manto offers the glimpse of the denuded body in the name of fictional argumen¬ tation. The “innermost recess of physical space” is the site of dam¬ age; to reveal this damage, and to force readers to recognize their voyeuristic participation in uncovering it, is to make an argument about ultimate and widespread social complicity in the violence that has destroyed Sakina. Everyone is guilty, Manto charges, because everyone has seen those “opened” thighs. For all its astringency, Manto’s moral argument is also a curi¬ ously nostalgic one: embedded in the representation of sexual sav¬ agery is a deeply male sense of loss. Freud speaks of the unheimlich nature of the female genitalia, the uncanny and “unhomely” place that “is the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human 100

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

beings ... the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning” (153). In Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of the male experience of home, the recesses of the female body are the sites of loss, terror, and symbolic death. "The unheimlich,” Freud further explains, “is what was once heimlich, home-like, familiar; the prefix W is the token of repression” (153). Thus Manto’s chron¬ icling of female victimization and male depredation are ulti¬ mately bound up with the thematics of homelessness and unbelonging foregrounded in “Toba Tek Singh.” Sakina’s act of “opening” is the reminder that the rupture of Partition has removed all that is familiar, has made home an impossibility. Manto’s fictional argument about moral lapse that has this open¬ ing at its imagistic center is also an argument about the unhomely character of the literary life, of life as a self-described truth teller. Here is an author who in his fiction and in his public speeches calls attention to himself as unorthodox, alone, eccentric. He claims that he has not yet found his “rightful place” and must live “imprisoned” within his own work. Salman Rushdie also dwells frequently on the oppositional stance of the exilic author who per¬ petually endures the pain of dislocation. For Rushdie and Manto both, the “smashing” of the moral and political status quo remains a burdensome responsibility. Rajan has described the shift within the representation of rape as a movement from private recess to public pronouncement. In Manto’s story, there is a parallel move¬ ment, a shift from the terror of the 'hitherto hidden female body to the terror of making moral judgments about the society that has undressed that body.

Social History in the “Margins” On one level, Manto’s stories approximate the formal techniques of reportage. These fictions seem immediate and reliable. They are at first glance documentary texts. But, as I have already sug¬ gested, the stories often extend beyond such mimetic reflection of social realities; they insist that to examine these realities demands judgment, and it is in this way that Manto’s short sto¬ ries construct an ethical argument about social suffering. 101

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Barbara Foley speaks of the need to recuperate literary referentiality in order to examine the kinds of knowledge that we do gather from fiction. Foley takes issue with the influential poststruc¬ turalist argument which suggests that the insistence upon a ref¬ erent beyond textuality itself demonstrates an “epistemological naivete” and gestures toward political repression (34). The post¬ structuralist, then, believes that the critic, by privileging referentiality, resorts to an empiricism which closes down the potentiality of signification within a text. This empiricism establishes a set of hegemonic boundaries that enforce a homogeneity and determinacy. Further, such an empiricism ignores the ideological sat¬ uration of literary discourse. But for Foley, the poststructuralist fetishizes textuality at the expense of a more useful understand¬ ing of the assertive nature of literary representation. She does not argue that what she calls the “documentary novel” objectively rep¬ resents a self-evident reality, nor is she willing to ignore the polit¬ ical coding of fictional discourse and of the knowledges it purports to disseminate. Rather, Foley seeks to recover mimesis from the moldy Aristotelian attic. She wants to examine the ways in which “the concrete particulars of character and event represented in a novel mediate and reconcretize actual people, occurrences, and sit¬ uations” (17). Such an examination also involves an attention to the author himself or herself—that figure who, in fact, signals cer¬ tain representational intentions by means of varying conventions. The author, in short, makes propositional assertions through the mimetic text. But, equally important for Foley, mimesis is a “contract,” a convention “wherein writer and reader share an agree¬ ment about the conditions under which texts can be composed and comprehended. ... And the essence of mimesis—for [it] has an essence, pace Derrida and company—is that it is a social prac¬ tice, whereby authors impart cognition of a particular kind to their readers” (40-41). Thus author and reader are both active agents; the documentary novel is a distinct kind of text that borrows the authority of nonfictional discourse in its attempt to refer to an understandable, stable, and verifiable world while reminding its reader that it consists, after all, of people and events that do not exist. Such a fictional text is thus a persuasive one: it represents 10 2

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

these people and events in order to propose “evaluative attitudes” toward them. Foley’s work is helpful insofar as it allows us to think ourselves out of the comer into which literary critics sometimes paint them¬ selves. She insists that we consider not simply intentionality and the contract between author and reader but also the mode of cog¬ nition that allows us to learn something from a fictional text. At its most basic level, Foley’s account has a commonsense appeal. I readily agree with countless other critics and historians in saying that the literary fiction (or film) of Partition is an important source of information about that now distant event. However much we are aware of the ideological turns of a Partition story, we finish a reading of it and believe that we have learned something new about a place and an epoch that seem qualitatively different from the South Asian present; we sense that the story is engaged in an important communicative act. But, beyond this attention to the pedagogical nature of docu¬ mentary fiction, the more dramatic critical force of Foley’s argu¬ ment lies in its insistence on mimesis as a mode of cognition “enacted through a generic contract of which the purpose is to inter¬ pret and evaluate past or present historical actuality” (64). To put the question most simply, the mimetic act is an act of configur¬ ing the historical world not just in a plausible way but in a judg¬ mental one. The text seeks to efface the subjective character of mimesis—the “informing authorial'perspective”—but simulta¬ neously “attempts to move its readers to accept values and beliefs more or less consciously endorsed by the author, with which they may well not agree” (66). When we enter into the mimetic con¬ tract with an author, we are partly and temporarily committing ourselves to a particular political and ethical perspective. But Foley does not consider the possibility I raised at the beginning of this book, that readers bring to texts their own unique intentions. The reader of the narrative of social suffering comes to the text with preconceptions, political leanings, and expectations about what light the text may shed on the experience of suffering. The text’s radical pluralism arises out of this jostling of intentions. Thus our entrance into the mimetic contract is always an ambivalent one. 103

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I would further revise Foley’s claims in another key respect: Manto’s short stories actually represent a departure from the mimetic contract that Foley locates in the documentary novel because their “evaluative attitudes” are not really complete and coherent. The stories permit ellipses and contradictions—gaps in the contract, so to speak. Mimesis in Manto’s case is not sim¬ ply an act of assertion or even persuasion but a means of propound¬ ing, testing, and revising moral arguments about the social world. The difference is not a negligible one. “Toba Tek Singh” mines Partition, presenting neither a straightforward and documentary version of the events nor a credible social history; the story does not even attempt to convince its readers “of the legitimacy of the author’s specific conceptions of [the] processes and structures” in the historical world (Foley 85). Instead, Manto nearly turns the very idea of social history on its head. In its relentless ironizing of the allegorical form-—indeed, in its ironizing of the very possi¬ bility of representation—“Toba Tek Singh” performs the impos¬ sible: it renders ludicrous the idea of a “true” or “complete” history of the social realities of Partition while nonetheless attempting to sketch out such a history. The story of the exchange of inmates is the story of cartoonish suffering, but that suffering yet points to other narratives that remain submerged (the narratives of the abducted women, for example). In short, Manto’s polemical “realism,” in all its documentary guises, aspires to exceed mere referentiality, to exceed and over¬ turn even the mimetic contract that Foley describes. The series of sketches from 1949 titled “Black Margins” [“Siyah Hashe”] pres¬ ents Manto’s most radical narrative experiment. The longest of the thirty-two pieces is about five hundred words, though most are much shorter, and some consist of only a dozen. The sketches are linked thematically, providing a variety of perspectives on urban calamity during Partition, but they lack a recognizable coherence or true characters. With no sense of beginning or ending, the pieces extract moments of action and outburst. “Black Margins” received as hostile a reception from critics as any of Manto’s other works, for the text challenged the political, aesthetic, and formal conven¬ tions that the Progressive held dear. The Progressives declared 104

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the sketches incomprehensible and politically retrograde. After Mantos death, “Black Margins” remained out of favor and out of print even as the rest of his work was republished and translated. In an appendix to his 1951 short story collection Yazid Manto set about defending “Black Margins” while again lamenting the political and artistic loneliness of his new life. Manto suggests that he is a literary martyr. Referring to his melancholic life away from Bombay, the city he loves, he speaks of the further grief of hav¬ ing his collection of sketches savaged: “And, believe me, it caused me great pain when some of my literary friends made cruel fun of my book, denouncing me an irresponsible carrier of tales, a jokester, a nuisance, a cynic and a reactionary. One of them, a close friend, accused me of having robbed the dead of their possessions to build a collection” (cited in Hasan xii). The untitled first sketch of “Black Margins” is the transcript of a fabricated Associated Press wire story that reports acts of celebration in the cities of Amritsar, Gwalior, and Bombay in the wake of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. Whether these are Mus¬ lim or Hindu celebrations (or both) we are never told. But, more crucially, we do know that in historical actuality Gandhi’s death marked the gradual subsiding of Partition violence. In the dehistoricizing maneuver of “Black Margins,” that death actually marks an initiating moment. Celebrating the murder of the “father” of the nation is a collective paroxysm that leads inexorably—even apocalyptically—to a breakdown of social order. This journalistic transcript establishes both an immediacy and a highly public con¬ text for the set of sketches. The sketches in “Black Margins” have a “found” quality: characters and places alike remain unnamed; since the pieces offer no “interiority” of any kind, they record only what is visible and audible—public acts, public dialogue, and pub¬ lic cruelty. They call attention to themselves as haphazard obser¬ vations from the “margins,” a collection of textual fragments that resist literary coherence. Underlying the text is an assumption about the vitality of the liminal; it does not differ much from what the anthropologist Arthur Kleinman proposes in Writing at the Mar¬ gin, that “the margin may be near the center of a most important thing: transformation. Change is more likely to begin at the edge, 105

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in the borderland between established orders” (5). Here is where the project of “Black Margins” and Manto’s rhetorical insistence on his marginal cultural and political status coincide. Manto belabors his claims of being an outsider. As Kleinman says of his own status, “I find myself inherently uncomfortable in the cen¬ ter and suspicious of the mainstream, even when that specifies my professional location. A sense of resisting, going against the grain, comes naturally to me” (2). So, too, Manto is comfortable with, indeed relishes, oppositionality. In “Black Margins" this going against the grain sometimes con¬ sists of narrative absence. The sketch “Out of Consideration,” for example, consists of only two lines of startling dialogue: “Don’t kill my daughter in front of me.” “All right, all right. Peel off her clothes and throw her in with the other girls!” [Manto 31]

There is no explanatory narrative apparatus here. Unlike Sakina in “Open It,” the daughter here is thoroughly invisible, in fact bod¬ iless. The cultural issues of female voicelessness, of male codes of purity and honor, do not arise because such a sketch has no identifiable theme. Without any exposition, without any charac¬ terization of the relationships, villains, or environment, the sketch consists of an overheard fragment of cruelty. Readers cannot take perverse comfort in the idea that some acts are “unspeakable,” that Partition brutality ultimately remains unimaginable. These lines demand that we do a great deal of the work of imagining. Even more than “Open It,” “Out of Consideration” is a distillation of moral judgment, a verbal demonstration of widespread social failure to act and to prevent suffering. Would anyone who over¬ heard these lines in 1948 have chosen to act to save the girl and her parent? Would anyone have spoken out? The unequivocally sarcastic title points to Manto’s belief that intervention was incon¬ ceivable. In such a story, the social world is not complete or com¬ plex; that world is represented with bleak judgment. Fictional argumentation consists of holding up a mirror to the ugliest scenes in order to compel recognition.15

106

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

But it is far from clear what this recognition entails. What, after all, does Manto demand that his reader understand or acknowl¬ edge? We might obtain an answer by considering a piece from “Black Margins” that is less charged with such bodily violence. I quote the sketch, “Invitation to Action,” in its entirety: When the neighborhood was set on fire, everything burnt down with the exception of one shop and its sign. It said, “All building and construction materials sold here” [Mantoig].

Here we find no actors or victims whatsoever. Our expectations of narrative completeness are again unmet—the fire “was set” (pas¬ sive voice) and the neighborhood destroyed, but we are not told who is guilty of the act or who (or which community) has been harmed. The first and leading sentence of the piece deals in gen¬ eralities. The second sentence contains the only prominent detail, but it seems irrelevant and unnewsworthy: the surviving sign marks a hardware shop. We might be tempted to read these twentyodd words the way we read an Imagist poem. The two sentences offer a curious juxtapositional relationship between two images. The very ordinariness of the language conforms to Ezra Pound’s notion of the “direct treatment of the thing”—the Imagist poem that is to be a visual and subjective marker of some objective thing discovered in the world. But Manto’s sketch evokes none of the visual dynamism of an Imagist work. “Invitation to Action” offers instead a static picture; it presents an action, a scene of ruin, that is already over, frozen in its com¬ pleteness. The surviving sign with its mundane words marks the barrenness of the place, the lack of life that cannot be transformed or redeemed by any language, poetic or otherwise. “Invitation to Action” cannot be read in isolation. It is no Imagist “thing-in-itself,” unmoored from a social and political context. Rather, it is linked to all the other sketches that make up “Black Margins” and to the broader telling of Partition. It takes us back to the knotty issue of referentiality. What or whose history is it telling? With no names or details to anchor it, what does the sketch describe or teach us? It violates

107

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the mimetic contract between author and reader that Barbara Foley describes, for how exactly does it “interpret [or] evaluate past or present historical actuality” (60)? There is a tension between the “found” quality of such a sketch—the quality that makes it a thing of the world, referring to the world—and the ironic undercutting of social history. Manto’s withholding of names and specificity means that social history is something we must construct our¬ selves. But it is precisely in the violation of the mimetic contract— in the upsetting of readerly expectations—that I locate what I have been calling Manto’s fictional argument: “Black Margins” is less a glimpse of Partition than a labored critique of the Progressive movement’s political adherence to a coherent realism force-fed to its audience.16 In the appendix to Yazid, Manto speaks angrily of the Progres¬ sives who have “allowed [themselves] to be led by the nose at the instance of a Movement which was morbid and sterile” (Hasan xiii). He asks a series of rhetorical questions in which he does not shrink from suggesting that the Progressives are stymied by uno¬ riginal and lazy minds. Manto finds their literary manifestoes self-serving and egotistical, and he wonders, “What sort of new literature were they trying to produce where a poem was a machine and a machine a poem?” (xiii) No doubt Manto’s charges are moti¬ vated by a zeal for retaliation (though he denies this is the case), but he is also very much concerned with the status of literature and of the intellectual in post-Partition South Asia. He says: I regret that the Progressive writers decided to mess around with pol¬ itics, preparing in the process, at the Kremlin’s instructions, a potion of literature and politics which was without efficacy. The patient for whose benefit this concoction was brewed was unknown to them. . . . In fact, none ofthese Kremlin-inspired healers bothered to think about him. The result is there for everyone to see. We are now being told that literature has lost its dynamism [Hasan xiv-xv],

A sketch like “Invitation to Action” represents this argument in fictional form. In its brevity, in its strangely empty signifying of urban ruin, it serves as antidote to the potion Manto so decries. Here is a “poem” that has nothing machinelike or politically

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

mechanical about it; though its central images are “static,” it argues for both a dynamic literary experiment and a dynamic role for its readers, who must recuperate or fill in narrative where there is none. And while Manto is deeply suspicious of a literature that makes a political case, his sketch does exactly that, for it stands as a rebuttal to the politics of the Progressives, who sought to pro¬ duce aesthetic objects that would serve to “uplift” and that would present models of social change. “Invitation to Action" belies its own title; on the surface, the sketch seems to invite no action, no change; it is merely observational—hence its devastating force. But Manto further insists here that observation is indeed critical: the Progressives extemporize and rally to action without seeing the texture of the conditions before them, relying instead on prescrip¬ tions taken out of context. Manto demands that writers and read¬ ers remain aware of their blind spots. “Invitation to Action” is thus the beginning of seeing. Manto’s work stimulates contention, and for recent scholars con¬ tention is the surest means of continually revising the histories of Partition. Gyanendra Pandey, writing of historiographic attempts to come to terms with violence in India, claims that “there is no consensus among us about the nature of Partition. We have no means of representing such tragic loss, nor of pinning down—or rather, owning—responsibility for it. As a consequence, our nationalist historiography, journalism, and filmmaking have tended to generate something like'a collective amnesia” (“In Defense of the Fragment” 33). Pandey’s assessment seems rather bleak, especially given his valorization elsewhere of an array of “fragmentary” texts, such as diaries, oral narratives, and poems. But Pandey’s assertion about “collective amnesia” is a goad to jour¬ nalists and scholars of South Asia, for he suggests later that the antidote to forgetting is the accumulation of multiple histories. These are the fragmentary texts that insist on their own provisionality (50); for Pandey, no totalizing discourse about Partition is pos¬ sible or even acceptable. If there is no consensus about that event, if its history is effectively up for grabs, then discussion, exchange, and remembering are guaranteed. The text that is provocative opens up critical spaces; the provocative text perversely asks that 109

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

its readers challenge it. In such a deliberate move, Manto dedi¬ cates “Black Margins” to “the man who, while narrating his blood¬ curdling exploits said, ‘When I killed an old woman I felt horrified as if I had committed a murder.’”

Ends Manto’s polemic is obviously complex, contradictory, and even selfdirected. In his fictional work and in his extraliterary pronounce¬ ments, he fashions himself not simply as social critic but as public intellectual. He consciously cultivates a reputation for literary obstreperousness that evokes what Bruce Robbins has called the “free” intellectuals, the luftmenschen, the writers who stand in a kind of otherworldly space, renouncing career, professionalization, and affiliation in the name of disinterested and adversarial poli¬ tics (8). A few passionate critics have been quick to celebrate this reputation, constructing a Manto who is heroic (he is Flemming’s “lonely voice”), a truth teller or ethical guide in the aftermath of the absolute suspension of ethical norms.17 Politically, though, Manto is something of a cipher.18 He remained detached from the major events and movements of the time: his discussions of Indian independence are laden with skepticism; he is suspicious of Gandhi, highly critical of Nehru.19 And, unlike^ Ghosh, who speaks so passionately about the writer’s act of joining, Manto seems to close off the possibility of writerly commitment. Indeed, it is his independence from institutions, his repudiation of liter¬ ary convention and of political solidarity, that charms (or exasper¬ ates) his readers and critics today. Scorning anything that smells of orthodoxy, Manto finds no con¬ tradiction in exploiting the short-story form as a means of both succinct literary protest and sensation. Fictions like the fragmen¬ tary “Black Margins” and the comic fable “Toba Tek Singh” resist easy labeling; indeed, they do not sit comfortably with our famil¬ iar periodizing or formal categories, for if they are not realist, they are not “naturalist” or “modernist,” either. No such term seems suitable, because our generic labels do not take into account the rhetorical functions of these fictions. They are, as Barbara Foley 11o

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

says of the documentary novel, “goal-driven efforts” (60); but, even further, they are hybrid texts, employing a variety of fictional modes and poses (realist, allegorical, farcical, journalistic, sensationalist) in the name of ethical argument. It is ironic, then, that these fictions steeped in the ethical were themselves the target of mor¬ alizing by critics of the period who were alarmed by the porno¬ graphic. Perhaps most troubling for the moralizing critics is the way in which the stories tend to posit dystopia as an irrevocable South Asian condition. Manto is disillusioned, even disgusted, with politics and the political order of his day, and his fictional world only brings decay to light. The violence of Partition, and the social damage it produced, linger after 1948, the fictions insist. And they darkly suggest that the dissolution of social and sexual relation¬ ships inevitably points to a more apocalyptic end. At first glance, Manto’s story “Cold Meat” would seem to have nothing to do with the threat of apocalypse.20 It tells the story of a particularly vicious man, Ishwar Singh, who visits his mistress, Kalwant Kaur, after he has spent several days committing Parti¬ tion atrocities. He is shaken, disconcerted, and, as it turns out, unable to have sex with Kalwant: “Ishwar Singh, despite his vig¬ orous efforts at foreplay, could not feel the fire which leads to the final and inevitable act of love. Like a wrestler who is being had the better of, he employed every trick he knew to ignite the fire in his loins, but it eluded him. He felt cold” (Manto 122). “Cold Meat” is a story of romance and failed-erection. The couple’s “lovetalk’ involves a series of metaphors, most notably that of card play¬ ing, whereby the throwing of the trump signifies consummation. When Ishwar fails to produce this trump, Kalwant demands to know who “has squeezed [him] dry” (123). When he admits there has been another woman, she stabs him with his own kirpan (sword), the symbol of Sikh manhood. He is thus mortally wounded by his own phallus. As he bleeds to death, Ishwar explains that he abducted a young woman after killing her family. He car¬ ried her outside the city and then “decided to trump her right away” (124); but he realizes in the midst of the act that she is dead, “a heap of cold flesh.” After this explanation, Kalwant puts her hand on Ishwar’s, discovering that he, too, is suddenly “colder than ice.”

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

The real potency of the story thus depends upon this brutal twist, a final moment of utter revulsion when Ishwar admits that he has raped a dead woman. And this admission is precisely the reason why Manto’s critics have denounced the story as pornographic. Indeed, in the wake of the publication of the collection, also titled Cold Meat, in which this story appears, Manto was tried for obscenity in the High Court of Lahore. Manto had previously been charged on numerous occasions, but this work marked the first time the judgment went against him. Shahid Jalal, Manto’s grand¬ nephew, writes in the preface to an anthology, “Manto was very upset about [the order] because it was only on reading the judge¬ ment in the newspapers that he came to know that the case had been heard by the Court. He was sure if he had known about the hearing he would have arranged for his defence himself” (io). “Cold Meat” was thus condemned in stealth, and clerics who awoke to the threat posed by Manto’s writing soon issued/atwas against him—judgments against the very person of the author, which were later echoed in the more potent condemnation of Salman Rushdie. Even subsequent historians and scholars who have counted them¬ selves among the great supporters of Manto’s work—critics like Leslie Flemming—have claimed that the banned collection’s title story is unacceptably pessimistic, a “highly individualistic, unre¬ alistic view of the Partition events” (Flemming 79). The clerics denounce Manto’s story because of its shocking verisimilitude, whereas Flemming and the Progressive critics of the 1940s and 1950s deem it the least appealing of his texts for the opposite reason. But the moralistic charge of obscenity and the historical charge of antirealism are in fact linked: both judg¬ ments against Manto indict him for foregrounding what seems most base and violent in human behavior during Partition. For the clerics and for the government of Pakistan, this kind of nar¬ rative has social consequences. In portraying such criminal behav¬ ior, it threatens to incite more by fueling an immoral imagination; as such, the story destabilizes a social order just recently estab¬ lished. In one sense, this critique parallels Elaine Scarry’s insis¬ tence that when language and literature attach a name to pain and

112

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trauma, they collude in the destruction of civilization (42). While Scarry’s analysis and the government’s condemnation of Manto are responses to vastly different situations, both do grow out of an anxiety about the potential for healing and about the proper representation of social suffering. For critics who seek a social history of Partition in Manto’s fiction, the story offers no hope, no sense of the courageous or affirming work of citizens during those events. Such failure to rep¬ resent individual agency is precisely what motivates Harveen Mann to declare Manto’s work misogynistic. In Manto’s stories, victims and aggressors alike are allowed narrative space. His work does indeed trouble, but it is thus far more potent and productively com¬ plicated than Mann would allow. Her version of the Partition nar¬ rative permits only one kind of victim and one form of resistance. Manto’s stories suggest that these terms—victim and resistance—are themselves no longer meaningful when the complex history of social suffering of 1947-48 is considered. In the astonishing case of “Cold Meat,” the aggressor becomes a sufferer, too.21 In a striking repetition of the voicelessness of the damaged daughter Sakina at the end of “Open It,” Ishwar, the figure of the warrior, becomes a figure of male voicelessness. When he fails to produce his “trump” with Kalwant, he cannot at first explain it, though she demands that he tell the truth. His voice becomes “barely audi¬ ble” (Manto 122). After Kalwant stabs him, he speaks only halt¬ ingly: “He began to groan. His pain-Was becoming unbearable, but she was unconcerned” (123). Here is the male body reduced to the registering of pain. The story’s title refers both to its char¬ acters’ emotional coldness and to the inevitable state of lifeless¬ ness that suffering bodies reach. But if the issue of victims and violators is muddled in Manto’s fiction, then stories like “Cold Meat” permit no accounting and no justice. This is a narrative of vitu¬ peration, full of the curses and recrimination exchanged by Ish¬ war and Kalwant, for whom language serves to express violent contempt and to inflict damage. But vituperation in “Cold Meat” points to an even more seri¬ ous shift: narrative now exceeds what I previously called the argu-

113

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

ment of fiction. Here, the argument about the ordinary individ¬ ual’s complicity in Partition violence gives way to an eschatolog¬ ical imagining. Like “Toba Tek Singh,” “Cold Meat” is allegorical: the end of the relationship between Ishwar and Kalwant comes to represent a greater social and cultural end. The clerics and crit¬ ics who have taken issue with Manto’s fiction, because of the real¬ ity or unreality of its foul-mouthed protagonists, are in fact uneasy because the story dwells so resolutely on the impossibility of under¬ standing between two individuals and on the entropic drive toward lifelessness. While Manto treats with disdain the charges of obscenity leveled against him, he himself recognizes the greater threat such a story poses if it is read as a draining of all hope. Once more, Manto rises to his own defense, making a firm claim about the affirmative nature of his work and about the revitalizing author¬ ity of his fiction in a moribund literary scene. “Literature is not a dead body,” he asserts. “Literature is not a disease but its alter¬ native. . . . Literature is the pulse of a nation, a community— literature gives news about the nation, the community to which it belongs, its health, its illness” (Narang 72). But Manto’s pro¬ nouncements about the vitality and curative power of fiction are undermined by the appearance of two dead bodies at the end of “Cold Meat.” Ishwar, symbolically castrated, and the girl he describes raping, lifeless at the moment of consummation, negate the possibility of the community’s (or the nation’s) survival. Lit¬ erature may not be a dead body, but it is replete with dead bodies. Such a body count points to dystopia. In the opening paragraph of “Cold Meat” we read that “a strange and ominous silence seemed to have descended on the city” (Manto 119). The silence marks the end of violence in that city, the end of Ishwar’s killing spree. After his horrifying excesses, he returns home to his lover. Paradoxically, the end of violence at the story’s beginning is not the end at all, since the narrative in its almost contrived way already foreshadows some deeper reve¬ lation. In its necrophilic brutality, that concluding revelation on Ishwar's part echoes, as I have been suggesting, an apocalyptic finality. Of course, Manto's apocalypse is not at all of the theolog¬ ical variety, laden with prophetic notions of millennialism and 114

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

moral accounting. I quote Frank Kermode again: “Although for us the End has perhaps lost its naive imminence, its shadow still lies on the crises of our fictions; we may speak of it as immanent” (6; emphasis in original). Fictions, Kermode suggests, are ultimately concerned not just with their own structural conclusions—the problem of ending a story—but with cultural crisis, with the com¬ plex movement between progress and catastrophe: the ending of all imagination (30). For Manto, Partition marks such an end of imagination. “Cold Meat” concludes with the dead because that is all Manto can represent. Indeed, the ends of many of his Par¬ tition stories are similarly final. When we approach the conclu¬ sion of these narratives, we reach a moment of shock, revelation, collapse, and coldness: Toba Tek Singh, at the end of that epony¬ mous story, shouts and dies in no-man’s-land; Sakina reveals her battered body at the end of “Open If’; the narrator who tells an old woman the truth about her “abducted” daughter at the end of “I Swear If’ kills her with that pronouncement; other examples abound. Manto’s critics call such endings overdramatic, con¬ structed for maximum shock value. But such endings also form a way of seeing the world, a way of proposing that the holocaust of Partition is not only unforgettable but insurmountable. Here I detect the operation of decompensation in Manto’s work; fiction is consumed by ends and can point to nothing else; narrative and death become inextricable. For Manto, the South Asia that emerges after 1948 is undeniably scarred, permanently frozen in its own violence. In Manto’s reconstruction of the history of the 1940s there are no heroes, no moral champions, no Mahatma Gandhis willing to die for principle. Independence and nationhood turn out to be false promises. The possibility of hopeful action has been entirely replaced by verbal and physical profanity. But is this apocalyptic thinking merely misanthropic? Perhaps Manto turns to the extremes of fictional representation because Partition demands superlatives. Erich Auerbach describes the way in which twentiethcentury writing expresses outright hostility to the world it must represent: “We not infrequently find a turning away from the prac¬ tical will to live, or delight in portraying it under its most brutal ns

THE ARGUMENT OF FICTION

forms. ... There is a hatred of culture and civilization ..., and often a radical and fanatical urge to destroy” (551). Auerbach, of course, refers to the Western philosophical and artistic crisis that produced modernism. In Manto’s work, which addresses the crises of South Asia in the middle of the twentieth century, writ¬ ing does not seek to destroy, but it does “fanatically,” or at least compulsively, expose culture and civilization that have destroyed themselves. Such a social upheaval demands a radical kind of lit¬ erary imagination—an imagination that very nearly extinguishes itself in the charged conclusion of every text.

11 6

.

Dead dictators are my specialty. I discovered to my horror that all the political figures most featured in my writing—Mrs. G, Sanjay Gandhi, Bhutto, Zia—have now come to sticky ends. It’s the grand slam, really. This is a service I can perform, perhaps. A sort of literary contract.

Salman Rushdie, cited in Ian Hamilton

“The First Life of Salman Rushdie”

3 MURDEROUS FICTIONS

D I

%USHDIE REPUTEDLY MADE

his “dictators” remark in August 1988 upon hearing the news of the death of the Pakistani premier, General Zia-ul-Haq, in a mys¬ terious plane crash. The very fact that Rushdie’s comment is merely rumored makes it a particularly apt starting point for a critical consideration of his politics and'his representation of social suffering in South Asia, for here is a writer whose texts, most notably his 1983 novel Shame, thrive on the ironic play of specu¬ lative gossip and on histories fashioned out of grandiose innu¬ endo. Rumor, we might say, is a means of literary gamesmanship and a way of subverting official narratives. It provokes laughter and skepticism, turning figures of authority into objects of ridicule. Literary rumormongering—the passing on of inflated and fan¬ tastic stories—goes hand in hand with what I have been calling the argument of fiction, the rhetorical position that allows for a critique of the institutions and social structures that give rise to social suffering. In Rushdie’s case, the linking of rumor and rhetor¬ ical positioning allows for a postmodern politics. This very term, 119

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

“postmodern,” has too often inspired only critical platitudes, and we must assess it with an eye toward historical and textual specificity. Rushdie spells out his guiding imperative, one that just begins to hint at the politics I am describing: “Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. ... Be bloody minded. Argue with the world” (“Gunter Grass” 277). But rumor and argu¬ ment themselves can become weapons turned against the writer. To “go for broke” means declaring war on the demagogues, but it also means that the author risks being called a demagogue him¬ self. As Rushdie has come to understand, a literary reputation can be deformed and reshaped by rumor. The loss of “safety nets” can become a terrifying and unpredictable condition. Critical responses to Rushdie’s work—even to the much acclaimed recip¬ ient of awards, Midnight’s Children—have often devolved into name-calling and caricature. Most vividly, the popular Muslim re¬ sponse to Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, outrage fueled by a sense of betrayal, was based on rumors about what the text meant or said. When the author himself becomes the object of a literary “contract” of the very extraordinary sort issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, then the leading cleric of Iran, it becomes a matter of survival, not just of politics or literary play, to get the facts straight, clear up rumors of involvement in plots, and, indeed, clarify authorial intention. The argument of fiction in Rushdie’s case is a high-stakes dis¬ course, an intensification of the incendiary potentialities of language. The Partition fiction of Saadat Hasan Manto was cen¬ sored or banned, but Rushdie has been called upon to answer per¬ sonally for his authorial intentions. In a very bewildering sense, then, the threat to the authorial self is the extreme outcome of Rushdie’s exhortation about the writerly commitment to critique. Before and after the publication of The Satanic Verses, he main¬ tained that literature has crucial political work to do and that the responsibility of the writer lies in a series of interventions in the extraliterary world. The novel, Rushdie has proclaimed, is not sim¬ ply a vehicle for challenging consensus but a preeminent means of opposing political leaders themselves. The author necessarily 120

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

stirs up trouble, standing arrayed for verbal battle against politi¬ cians and authoritarians who permit social suffering to go on, and who are often its very source. All of Rushdie’s fiction grapples in some way with what he con¬ siders to be political or religious authoritarianism—the think¬ ing that posits an unerring and seemingly repressive truth about the nature of the social or spiritual world. Such authoritarianism is for Rushdie the basis of social trauma. In his novels, counternar¬ rative consists not just of rumor but of caricature. It is no small irony, then, that Rushdie himself has been the target of carica¬ ture. His alleged remark about “dead dictators” is very much rooted in the tendency of his texts to kill off prominent figures in political power. Toward the end of Shame’s polemical and satiric portrait of General Zia’s rule over Pakistan, the narrator asks, “How does a dictator fall?” He subsequently answers his own question: “I mustn’t forget I’m only telling a fairy-story. My dic¬ tator will be toppled by goblinish, faery means. ‘Makes it pretty easy for you,' is the obvious criticism, and I agree, I agree. But add, even if it does sound a little peevish: ‘You try and get rid of a dictator some time’” (272). In the fictionalized history of Zia, the dictator is finished off by a deus ex machina. Rushdie’s nar¬ rator acts as judge and executioner in the text: the depiction of authoritarian excess is ultimately followed by the grisly decapi¬ tation of the dictator’s body. The ironies continue to multiply: five years after the novel’s publication, the real Zia would die in no less absurd a fashion.1 Moreover, Rushdie’s mordant comment about the “literary contract” he himself has taken out on the lives of South Asian dictators points again to a very different kind of “contract”—that which exists between author and reader. I have already discussed, in the context of Manto’s fiction, Barbara Foley’s critical account¬ ing of the mimetic contract “wherein writer and reader share an agreement about the conditions under which texts can be com¬ posed and comprehended,” and Foley says further that “the essence of mimesis ... is that it is a social practice, whereby authors impart cognition of a particular kind to their readers” (40-41). The traditional documentary realist novel, in establishing a mimetic 121

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

contract between author and reader, attempts to persuade, demand¬ ing that its readers at least temporarily commit themselves to a particular political and ethical perspective. Manto’s short stories push the boundaries of this contract, turning the ethical critique onto readers themselves. A satiric novel like Rushdie’s Shame fur¬ ther exacerbates the stresses of this contract, eliminating the very ground of documentary realism. Shame is not merely persuasive but brawling. It is also deeply concerned with the distress of narra¬ tive representation and with the problems of marginality and artis¬ tic authority. For its most severe critics, the text is self-indulgent and repellent, calling obsessive attention to itself through its insis¬ tence on fictional contingency. On the one hand, such contingency actually enables a healthy political skepticism. On the other, the text’s destabilizing maneuvers constantly threaten any opposi¬ tional politics. To put this problem somewhat differently, Shame presents us with a set of political propositions about the nature of repressive regimes and about resistance to them, but it also undermines readerly faith in the mechanisms of narrative. This dualism—the simultaneous affirmation and undermining of the political and literary project—is the defining quality of Rushdie’s postmodernism. The narrative’s fragmentation and ceaseless play mean that the reader appeals frequently to the authority standing behind the fragments, the authority who binds them in his very name. To make sense of the mess, readers and critics thus turn to Rushdie himself. This position on the part of Rushdie’s readers and critics is not so far removed from that of the protesters who demanded that the author of The Satanic Verses be held account¬ able for the fragments that had so powerfully offended them. Rushdie’s insistence on the political work required of fiction cannot help inspiring suspicion, anxiety, indeed outright hostil¬ ity. His novels are objects that readers feel compelled to be for or against. For Rushdie, such provocation is in the nature of post¬ modern work, which always deploys parody and multivocal pas¬ tiche in the service of political argument. Rushdie’s novels have also been assailed by South Asian literary and cultural critics dis¬ mayed by what they perceive as his irresponsible politics. The

122

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

author, they argue, kills off not just his fictional versions of dic¬ tators but also the possibility of resistance to oppressive regimes; he kills even hope, and remains obsessed with grotesque violence. I propose to examine how Rushdie’s parodic fictions are read as murderous ones. There are two fundamental questions running through this chapter: Is there some means of getting outside the dynamic of for and against when it comes to Rushdie? Is it pos¬ sible to read his work without simply dismissing his oppositional politics as reckless and hopelessly self-reflexive? As I have been suggesting throughout this book, political fic¬ tions that generate contention are highly effective, indeed crucial, cultural products, for they bring social suffering to the forefront of public discussion. In the fictions I have already considered— Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Mistry’s A Fine Balance, and Manto’s short stories—violence has been the source of either anguished narrative self-consciousness or scathing polemic. In the cases of Ghosh and Mistry, novelistic language seems incommensurate to the violence bom of social suffering. Writing cannot do anything but record, and yet these narratives also suggest that redemption may lie even in recording, for recording stimulates remember¬ ing, and remembering may be the key to the maintenance of a social conscience. For Manto, violence must be represented in all its grisly detail; narrative exceeds realism in the attempt to judge the social underpinnings of violence, and thus narrative attempts to convict society at large. A text like Rushdie’s Shame approaches social suffering from an oblique, ribald, and uniquely disquiet¬ ing perspective. Instead of contending with the psychological and social consequences of violence in South Asia or with the trials of ordinary, disenfranchised, or economically forgotten citizens confronted by extraordinary cruelty, Rushdie deals with the twin problems of violence and repression through a satirical expose of political elites. The text adopts the language and mechanisms of violence, thus recreating a bmtal and vituperative social universe. In Shame, Rushdie indicts even the political imagination of Pakis¬ tan; it is a nation that remains “insufficiently” imagined, he says explicitly, borrowing the terms of Benedict Anderson.2 But Rushdie

123

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means to suggest more, for in his fictions the counterimagina¬ tion is always valorized as the most potent means of interven¬ tion in the authoritarian state. Shame’s unsettling of terms and political definitions proves valu¬ able insofar as it destabilizes our assumptions about South Asian history and politics and about those who suffer in their matrix. But always there is a doubleness, a textual insistence and a tex¬ tual withdrawal. The novel thus remains a troubled and trouble¬ some critical object. It is often read as “evasive,” “distraught,” and “complicif in the repression of history.3 With the mimetic con¬ tract suspended, with the stakes of parody so high, with the very issue of interpretation problematized and scrutinized by the nar¬ rator himself, our every act of reading is fraught. The apocalypse with which Shame concludes is the drastic means of shutting down both parody and readerly protest. The end of the text is the moment when the narrator extinguishes not just the novel’s play¬ ers but the narrative itself. Such a finale acts as a catharsis, deci¬ sively curtailing the proliferation of troubled readings. In contrast, The Satanic Verses seems to be a recuperative text, for it begins with such an apocalypse and concludes with domestic reconcili¬ ation, as though the problem of interpretation has been laid to rest. By February 1989 Salman Rushdie was no doubt aware of the ironies of such a reversal. Readers and nonreaders alike sought to call the author before a public court, wrenching him out of the phantom backstage of the novel; they sought to expose his agenda and in some cases went so far as to imagine a villain who himself inflicts suffering.4

Not Quite Rushdie The problems of intentionality and authorial persona are both linked to Rushdie’s claim that he is a “migrant” intellectual. He has claimed that he has an excess of belonging (he was born in India, taken by his Muslim parents to Pakistan “against his will,” and schooled in England, where he was married and made his lit¬ erary reputation) and that he is in fact free of belonging altogether. “Roots,” claims the narrator of Shame, Rushdie’s alter ego, “are 124

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places” (84). Rushdie has also written influentially: The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas ratherthan places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves—because they are so defined by others—by their otherness. .. . The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier [“The Loca¬ tion of Brazil” 124-25], For Rushdie, migrancy confers a new and more penetrating abil¬ ity to see, to remember, and to redefine. But if the migrant sus¬ pects reality, the inhabitants of that reality suspect him as well. The South Asian intellectual Aijaz Ahmad develops a chapter of his book In Theory into a stinging critique of Shame (and of Rushdie’s work in general). He asserts that Rushdie’s use of the modernist metaphor of exile disparages as antiquated the ideas of community and affiliation. For Ahmad, such self-exile is also an elite condition far removed from the forced dislocations expe¬ rienced by refugees worldwide. Ahmad, fundamentally distrust¬ ing Rushdie-as-outsider, thus prioritizes the politics of location in any act of textual interpretation.5 Such distrust—indeed, such a sense of betrayal—was inherent in the outrage directed against Rushdie by the Muslim community jn England in 1989. He who ought to have- been one of them seemed to treat their truths with contempt. A less vitriolic but no less distrustful reaction greeted Rushdie in 1997, when, surveying the literature of India's first fifty years of independence, he declared that “the prose writing . .. created in this period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen ‘recognized’ languages of India, the so-called ‘vernacular languages,' during this same time.... The true Indian literature of the first postcolonial half-century has been made in the language the British left behind” (“Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!” 50). Rushdie acknowledges that 125

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this is not a conclusion he would have expected to reach; he admits, too, that he was limited in his survey by sometimes poor transla¬ tions. But he goes on to assert that poor translations cannot be an excuse for the lack of inventiveness among non-Anglophone writers. In the anthology of fiction that Rushdie subsequently edited, Manto is the only non-Anglophone Indian writer to make an appearance. English thus becomes for Rushdie the lingua franca of a new cosmopolitan literature that is freely accessible to global audiences. What remains telling about the critical opposition to Rushdie’s large claim is the suggestion that he has somehow betrayed the specific cause of literature in South Asia. He who speaks from a position of authority in the West, and who might have promoted little-heard voices, ends up silencing them.6 It is thus on the basis of controversy and literary outspoken¬ ness that Rushdie constructs an authorial reputation. Such a rep¬ utation as public intellectual depends on his making as many enemies as allies.7 It depends, too, on clearing and claiming a space for discussion, on establishing the terms of debate about what con¬ stitutes such things as the “true Indian literature.” The valoriz¬ ing of English is part and parcel of a project to become a kind of authorial truth teller. Rushdie, even while ironizing the notions of sincerity and authenticity, simultaneously reaffirms them; as Lionel Trilling would say, “the artist seeks his personal authen¬ ticity in his entire autonomousness—his goal is to be as self¬ defining as the art-object he creates” (ioo).8 Rushdie, adopting volatile, postmodern modes of satire and rewriting history, has cultivated such a self-styled courageous ethical stance and fash¬ ioned a Western reputation for himself that would enable him to espouse a set of humanistic values globally applicable to political situations. For Rushdie, postmodernism must have a political direc¬ tion and cannot simply consist of a set of textual games and eva¬ sions. Rushdie is thus engaged in what that other major figure of intellectual cosmopolitanism, Edward Said, has privileged as “secular criticism”—the duty to adhere to an exilic humanism that is at once skeptical, ironic, and oppositional. Such a humanism forms the basis of an adversarial position that “in its suspicion of totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impa126

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tience with guilds, special interests, imperialized fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind [is] . . . constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom” (Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic 29). The examination of Said’s notion of secular criticism—indeed, of the vocation of the intellectual—is the intriguing work of a great many other studies.9 For my own purposes, 1 draw on Said’s definition of the committed intellectual because it turns so essen¬ tially on the paradoxical status of the migrant intellectual; he or she is both marginal (situated on the border between communi¬ ties) and central (influencing political debates in a variety of com¬ munities).10 The writer is committed not to place but to ideas and to democratic openness. The writer is heroic because he or she is always troubled by that placelessness, by the “pain” of cosmopol¬ itan exile. As Rushdie, too, asserts, “To be a migrant is, perhaps, to be the only species of human being free of the shackles of nationalism (to say nothing of its ugly sister, patriotism). It is a burdensome freedom” (“The Location of Brazil” 124). Such a claim about the freedoms of the cosmopolitan is almost facile, but it goes hand in hand with what Rushdie calls, in his tongue-and-cheek way, “rowdyism.” Surveying the spate of British films in the early 1980s that contributed to a nostalgia for empire, a “Raj Revivalism,” Rushdie demands that intellectuals quarrel with such popular representations ofjjndia, maintaining that there is no room for the excuse that such works are mere entertainment. In so doing, he turns to Orwell, whose essay “Inside the Whale” Rushdie interprets as a defeatist and despairing intellectual tract. Orwell seeks to find Jonah-like refuge within the whale, Rushdie argues, while in fact “we live in a world without hiding places, a ‘whaleless’ world” (“Outside the Whale” 101). Fie goes on to say that he is exhilarated by the rowdy quarrels of such a world:

Outside the whale the writer is obliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm, so that objec¬ tivity becomes a great dream, like perfection, an unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite ofthe impossibility of success. Out127

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side the whale is the world of Samuel Beckett’s famous formula: I can’t go on, I’ll go on [ioi].

Thus the novelist is obligated to incorporate the political into fiction; there is no space for neutrality. Yet Rushdie’s claims about exile are precisely an attempt to clear a neutral “border” space, a van¬ tage from which a broad array of critiques might be leveled. By drawing on Beckett, he also situates himself at a postmodernist node of ambivalence—acknowledging political, cultural, and epistemological crises while maintaining that art and literary dis¬ course themselves try mightily but sometimes fail to surmount them. Here lies a critical point at which non-Westem intellectuals have challenged Rushdie’s postmodern work and his political commit¬ ment to the pressing social and political issues of South Asia. Kumkum Sangari writes that “postmodernism does have the tendency to universalize its epistemological preoccupations.... [The West] does not take into account either the fact that the post¬ modern preoccupation with the crisis of meaning is not every¬ one’s crisis (even in the West) or that there are different modes of de-essentialization which are socially and politically grounded” (“The Politics of the Possible” 242-43).11 For Sangari, the West’s predilection for the postmodern tends to be irresponsible, and the mode of irony and epistemological uncertainty that postmod¬ ernism cultivates (like modernism before it) strips communities and cultures of their specific identities. A social and political grounding requires a particularized attention to place, not an over¬ arching claim about the process of globalization or about the national failures of the Third World. In “The Politics of the Pos¬ sible,” Sangari offers a reading of Midnight’s Children that criti¬ cizes Rushdie’s use of allegory and parody as despairing. Against his essayistic claim for the optimistic and constructive politics of his fiction, Sangari detects an arrogance and an inability to think beyond the categories imposed on South Asia by Western histo¬ rians and intellectuals. But Sangari neglects to consider the ways in which Rushdie’s work very deliberately opens up and explodes categories vis-a-vis 128

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its mode of parody. Moreover, while a novel like Shame foregrounds the crises of representation and of epistemology, it also remains insistently grounded in particular historical circumstances— those of Pakistan in the 1970s. At one level, then, Sangari’s objec¬ tion to Rushdie’s fiction is part of a turf war, a struggle between the intellectual committed to a place—belonging to a South Asian home—and an intellectual who renounces home in the name of exilic oppositionality. The competing demands of the literary ego and of political commitment have thus long fueled the disputes over Rushdie’s work. He is always, to put it bluntly, in trouble. In his public pronouncements, Rushdie has wel¬ comed such trouble in the name of his vaunted rowdyism; he insists that it is in the nature of the argument of fiction to draw the fire of critics like Sangari. On the one hand, Rushdie is at times wary of challenge, and the postmodern, playful self-reflexivity of his novels is a preemptive and defensive means of evading the charges of his critics; on the other hand (with Rushdie, there is always another hand), this self-reflexivity further provokes the charges of these critics. Shame is a deeply unsettled text: it both constructs and undermines its own powerful rhetorical argument about politics and Pakistan. The novel’s narrator becomes a means of ambivalence—Rushdie can adopt particular political positions and simultaneously distance himself from them.

Protest and Play Shame consists of two narrative threads: the first, what the nar¬ rator calls a “modern fairy-tale,” is an allegorical retelling of the history of Pakistan; the second is the narrator's account of his own authorial life and his acts of creation. In the allegorical compo¬ nent, we are treated to a spectacle of political farce and tragedy. The story begins with a so-called peripheral hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil (named after the poet of the Rubiyat), a boy who is the prod¬ uct of three mothers—witchlike sisters—and who grows up to be a “shameless,” amoral man. The story’s ostensible heroine is Sufiya Zinobia, the mentally deficient girl who is the daughter of Gen¬ eral Raza Hyder, the fictional stand-in for the historical General 129

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Zia ul-Haq. The narrative briefly touches on the violence of Par¬ tition and on the political turbulence of Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s, but it revels in the soap-operatic saga of the Hyders and the Harappas, families related by marriage (though, in historical fact, the Zias and Bhuttos had no such connection). Iskander Harappa is the fictional figure for Pakistan’s democratically elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whose regime engaged in its own brutal tac¬ tics. At the center of the novel is the parodic story of the rise and fall of Chairman Harappa and the subsequent abuses of power on the part of General Hyder. Sufiya Zinobia, who becomes the novel’s allegorical vessel for “shame,” absorbs the currents of vio¬ lence in Pakistani society until she metamorphoses into a venge¬ ful beast who brings down all the novel’s antiheroic characters, including the obese and unrepentant Omar Khayyam. In the mean¬ time, the narrator has playfully proffered bits of his own history, describing his family’s emigration to the “actual” Pakistan and his own somewhat incomplete knowledge of that country. He describes as well his brief visits, when he catches glimpses of the very real toll that Zia’s rule takes on citizens. The novel thus veers between this narrative of political earnestness and a narrative filled with two-dimensional characters playing out the grotesque story of a nation, a story which is also that of an elite family. By any measure, the history of Pakistan has been filled with political disappointment and frustrated democratic hopes.12 The reigning idea that Pakistan since its birth has been an “Islamic” state masks its ethnic and linguistic diversity. During Partition, Muslim migrants from across the subcontinent poured into the nation, transforming its communities and cities in a brief span of time. In 1947, the country consisted of two Muslim-majority “wings,” eastern and western, separated by a thousand-mile stretch of India. In 1971 the eastern wing, resentful of the west¬ ern wing’s linguistic and cultural domination, seceded to form the nation of Bangladesh. In that conflict, India interceded on behalf of the new nation, and that war marked the third major military confrontation between the former constituents of British India. In addition to such external conflict and the instability of its bor¬ ders, Pakistan has faced the more unsettling problem of domes130

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tic political turbulence. Pakistan’s four constitutions have been var¬ iously amended, twisted, and abrogated outright, both by demo¬ cratically elected leaders and by military figures who have led coups d etat (most recently in 1999) and assumed the presidency. Through allegory and savage parody, Rushdie’s novel addresses this history of thwarted democracy. Virtually every critic has remarked on the fact that Shame contains an unequivocal, indeed bitter, argument about Pakistan’s failure as a nation.15 They claim, too, that while Midnight’s Children, with its focus on India, is a novel of “openness,” offering a multiplicity of narratives, Shame has a “closed” construction, dealing single-mindedly with politi¬ cal horror.14 For Rushdie, Pakistan has been riven by contradiction from the start; it is a place, he has stated grimly in an interview, with very little chance for “long-term survival” (Haffenden 257). The author thus makes no attempt to conceal his revulsion for Pakistan. His mode of argumentation deploys the carnivalesque and the scatological; sober political events are allegorically, though not consistently, transformed into bodily and excremental mat¬ ters.15 Allegory in this text is not a case of one-to-one correspon¬ dence between actual historical actors and fictional counterparts. Instead, the novel’s characters point back toward “real” figures— Bhutto and Zia—while turning them into objects of rumor, ridicule, and revulsion. The text insists on juggling parallel real¬ ities; as the narrator states, “There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country, exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality” (22). It is this slight angling of both nation and narrator that has ultimately proved most problematic for readers and critics, pro¬ ducing the conflicts of interpretation that I have so far described. Questions abound. Why tell the story of Pakistan in this fashion? How do we reconcile the differences between the narrator’s “seri¬ ous” argument and his “comic” political allegory? Such uncertain¬ ties fuel the need to reconstruct intentionality; What does the author mean to say? Here is a figure who claims responsibility for the text from within it, but is the narrator Rushdie, or not quite? The easy answer is, of course, that it simply doesn’t matter. But, 131

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given the fact that Rushdie has taken such an unequivocal stand in his essayistic pronouncements about the imperative of the nov¬ elist to speak for a cause and to avoid the anonymity of political quietism, it seems natural that readers would pin down this nar¬ rator and strip off his guise. Early on, the narrator defends his authority to speak of (and fictionalize) Pakistan. Ventriloquizing and anticipating the voice of his critics, he says: Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! ... I know: nobody ever arrested me. Nor are they ever likely to. Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking to us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies? I reply with more questions: is history to be considered the property of the participants solely? In what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map out the territories? Can only the dead speak? I tell myselfthis will be a novel of leavetaking, my last words on the East from which, many years ago, I began to come loose. I do not always believe myself when I say this. It is a part of the world to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only by elastic bands [22].

Here, in rather straightforward rhetorical terms,, the narrator asserts that the migrant’s view of Pakistan cannot be dismissed— history is not a proprietary object. His pose is at once defiant and sympathetic. And, most crucially, he privileges novelistic discourse for its ability both to invent and to speak for a past truly knowable only to the dead (the repressive politicians and their victims). The passage follows an anecdote in which the narrator tells the story of a friend of his, a poet, who was jailed by the authorities, hung from his ankles, and tortured; the poet, now released, has ceased to write. The narrator here claims to speak for one who can no longer do so. Thus he adopts the voice not just of his critics (who deem him a trespasser) but of his allies, too. Curiously, the rejoinder to the critics is followed by a reflection on “leavetaking,” on the uneasy but poignant exile with which the narrator must come to terms. He at first asserts that the novel rep132

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resents his “last words on the East,” but adds that he does not believe his own claim (for the words can be neither definitive nor tem¬ porally final). This ambivalence and the canny use of autobiogra¬ phy serve as the chief means of responding to those who would call him an outsider with no right to this material. The narrator says that he has learned Pakistan in “slices” during his infrequent visits: "I think what I’m confessing is that, however I choose to write about over-there, I am forced to reflect that world in frag¬ ments of broken mirrors.... I must reconcile myself to the inevitability of the missing bits” (66). The confessional is a mode of earnestness, of so-called straight talk that admits to the short¬ comings of the narrator’s experiential knowledge while attempt¬ ing to earn him the more elusive authority of a truth teller. Whatever the missing bits, the narrator seeks to reassure us that the larger political point will be sincere. But it is precisely Rushdie’s sincerity that is so severely doubted. Lionel Trilling, that famous commentator on the sincerity of Orwell, claims that in the modern age the term “sincerity” has become something of an anachronism, a relic of the great English autobiographies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Trilling suggests, however, that it still serves a virtuous historical purpose: “If one spoke publicly on great matters as an individual, one’s only authority was the truth of one’s experience and the inten¬ sity of one’s conviction of enlightenment” (23); the subject of this autobiography was a self “bent on revealing himself in all his truth” and on “demonstrating his sincerity” (25). For Rushdie, such sin¬ cerity, such absence of dissimulation, lies in the construction of a viable narratorial self who can speak to the personal. Omar Khayyam, Sufiya Zinobia, Raza Hyder, and all the rest are his inven¬ tions, but the narrator must convince his readers that they are inventions of a thoughtful and compassionate mind. Here is the shift from rowdyism to quieter self-reflection. Given the novel’s outrageous historical caricatures and its even more whimsical plot, such reflection goes unnoticed or unread. Shame’s most persistent critics find the narrator’s pose wholly insincere. In her review of Shame, which appeared shortly after the novel’s publication, Kumlcum Sangari sets the tone for a gen133

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erally unfavorable South Asian response. She is wary of Rushdie’s use of the fabulous (even the review’s title, “Avatar of Disorder,” suggests a kind of failed mysticism). She argues that Shame’s exper¬ imental narrative does not succeed in the re-visioning and reassess¬ ment of Pakistani political culture that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work has accomplished for Latin America. Sangari declares that Rushdie’s politics “are rudimentary because they rely too much on journalistic ‘exposure,’ too little on analysis” (“Avatar of Disor¬ der” 204). The narrator may adopt a tone of honesty, but he is also “precocious, preachy, glib,” and cynical (205). In Sangari’s terms, then, Shame is nothing more than a too vividly imagined roman a clef whose narrator seeks to shock and score easy points.16 The counterreadings of Shame all take issue with the baldly stated intentions Rushdie has provided in the essayistic and rhetorical apparatus that surrounds the novel. These essays, these texts that do not operate in the register of parody and play, lay out a political program that Rushdie calls progressive and humanist. He wants above all to assure us of his good intentions. Yet liter¬ ary critics have long been trained to suspect and deny the valid¬ ity of authorial intention. Wimsatt and Beardsley, in their classic refutation of biographical criticism that takes the recovery of intention as its highest goal, insist that “we ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to. the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference” (1016; emphasis in original). I would counter, however, that we ought to recognize that neither ordinary readers nor pro¬ fessional critics really operate this way. While we rightly avoid biographical criticism, we do recognize that the author means something in an urgently affective and intellectual sense. In Shame, the dramatic speaker (the narrator) demands to be read as a shadow version of the author; hence his thoughts and atti¬ tudes, paradoxically, both are and are not Rushdie’s. But ultimately readers of Shame, both supportive and outraged ones, following a kind of commonsense rejection of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s intentional fallacy, tend to believe that the thoughts and attitudes of the narrator, who is a shadow version of the author, are in fact Rushdie’s after all. The narrator’s unlocatability is nothing more 134

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than a pose, a slight shift that does not remove from Rushdie the responsibility for the arguments that lace the text. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s claims grow more relevant, and more interestingly problematic, when they describe a text’s parentage: “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public” (1016). As demonstrated by the enormous popular reaction to The Satanic Verses, even more than by the critical reaction to Shame, the novel does not so much belong to the public as it is subject to a powerful public and buffeting response. A text may not, in such a case, even be read at all. But that text forever remains the author’s possession in the minds of all readers; the text’s name and the author’s are inextricably linked in critical and journalistic regis¬ ters. We must acknowledge the fact that for these readers the novel is not a child, born and “detached.” It is, to redeploy the metaphor that Rushdie uses, joined to the author by “elastic bands”: the fur¬ ther the text moves from the author (or the more the author tries to distance himself from the text), the more powerfully are the two pulled back together. Wimsatt and Beardsley might dismiss Sangari’s critique of Rushdie’s novel as flawed at the core because it pivots on condemn¬ ing what the author “means” to say. Aijaz Ahmad’s denunciation of Shame goes even further than Sangari’s, and it is both more complicated and more frustrating than the framework of the inten¬ tional fallacy would allow. Ahmad’s critique leads to the recon¬ struction of an offensive and even insidious writer who has no sense of the actual social and political suffering in South Asia. But Ahmad’s interpretation also attempts to close down the pos¬ sibility of other readings. In short, Ahmad’s is a univocal and, at times, repressive mode of textual engagement that grows out of a deeply felt personal revulsion for the text. Ahmad’s book, In The¬ ory, mounts a systematic challenge to the theoretical and politi¬ cal positions of major Western academics, including Edward Said and Fredric Jameson.17 The chapter on Shame attempts to over¬ turn Rushdie’s canonization in the West, first by contesting the valorizing of migrancy and postmodernism. Ahmad insists that 135

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Rushdie, like Said, is a rootless self-exile who, by choosing to leave the nation of his origin, has abdicated his intellectual responsi¬ bilities in the Third World in favor of a highly privileged cultural position among the Western academic and artistic elite. Specifically, and despite Rushdie’s statements to the contrary, he argues relent¬ lessly that a novel like Shame is complicit with quietism because it is a claustrophobic, even suicidal, text that makes despair fash¬ ionable and fetishizes a bleak Foucauldian political universe. Ahmad writes, “History, in other words, is not open to change, only to narrativization. Resistance can only be provisional, personal, local, micro, and pessimistic in advance” (In Theory 131). Hence Shame is a morally flawed novel that does not permit what Ahmad calls “heroic action,” or the amelioration of social conditions. The narrative presents a series of grotesques to earn its laughs; but, in its preoccupation with a narrow and elite stra¬ tum of Pakistani society, it ignores the lives and struggles of those who have no voice. Ahmad further ties such an oversight to Rush¬ die’s class position; it seems too easy for Rushdie, writing com¬ fortably in London, to portray dictators as buffoons, to complain of oppression, and to describe a disintegrating nation. Ahmad insists, “It is always much harder to affiliate oneself with specific kinds of praxis, conceived not in terms of values which serve as judgments on history, but as a solidarity with communities of individuals” (152). Yet Rushdie’s narrator does insist on important kinds of solidarity in the course of the novel: he claims kinship with the poet tortured by Zia's regime; he recalls the indissoluble bonds of family during his visits to Pakistan; and he emphasizes, however problematically, his sympathy with and connection to the struggles of Pakistani women against a sometimes repressive Islamicization. For Rushdie himself, the sense of solidarity (or “joining,” as Amitav Ghosh would put it) has extended more force¬ fully into the politics and immigrant communities of England. He has pointed to his work on behalf of the Charter 88 movement (to bring a written constitution to Great Britain); he has also claimed an important role in the education of communities about the prob¬ lems of intractable racism. Shame’s narrator, shifting the focus from Pakistan on one occasion, speaks of the trials of the Asian 136

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communities within London, and of the violence that blazes occasionally: “Humiliate people for long enough and a wildness bursts out of them” (120). Ahmad dismisses the importance of these versions of solidar¬ ity because the novel’s narrator and, by extension, Rushdie seem too keen on self-exile and on “unbelonging.” But, as Marjorie Levin¬ son writes in response to Ahmad’s critique, “On the face of it, the rejection of the idea of belonging would seem to be a dangerously complaisant tendency-[Yet] what is renounced by this new pol¬ itics is not collectivity, not affinity, and not shared and structured belonging. It is the model of a stable and somehow given coinci¬ dence between identity and function/gender/ethnicity/race and so forth that is refused” (22; emphasis in original). Ahmad thus misreads Rushdie’s revision of an older model of solidarity for a cold rejection of solidarity altogether. It is in this sense that irony itself is misread and misapprehended. Considering the passage in which the narrator speaks of the novel as one of “leavetaking” and as his “last words on the East,” Ahmad declares that Rushdie is overstating his capacities and his intentions while making a grossly essentialist claim about an amorphous region called the “East” (135-36). But Ahmad seems unwilling or unable to con¬ sider the possibility that the narrator adopts a self-conscious and self-mocking tone here, one that clearly ironizes and, indeed, pokes fun at his own authority to speak and his need to return obses¬ sively to the literary grounds of his Origins. Ahmad, in short, is too serious when it comes to the narrator’s grandiose claims and parodic inventions. Where the narrator’s levity forms a kind of selfreflexivity, a wariness of pronouncements that might become dogma, Ahmad sees a willful disregard for “reality.”18 Rushdie has asserted that “unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it may subsequently be recon¬ structed” (“The Location of Brazil” 122). But he adds, too, that “there lies in this approach, a terrible danger which is not faced by the realist artist. The danger is whimsy” (123). He thus acknowledges that it is sometimes too easy to make light of devastating realities without really considering the nature of social suffering. Rushdie’s insistence on remaining both playful and vigilant accounts for the 137

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curious ambivalence of a novel like Shame. And that ambivalence is what in turn gives rise to an interpretive anger like Ahmad’s: Rushdie wants everything both ways, which seems tantamount to evasion and political surrender. But, for Rushdie, having a mat¬ ter both ways is a means of more effective affirmation. The nar¬ rator’s intervention toward the end of the novel is instructive. As the revenge drama of the dictators draws to its violent close, the narrator pauses to pontificate on the Islamic revival, the “so-called ‘fundamentalism’” (266) imposed from above on ordinary Pak¬ istanis. The quotation marks he places around the word “funda¬ mentalism” suggests that he believes the movement to be a betrayal of Islamic belief. But he equally seeks to avoid homogenizing Islam itself, treating it as a uniformly “extremist” religion as it some¬ times is treated in the Western press. (The narrator further insists on differentiating between the ideological underpinnings of Islam in Iran and Pakistan). The narrator goes on to say that this fun¬ damentalism is a mythology that is “rammed down people’s throats” (266), and he argues that such a mythology inevitably unravels and is violently opposed by the people themselves: This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship . . . no, there is a third, and I shall not be so pessimistic as to deny its pos¬ sibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty; equality; fraternity. I recommend them highly [266-67].

Here the narrator treats Enlightenment ideals as transportable commodities, and his “recommendation,” a paragraph in itself, is tinged with sarcasm, for can such imported (and imposed) myths sustain a political culture any more than the defunct one can? Here again lies the doubleness, for we might read the narrator’s rec¬ ommendation in opposite fashion, as a genuine affirmation of this liberal-humanist ideal for a community where basic freedoms are still threatened; in such a context, democratic values remain essential elements of political dialogue. For Ahmad, such a recu¬ peration seems glib, falling into the trap of a neoimperialist imposition of Western ideas on the postcolonial nation. But the 138

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narrator, in his very ambivalence, is not calling for the uncritical adoption of these values; instead, they are to be tested and contested. The problem of interpretation in Ahmad’s case is, in a final sense, the result of a bristling sense of personal injury. Just as Muslims felt attacked by The Satanic Verses because the author seemed to write from a position of arrogant and dismissive cul¬ tural elitism, Ahmad acts out of a sense of sincere but visceral resentment.19 He is deeply dismayed by the cavalier way in which Rushdie represents South Asians, their crises, and their responses to those challenges. Ahmad describes himself as a Marxist intel¬ lectual committed to South Asia, personally invested in its pro¬ gressive political causes, and determined to make his critical work “matter” in a deep sense. To him, Rushdie’s satire seems written in ignorance, unmindful of the actual work that must be done in Pakistan and the activist work that is already going on. Scholarly activism in South Asia, as I have so far described it in this book, consists of the work of intellectuals who seek to relieve social suffering and come to terms with its representation. In Ahmad’s case, scholarly activism lies in polemical labor, in contesting texts that misrepresent suffering. His contentious reading of Shame points not merely to the problematic irony of the novel but also to the way Rushdie, in virtually all his work, draws blood. He directly lampoons figures of authority (Mrs. Gandhi in Midnight’s Chil¬ dren, Zulfikar and Benazir Bhutto in Shame, the Ayatollah in The Satanic Verses), and he subtly indicts-the intellectual community that he believes has failed South Asia in the face of these authori¬ tarians. But Rushdie never explains how this community could have resisted such failure. In short, Rushdie never truly articulates a positive agenda, and that absence further alienates potential allies and makes problematic the text’s politics and, by necessary exten¬ sion, the author’s.

The End of the Real It is not my aim in this chapter to rescue Rushdie from his crit¬ ics. Rather, I have dwelt on the conflicted nature of interpreta¬ tion and of intentionality in Rushdie’s case because they are 139

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further symptoms of the instability of the South Asian imagin¬ ing of social suffering. From Ghosh to Mistry to Manto, the problems of “giving voice” and “telling the truth” threaten to undermine the fictional project. Now, in the case of postmodern representation, that problem intensifies, for what we encounter is not merely representation but antirepresentation, a strange appropriation of the real, and an overproliferation of historical narrative that purports to document injustice. The claims of read¬ ers like Ahmad are not without their persuasiveness, especially with respect to their analysis of Shame’s representation of women. These analyses run against the interpretive grain Rushdie him¬ self has attempted to establish, for he has frequently called him¬ self a feminist in all political matters. Once more, such readings extend the attack on the author himself: Rushdie, these critics argue, is a misogynist of the most insidious kind.20 We cannot fail to reexamine the political valences of an image like that of Shame’s Sufiya Zinobia: a madwoman locked in the attic who eventually flees and takes gruesome revenge on the leading men of Pakistan. Midway through the novel, the narrator pauses in the telling of the Harappa-Hyder saga to make his most crucial statement about gender. It is worth quoting in full: Once upon a time there were two families, their destinies insepara¬ ble even by death. I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sex¬ ual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the periph¬ eries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all man¬ ner of sinuous complexities, to see my ‘male’ plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and ‘female’ side. It occurs to me that the women knew what they were up to—that their sto¬ ries explain, and even subsume, the men’s. Repression is a seam¬ less garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well. . . .

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So it turns out that my ‘male’ and ‘female’ plots are the same story, after all. I hope it goes without saying that not all women are crushed by any system, no matter how repressive. It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impres¬ sive than her men . . . their chains, nevertheless, are no fictions. They exist. And they are getting heavier.

If you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining. In the end, though, it all blows up in your face [180-81; emphasis in original].

It is here that the narrator most forcefully makes his case for the possibility of women’s resistance. He seeks to make clear, too, that he is entirely sympathetic to their plight in a repressive Pakistan. Women are “more impressive” than men, he asserts, and the proof lies in his pathetic hero, Omar Khayyam, and in the violent buffoons who run the nation, Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder. In suggesting that women’s chains are “no fictions,” he once more coyly demotes “mere” storytelling to gesture toward a kind of his¬ torical accounting that brings social tragedy to public awareness. But the narrator’s inclusion of the “female plot” is a peculiar one: he claims that the female characters have an agency of their own, that they “marched in from the peripheries” to demand inclu¬ sion, as though they had been relegated to the peripheries by the narrator himself. The narrator cannot fully exercise his intentions, for they are impeded by the forces he has set in motion. He admits to his own repressive tendencies—making central the “masculine plot”—only to find that such repression cannot succeed and that he is “obliged” to see his original plot “refracted.” Therefore, nar¬ ratives are manipulable from within by characters possessing an agency of their own. Nevertheless, the narrator’s comment about the women marching in may be simply a sly means of drawing attention to the female plot, a way of snatching his audience out of complacency. In this case, then, the narrator is in full sympa¬ thy with women’s burdens, and of course he fully intends his mas¬ culine plot to be refracted or subsumed. In either case, his argument about the repression of women is

141

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unsettling in its reversals, for it ultimately leaves suspended the issue of women’s agency and resistance. Once the women have marched in, are their narratives in fact central to the text? Or do the women's stories once more simply become part of the men’s (since, as the narrator claims, “it turns out that my ‘male’ and ‘female’ plots are the same story, after all”)? The narrator both remarks on the weight of women's chains and suggests that repression is a “seamless garment”—women’s chains point to the larger issue of authoritarian excess, which is in fact the focus of the novel. “It all blows up in your face,” the narrator warns, though, as becomes apparent in the novel's conclusion, that predicted explo¬ sion applies equally to the narrator himself. What “blows up” is the attempt to yoke together the male and female plots, to con¬ struct an argument about repression, to establish a progressive politics. This is a narrative racked by dissension from within, on the part of its wayward characters, and without, on the part of its unsettled (mis)readers. The narrator makes clear that a woman’s body stands at the ori¬ gin of the story—or, rather, two women’s bodies, one real and the other fictional. He says that the impulse to write the novel came from a story about a young Pakistani woman in the East End of London who was murdered by her father because she was having an affair with a white boy. The father was motivated by a sense of shame, by a horror at his daughter’s shamelessness in allowing her own body to be violated. For the narrator, warring notions of shame and shamelessness are the most powerful source of violence in Mus¬ lim society. He further claims that the heroine of his story, Sufiya Zinobia, “grew out of the corpse of that murdered girl, although she will not (have no fear) be slaughtered by Raza Hyder” (118). Both women, real and imagined, are wholly defined by their bod¬ ies, even for the narrator. The real woman’s body is the object of violence, and the imagined one’s will become the source of it. Sufiya Zinobia, the novel’s heroine, becomes the very embod¬ iment of shame. She is the “sponge,” the narrator claims, that soaks up the violent and shameful acts that have marred the nation of Pakistan. Her own violence and grotesque action are merely the

142

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results of the poisoned atmosphere that she breathes. Aijaz Ahmad claims that Rushdie’s novel depends on a structure of rep¬ resentation that produces monstrous female characters. Sufiya Zinobia, he laments, becomes the oldest of misogynist myths when she wanders out into the night, seducing young men and then decapitating them. She is represented as the poor sweet virgin who is in fact a vampire. Ahmad goes on, “Considering that Rushdie himself has stressed the importance of women in Shame, as well as his own conception of Sufiya as a principle of honor and redemp¬ tion, he seems to have fashioned a macabre caricature of what female resistance to cruelties might be; the woman herself becomes, in this version, a rapist” (In Theory 149). For Ahmad, Sufiya exemplifies Rushdie’s impoverished social imagination; there is no possibility here for any kind of action outside brutal retribution. Sufiya, possessing a beautiful but beastly body, becomes the principle of blind destruction whose dirty work ulti¬ mately leads to the “purging” of the tainted Pakistani nation. Then again, far from romanticizing violence, as Ahmad has suggested, Rushdie’s novel challenges and revises the very idea of representing violence (just as it revises the relation between gender and violence). Violence seems to seep into language itself, obliterating omniscience and the possibility of redemption. That is, the narrator is himself caught up in the structures of violence he seeks to challenge. There is no means of imagining a commu¬ nity, or even an interaction between'two people, that does not involve violence. It is as though Shame’s claustrophobic, gruesome universe offers its readers a fuller and more terrifying sense of what it might be like to inhabit the Pakistani universe. Of course, it then becomes equally possible for readers to dismiss the novel as impossibly bleak, for the novel’s representation of that universe begs the question of whether there really is no room anywhere in Pakistan for opposition, for coalition, for speech. Shame steadfastly publicizes and grieves over social suffering but, in a final reversal, capitulates in the face of it. In the novel’s final scene, when Omar Khayyam awakens from a dream in the house of his birth, he is visited by his wife, Sufiya Zinobia, who

H3

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

has come to take a final revenge against that most shameless of characters, himself: He stood beside the bed and waited for her like a bridegroom on his wedding night, as she climbed towards him, roaring, like a fire driven by the wind. The door blew open. And he in the darkness, erect, watch¬ ing the approaching glow, and then she was there, on all fours, naked, coated in mud and blood and shit, with twigs sticking to her back and beetles in her hair [304].

The narrator is left to speak for Sufiya Zinobia as he has all along: his language is full of the grotesque and the excremental, and it points to the profound failure of human relationships in this world. This moment is a violent parody of marriage, with Omar Khayyam’s “erect’ stance a hint of his failure to consummate his marriage with his wife. In this final scene, as throughout the novel, sex is always equated with violence and death. Sufiya Zinobia herself possesses no voice or language; she stands as a deformed ani¬ mal able only to act destructively. Her violence is the violence of “judgment”—she acts as the mechanism that undoes the novel’s chief antihero, Omar Khayyam, who has also served as a metonym for Pakistan itself. Sufiya Zinobia’s extraordinary rampage is the height of parodic excess: in her metamorphosis, she represents a surreal counterpoint to the monstrous nation; here, in the end¬ game, is the monster that decapitates and virtually devours the nation. There is something both greatly laughable and unnerving about this final moment. Rushdie may mean to say that Sufiya Zinobia is an unreal phantasm, an avenging angel who is not at all representative of the social options that are actually available to the women of Pakistan. But there she is nonetheless, ultimately an ogre, and the only woman in the novel with the authority to act. Is Rushdie subverting the trope of the madwoman in the attic, or is he reinforcing it? As }. Hillis Miller argues, ironic subver¬ sion may ultimately reemphasize what it sets out to oppose, since “the man who attempts to say one thing while clearly meaning another ends up saying the first thing too, in spite of himself” (219). Some readers miss irony, not because they are naive or insen144

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

sitive to language but because they simply cannot imagine how (or why) certain circumstances and events could be ironized (cir¬ cumstances like the revocation of women’s rights or the authori¬ tarian cruelty of the Pakistani regimes). Perhaps it goes without saying, then, that the writer is not the master of language and rep¬ resentation. But the novel’s narrator attempts to tell us how to read. He insists on the seriousness of the “real” political situation in Pakistan. He aims to shape the experience of reading and process¬ ing history; he seeks to force his readers to reflect on the submerged South Asian past and to “see” properly; he suggests that the story of suffering which the novel tells is not limited to South Asia but has resonance in the West, too; he sows his story with aphoristic comments about marriage, family, and history; he tells us of his own conflicted position between nations; the list of explanations and caveats goes on and on. As I have been suggesting, however, Shame’s appeal truly lies in its comedy, in narratorial gossip about Pakistan and in the panoply of unusual characters with their petty rivalries. The gap between the earnest and the comedic is the space of irony, and it begins to disorient the text’s audience. Are we to laugh when we read of the guerrilla “tribals” in a remote district of Pakistan who have attacked the team of expert surveyors sent by the gov¬ ernment and “raped each member of the team eighteen point six times on average (of which thirteen point nine seven assaults were from the rear and only four point six nine in the mouth) before slitting one hundred per cent of the expert gullets” (90)? The use of statistical language to describe the brutality provokes laughter, but are we then appalled at our own amusement? Can we laugh at (or with) the novel but remain vigilant about what is really happening to Pakistan? The novel is a compilation of comic monstrosities. Sufiya Zinobia’s mad and bloody butchering of exactly two hundred eighteen turkeys in the yard next door is of course emblematic of the grotesque violence that contributes to the narrative’s self-professed “fantasy.” We confront again and again not just the mutilation of animal bodies but of human ones as well. Iskander Harappa is killed not once but twice—he is shot dead after he insults his guard, and then Raza Hyder has him ms

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

hanged. We discover a narrative overproduction—indeed, an overdetermination—of violence. But it is not merely violence that is excessive and fantastic; so are all kinds of familial and psycho¬ logical conditions: Omar Khayyam has not one, but three demand¬ ing mothers; General Hyder is haunted by the maddening voice of Harappa’s ghost, which visits him unceasingly; his second daughter, “Good News,” is burdened by an overfertility that leads her to produce children in arithmetic progression until she finally kills herself. Thus the historical and dynastic conflict between the “real” Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zia ul-Haq is transformed altogether in the fictional retelling. These men in fact become larger than life. Political struggles are transformed into sexual ones and are then wildly exaggerated. Characters’ names also become markers of this overdetermination. “Iskander” is a Sanskritic variation of Alexan¬ der (the Great), and “Raza” is etymologically close to “Raja” (impe¬ rial ruler); “Harappa” echoes the name “Harappan,” the ancient Indus Valley civilization; “Sufiya” contains “Sufi,” the name of the heterodox Muslim group; and, of course, Omar Khayyam Shakil is the faulty reincarnation of the famous medieval Persian poet. Through the ironic use of legendary names, and through various familial narratives full of innuendo, the history of Pakistan—-and the history of its peoples’ sufferings—is stretched practically beyond recognition. Such a comic stretching of history sets out to question the reli¬ ability and meaning of historiography and historical recovery.21 The novel’s black humor, its overproduction of violence, and its exaggerated representation of female resistance all suggest that readers must not take too seriously any historical narrative what¬ soever. Shame clearly seeks to cultivate a healthy skepticism. As Rushdie himself argues in his essay on the film Brazil, the novel’s smashing of “official” reality entails the fictional construction of dystopia, not in the service of an all-encompassing nihilism or a mutilation of history but as a way of dislocating his audience’s familiar perspective. If we say, somewhat crudely, that the tradi¬ tional realist novel offers the simulacrum of the real in its atten¬ tion to the details of everyday social existence, then Shame, in its 146

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

metafictional opposition, offers a simulacrum of the real gone hay¬ wire. The narrator even reflects on what the novel is not, musing, “But suppose this were a realist novel! Just think what else I might have put in” (71). He goes on to list the “true” historical anecdotes about Pakistan that would have thus entered the story. He concludes: By now, if I had been writing a book of this nature, it would have done me no good to protest that I was writing universally, not only about Pakistan. The book would have been banned, dumped in the rubbish bin, burned. All that effort for nothing. Realism can break a writer’s heart. Fortunately, however, I am only telling a sort of modern fairy-tale, so that’s all right; nobody need get upset, or take anything I say too seriously. No drastic action need be taken, either. What a relief! And now I must stop saying what I am not writing about, because there’s nothing so special about that; every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales ... I must get back to my fairy-story, because things have been happening while I’ve been talking too much [68].

Here, the narrator offers a deliberately pat excuse for using a cover to write the story of Pakistan. Realism, he suggests, is more eas¬ ily attacked by the censors. But, of course, changing the names and places and turning the history of Bhutto-Zia into farce will fool no one. By calling the novel a “faffy-tale,” the narrator invokes a prenovelistic genre that might merely entertain. But the fairy tale is precisely the “weapon of unreality” Rushdie has so valorized. The narrator clearly demands that readers “get upset” and take this history seriously. The irony is unmistakable here, for Rushdie the essayist would argue that “drastic action” is indeed absolutely required. No easy relief is possible. But the narrator further points to the insufficiency of the text—the telling of one particular story prevents the telling of others. Censorship is inherent in the act of narration. Shame’s narrator seeks to empower his readers to take action of some kind, but the text itself never offers any specific avenues for such action. We have returned here to the problem raised in Amitav 147

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines. Is writing itself efficacious? Can it have any effect in the political world at large? In Rushdie’s case, it is not the writer-intellectual who dwells on his relation to action and to activism. Instead, the writer exhorts the reader to make some decision about texts, reseeing the world, and changing it. Such an exhortation produces a readerly anxiety: we are, as I have argued, caught between laughter and horror; we have been told how to read—with an eye toward the “real”—but our acts of interpre¬ tation are fraught with the possibility of misunderstanding or mis¬ application.22 Again, what the narrator explicitly argues about the tragic and repressive nature of Pakistani regimes, and about the suf¬ fering of the nation’s women, stands in uneasy relation to the bitingly satiric representation of those regimes and of the women who labor under them. This readerly anxiety about the viability of the parodic narra¬ tive ultimately redounds on the narrator himself in yet another literary manifestation of decompensation. Shame’s final moment is an apocalyptic and total one in which the narrative comes to an abrupt and irrevocable end. It is as if, given the narrator’s frustra¬ tion with the process of shaping the readerly experience, apoca¬ lypse becomes the only means of foreclosing further interpretive conflict. After Sufiya Zinobia, waiting by his bedside, strikes Omar Khayyam, the conclusion is rapid: His body was falling away from her, a headless drunk, and after that the Beast faded in her once again, she stood there blinking stupidly, unsteady on her feet, as if she didn’t know that all stories had to end together, that the fire was just gathering its strength, that on the day of reckoning the judges are not exempt from judgment, and that the power of the Beast of shame cannot be held for long within any one frame of flesh and blood, because it grows, it feeds and swells, until the vessel bursts.

.

And then the explosion comes, a shock-wave that demolishes the house, and after it the fireball of her burning, rolling outwards to the horizon like the sea, and last of all the cloud, which rises and spreads and hangs over the nothingness of the scene, until I can no longer see what is no longer there; the silent cloud, in the shape of a giant,

148

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grey and headless man, a figure of dreams, a phantom with one arm lifted in a gesture of farewell [305].

Sufiya herself is consumed by the force she has unleashed, though she is unaware of what has occurred. She is unaware, too, of that truth which the narrator pronounces so gravely—that “all stories [have] to end together.” Shame and the principal embodiment of shame, Sufiya, come to a forced conclusion on “judgment day,” the title of the novel’s final section. The narrative’s loose ends are fantastically tied up, and the novel is absolved of its own troubled political maneuvering once these stories “end together.” The explosion, which so obviously resembles a nuclear one, both por¬ tends a terrifying catastrophe in the South Asian future and sug¬ gests that the narrative’s own excesses, which have almost paralleled those of Pakistan itself, can only be undone with this most com¬ plete of annihilations. The narrator loses the ability to see Pak¬ istan; in the wake of the explosion, the imagined and chaotic nation itself has vanished, no longer to be the province of a weary story¬ teller. Fictional argument and fictional representation can proceed no further. The physiological term “decompensation” can refer to the failure of the heart muscle to maintain adequate blood circu¬ lation; in the case of fiction, the term denotes a phenomenon marked by the failure of language to circulate, to signify mean¬ ing in the face of catastrophe. And in the particular case of Shame, the decompensation is an End but also a remarkable and self¬ destructive means of asserting control over unruly and chaotic beginnings and middles.23 The narrative, which has opened itself up to attack, sweeps every¬ thing away in one vast cathartic gesture, a “gesture of farewell.” Significantly, the gesture is part of the ghostly afterimage of a decap¬ itated Omar Khayyam, he who has been the story’s villainous hero, the protagonist against whom the narrator has coyly protested for his excesses and moral lapse. In the penultimate scene, Omar Khayyam has a dream in which he attempts to absolve himself of his crimes, claiming that he has never been responsible for his own actions. His executioner declares him guilty nonetheless and shoots him through the heart. Oneiric justice is not enough, of

149

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course, and the narrator provides a much more violent punishment for his hero, as if in rejoinder to readers and critics who might doubt his political commitment to ending repression, for though Omar Khayyam is of course no violent dictator, he is the willing and sanguine pawn of the authoritarian figures of Pakistan; and, worse, he is utterly unaware of his complicity in a system of bru¬ tality. The novel’s conclusion is its attempt at proper justice, a means of clearing up misunderstanding insofar as the explosion undoes the ambivalence that has dominated the novel. Until that moment, Rushdie’s irony has served to destabilize the real; the nar¬ rator’s ironic position turns Pakistan’s plight into a black comedy but also insists that this plight has deep human consequences. But the novel’s final scenes contain no such uncertainty.24 The novel adopts a prophetic voice that laments the tragedy of Pakistan’s nationhood. There is indeed a moral lesson here, too: Omar Khay¬ yam and the rest are punished unequivocally. The apocalypse that marks the end of the novel also marks the end of irony and satire. But is this apocalypse also a symptom of narrative desperation? Has the narrator, and thus has Rushdie, abandoned both a writerly and a political responsibility to the historical “truth” at this point? Kumkum Sangari, interviewing Rushdie, insists that Rushdie’s deployment of an explosive ending, a totalizing justice, ignores the range of powerful forces that shape the ruling classes of Pakis¬ tan. Sangari tells Rushdie that the novel seems flawed because its conclusion is so final, and because it fails to consider the real nature of the contradictions that shape the nation’s political culture. Rushdie, unfazed, replies:

You see that explosion at the end as being purely apocalyptic and destructive. Well, I don’t particularly wish to prescribe ways of look¬ ing at it, but it’s also a kind of cleansing. I don’t know the meaning of that explosion: there it is. The book begins and ends at the frontier, the idea ofthe frontier being at the edge of a void, being a trap. Because in a totalitarian or near-totalitarian state, the frontier is not simply the thing you pass to reach elsewhere, it is the thing that keeps you in. You have that feeling in Pakistan, of claustrophobia, of being contained [Sangari, interview 249]. 150

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Against Sangari’s claim that he has been untrue to the “real” Pak¬ istan, Rushdie suggests that Shame’s conclusion provides only a fantasy of explosion: the final moment cannot be captioned with a meaning; it is simply “there,” inherent and natural in the telling of the story. The explosion that occurs at the frontier of a repres¬ sive state is a kind of fantastic imagining of freedom—the only means of escaping the “trap,” of freeing oneself from the claus¬ trophobia of that state. But Rushdie does not acknowledge that narrative itself may have become too claustrophobic, entrapping its readers and its own nar¬ rator in allegorical terrors veering out of control. Witness the pil¬ ing up of bodies and of mechanisms of death in the final section. The explosion, in this sense, becomes not just a fantastical out¬ come but the only means of closing a narrative that has plumbed the depths of political brutality. The narrator loses sight of the imag¬ ined nation because he cannot bear to look at it anymore. There is indeed a cleansing here, as Rushdie remarks in the interview, but Shame is incapable of explaining what replaces the system and community that have been wiped away by the hand of divine narratorial intervention. Shame is a literary weapon, in this sense, venting frustration and imagining the destruction of the men¬ acing “container” that is Pakistan. Can it be, however, that such a cleansing remains a kind of productive failure? After all, failed narration is still narration—it still speaks in the face of repres¬ sion; it can be revisited, reconsideredvand indeed recontested by its audience. This failure and contestation are precisely what Richard Rorty valorizes as the enormously potent solidarity that emerges from the contingency of the imagination (xvi).

The Reconciliations of The Satanic Verses It is one of the great ironies of The Satanic Verses, the novel that followed Shame, that it in fact aims for a healing of ruptures— an ironic healing, of course, given its tumultuous reception and the massive rupture it caused between Western intellectuals and the Muslim community. The “Rushdie Affair” (the commonly used shorthand for the series of events in early 1989) led to renewed 151

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

and heated debate about the nature of Islam and about the respon¬ sibilities of the novel form. Rushdie did not conceal a deep sense of hurt upon hearing the epithets leveled at him by members of the Muslim community in England and South Asia. In a heavyhearted essay, he speaks of the need to find common ground, to find the space for conversation: The Satanic Verses is, I profoundly hope, a work of radical dissent and questioning and reimagining. It is not, however, the book it has been made out to be, that book containing “nothing but filth and insults and abuse” that has brought people out into the streets across the world. That book simply does not exist. This is what I want to say to the great mass of ordinary, decent, fair-minded Muslims, of the sort I have known all my life, and who have provided much of the inspiration for my work: to be rejected and reviled by, so to speak, one’s own characters is a shocking and painful experience for any writer [“In Good Faith” 395].

For Rushdie, being thus reviled represents a moment of supreme misunderstanding: he maintains that he has fought for years on the side of South Asian immigrants, advocated their causes and agitated against the Thatcherites. He intended The Satanic Verses to be an expression of solidarity with the minority communities of London.25 But the Muslim public has repudiated his authority to speak on its behalf. Rushdie believes that his critics have pro¬ foundly misread his novel, making it out to be something it is not.26 It remains telling, however, that he also says he has been “rejected and reviled by” his “own characters.” It is as though the author cannot fully imagine the Muslim community’s real complexity, the fact that it is full of living and autonomous individuals. He reduces them to figures within his own fictional universe— people who require his authorial voice in order to be heard. Rushdie himself has misread the Muslim public. The modes of fictional argument and representation that pro¬ voke readerly anxiety in Shame now produce a readerly hurt that Rushdie readily acknowledges, and for which he virtually apolo¬ gizes. Of course, there was no single, unified Muslim response 152

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

to the text; instead, intellectuals, politicians, and citizens of a great many nations found themselves grappling with Rushdie's per¬ ceived challenge to faith and with the Enlightenment claim to free¬ dom of speech.27 Even now, more than a decade and a half later, what remains most astonishing about the Rushdie Affair is the way in which the interpretive conflict had such dire consequences. The author’s life was in jeopardy, bookshops were firebombed, pub¬ lishers were threatened, one translator was in fact murdered, and the book itself was indeed “banned, dumped in the rubbish bin, burned” (Shame 68).28 The narrator of that earlier novel, who speaks so ironically of the realist novel that falls into the hands of the censors, presages the very unironic fate of the decidedly antirealist text The Satanic Verses. At the outset of the turmoil, Rushdie publicly denounced the government of Rajiv Gandhi for permitting India to become the first nation to ban the book. He declared that Gandhi was undermining the secular and democratic basis of Indian society by trying to appease angry Muslim politi¬ cians (already incensed by the Hindu attempt to destroy the mosque in Ayodhya). Thus, from at least one perspective, the novel became another flashpoint in South Asian communalism.29 “Novels” suddenly seemed both immensely important—the cause of such powerfully felt outrage and of global political tremors— and terribly unimportant when weighed against the human deaths that did in fact occur.30 Beneath the debate and the recrimination there still lies a text, its particulars nearly forgotten in the fuss. What I offer here is not so much a sustained reading of the text but rather a brief reflection on its idiosyncrasies in the context of social suffering. As I have suggested, the text adopts a mode of reconciliation. Rushdie, having taken criticism from a variety of quarters for pur¬ veying political hopelessness in the conclusions of his previous two novels, sets out in The Satanic Verses to reconstitute com¬ munity and coalition. Whereas Shame makes an absolute dis¬ tinction between East and West, between the political disaster of Pakistan and the moral authority of the text’s narrator, The Satanic Verses remains much more uncertain about such bound¬ aries and about the position of the intellectual. The novel itself 153

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begins with what might seem an apocalypse of sorts, another great explosion. But in this case it is fecund, not terminal; it is an orig¬ inary violence that could lead to the healing of the social fabric. Unlike the fireball at the end of Shame, this one becomes the source of narrative possibility. The novel’s two protagonists, both actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, tumble earthward: “Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time . . . the jumbo jet Bostan, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beauti¬ ful, snow-white, illuminated city” (4). Gibreel and Saladin, per¬ formers extraordinaire, are representatives of the world of pastiche and fantasy, “reborn” after this terrorist explosion above London. Their survival and subsequent transfiguration form the starting point of the novel’s celebration of migration, newness, and “mongrelization.” That space high in the sky, a place of transit, is a site where “anything becomes possible” (5). Instead of allegory, this novel offers narratives of imagination, flux, and journeying. This is a novel whose many stories and threads refuse to be contained. This is a novel not content with mere dialogue; instead, it offers many voices speaking all at once.31 The text’s satire and modes of carnivalesque humor are not aimed at the large and politically repressive structures responsi¬ ble for social suffering but at localized instances of “purity”—the insistence that one version of the truth must prevail. Rushdie— for retelling the fundamental narrative of Islam, for introducing the very notion of doubt— has been taken to task by concerned Muslims. Yet the text seeks a way out of the old dualism of fun¬ damentalism and secularism, explicitly promoting a project of con¬ structive and rehabilitative humanism.32 Instead of simply dismissing faith as backward belief, the text seeks to get inside faith, to understand the deep and abiding impulse of the believer, in order to fashion an alternative and viable set of ethical and polit¬ ical principles. Unlike Shame, this later novel has no presiding narratorial voice, no author figure who attempts to shape the read¬ ing experience. Instead, while focusing on two figures, the text offers a cast of figures who are all individually engaged in that 154

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

process of searching for some means of connectedness, whether political, familial, or intellectual. The texts complicated reimagining of connectedness and belonging is inextricable from its representation of the urban riot. Social violence is radically different here from its manifestation in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines or in the stories of Manto. The riot is a zone of mingling and contestation, an outgrowth of post¬ colonial migration to the West. Ian Baucom writes that the “urban riot manages not merely to vandalize but to reorganize England’s spaces of belonging, to introduce newness to the world not sim¬ ply as a schizophrenic epiphany but, as Rushdie put it in The Satanic Verses, as a process of‘fusions, translations, and conjoinings’ ” (8). London becomes the site of what Baucom further calls “riotous performances” (213); we are thus far from the commu¬ nal riot of the South Asian metropolis. The riot in The Satanic Verses expands the spaces in which we must consider social suffering. The social violence in the novel echoes England’s 1981 Brixton riots. In part, those riots were a reaction by Asian and African immigrants against the new Nationality Act, which attempted to impose a narrow definition on British citizenship and ancestry. The riots and the government’s response galvanized Rushdie and helped define his political stance (decidedly antiThatcherite). Alongside its re-visioning of violence, national identity, and con¬ nectedness, The Satanic Verses upholds popular film and song as vital sources of reimagination and cultural celebration. Against apocalypse, against purity, and against political hopelessness stands the Bollywood song-and-dance routine, with its own roots in the camivalesque.33 Popular culture—whose emblem is Gibreel, superstar—is redemptive in its ability to amuse, divert, and then joyfully tease the status quo. Popular culture plays fluidly with the sacred and the profane: Gibreel’s “big break arrived with the com¬ ing of the theological movies. Once the formula of making films based on the puranas, and adding the usual mixture of songs, dances, funny uncles, etc., had paid off, every god in the pantheon got his or her chance to be a star” (24). Though Gibreel is even¬ tually driven to suicide by his existential and religious uncertain155

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

ties, it is not the man himself who represents imaginative possi¬ bility, but rather the celluloid image of the man. Gibreel is wholly co-opted by his public, for better or for worse, and his films, like much of South Asian popular cinema, do not merely satisfy an escapist impulse for their audiences but create the conditions for an agency that potentially transforms ordinary life. As Arjun Appadurai, in his astute and influential study of consumption, media, and pleasure, writes: Fantasy can dissipate (because its logic is so often autotelic), but the imagination, especially when collective, can become the fuel for action. It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neigh¬ borhood and nationhood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape [Modernity at Large 7].

Where Rushdie’s Shame is at a loss to fully explain the sources of resistance within an oppressed society, The Satanic Verses, with its frequent invocation of the joyful collectivities created by popular culture, hints that the imagined worlds of film and song can sub¬ vert discourses of “purity” that hierarchize community and cur¬ tail expression.34 For all its celebration of the subversive and the polyphonic, how¬ ever, the novel ultimately extols the redemptive and more tran¬ quil zone of home and the domestic. When I speak of home here, I distinguish it from Homi Bhabha’s notion of home as a repres¬ sive structure. Bhabha speaks too quickly of a “traumatic ambiva¬ lence” (The Location of Culture 11) that arises from the liminal position between home and the world. For Bhabha, moreover, Rushdie’s novel is centrally about the Western metropole that “must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees” (4). But the truly subversive quality of The Satanic Verses is its suggestion that home is in fact liberatory, and, further, that South Asian histories need not always coincide with postcolonial ones. It is ultimately Saladin who achieves a measure of peace in a novel filled with characters driven to destruction by personal turmoil. Saladin, who has been transformed into a devil with horns and then returned to his original human form, must 156

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

come to terms with home and family and with India, the nation that he repudiated in his youth. The Satanic Verses’ final chapter, in which Saladin attends to his dying father, represents the most sustained instance of affective engagement in Rushdie’s oeuvre. The story genuinely, unexpectedly moves us; the modes of satire and critique, so vitriolic in Shame, and gradually diminishing in the course of this enormous novel, have finally disappeared with¬ out a trace. Saladin reflects on the nature of responsibility after his father dies (and after Gibreel has killed himself): He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Ara¬ bian Sea. The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal Point out to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a parting in the water’s shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook his head; he could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. . . . “Come along,” Zeenat Vakil’s voice said at his shoulder. It seemed that in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt—in spite of his humanity—he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one’s good fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking his elbow in its hand. “My place,” Zeeny offered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” “I’m coming,” he answered her, and turned away from the view [546-47].

So the text ends with a rare epiphany. The novel that begins with the “big bang” concludes with small understanding and quiet resolve. Saladin is reconciled with his father after decades of mutual resentment, and he recognizes his unshakable ties to Bombay. But that recognition is an “adult” one, not one of fantasy or nostalgia. He sees at last that “place” is not to be imagined but inhabited. He is interrupted in his thoughts by Zeenat, his lover, who rep¬ resents commitment to place in her resolute devotion to India’s progressive political causes. Redemption lies in the small gesture of intimacy, his elbow taken in her hand. He will go to her “place” after acknowledging his “humanity” and his failures. For Rushdie himself, redemption has not been easy to attain. 157

MURDEROUS FICTIONS

He has been championed, defended, and lauded in the West. Even in the rest of the world, his work is certainly read more widely now than it was before the Rushdie Affair. And he is without a doubt a global literary celebrity. At times he looms larger than life, like the lampooned political legends who people his novels. In 1990 a film titled International Guerrillas appeared in Pakistan, telling the story of the male members of a noble family who have pledged to assassinate Rushdie for his blasphemy. Rushdie is depicted as a drunken, lascivious agent of a Zionist conspiracy against the nation of Pakistan itself. At the end of the film, the heroes have been nailed to crosses by Rushdie, and they pray for divine inter¬ cession, which does at last arrive when three copies of the Qu’ran appear and fire a beam, striking the author down. The murderous fiction has thus curiously provoked murderous film.

158

s'

Shekhar

O my beloved!—my Life— come and mingle with me. 0 my beloved!—my Life— let me mingle with you. Our memories . . . they mingle in my heart, Our memories . . . they mingle with the clouds.

Dream, O dream, I shall melt in your eyes. Shekhar

If you do love me, come and mingle with my eyes. If you do not love me, let me mingle with the earth. Shai labano

If you do love me, come mingle with my eyes, If you do not love me, let me mingle with the earth. O my beloved!—my Life— come and mingle with me. Memories, O memories, mingle with my heart.

I only looked upon you once, but how could I not come to you. I come like the wind to touch your face. I cry for joy to see you. And even these tears taste sweet.

You are the air I breathe, and my soul waits for you.

Shekhar

If you don’t come to me, I shall set myself ablaze,

O my beloved!—my Life— come mingle with me.

If I die, I shall not be sorry for myself.

Memories, O memories!

But if I die, others will blame you, And I shall be sorry for you.

The moon mingles with the sky itself. Shai labano

Is this the beginning or the end?

We too mingle, as the rain mingles with the earth.

Our fate is in your hands.

We are now one. I am filled with your soul.

Shai labano

O my beloved!—my Lifecome mingle with me.

And our hearts both are filled with these memories.

For our love, I have left my home and family.

—A. R. Rahman

In your heart I shall be fulfilled.

a song from

“Uyire,” Maniratnam’s Bombay

THE MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

l T IS

PERHAPS A TESTAMENT

to the boundless energy of Indian popular cinema, and to its lively disregard for Western conventions of narrative coherence, that this duet between lovers occupies such a central position in Maniratnam’s 1995 film Bombay, a film that ostensibly tells the story of the horrors of the 1993 Hindu-Muslim riots in that city. Here is a song that became a smash hit, eclipsing the him itself (as him songs often do in India); here is an album track now played at wedding receptions; here is a number that remains, above all, a catchy tune. I begin with it because of its very memorableness— it lingers in the mind’s ear even more than the hlm’s images of urban devastation linger in the mind’s eye. The song, tided “Uyire” (“Life” or “Beloved”),1 echoes again and again with the language of bodilessness and of romantic fusion. As Chinanda Das Gupta has argued, songs in Indian popular cinema are virtually transcen¬ dental devices, employing a mythic style of discourse substantially removed from the dialogue that fills the rest of hlmic narrative (59).2 In Bombay’s celebratory “Uyire,” then, we are presented with

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

a happy ending, one that occurs twenty minutes into the film: the couple is united against the communal odds; the religious differences of the lovers are erased, and thus they become a model for India’s secular unity. The song, performed by the lovers as they stand on the dramatic, verdant cliffs above the sea near their vil¬ lage, calls attention to an idyllic Indian past, an apolitical time of harmony among communities. Interestingly, such veneration for a rural past stands in curious contrast to the film’s ongoing promotion of an urban and cosmopolitan modernity, embodied by the metropolis Mumbai (formerly Bombay) itself. It goes with¬ out saying that to move from the literary text to a lush and extrav¬ agant picture like Bombay is to encounter an unmistakable and bewildering shift in register. But, more than this, it is to recog¬ nize more fully that the literary text privileges certain modes of representation when it comes to social suffering. The literary text makes social suffering visible in a particular way, and to a partic¬ ular audience that receives representations through the private act of reading. Thus we cannot afford to ignore popular cinema, where narrative is joyfully fractured by song and performance, and where reception is frequently a communal act exercised in a vast movie theater. Popular cinema impels us to consider even more carefully the issue of intentionality. I have discussed authorial and readerly intentions. What might we say, then, about the intentions of moviegoers? In the song “Uyire,” the mutual profession of love depends on the gaze. The Hindu hero, Shekhar, and the Muslim heroine, Shailabano, have literally fallen in love at first sight. And they are, of course, objects of the audience’s gaze. Throughout the film, the long, lingering shots of the amorous couple attempt to make us identify with them and with their communal predicament. On the one hand, the song I have quoted at length is consonant with Indian cinematic conventions: it fulfills the demands of melodrama in its truest sense. (As I shall explain, the term “melodrama” stands not as a pejorative or evaluative term but as a generic one, point¬ ing to film’s crucial mode of affect.) Melody heightens affect; song also marks a moment when the characters step outside the space-

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

time of narrative in order to express unselfconscious emotion and to enact metaphorically the sexual union whose more literal or graphic representation would never be accepted by South Asian audiences. On the other hand, the song is highly unusual simply because it involves characters from different communities. As crit¬ ics have long pointed out, Indian film typically deals in the most oblique of ways with characters belonging to the non-Hindu minorities.3 Maniratnam’s Bombay thus represents a radical depar¬ ture, one that became phenomenally popular all across India, not just in Tamil Nadu, the southern state of its origin. But it was also a departure that provoked a range of political resentment, not unlike the furor created by the literary texts I have already examined. Bombay represents a curious hybrid, deploying a cinematic and national realism while co-opting the familiar non-narrative strategies of the Bollywood film. This film’s realism is “national” because, like much of the rest of Maniratnam’s cinematic oeuvre, it is profoundly concerned with what it means to be a good citizen of India. In fact, it goes further than mere concern, actively pro¬ moting an ideal of secular citizenship that stands starkly against communalist identities. Bombay’s realism also depends on a kind of documentary apparatus. Shekhar, the highest exemplar of the secular citizen, is also an investigative reporter for Indian Express; he searches out the manipulative provocateurs, Hindu and Mus¬ lim, who goaded their “masses” to riot in January 1993. The film’s documentary mode is unapologetieally didactic. Bombay insists that the failure of secular citizenship has heartrending conse¬ quences: the desolation of “innocents,” women and children unhomed and slaughtered in the streets of the city. I have turned to popular cinema in South Asia in this, the final chapter because films like those of Maniratnam make social suffering observable to a vast consumer public. In this sense, such films force citizens to recognize and reflect on the suffering that the public may see and easily dismiss in everyday life. Suffering in film—the wail¬ ing babies, the dead mothers, the smoke spiraling out of shanty¬ towns—is made visible in the most literal sense, given the impact of the camera’s work, but suffering also becomes visible in the

163

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

figurative sense because a film like Bombay has the capacity to shape, very broadly, public discussion and debate over commu¬ nal violence. Against those critics who would treat a film like Bombay with condescension, insisting that it manipulates its viewers and con¬ structs an unambiguous nationalist program, I propose that Bom¬ bay, like Maniratnam’s other important work, the 1992 film Roja (Rose), consists of fractured fantasies of the nation. These fantasies are a sometimes conflicting vision of what the nation might or ought to be. These two films do not neutralize or contain threats to the nation and its unity by providing an “outlet” for viewers’ anxieties. Narratives and happy endings in these films are hardly straightforward in their “ideological” effects. Bombay has been derided for its lack of narrative logic, but such logic is in fact wholly beside the point. Bombay substitutes a variety of maneuvers and affective situations in addressing its audiences and issuing its principal imperative: “Enjoy yourself,” the film seems to exclaim, “but learn to be a proper Indian citizen as well.” Accordingly, the film makes social suffering consumable while also making it the ground for national commentary. Bombay makes solutions to the crisis of the nation readily available, but the film is not so clear that viewers accept such solutions at face value. Like Salman Rushdie, Maniratnam has become a lightning rod for political argument. He has been assailed by Hindus for por¬ traying Muslims in too sympathetic a light; he has been denounced by Muslims for egregiously stereotyping them; he has been damned by critics on the left who believe that his representation of communal violence is too simple and too moralistic. Like Rushdie, Maniratnam has also been the target of violent reprisal; representations, as we have seen, do matter: in 1995, the director was hurt in Madras when a bomb exploded near his car. Of course, Maniratnam speaks to an audience that Rushdie will never reach, and a director has an economic impact that a literary author could never achieve. To put this point most plainly, a film like Bombay is a profit-making product as much as a political and aesthetic object. That said, the film seeks desperately to cultivate sincerity. Its

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

version of national realism enacts what I would call a heroic pub¬ licness: the film implies that its artistic expression is heroic in itself because it dares to raise issues that until now have been left unspo¬ ken in the popular register.4 Yet, as I have already suggested, Bom¬ bay also relies on non-narrative and affective scenarios—the songs, the dances, the little comedic moments that diverge from the story of violence. The film makes central the tribulations of the lovers, the star-crossed duo that marries against the wishes of family. The marriage is a happy one, and the couple becomes parents to a pair of charming twins. But the familial idyll is inter¬ rupted by the epic riots in Bombay. Thus the suffering of the com¬ munity and the suffering of the nuclear family are visibly, dramatically, and musically juxtaposed. This filmic maneuver depoliticizes the communal problem facing India, suggesting that the crisis of the nation is more crucially the domestic crisis of recon¬ stituting the loving family. Popular cinema in India—and Maniratnam’s films are no exception—remains highly concerned with the utopian space of home, a space untainted by the political or the communal. No doubt Bombay’s conclusion is artificial. But virtually every Indian spectator would agree that social solutions are never so read¬ ily available. I choose to posit a savvy spectator, not a naive or pas¬ sive one beguiled by neat resolutions to threats to the social body. Utopian resolutions, just like musical numbers, are sources of plea¬ sure. I believe it would be facile and even condescending to call such elements “escapist,” as though viewers flock to such films in order to forget their economic or social woes. Rather, cinematic pleasure, especially in the case of Maniratnam’s films, is a matter of affective urgings. That is, although Bombay has realist aspira¬ tions, it nonetheless seeks to deploy a set of emotional situations that appeal deeply to Indian audiences. A trip to any movie the¬ ater will bear out the striking difference between audiences in the West and those in India: at every turn of the plot, audiences cheer, comment, or applaud; they join in the singing of musical num¬ bers; they jeer when they feel manipulated by the filmmaker; there is, in short, a level of participation and emotional involvement unheard of in the West. 165

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

Bombay espouses an idealized notion of modern India and of the modern Indian metropolis, a notion that rouses audiences despite the fact that they recognize how “unreal” this onscreen India remains. Audiences enjoy seeing a pluralist India enacted on film because such a cinematic vision represents the nation as it ought to be (and, of course, the audiences themselves are plu¬ ralist, since they are composed of a variety of communities). Maniratnam’s blockbuster Roja, an important predecessor to Bombay, is a thriller that tells the story of lovers caught up in the civil tur¬ moil of Kashmir and separated by terrorists. Here, even more than in Bombay, the hero is an exemplary figure of Indianness, and the heroine is the model of fidelity; here are a hero who again and again insists on the political and territorial unity of the nation and a heroine who prioritizes the domestic. The couple thus serves as a model for modem familial life in India. Both Roja and Bom¬ bay depend upon the construction of a highly charged moral drama in which ordinary citizens from India’s villages can become heroic, larger than life. Such a moral drama lends an urgency, how¬ ever short-lived, to social suffering: films, far more than newspaper headlines, make audiences aware of the tensions, contradictions, and unsettling political forces that threaten the nation.

Movies for the Millions The history of popular Indian cinema has received much needed critical attention in recent years. But, to a large extent, this cinema remains an object of derision among the Indian middle class and the highly educated, who since the earliest days of film have con¬ sidered it a low form of entertainment that inescapably caters to prurient tastes. A certain brand of critic, always impatient with what is perceived to be popular cinema’s formulaic nature and vulgar¬ ity, has long championed “parallel” or art cinema—best exemplified by the work of the Bengali director Satyajit Ray—as truer to Indian “reality.” Of course, there is nothing astonishing about the highbrow dismissal of “movies” as mere titillation. But, as both anec¬ dotal and sustained research bear out, even the most avid movie¬ goers, the so-called masses—the Indian urban and rural poor—tend 166

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

to disparage cinema, suggesting that it threatens social mores and that it is indeed a purely escapist lure.5 It seems, then, that audi¬ ences of all backgrounds frown upon the pleasures that cinema makes available—pleasures that derive from fantasies about utopian social resolutions and about ideal sexual relations. Perhaps films are, in this sense, guilty pleasures even for the highbrow who claims to want no part of them. Such films are ridiculed, but they and their stars remain larger-than-life objects of devotion, icons that fill public space in almost overwhelming fashion. On hundreds of billboards, posters, and flyers the body of the star is celebrated and sold.6 If films do indeed provide a vast public fantasy, it is worth considering how, exactly, that fantasy operates, and why it might elicit contradictory responses within its spectators. Why is movie¬ going a guilty pleasure? And has it always been so? Indian cinema in its origins was immediately associated with technological modernity and foreignness. The Lumiere cine¬ matograph, the first motion projector used in a public screening, arrived in Bombay in fune 1896, just six months after its debut in Paris, and the program of films that were shown created as great a sensation in India as anywhere else. But in India, cinema itself and its subject matter represented unheralded possibilities and threats. Film immediately became a medium for conveying “real¬ ity” but also for manipulating it, for conning the masses. Film also made the machinery of modern life potently visible. The Lumiere brothers’ most famous film—depicting an express train pulling into a station—glorified movement, transformation, and the human harnessing of power. But the most important Indian filmmaker of the early period, D. G. Phalke, dealt largely with “mythologicals”—traditional Hindu stories from the oral tradition that glorified duty, truthfulness, and fidelity. In this sense, the pop¬ ular films of the 1910s immediately established an indigenous spirit for Indian cinema, removing the taint of foreignness. But by the end of World War I, Hollywood was truly cinema’s capital, producing some 80 percent of all films worldwide. Amer¬ ican films were frequently screened in India, for, despite the sus¬ picion toward foreign films, the audience’s appetite for these images remained enormous. American imports made the British 167

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

authorities increasingly uneasy; they believed that the image of the white race projected by Hollywood was a potentially negative one. American cinema thus posed a political threat, undermin¬ ing the “respect” that the British sought to inspire among Indi¬ ans. Equally important, though, is that the British government was looking for the means to protect its own film industry from the American steamroller. The Cinematograph Act of 1918 created regional boards of censors to review all films, and by the 1930s and 1940s, political censorship was being applied more fre¬ quently in order to quell the nationalist movement. During this period, songs became a crucial means of transmitting slogans and political messages, since music was more difficult to police than were the films themselves. From the 1940s through the 1950s, the idea of Indian unity was a central concern in popular cinema, especially as a shared iconography of the nation became meaningful and widely dissem¬ inated. Sumita S. Chakravarty, in her influential study National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-198/, describes the diverse ways in which cinema contributed to raising the national con¬ sciousness. Adapting Benedict Anderson’s claims about the value of print capitalism in creating a shared sense of national culture, Chakravarty suggests that popular cinema in the 1940s and 1950s created an enormously appealing sense of collective and common purpose. She writes that cinematic “realism gives shape to the social/national imaginary, the ideal of wholeness of per¬ ception and unity of common experience” (81). In the context of this realism, then, filmmakers and the state worked in tandem to sustain very particular Indian national narratives through the cin¬ ema itself, “renewing] calls for moral integrity [and] sincerity of purpose” (86). As I have suggested, suspicions of immorality in Indian cin¬ ema have lingered to this day. In the first decades of the twenti¬ eth century, there was in fact a strong stigma attached to working in films, especially for women. Acting in the movies thus became, for a brief time, the occupation of prostitutes. The issue of respectability remains unresolved insofar as moralistic critics con¬ tinue to maintain that film is inherently a permissive medium, 168

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

one that shows too much of the wrong kind of reality. “Morality” and “realism” are linked key terms in the discussions of film’s civic responsibility in India. Should the cinema be didactic? Should it provide examples of upright conduct for the “masses” to which it caters? What duty to verisimilitude does the cinema have? Of course, answers to such questions have been wide-ranging, and the competing demands of morality and realism had a variable influence during Indian cinema’s first century. But both issues are inextricable from that of “Indianness”; Chakravarty has claimed that “the call for realism meant that cinema should project not images of what Indian society was but what it should be.... Realism is the masquerading moral conscience of the Indian intelligentsia in their assumed (though not uncontested) role of national leadership” (81). Realism in this sense is a mode of discovery, a means of portraying a “truer” India and of calling attention to the moral center of that India. The prohibition of onscreen kissing serves as a crucial locus for an understanding of the nationalist politics of morality and culture.7 The prohibition itself was informal and unwritten, with filmmakers largely policing themselves until the mid-1980s, when some films began to include tame kissing scenes in order to sell themselves as risque. During the period of this prohibition, the filmic kiss came to signify improper and foreign behavior. Scenes of kissing were not cut from Western films screened in India, but the prohibition in Indiarl-made films came to repre¬ sent, for audiences, filmmakers, and censors alike, a kind of brave maintenance of a national morality: the kiss, they suggested, was alien to India. The hero of the typical popular film might often demand a kiss from the heroine, but it was always her duty to refuse, to turn away from the proffered lips, thus preventing an act of public immodesty and eroticism. In this refusal lies an inter¬ esting heightening and postponement of cinematic pleasure, since, in a literal sense, such a moment represents a deferred climax. The intertwined issues of national realism and national moral¬ ity are further complicated by the fact that Indian popular cinema is radically fractured along linguistic and regional lines. Relatively

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

little attention has been paid to the multiplicity of cinemas, to the crosscurrents and contestations of films in the numerous linguis¬ tic traditions of the subcontinent. While such a study is beyond the scope of this discussion, I will offer a word about regional cin¬ emas, since Maniratnam’s films are products of Chennai (formerly Madras), not Hindi-language products of Mumbai, which is often considered India’s film capital. Tamil cinema is in fact the nation’s largest in terms of number of features produced. A quarter of all India's movie theaters are in Tamil Nadu, and some research has suggested that Tamils attend the cinema far more regularly than Indians elsewhere.8 Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the state’s last six chief ministers have been film actors, filmmakers, or screenwriters, a fact that suggests the enormous political cap¬ ital that the cinema has accumulated. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the dramatic rhetoric and the highly memorable dia¬ logue of Tamil films propelled the Dravida Kazhagam Party (DMK) toward astonishing electoral success. Some leaders of the party— the active screenwriters and filmmakers—grew adept at manip¬ ulating the medium’s capacity for social commentary. Most spectacularly, the superstar M. G. Ramachandran (or MGR, as he was popularly known) used the colors of the party in his films, gave voice to its policies, and took on roles in which he played savior to the poor. Fie went on to become the most charismatic and widely adored chief minister of Tamil Nadu.9 The DMK and, later, the splinter party known as the AIDMK were strongly anti-Congress (Congress was the party of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, and the party that claimed to have made India a nation). The DMK and the AIDMK had as their over¬ riding political objective the defense of “Dravidian” cultural and linguistic uniqueness against north India’s Aryan/Brahmin dom¬ inance. As such, the parties, along with the films that rendered them in such a positive light, were highly regionalist in nature, directly challenging a hegemonic Indianness. The nation, these films implied, was not an idea to which they would subscribe wholeheartedly. While the films of Maniratnam are rooted in the Tamil language and exalt Tamil rural life, they reverse the politi¬ cal thrust of the Tamil cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Roja and 170

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

Bombay unwaveringly espouse the notion of the undivided and indivisible nation. Clearly, Tamil cinema is a cultural production greatly removed from the English literary texts through which I have thus far exam¬ ined the issue of social suffering.10 But it is precisely this removal— this seemingly peripheral political status—that makes Tamil cinema such a vital channel for exploring the political and cul¬ tural valences of violence between Indian communities, for such a cinema is hardly peripheral, of course: it is a fundamental ele¬ ment of the cultural and media experience of more than seventy million people. It is, as I have begun to describe, a source of plea¬ sure.11 But these millions are not simply passive recipients of filmic messages and filmic optimism. We cannot rest with the unidimen¬ sional and disdainful model of the viewer of popular film, who supposedly is less critically attuned than the reader of a literary text. Nor can we assert, as Fredric Jameson does, that “the visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination” (Signatures of the Visible i). Moviegoers, especially in the case of Maniratnam's films, are always engaged in a series of negotiations, dialogues, and evaluations. Sara Dickey’s comprehensive survey of the reception of Tamil cinema is useful here, for her sophisticated cultural study offers a means of theo¬ rizing the agency of the spectator: Spectacle does objectify, does externalize, does remove the viewer from action. Yet much of what is objectified is not only what the filmmaker urges on the viewer but also what viewers have demanded as a vision of their own lives. Moreover, as with any other form of expressive cul¬ ture, what is portrayed becomes part of the public sphere, to be dis¬ cussed, applied, and—as viewers themselves argue—manipulated back into their lives, potentially affecting change. Spectacle works as escape partly because viewers are watching themselves—because they can temporarily replace their real selves with the image they can see [176]. Tamil films are dynamic components of the public sphere, and they are vital sites where the idea of the nation can be reworked and replayed. As Dickey suggests, viewers have an impact on films

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

even as they take away from those films a set of fantasies and utopian images. Tamil cinema is, finally, a powerful source of imag¬ inative and affective energy.12 It is not simply that the nation is imagined, as Benedict Anderson and others would have it. The nation is felt and heard; the nation is given color and form; and in the midst of that visceral experience of nation, sexual and famil¬ ial relations are powerfully reimagined, too.

National Thrills With the release in 1986 of his third feature, Mouna Ragam (A Silent Symphony), Maniratnam secured a reputation among audi¬ ences and critics as an innovative filmmaker willing to break Tamil cinema’s mold. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, viewers of all lands had bemoaned the artificiality that had overtaken Tamil film. Films of earlier decades, though seemingly formulaic, had res¬ onated with audiences as action-oriented features full of Western dress and musical rhythms did not (Rajagopal 114). The megahits of the past—the films that had drawn repeat viewers and that ran in the theaters for months or even years—had disappeared. But Maniratnam’s work marked a renaissance, and viewers flocked to his more complex characters, his innovative use of the camera, and of course, the lively music of A. R. Rahman. Maniratnam’s films have readily traversed India’s linguistic boundaries; most have been dubbed and repackaged for non-Tamil audiences. Thus they have become national successes in a way that very few other Tamil—or Hindi—films have ever done. A number of film review¬ ers have lauded Maniratnam’s work as exemplifying a potent “mid¬ dle” cinema—a cinema that bridges the seemingly insurmountable divide between Indian popular and art him. Recent essays about the state of Indian popular him cite Maniratnam as the industry's saving grace.13 With Roja, Maniratnam entered a distinctly political realm, pressing the tropes of cinematic melodrama into the service of the nation. But the fact that Roja co-opts elements of both popu¬ lar and art him has discomhted some cultural critics, who have declared it fascist. Following Walter Benjamin, they suggest that 172

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

Roja, with its unexpectedly inventive cinematography, introduces the aesthetic into political life, with the aim of stirring deep pop¬ ular sentiment about the glories of the Indian nation. Rustom Bharucha, who elaborates on the fascist elements of Roja, borrows the terms of Noam Chomsky to argue that the film seeks to “man¬ ufacture consent,” and thus to create a communal consensus about the Kashmir crisis.14 In short, he believes that the film is deeply propagandist^. And, indeed, Maniratnam did receive the support of the Ministry of Defence in producing the film, and the Gov¬ ernment of India awarded it a prize for “national integration.” Perhaps more damning is that Roja received high praise from L. K. Advani, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, the Hindu-right party that controlled Parliament from 1997 until 2004). Thus evidence for the film’s jingoistic appeal is not hard to find. But do its viewers simply swallow its message? Bharucha’s warning about the joining of the aesthetic and the political rep¬ resents a peculiar kind of critical condescension. For him, a film that innovates, that moves beyond mechanical entertainment, is a threatening cultural object, for it more insidiously indoctri¬ nates the unreflective Indian subject. Furthermore, Bharucha's assessment relies on the presumption that the film is narratively coherent, that it has a decisive and overriding logic—its patriotic political message—and thereby presents one idealized version of the nation. Roja enacts a charged nationalist'drama that works in compli¬ cated, sometimes incoherent ways. The film opens in the semi¬ darkness of a forest where the Indian army is pursuing a group of suspected terrorists. The images here are murky, and the cam¬ era’s movements are rapid—an unusual combination in a typical Indian production. After a firefight, the leader of the band, known as Wasim Khan, is apprehended. The film then suddenly shifts to an idyllic Tamil village, where the heroine, Roja, takes up the song “Chinna Chinna Assai” (“Lit¬ tle Desires”), in which she extols the small joys of rural life and of domestic harmony. This song stands as the film’s anthem. Her vil¬ lage is a lush and playful place, a version of the “true” India: apo¬ litical, tradition-bound, and fertile. The hero of the film, Rishi Kumar, 173

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

arrives from the metropolis, Chennai, to find a wife in the village, having told his mother that he must have a girl from the heartland. His intended bride is Roja’s sister, but it turns out that his intended has fallen in love with another man. Rishi, thinking that he will spare her family additional shame, says he will marry Roja instead. The new couple moves to Madras, but Roja makes clear that she is deeply unhappy with the marriage into which she has been thrown; she rebuffs Rishi’s attempts at affection and says she wants to go home. The hero slowly wins her over. His seemingly glam¬ orous career as a cryptologist for the government soon demands that he go to Kashmir in place of his superior, who is taken ill. Roja insists on joining him, despite the potential danger. The cou¬ ple frolics in the snow and mountains, and we are afforded a glimpse of Kashmir’s legendary beauty. At this point, the film hints that Rishi and Roja finally consummate their marriage. The marital idyll is interrupted when Rishi is taken hostage by the same terrorist band that was pursued at the film’s outset. The terrorists demand that the government hand over their leader, Wasim Khan, in exchange for the cryptologist. Roja, in the meantime, has hysterically called upon the police and the army to find her husband. At this point, she adopts the role of the dutiful wife. Rishi, for his part, becomes the dutiful Indian, refusing to cooperate with the terrorists and taking advan¬ tage of every opportunity to declare India’s right to rule over Kash¬ mir. Even as he is beaten, he calls out, “Jai Hind” (“Victory to India”). At other moments he tries to reason with another leader of the group, Laquiat, hoping to show him how extreme and inhu¬ man his political views are. In the film’s most memorable scene—the one that has most provoked the ire of critics—one of the terrorists burns an Indian flag in the yard outside the building where Rishi is kept captive. Rishi sees the desecrated flag and runs into the yard. Though bound at the wrists, he manages to knock out the offending ter¬ rorist. He then throws his body on the burning flag in order to put out the flames. Roja continues her efforts to save her husband, appealing to the colonel in charge of the mission and, ultimately, to a visiting 174

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

cabinet minister. The government finally agrees to free Wasim Khan, but when the day for the exchange arrives, Rishi escapes his captors, determined to prevent the release of Wasim. After a long chase, a bruised and exhausted Rishi is cornered by Laquiat; the Indian army is closing in, and Laquiat threatens to kill Rishi. The hero asserts that Laquiat is indeed human and does not have the heart to kill him. Finally, Laquiat accedes and releases his captive. Roja and her husband are reunited. The film’s casual defenders often point to this final moment as evidence of Roja’s “balance.” Its villains are not two-dimensional, they maintain; rather, the terrorists are humanized and fully psy¬ chologized. For such viewers, the struggle between captor and captive seems real, not simply formulaic. The film’s success has hinged on this perceived evenhandedness and realism. Sumita S. Chakravarty asserts that in the national realism of the 1940s and 1950s, filmmakers sought to capture the “visceral quality of the experience of nationhood” (99). This brand of realism deftly called attention to its sophistication (its carefully constructed plots and scenes) but unselfconsciously adopted elements of the typi¬ cal commercial picture (the songs, dances, and stars). In this min¬ gling of storytelling modes, national realism attempts to build a consensus about what the nation represents. More specifically, Chakravarty says, “The ‘truth’ that the cinema was expected to ‘cap¬ ture’ on screen was not only the truth of social and psychological experience but the ‘truth’ of the right solution to moral dilemmas for the edification and satisfaction of the audience” (99). The truth about the nation thus becomes a moral truth—one that is wholly familiar to viewers, but one that they nevertheless expect to see dramatically replayed. What Chakravarty neglects, however, in evaluating this national realism is the way in which popular cin¬ ema presents not a single story or a single truth but multiple and conflicting ones; Roja stands as a rousing example of this multi¬ plicity. No consensus is really created by its realism, nor is there a manufacturing of univocal “consent,” as Rustom Bharucha would have it.15 Roja in fact consists of a noncoherent set of fantasies and dialogues bound together by a satisfyingly realist narrative logic (the political story of capture and freedom). 175

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

Undoubtedly the flag-burning scene is the most patently jin¬ goistic moment of the film. It is also the scene that has drawn the greatest cheers from theater audiences. Moreover, whatever “humanized” face the film puts on the Kashmiri terrorists, it con¬ sistently portrays their devotion to Islam in a forcefully negative light. During the flag-burning scene, the camera cuts repeatedly between Rishi’s attempts to put out the flames and Laquiat’s prayer. The acts of bowing and of touching the Qu’ran are equated with terrorism, here and elsewhere in the film; Laquiat seems deliri¬ ously fervent, oblivious to the world around him. The film’s stark juxtaposition of Rishi’s defense of the national symbol and Laquiat’s Islamic religiosity lends support to the claim that Roja nourishes Hindutva—literally, “Hinduness,” an ideology under¬ lying the Hindu nationalist movement that equates religious and national identity, insisting that an Indian must be a Hindu.16 Rishi’s fantastic act of defense recalls the periodic and extraor¬ dinary acts of self-immolation committed by politically or reli¬ giously zealous individuals who protest government policies that seemingly threaten the cohesiveness, status, or privileges of their communities. If, on the one hand, the film portrays Rishi as the ardent defender of the Hindi/Indian nation, it treats him, on the other, as the model of cosmopolitan modernity. His very occupa¬ tion, that of cryptographer, suggests sophistication; he is at ease with the English language; he often appears on screen in jeans and T-shirts. And, finally, he takes no part in his wife’s abiding Hindu faith. Thus the film unproblematically depicts Rishi as zealot of the national cause (and of a specifically anti-Muslim cause) and as hero of a Westernized, scientific secularism. Similarly, the film veers between the valorization of the rural idyll (Roja’s quaint village, with its wisecracking matrons and with its waterfall and lush fields) and of the metropolis (Rishi’s urban space, with its high technology and its ostensibly more tolerant view of gender roles). Such conflicted representation recurs in Bombay, and it is symp¬ tomatic of what I call “fractured fantasies.” Maniratnam’s realism relies on the production of a series of utopian scenarios: Roja’s Tamil villagers remain blissfully unaware of political turmoil; the 176

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

cigarette-smoking leading man successfully woos the headstrong but ignorant country girl; the Tamil hero, a loyal servant of the state, remains unwavering in his belief in the rightness of India’s rule over Kashmir; the survivor’s superhuman strength allows him to escape and ultimately reach his wife.17 Such scenarios do attempt to essentialize an “Indianness” (if not a “Hinduness”); though, paradoxically, these essentialisms seem multiple and contradictory (India is the sum of its rural past; India is techno¬ logically sophisticated; India is a great diffusion of localities and languages; India is a unity that transcends its communities). Rather than promoting a fascist response to the nation, rather than being mere propaganda (as Bharucha suggests), these scenarios estab¬ lish the various terms of public debate about what it means to be Indian; these scenarios create, as Ashis Nandy has claimed about popular cinema as a whole, a political idiom within public culture (12). Then again, Roja does not really allow for a contestation of the idea of nation itself, nor does it permit any sympathetic iden¬ tification with the “enemy,” the Kashmiri terrorist. But the film makes clear that “Indianness” is not a given, despite the rhetoric of its own hero. The term “public culture” refers to varied aesthetic, political, and mediatized forms that together comprise a “zone of cultural debate” in which understandings of Indianness can be con¬ tested.18 These forms are not merely consumed by audiences but received critically; public culture is^a zone of reflection, energy, and enjoyment. The set of utopian scenarios to which I have been referring is one of Roja’s sources of pleasure. The fact that the fan¬ tasies are fractured, conflicting, or even mutually exclusive poses no narrative problem for viewers—not because such viewers are unsophisticated, but because they expect, and in fact demand, a kind of vortex of possibilities in film. A spectacle worth seeing and worth paying for consists not just of elaborate fantasies and romances but of multiple and dissimilar fantasies and romances. In this sense, film resists both the authoritarian impulse and the straightforward project of “integrating” the nation. Roja cannot wholly interpellate its viewers, because those viewers maintain a critical distance from the film. They certainly cheer at the sight 177

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

of a valiant Rishi Kumar putting out the flames that are consum¬ ing the Indian flag, but they recognize such an act as purely and outrageously filmic, an act that the larger-than-life hero is expected to perform. Viewers recognize didacticism as such. Roja sets out to fulfill everyone’s “little desires,” as its first musi¬ cal number, “Chinna Chinna Assai,” elaborates. The heroine’s rap¬ turous singing about her desires, about the small pleasures of her village, and about her happy ease with the earth is thematically cen¬ tral.19 The song sequence serves as the film’s second opening, and it immediately follows the prologue scene in which the terrorist Wasim Khan is captured by the army. The song is thus the anti¬ dote to the violence of politics. Roja, frolicking in a waterfall, claims that her desires are simple but discerning. She loves her family, her community, and her natural surroundings, but she also val¬ ues her freedom and wishes to obtain a college education. There is an abundance of water in the song sequence—water irrigating the rice paddies, surrounding the heroine’s body as she bathes, and pouring down the waterfall that serves as the tranquil backdrop to her larking. The water serves the rather obvious role of cleansing the brutal doings of the army and of the terrorists in the film’s ini¬ tial scene. What remains curious, then, is this oscillation between little pleasures and violence. Ultimately, even the violence becomes a source of viewers’ pleasure. There is the strange thrill as the cam¬ era jolts its way through the terrorists’ hideout; there is the plea¬ sure of seeing the beaten hero survive; there is the thrill of the final chase. We all get to see our little desires played out. Maniratnam’s realism privileges the register of desire because it is one that is wholly manageable. The working of desire— romantic desire, material desire, bodily desire—is the most famil¬ iar trope of Indian popular cinema. Maniratnam himself, in various interviews, has insisted that his films communicate a “mes¬ sage” but do so through recognizable conventions. He claims, “I want to say something, and if I have to wrap it in a story form, I don’t mind. I want to make it in a form that the people are used to” (cited in Ganguly 72).20 But the demands of familiarity mean that this is a realism built on exclusions, for despite its earnest attempt to “show” the political—in a way that few popular films 178

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

even claim to do—nowhere are the real and frequently documented sufferings of the Kashmiris to be found. We see no glimpse of the Indian army’s jailing of suspects with no regard for the law, the massacring of civilians by both sides, the razing of whole villages. Social suffering is in fact transmuted in Roja. The film has no visual vocabulary for dealing with political and social actuality. Suffering becomes solely a domestic matter: it is the result of the sunder¬ ing of happy newlyweds. We find, then, abundant melodrama rather than cinematic real¬ ism (and the political world it would have to describe). But melo¬ drama is not merely equivalent to escapism; rather, it seeks to present and clarify moral dilemmas. In this way, melodrama coun¬ teracts the effects of the fractured fantasies to which I have been referring; melodrama provides narrative unity and smooths out possible contradictions in order to provide harmonious solutions. In the case of Roja, melodrama consists of the driving impulse of the wife to find her husband and of the husband to be reunited with his beloved wife. Peter Brooks writes that melodrama involves a Manichean struggle (in the present case, there is the blameless couple, marked as Indian, resisting the cold-blooded terrorists, marked as other). Brooks argues further that melodrama “is the drama of morality: it strives to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to ‘prove’ the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, mashed by villainy and perversions of judgment, does exist and can be made to assert it$ -presence and its categorical force among men” (20). By this account, melodrama serves two purposes: it offers a profoundly satisfying and pleasurable reso¬ lution, and it instates a recognizable moral order. In Roja that moral order lies, of course, in the maintenance of domestic union in the face of political violence. The state cannot save Rishi Kumar—only his wife can. The state, emblematized by the army colonel, at first refuses to act and then, when it does, cannot find the band of terrorists from which the hero is to be rescued. But Roja pleads, insisting that though she is just a simple woman, she is a citizen of India who deserves the state’s help. She maintains that she does not care about political calculation—-she only wants her husband. 179

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The young village woman manages to sway the Indian govern¬ ment, thereby proving the moral worth of the nation’s ordinary citizens. But viewers recognize that Roja and Rishi are extraordi¬ nary citizens whose tribulations and final victory can occur only in the unique universe bounded by the melodramatic conventions of cinema. The Manichean struggle is the film’s means of secur¬ ing the audience’s affective engagement. Brooks speaks of the way in which popular culture fulfills a “primal need for melodramatized reality” (205). In Roja’s conclusion, the pleasures of witness¬ ing the romantic reunion trump the political; in fact, there is no sense here that the troubles in Kashmir continue. Rishi and Roja’s resolution becomes Kashmir’s, as though a domestic reconstitu¬ tion parallels the reconstitution of a “greater” India that includes Kashmir. Yet, as I have been suggesting all along, the viewer who walks out of the theater having seen Roja would not blithely assume that the problems of Kashmir have been resolved. On the contrary, the act of watching the film—and then turning away from it— heightens the awareness that social suffering endures. The pri¬ mal need for melodramatized reality having been fulfilled, the burdensome imperative of ordinary reality descends once more.

Singing and Suffering If Roja provoked harsh critical scrutiny, Maniratnam’s subse¬ quent and most financially successful feature, Bombay, roused far greater resentment and outrage both from critical and political quarters. Upon its release, the film became the focal point of a passionate debate about the representation of communalism and, even more important, about the place of popular film in politics. The film begins with a familiar West Side Story premise: in a tradition-bound South Indian village, the Hindu hero, Shekhar, is smitten at first sight by the Muslim heroine, Shailabano. Before they have even spoken, Shekhar knows he must win her, and he tries ardently, despite Shailabano’s early attempts to discourage him. A close friend warns him of the danger of courting a Mus¬ lim, but Shekhar persists. Finally he manages to ask Shailabano to meet him at the sea cliffs, declaring that he has devoted his life

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

to her. Above the crashing waves, he begins to sing the hit song “Uyire,” with which I began this chapter. He is finally joined in song by Shailabano, and the two pledge their lives to one another. They embrace, far from the eyes of the village. Shekhar then goes to Shailabano’s father, Bashir, to ask for his daughter’s hand. Bashir takes down his sword and threatens to kill the young man, saying the blood of Hindu and Muslim can¬ not mingle. But Shekhar, in the film’s first heroic act, snatches the sword from Bashir, cuts his own hand and Shailabano’s, and allows their blood to mingle in the most literal sense. Shekhar then informs his own family, drawing the ire of his father, Narayan, who subsequently marches to Bashir’s house with his entourage. The fathers and their followers confront one another, making a series of verbal threats. Shekhar later tells his father he can wait no longer. He departs for Bombay, where he will be a journalist, and he says he will never return to the village (for the sake of consistency with the film’s title, I will in the remain¬ der of this discussion use the name Bombay for the city instead of its current name, Mumbai). Shailabano makes the long trip north as well, stealing away from her family home after her father has insisted that he will arrange within a week her marriage to a Muslim boy. Shekhar and Shailabano are married in a civic office. The shots of the city make clear how radically different, how modern and cosmopolitan Bombay is, in contrast to the village. Yet the film also provides a brief glimpse of the Hindutva movement—Shailabano sees a menacing parade of Hindus in the street as they chant for the building of a temple to Ram in Ayodhya. Except for this moment, this second portion of the film consists of domestic scenes. Shekhar and Shailabano enjoy their freedom in the city. But it seems that they have not yet consummated their marriage, and Shekhar makes various attempts to kiss Shailabano and bring her to their bed. Some of these attempts are interrupted comically; during others, Shailabano is shown to maintain her discreet modesty. Finally, the hurdle is overcome (offscreen, of course); and immediately thereafter, Shailabano announces her pregnancy. She gives birth to twins. And one boy is given a Hindu name; the other, l 8i

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

a Muslim one. Both names are those of their grandfathers. The twins become a metonym for communal unity. The third section of the film turns decisively toward the com¬ munal problem. Scenes are titled with precise dates, portentous headlines are flashed, and the Bombay riots are vividly portrayed. Throughout the scenes of mayhem, the boys are portrayed as inno¬ cents caught in a violent struggle that seems incomprehensible from their point of view. At one point they are cornered in the street by masked men who demand to know whether they are Hindu or Muslim; the boys say they are both, and at that they are doused with kerosene and nearly set aflame before their father and the police intervene. The film dwells, too, on the ruins of some of the city’s neighborhoods. In the midst of the violence, Shekhar plays the role of “objective” journalist for Indian Express, seeking out Hindu and Muslim leaders for answers. During a lull in the violence, both Shekhar’s and Shailabano’s parents come to the city, wanting to know that their children are safe. Narayan and Bashir achieve a reconciliation after Bashir saves Narayan from Muslim hooligans. But the rioters return, and this time the family home is destroyed; Shekhar and Shailabano escape with the boys, but all four of the couple’s parents are killed. The boys are then separated from Shekhar and Shailabano, who spend the next couple of days searching for their sons. The film reaches its climax when they return to their shattered neighborhood and Shekhar confronts a Hindu mob, telling them that they have destroyed enough. He douses himself with kerosene and dares them to burn him, too. The film cuts between this scene and two others in which a Hindu priest and a Muslim mother sim¬ ilarly shame crowds to stop the violence. The angry men drop their weapons and retreat. Suddenly the twins appear, and the family is reunited. People begin to emerge from the houses and streets, Hindus and Muslims joining hands as they reclaim their neigh¬ borhood. The film concludes with rising voices singing of union, peace, and Indian commonality. Bombay was the first popular film to deal so overtly with com¬ munal violence. It is explicitly concerned with the notorious events of December 1992-January 1993, when the city erupted 182

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

in riots after the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayo¬ dhya, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Even more than the Delhi riots of 1984, the crisis that shook India following the events in Ayodhya underscored the extent of the communal problem. Moreover, the year 1993 surely marked the lowest point in Hindu-Muslim relations since Partition. At issue in Ayodhya was a mosque built in 1528, during the reign of Babar, the first Mughal Emperor of India. In 1984, Hindu leaders had begun forcefully agitating for the demolition of the mosque and for the construction of a Hindu temple on the site, considered to be the birthplace of the god Ram. On Sunday, December 6,1992, more than 300,000 people gath¬ ered around the Babri Masjid, many dressed in the saffron colors of Hindu nationalism. The crowd overwhelmed the police barri¬ cades, swarmed to the mosque’s walls, and tore them down with mere hand tools. These astonishing events were broadcast around the world by CNN. The Indian government did little to stop the demolition once it began. Over the course of the next four months, some 1,700 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the violence that erupted around the country. The rally on that December day had been organized by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (the VHP, the World Hindu Council) and by the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, the Indian People’s Party, the chief opposition party, which eventually defeated the longruling Congress Party in 1997).21 The state of Uttar Pradesh was led by the BJP at the time, and in the,wake of the demolition the Indian government did in fact dismiss the state government and banned radical movements on both the Hindu side and the Mus¬ lim side. But such a move was largely symbolic, and it did noth¬ ing to prevent the massive outbreak of violence. The events at Ayodhya, and the subsequent rise of the BJP’s political star, high¬ lighted the dramatic social energy of religious nationalism.22 More¬ over, they occasioned an extended and sometimes anguished dispute about the nature of secularism in India.23 Maniratnam’s Bombay attempts to speak persuasively about the place of the secular. And it is precisely this—the film’s intention to enter into the most contentious space of public culture—that landed it and the director in trouble, a situation not dissimilar 183

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

to Salman Rushdie’s after the publication of The Satanic Verses.24 As I remarked at the outset, however, Bombay sets out to address millions, coveting an audience of viewers that goes far beyond an English-educated elite. And yet the comparison between Maniratnam’s film and Rushdie’s novel is not entirely inapt, for both are very much shaped by the experiences and tropes of pop¬ ular culture, though certainly Rushdie sets out to ironize the text’s relationship to that culture. But both filmmaker and novelist are highly aware of the workings of conventional Indian cinema, and both do in fact celebrate its possibilities. Rushdie draws Gibreel, a central character, from Bollywood, and he deploys the melo¬ dramatic energy and magical plot reversals common to the pop¬ ular form. Finally, Bombay and The Satanic Verses attempt to undo narrative coherence, rupturing smooth storytelling and withhold¬ ing fully psychologized characters inhabiting a wholly “realistic” social world. Of course, Maniratnam’s work does not undo narrative coher¬ ence for the same subversive reasons that Rushdie’s novel does. Bombay’s jumbling of narrative components is part and parcel of its strategy of communicating a political “message,” as Maniratnam himself has said explicitly. Bombay wants to leave its view¬ ers with the “true” India, not necessarily the “real” one. Moreover, Bombay does not rely on the printed word—an obvious point, but one worth making. Film criticism sometimes privileges “textuality” at the expense of examining those unique nontextual elements of film (light, color, sound, silence) that make it a complex affective experience for its viewers. Though a number of critics, among them Homi Bhabha, have insisted on the cultural priority of narrating the nation, I would like to consider the means by which a popu¬ lar film, rather than narrating, sings the nation. In his introduction to Nation and Narration, Bhabha suggests that the ambivalence of literary language is very much parallel to the ambivalence of discourse about the nation. Moreover, he argues that “nationness” depends upon narrative representation: “To encounter the nation as it is written displays a temporality of culture and social conscious¬ ness more in tune with the partial, overdetermined process by which textual meaning is produced through the articulation of 184

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

difference in language” (2; emphasis in original). I would counter that such a view of the articulation of nation ignores culture as it is experienced by a vast swath of the South Asian population. The song “Uyire” is steeped in the language of romance but also emphasizes the “mingling” of self and other, placing the high¬ est value on the erasure of difference. This erasure is exactly Maniratnam’s vaunted “message”: the Indian nation depends on this willing surrender of local or sectarian identity. The film upholds a secular ideal, one that it takes to be consonant with the under¬ pinnings of India’s founding. Moreover, it is an ideal that rather consciously invokes the secular modernism of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. From the 1930s onward, Nehru vocif¬ erously attacked communal politics, especially those of Hindu revivalist organizations. In January 1948, speaking at the Aligarh Muslim University, he insisted: You are Muslims and I am a Hindu. We may adhere to any religious faith or even to none; but that does not take away from that cultural inheritance that is yours as well as mine. The past holds us together; why should the present orthe future divide us in spirit [cited in Nanda no]?25

Maniratnam’s hero, Shekhar, redeploys such rhetoric at every turn, posing a seemingly commonsense, humanistic challenge to what he considers narrow-minded religiosity.26 Shekhar, then, like Nehru, pins his faith on rationalism. Fur¬ ther, Shekhar, like Nehru, was born a Hindu but remains hostile to religion and wants no part of religious ceremony (Shekhar and Shailabano’s wedding is wholly secular; the civil servant’s act of stamping the license stands in stark contrast to the ornate and richly symbolic wedding ceremonies that are often portrayed in popular cinema). At one decisive moment, Shekhar stands in a devastated street of his neighborhood, chastising his journalist friends, one Hindu and the other Muslim, who have dropped their cosmopolitan, professional demeanor and begun to attack each other on the basis of religious difference. The Hindu says Shekhar has forgotten that he is Hindu; the Muslim counters, saying Shekhar has forgotten that his sons are half Muslim. Shekhar 185

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

shames them into silence, shouting that he and his family are nei¬ ther Hindu nor Muslim but Indian. Shekhar’s brief lecture operates in the same register as the film’s songs. They are not the stuff of ordinary speech; they employ inflated rhetoric, heightened gestures on the part of the actors, and a language that relies on the tropes of emotional appeal. Shekhar delivers an equally definitive oration at the end of the film, when he shames the Hindu crowd into dropping its weapons. Both soliloquies, like the love song “Uyire,” are the film’s means of “singing” the nation, of giving the nation an affective resonance. Such singing is a calculated attempt to draw the viewers’ tears— or cheers; these are moments that reflect the pleasure of partici¬ pation in both the film itself and in the nation as a whole. Indeed, Bombay seeks to make the experience of the nation an enjoyable one. Shekhar is the exemplar of Indian citizenship, but the film makes clear that citizenship is not a dry, dull political exercise— it is always tinged with heroism. And yet the film does far more than espouse the virtues of cit¬ izenship, for, as I have been suggesting, Bombay is made up of distinct and contradictory components. In the first half of the film, the songs and dances are concerned with romance and family. At one level, these are diversions, the sugarcoating that Maniratnam says is necessary in order to purvey his message. In the domes¬ tic space, the romantic idyll can continue the way it began on the sea cliffs, when the couple sang “Uyire.” Sexual desire must be hinted at, heightened, and satisfied, with Shekhar playing the role of the modernized, lusty husband who must overcome his wife’s innate diffidence. When the film enters the space of the home and the space of the bedroom, it is intent on titillation. And indeed, the first half of the film, with its focus on the forbidden love across the communal divide, is very much a conventional love story in the most familiar mode of Indian popular cinema. But in the second half, the film treats the domestic space as the domain of the nuclear family, and as it does so, it pulls in a particular political direction. That is, the cheerful space of home and the melodies engendered there serve as the counterpoint to the nation. In the second half, the film veers between the story of 186

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

home and the story of the headlines outside. The domestic space is an idealized one in which Shekhar and Shailabano are free of communal condemnation, their village mores, and even financial realities; further, they are parents to twin cherubs who embody Hindu-Muslim unity. The nuclear family of four, a highly mod¬ ern unit in India, must maintain its autonomy from even grand¬ parents and extended family, here symbolic of traditional India; hence the grandparents’ visit disrupts the carefully balanced world Shekhar has created: Bashir and Narayan squabble endlessly about the boys’ upbringing. The domestic space requires constant vigilance, and Shekhar, as hero, must guard against incursions into the home. Of course, the most forceful of these incursions is the rioting after the events in Ayodhya. Interestingly, and perhaps a bit disturbingly, though Shekhar’s and Shailabano’s par¬ ents are all killed in the fire that consumes the home, the couple forgets the older generation at once. The centrality of the nuclear family is again reinforced. After the rioting has begun, the domes¬ tic space must be reconstituted and its boundaries reestablished, for in this particular melodrama the violence of the nation threat¬ ens it continually. Bombay’s melodrama relies on its depiction of the suffering of innocents. If, as Peter Brooks proposes, melodrama consists of a Manichean struggle of light and dark that articulates a moral order, then in Bombay the light is surely represented by terrified children who are caught in the violent upheaval orchestrated by manipula¬ tive politicians on both sides of the communal divide. Here again is the distinction between the true and the real; melodrama seeks to deal squarely with the former. A picture like Bombay attempts to convey a charged social situation (and its resolution) in the most heightened and obvious form, without necessarily conforming to the demands of verisimilitude. Thus the film takes pains to por¬ tray the repeated terror of the twin boys, caught in an urban war they cannot fathom. But the film makes much less of an attempt to explain how that war actually began or who are its players. Maniratnam’s brand of melodrama, in representing the true, tries to “picture” suffering. Such picturing goes hand in hand with what I have been calling the singing of the nation; both elements 187

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

are means of provoking viewers, and both are autonomous in the sense that the narrative does not in fact require them. Like song and dance, the long shots of desolation and wailing children are moments when the film momentarily suspends its temporal and spatial logic in order to achieve a particular poignant or arous¬ ing effect. In picturing social suffering, Bombay puts images of trauma into a protected filmic space where they can be watched repeatedly, where they can be felt, pored over, and felt again. The film also insists that social suffering is indeed communicable; such suffering is not lost, inarticulable, or beyond the powers of rep¬ resentation. Bombay never falls prey to silence, never falters or becomes self-conscious about its modes of representation. The film remains supremely confident that it can show the horrors of the city’s riots in 1993. Thus the film is not subject to the phe¬ nomenon of decompensation; its mechanisms of representation are never thwarted. As Fredric Jameson tells us, film maintains a “utopian dimension” and a “ritual celebration of the renewal of the social order and its salvation, not merely from divine wrath, but from unworthy leadership” (Signatures of the Visible 27). What makes Bombay troubling is that it gets the facts about suffering plainly wrong. In its dramatization of the riots, the film employs both the pathos of innocents and a documentary mode: the dates, the headlines, the enacted interviews with Hindu and Muslim leaders. Maniratnam claims to have sought an evenhanded approach, one that avoids placing disproportionate blame on one side or the other. And, indeed, the very fact that Hindu aggres¬ sion is portrayed onscreen makes Bombay unique in popular cin¬ ema. But it is indisputable that the film places more visual and narrative emphasis on the violence perpetrated by Muslims.27 I would add, too, that for Bombay to suggest that the violence on both sides was equal demonstrates a surprising historical amne¬ sia, since journalistic investigation has quite strikingly borne out that the Muslim community took the brunt of the attacks in Bom¬ bay. Like the systematic violence committed against the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, the murder of Muslims in 1993 constituted a vir¬ tual pogrom. The vivid and charged debates over the film have focused on i 88

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

the film’s figuring of its communal villains. On the Hindu right have been promoters of the film. Bal Thackeray, leader of the Shiv Sena, a powerful Hindu party active in Bombay, has maintained that Bombay depicts the riots accurately. A character modeled on Thackeray is in fact featured in the film itself—he is the Hindu spokesman Shekhar interviews in the midst of the riots. Before the release of the film, Thackeray demanded the chance to screen it, and he subsequently forced Maniratnam to make changes, most notably the cutting of a bit of rhetoric in which his character describes the wiping out of the “other” community; of course, Maniratnam’s acquiescence to the excision landed him in fresh trouble from other quarters. After its release, Thackeray called Bombay “a damn good film.” Of the Bombay riots represented in it, he remarked, “We didn’t start the violence. If you look carefully at the film, you will find that it is all there_We had no choice but to retaliate” (cited in Vasudevan, “Bombay and Its Public” 50). Thackeray thus defends his organization’s actions by referring to the film itself. Some liberal critics have agreed that the film is socially redeeming because it emphasizes a secularist view of Indianness. Numbers and specific facts are less important, says S.S.A. Aiyar, than the film’s truth about the “inhumanity of all slaugh¬ ter” (cited in Vasudevan, “Bombay and Its Public” 51). Finally, a different segment of those on the left, along with Muslim critics, has assailed Bombay for its lopsided version of the events. For them, the film reasserts a Hindu majoritarianism and ignores the genocidal maneuverings of Bal Thackeray and the forces he controlled. The film does in fact offer a negative portrayal of Bal Thack¬ eray and his communalist maneuverings. In a quite direct way, the character who stands for Thackeray in the film appears almost monstrous at times; visually, he is disturbing, even ugly, in his grotesque pronouncements. Is it possible that Thackeray, in pre¬ viewing the film, simply missed the reality of his depiction? Or did he relish the slight taint of villainy? Or, perhaps more provoca¬ tively, is the film incapable of managing incongruous and over¬ lapping political currents? Ultimately, the real—the historical actuality of what happened in a particular place—is downplayed in the name of Maniratnam’s humanistic message about Indian189

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

ness. Cinematic realism always gives way to cinematic melodrama, bringing to the fore an issue that only hovers in the background of literary texts like Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance: victimhood can be commodified. Social suffering can become a culturally mediated spectacle, especially when it becomes a popular phenomenon on the order of magni¬ tude of this particular film. Arthur and Jean Kleinman have per¬ suasively described the way in which social suffering has become a “master subject of our mediatized times” (i). The image of trauma is appropriated by mass culture in order to make an emotional and moral appeal. The Kleinmans further assert that this attempt to mobilize collective action is bound up with commercialized “infotainment.” Suffering is thus globalized, reduced to distorted fragments of traded cultural artifacts (2-3). Or, as Susan Sontag says of the commodification of trauma, “Shock has become a lead¬ ing stimulus of consumption and a source of value” (23). That is, shock sells, and the exploitation of sentiment has become so thor¬ oughly commonplace that we cease to recognize it as such. But is social suffering so readily contained by the vessel of a mass medium? Is Jameson’s “utopian dimension” the only one that remains visible in the raucous tangle of Maniratnam’s pop¬ ular filmic narratives? Do Roja and Bombay empty out all spec¬ ificity? Do these films’ audiences have no voice in political and cultural discourse? Sontag herself notes that the critical complaint about our social reality being overtaken by spectacle is a “breath¬ taking provincialism.” She argues that this view “universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertain¬ ment. ... It assumes everyone is a spectator” (hi). If we are to avoid a critical superciliousness, I propose that the answer to all my questions is no. I have claimed from the outset that the audi¬ ence for popular cinema in India is not an inert, passive recipi¬ ent of filmic messages. I reiterate that claim now, in closing, for viewers are not so easily manipulated, nor do they simply accept a film’s version of events as the definitive one. Viewers recognize that they are being entertained, but the pleasures of the political in cinema do not defuse these viewers’ knowledge—and fear— 190

MOMENTARY PLEASURES OF RECONCILIATION

that social tensions are not so easily managed or resolved. Cer¬ tainly, Bombay, like Roja, taps into what Peter Brooks calls “our primal need for a melodramatized reality” (205), and such melo¬ drama attempts to clarify and settle national conflict. But this clarification is temporary. After the immediate experience of the movie theater, national melodrama demands debate. In creating its affective scenarios, melodrama motivates its audience to turn decisively to real trauma and to that which escapes representa¬ tion. Easy reconciliation blurs, and melodrama’s soundtrack echoes still—a paradoxical and compelling reminder of what soci¬ ety has yet to achieve.

Photographs are relics of the past, traces of what has happened. If the living take that past upon themselves, if the past becomes an integral part of the process of people making their own history, then all photographs would re-aquire a living context, they would continue to exist in time, instead of being arrested moments. It is just possible that photography is the prophecy of a human memory yet to be socially and politically achieved.

—John Berger

About Looking

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l

CLOSE WITH ATRIO OF PHOTO-

graphs. We look at pictures, and they demand telling. Or, as John Berger insists, we look at pictures and we recreate histories. On Wednesday, February 27,2002, at 7:43 a.m., the Sabarmati Express pulled into the station at Godhra, a town of one hundred twenty thousand in the northwestern part of the state of Gujarat. The train carried a large number of Hindu pilgrims returning from a trip to Ayodhya, the site of the infamous 1992 demolition of the mosque purportedly built on the birthplace of the Hindu god-king incarnate, Ram. When the train arrived, there may have been an altercation on the platform, a hostile exchange between a Hindu traveler and a Muslim snack vendor. There may have been other insults exchanged. There may have been a deep conspiracy, a plan put into motion by Hindus themselves. The investigations have not yet told us enough. But the platform erupted in violence. Accord¬ ing to witnesses, a group of Muslims firebombed coach S-6, toss¬ ing crude incendiary devices from the platform and through the coach’s windows. The coach burned quickly and intensely, and the 193

CODA

FIGURE I

Hindu occupants had no way out. Fifty-eight died. The subsequent Hindu reprisals against Muslims spread through Gujarat nearly as fast as that fire had raced through the train. The worst violence was centered in Ahmedabad. The city sent out its police, and the national government deployed troops, but in truth they could not stop, or deliberately chose not to stop, the razing of Muslim neigh¬ borhoods and the burning alive of its inhabitants. Since the early 1990s, communal violence in South Asia had been documented to be an organized effort, not simply an out¬ burst of mob frenzy. In Gujarat, the efficiency of this organiza¬ tion reached a new level. The new tools of modern life were turned to the rioters’ advantage. Mobile phones and e-mail helped in the coordination and launching of attacks. These attacks themselves were precisely targeted within Muslim neighborhoods. After ten days of convulsion, the death toll stood above one thousand. 194

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 3

CODA

The violent sequences of that week—the life cycle of a communal event—have been extensively reported. The Western press seized on the riots as another dramatic and dangerous flash point in Hindu-Muslim relations in South Asia. Western reporters’ stories tended to condense and simplify this life cycle. South Asian jour¬ nalists and photographers sought to uncover the sources of the violence, and to counter past perceptions that they had ignored evidence of plotting by Hindu leaders who turned the riots into systematic murder. The tension in all the journalistic accounts, Western and South Asian, lay in the competing demands between the story of the individual sufferer and the story of communalism as a broad social phenomenon. So, then, the photographs with which I began—these show us some truth that is individualized and particular. But a photograph invites us to generalize, too. We hunt for clues. In figure i, an Ahmedabadi man pleads with rioters to spare his life. He is on the verge of tears. There is a small bloodstain near the collar of his shirt, and perhaps a splint on one finger of his left hand. We learned later that his name is Qutabuddin Nasruddin Ansari. The image, taken by a Reuters photographer, was published everywhere in South Asia. Ansari was immediately identified as the face of the Gujarati tragedy. In figure 2, rioters, arms upraised, brandish their weapons. Whom do they face? Are they posing and cheer¬ ing for the camera? Debris lies scattered at their feet. These men are not identified. We do not know what crimes they may have committed. Figure 3 shows a Muslim man with his hands open, embraced by another and surrounded by his family. Does the image of grief here slip into bathos? Does this family know we are watching ? The photograph of social suffering attains an aura that Walter Benjamin denies to the work of art mechanically reproduced. For Benjamin, this aura is the authority of the visual object, its unique¬ ness and its embeddedness in a set of social relations. By his account, the aura accrues to premodem forms of art. The photo¬ graph of social suffering is not situated in ritual or tradition, in Ben¬ jamin’s sense, but points outward to a matrix of social situations. And, further, the aura of the photograph of social suffering lies in 196

CODA

its capacity to haunt. The photograph is the remnant of the sur¬ vivor experience. Throughout this book, I have dwelt on the tex¬ tual and on the narratability of trauma; photographs are, of course, resolutely nontextual, and they place us in a potently different rela¬ tionship with social suffering. In the pictures, suffering seems more immediate, we might say, more memorable perhaps; as Susan Sontag writes in her meditative study Regarding the Pain of Others, “ Something becomes real—to those who are elsewhere, following it as ‘news’—by being photographed” (21). Film certainly comes closest to photography in its ability to confer the status of the real, but even film tells a story and offers context. The photograph comes to us without context. For these images from Gujarat, I have stepped in to provide the story, but a photograph resists the partiality of stories, insisting on its own completeness; it seeks the condition of impartiality. And, indeed, this is what the photograph's audience expects. According to Sontag, “For the photograph of atrocity, people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance” (26). Arthur and Joan Kleinman are troubled by the photograph’s presumption: pictures tend to essentialize and sentimentalize suffering. By the Kleinmans’ account, photography as a professional mechanics of representation depicts suffering as if it “existed] free of local people and local worlds” (7). In the context of popular cinema, I have already described the Kleinmans’ worry that appropriated images of trauma have become a part of entertainment and polit¬ ical economy. The Kleinmans conclude that valid appropriations of images of trauma must rely on critical self-reflection. Ethicists, anthropologists, historians, and, indeed, politicians must remain acutely aware of how images come to them and of exactly how those images are connected to local worlds. And Sontag once more: “The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs. This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding and remembering” (89). This kind of critique of the uses of photography and narrative is absolutely necessary, but it does not address a fundamental issue. I have suggested repeatedly in this book that narratives are a start197

CODA

ing point, leading us to some deeper but particularized understand¬ ing of social suffering. Pictures, like the novel or the short story or the popular film, are also moments of beginning, but they beg the question of what, exactly, we are to begin to do. None of us is exempt from Amitav Ghosh's imperative that we become joiners. In joining, none of us receives special sanction. We are never freed from renegotiating the terms of our engagement. But viewing, reading, and joining—the inescapable condition of the twentyfirst century—inevitably become onerous acts. At what point do we grow tired of looking at photograph after photograph and finally turn away? When does looking become the source of moral and political despair for us, the readers and viewers? I have discussed at length narrative’s means of dealing with the problems of fatigue and despair: in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, despondency is brushed away when the narrator turns to the consolations of romance; in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, despair over the enormity of suffering leads the narrative into a downward spiral, an overheated pessimism, and a failure of balance; in Saadat Hasan Manto’s sto¬ ries, political hopelessness portends apocalypse, a permanent rending of the social fabric; in Salman Rushdie’s Shame there is apocalypse, too, but the mushroom cloud gives way to The Satanic Verses’ domestic reconciliation, a mitigation of the world’s trou¬ bles; and in Maniratnam’s film Bombay, fatigue is stopped in its tracks, despair counteracted by a forgetting and a singing and a joining of hands. But what about those of us who are readers and viewers? How do we move on? Do we slip into despair or indiffer¬ ence? Do we opt out? Sontag tells us that it is merely platitudinous to say that view¬ ers grow callous because they are hypersaturated by images of suffering (105). I concur: our relationship to the sufferers is much more complicated than that. Our fatigue is real, the threat of despair is ever present, but that does not mean we grow inured to calamity. There are innumerable individuals, hundreds of locales across the globe, clamoring for our attention, showing us or telling us that they suffer. It perhaps seems crude to say so, but it is indeed pos¬ sible to remember too much, to be so hemmed in by an aware¬ ness of social suffering that paralysis ensues. Shoshana Felman 198

CODA

and Dori Lamb write of the Holocaust and testimony that “the imperative of bearing witness ... is itself somehow a philosoph¬ ical and ethical correlative of a situation with no cure, and of a rad¬ ical human condition of exposure and vulnerability” (5; emphasis in original). We are witnesses when we view the photograph, and our responsibility lies in self-diagnosis. And perhaps the cure lies in our solidarity with others who undertake the same process. For us to achieve solidarity, for us to join, in the sense Amitav Ghosh describes, we must choose. We cannot tune out the myr¬ iad voices and images, we cannot be reduced to the weighing of traumatic events in order to decide which is worthiest, but we do in fact choose which we will commit ourselves to. The story of Sikh survivors led the anthropologist Veena Das to the relief camps in Delhi; the passing of the generation of Partition survivors led Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon to the families, bringing succor to women who had never before had the chance to speak; perhaps someone seeing the picture of the pleading man in Ahmedabad in March 2002 felt compelled to join the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, the group that has long championed the cause of jus¬ tice and investigated the circumstances of this latest violence, too. And so we all discover for ourselves the routes to the work that necessarily grows out of those encounters with text and image. Qutabuddin Nasruddin Ansari, the pleading man in the pho¬ tograph, did not die in the Gujarati riots. After the violence sub¬ sided, Ansari, the “face” of commupalism’s victims, was recognized everywhere. In Ahmedabad, he found it nearly impossible to lead a normal life. He was subject to both pity and suspicion when he left his home; his daughter was taunted by people who saw the image of Ansari pleading and crying. A few months after the riots, he and his family moved to Malegaon, in the state of Maha¬ rashtra, where his sister lived. But he was still recognized in pub¬ lic and was startled to discover his image appearing in publicity slides that preceded films at the movie theater. A tailor, Ansari was unable to find anyone in the markets to buy his clothes. In August 2003, the government of West Bengal offered to rehabilitate Ansari, and he moved there to a new home and a new occupa¬ tion. Communalism’s most recent public sufferer has thus been 199

CODA

painfully scrutinized, his life deformed by publicity. In this con¬ text, the image with which I began seems troubling in a wholly unexpected way. Ansari’s fate is the curious product of our medi¬ atized times, and his story after the spring of 2002 is emblem¬ atic of the strange celebrity of suffering, a celebrity shared by victims and instigators, writers, filmmakers, and politicians. But that remains the disagreeable diversion, the subsidiary trauma I have touched upon in various contexts in this book. It cannot eclipse social reality or our duty to ameliorate it or our difficult relationship to those who have survived and those who have been lost. The photograph reminds us. It demands that we annotate. And with varying emphases and exhortations, so do novels, films, and histories of all kinds. Such cultural products—in engaging one of the most disturbing features of modernity, social suffering— have evolutionary rather than revolutionary potential: they chal¬ lenge audiences to reflect on their responsibility. Image and text, as representational mechanisms, can enter only so far into the decidedly dark space of suffering. They optimistically provide us some vocabulary—visual, textual, and oral—that we lacked before. But actual social solutions, of course, are and always will be the profound results of much harder work than signifying: they will depend on untiring human sympathy and human intervention.

200

NOTES

Introduction 1. Sumita S. Chakravarty writes of Nehru’s text, “This essentially cin¬ ematic book, which was recently serialized in fifty parts for Doordarshan, the state-owned national television network, presents a panoramic view of Indian history in order to ‘delve deep into the sources of India’s national personality,’ according to Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi. . . . Address¬ ing the general reader rather than the specialist, this remarkable book of nearly six hundred pages ... is a classic ‘colonial’ text in its mixture of national pride and humiliation, its mythologizing of the motherland and its project of historiographic revisionism” (18). 2. Dominick LaCapra offers a useful definition in this context: “Work¬ ing through is an articulatory practice: to the extent one works through trauma (as well as transferential relations in general), one is able to dis¬ tinguish between past and present and to recall to memory that some¬ thing happened to one (or one’s people) back then, while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future” (22). In this sense, Nehru’s version of “working through” is in fact a kind of pose. He him¬ self is not traumatized to such an extent that his notions of past, present, and future have been obfuscated. 201

NOTES TO PAGES 23-33

i

Writing and Redemption

1. For example, reviewers in the West, like those published in The Times Literary Supplement or The New Republic, speak broadly of inter¬ nationalism in The Shadow Lines and of its critique of frontiers. In South Asia, reviewers have called attention to Ghosh’s interest in the “imagi¬ nation” as a force for reexamining the history of the subcontinent. Of course, these examples are anecdotal, and I do not presume to account for the entirety of readerly and critical response to the novel. 2. Linda Hutcheon describes the “postmodern” novel as “historio¬ graphic metafiction.” This is a form that is “intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically .. . [lays] claim to historical events and personages” (5). She argues further, against the claims of detractors of the postmodern, that in the novel “history is not made obsolete: it is, however, being rethought—as a human construct. And in arguing that history does not exist except as text, it does not stupidly and ‘gleefully’ deny that the past existed, but only that its accessibility to us now is entirely conditioned bytextuality” (16). While I think it plausible to call both The Shadow Lines and A Fine Balance “historiographic metafiction,” Hutcheon’s term is wor¬ risome because it so easily empties out historical content. She has little interest in what specific histories might mean for the cultures (U. S., Latin American, South Asian) out of which texts emerge. Her emphasis falls so squarely on the second word of her phrase that metafictionality becomes the critic’s only point of access to the text. I am interested nei¬ ther in textuality nor in forms of parody or subversion, but rather in the ceaseless tension between the potentialities of “history” and “fiction.” 3. I will resist the term “political novel” for two reasons: first, because, as Fredric Jameson demonstrated two decades ago in The Political Uncon¬ scious, every novel is indeed a political novel in a deep sense; and, sec¬ ond, because I want to avoid treating these literary texts as polemical or as unambiguous and ideological exposes of South Asian institutions. One further issue sits uncomfortably at the boundary of my discussion: Is the South Asian novel in English always political? Must this novel, new to the international literary scene, deal with fundamental issues of social convulsion and cultural instability on the subcontinent? And, more prob¬ lematic, are the novel’s political surfaces themselves the reason it has become so celebrated in the West? 4. Aijaz Ahmad has spoken loudly about the need for the South Asian intellectual to be committed to local causes. But, for him, commitment is defined solely by that intellectual’s location. Hence diasporic writers 202

NOTES TO PAGES 33-43

and thinkers are guilty of forsaking politics and activism; they have also too readily embraced Western theory that substitutes the self-reflexive examination of discursivity, language, and power for real intervention. Ahmad writes, “History ... is not open to change, only to narrativization. Resistance can only be provisional, personal, local, micro, and pes¬ simistic in advance" (In Theory 131). But Ahmad’s polemic is too often cynical, ad hominem, and unaware of the varieties of intellectual activism. 5. There are other important models of activist scholarship, and though they remain less self-conscious about their discursive strategies, they have been quite influential in South Asia. In these accounts, communalism is often placed alongside broad categories like “secular moder¬ nity,” “collective identity,” “mass media,” and “public sphere.” At its most reductive, this scholarship attempts to “fix” communalism, in both senses; that is, it seeks to define the phenomenon in precise sociologi¬ cal terms and then, normatively, to suggest a cure. Most prominent among theorists practicing on this model is Asghar Ali Engineer, who proposes an “instrumentalist” perspective that explains communalism in terms of its intricate economic machinery. Engineer argues, from a Marxist perspective, that the “ruling classes use religion to divide the people and perpetuate their exploitative class structure” (4). An opposing view argues that economic interests cannot adequately explain the utter bru¬ tality of communal violence. This “primordialisf thesis puts the “re¬ sacralization” of culture at the center of modern South Asian society and attempts to map the processes, psychological or nonrational, that lead to the construction of an absolute “we-ness” in which the perpe¬ trator ofviolence can lose himself (Kakar 192). I admit I have given short shrift to the enormous variety of scholarship that deals with the commu¬ nal issue, but it is not my aim to resolve the multiple debates over causes and solutions. 6. Das remains conflicted about her role in mediating trauma and giving voice. She writes, “The conceptual structures of our disciplines— social science, jurisprudence, medicine—lead to a professional transfor¬ mation of suffering which robs the victim of her voice and distances us from the immediacy of her experience. In the memory of an event as it is organized and consecrated by the state, only the voice of the expert becomes embodied, acquiring in time a kind of permanence” (Critical Events 176). 7. Partha Chatterjee has described the 1980s controversy about the novel as a moment when the left failed to renounce parts of the cultural heritage that are odious. He insists, too, that the left frequently retreats 203

NOTES TO PACES 43-45

from all cultural questions, perpetuating a “sacralizing” attitude and the “worship of icons.” Thus Chatterjee is most disturbed by the progres¬ sives’ inability to critique a patriotism that “has been intimately tied with a distinctly religious (and[,] needless to add, upper-caste Hindu) expres¬ sion of the signs of power” (The Present History of West Bengal 4). 8. See Ashutosh Varshney (234-35) for an important analysis of the Hindu nationalist reliance on the territorial definition of community. The “sacred geography” is the space in which religious and cultural unity can be founded and defended. 9. Ghosh’s novel also alludes directly to Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line, a protomodernist novella published in 1917. Conrad’s text employs the trope of exile while describing the way in which such displacement is bound up with the problem of remembering. The narrator-captain of the text treats the “shadow line” as the boundary between youth and matu¬ rity and between the Orient and the West. Ghosh’s text also revises Con¬ rad’s image of the shadow line by multiplying the boundaries; there is no moment of passage from youth to maturity, no single crossing from the confusion of the East to the rationality of the West. In the preface to the novel, Conrad writes about the uses of memory in the construction of narrative: “The effect of memory is to make things loom large because the essentials stand out isolated from their surroundings of insignificant daily facts” (xxxix). In Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines there is no such division of essentials and insignificant facts; the narrator insists on the unshak¬ able connection of all occurrences, all acts and intentions. The essen¬ tials and insignificances all speak volumes about the life of the community at large. 10. See Theodor Adorno’s “Reconciliation under Duress” for a use¬ ful and thoroughgoing critique of Lukacs’s position. 11. In her discussion of Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, Gauri Viswanathan argues that Ghosh’s secularist tendency to homogenize religious movements and ideologies is politically naive and provides no pragmatic solution to the crisis of communalism. She writes, “Ghosh’s syncretism denies the historical reality of religious difference. That is why no mat¬ ter how moving Ghosh’s book might be, and no matter how appealing his humanist call for dissolving barriers between nations, peoples, and communities on the grounds that world civilizations were syncretic long before the divisions introduced by the territorial boundaries of nation¬ states, the work cannot get beyond nostalgia to offer ways of dealing with what is, after all, an intractable political problem” (8). Thus, in this account, a version of secularism like Ghosh’s—with its deep suspicion 204

NOTES TO PAGES 48-50

of collectivity and of the language of the divine—ignores the central organizing principle represented by religious affiliation. But Viswanathan may be too quick to conflate the narrator of In an Antique Land (a kind of “shadow” Ghosh) and the author himself. The difficulty in cri¬ tiquing Ghosh’s politics is that we cannot locate them with precision. Certainly, in the case of The Shadow Lines, we must be careful to dis¬ tinguish the narrator’s secularism from whatever might constitute Ghosh’s own. 12. For Caren Kaplan, the modernist writer-intellectual’s self-fashion¬ ing has a decidedly negative valence because it relies on an aestheticized homelessness. She argues that the “trope of exile works to remove itself from any politically or historically specific instances in order to gener¬ ate aesthetic categories and ahistorical values” (28). I would like to put pressure on such a strong claim, for it seems to me that in Ghosh’s novel the modernist deployment of exile is not at all so straightforward. The thematization of border crossing cannot be linked explicitly to “aesthetic categories,” because there are no narrative practices that are deemed uni¬ versally applicable to the representation of South Asian communities. Perhaps that which is valorized is the ultimate inadequacy of all narra¬ tive practices; this antiaesthetic is, of course, an aesthetic in its own right. But exilic homelessness does not legitimate this aesthetic, nor does it make possible a truly stable vocational platform from which the writer can speak. 13. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan remarks of The Shadow Lines, “One major source of difficulty is our inevitable, one might even say irresistible, identification of the narrator as the authorial voice. We are strongly pres¬ surized by the narrative tone and stance—at once judicious, reflective, intelligent, and sensitive—to accept the narrator’s account and his inter¬ pretation of men, women, and events as the definitive versions of real¬ ity” (“The Division of Experience in The Shadow Lines” 296-97). But how does the narrative thus pressure us? Is there really no irony or resistant point of view here? It seems to me that the narrative voice is consistently self-aware, consistently demands that we compare it with other “versions of reality.” 14. For a relatively recent text, The Shadow Lines has accumulated an impressive body of criticism. But virtually all scholarship dwells on the issue of nationhood. For example, A. N. Kaul writes, “This is not an inter-national novel because Amitav Ghosh acknowledges no sepa¬ rate national or cultural realities that have any value or deserve to be recognized. For him all such demarcations are shadow lines, arbitrary 205

NOTES TO PAGES 51-77

and invented divisions” (300); see also Meenakshi Mulcherjee, “Maps and Mirrors.” Anjali Roy writes, “Ghosh attempts to fill up the gaps in nationalist histories by telling alternate revisionist stories, suppressed or elided by nationalism’s dominant discourse, even as he interrogates the validity of nation, nationalism, and nationalist identity in an era of global capitalism” (35). Suvir Kaul, building on Gyanendra Pandey’s work, writes thoughtfully of the novel, “To articulate these silences, to give them a language, to ascribe to them a causal and structural place within the syntax of the modern nation, is to acknowledge a difficult and often repressed truth, that states, and citizens, are founded in violence” (“Separation Anxiety” 126). 15. David Morris has argued persuasively that the “silence” of suf¬ fering is itself a modern literary cliche. Narrative inevitably posits silence as an absolute horizon but then breaks through that silence in the recov¬ ery of language. More crucially, this recovery, because it organizes lan¬ guage in some particular way, is what enables the literary text to “validate or invalidate certain experiences of suffering” (40). Morris adds that the novel is ill equipped to represent social suffering because it is preoccu¬ pied with the individual and the biographical, not with the community. The narrator of The Shadow Lines is caught up in the same act of cre¬ ation, prioritizing the suffering of the writer-intellectual stymied by silence. 16. Veena Das might maintain that in the case of what I am calling “epistemological” suffering, language is deployed as an end in itself; suffering is constituted purely as something verbal, thereby “dissolving] the concrete and existential reality of suffering victims" (Critical Events 82). I am using Das slightly out of context, for she is actually discussing how scientific and medical discourses use specific kinds of language to legitimize or delegitimize the victim’s suffering. I would argue, though, that Ghosh's narrator, steeped in literary discourse, uses language in the same conflicted manner. 17. See Katherine Frank, “Mr. Rushdie and Mrs. Gandhi,” for a lively discussion of the suit and of Rushdie’s political stance toward Indira Gandhi.

2 The Argument of Fiction 1. Elsewhere, Pandey has written about the damaging standard polit¬ ical accounts of Partition. In these, “the tragedy appears as one that, for all its consequences, miraculously left the course of Indian history unal-

206

NOTES TO PAGES 8o-8i

tered. In spite of the emergence of two, now three, independent nation states as a result of Partition, ‘India,’ this historiography would seem to say, stayed firmly—and ‘naturally’—on its secular, democratic, nonvio¬ lent, and tolerant path” (“In Defense of the Fragmenf 30). 2. The usefulness and exigency of fiction were underscored by the proliferation of anthologies in the mid-1990s. Just as the fiftieth anniver¬ sary of Independence and Partition inaugurated a season of scholarly attention to the lapses in historiography and anthropology, it set off a wave of ambitious translation and publishing projects. Manto’s stories, of course, were available before and are only more so now. But the recent antholo¬ gies have brought to a wider South Asian (and, indeed, international) audience a great many writers whose work points to the enormous range of aesthetic and political responses to Partition. The three-volume work edited by Alok Bhalla, Stories about the Partition of India, is the most com¬ prehensive to date. But Bhalla perhaps too facilely suggests that the sto¬ ries provide healing and affirmative answers to the massive social questions the event raised. He writes in his introduction, “Contrary to the communal histories, the stories about the Partition have more to do with the actualities of human experience in barbaric times than with ideologies, and seem to be bound together by one common thread— they find the notion that there was always hatred between the Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims in ordinary life completely incomprehensible. I hope that the stories collected in these volumes will help one to find some coherent explanation for the irrational passions that erupted so violently amongst us that, forgetting our humanity, our religious faith and our cultural pride, we began to stalk and kill each other” (xiv). 3. Fredric Jameson has spoken sojnewhat glibly about the phases through which “third world” literature passes: “Nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the radical difference of non-canonical texts. The third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its tendency to remind us of outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural development and to cause us to conclude that ‘they are still writing novels like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson’” (“Third World Literature in the Era of Multi¬ national Capital” 73). Obviously, such a schematic view of periodization obscures the complicated cultural exchange between national literary tra¬ ditions. Jameson’s notion that the “third world” merely retreads the ground covered by the “first” seems far too simplistic. The work of Saadat Hasan Manto—certainly noncanonical for Western readers—cannot possibly

207

NOTES TO PAGES 82-93

remind us of familiar models. In this chapter, I seek to account for Manto’s departure from obvious generic labeling. 4. For Hayden White the very act of narrativizing is also a moraliz¬ ing act: “The demand for closure in the historical story is a demand . .. for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama. Has any histori¬ cal narrative ever been written that was not informed not only by moral awareness but specifically by the moral authority of the narrator?” (“The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of the Real” 24). Manto’s his¬ torical fictions, in their conclusions and in their assessments of Parti¬ tion, moralize in an even more urgent way: they dramatically suggest that the fate of a whole social order is at stake. 5. Manto’s first translator, Khalid Hasan, was personally familiar with the author, and his pronouncements have set the tone for biographical criticism. He writes in summary, “Manto, like Orwell, was a political writer.... Every story that Manto wrote is, in the Orwellian sense, a polit¬ ical story. Manto’s vision of man, his impatience with hypocrisy and cant, his rejection of pettiness and avarice, his celebration of the generosity of the human spirit, his recognition of the essential decency of the rejects of society, his assertion of the truth and vigor of life, are all political” (“Saadat Hasan Manto” 92). As I explain in my readings of Manto’s stories, such a view is rather simplistic, since Manto’s politics are not so optimistic. 6. Flemming lauds Manto’s linguistic complexity: “As a native speaker of Punjabi rather than Urdu, Manto chose neither to imitate the elegant style of Urdu speakers from Uttar Pradesh nor to write an Urdu heavily flavored with Punjabi idioms and constructions. Rather, he evolved a style at once both spare and expressive, dependent on Perso-Arabic vocabu¬ lary, yet capable of clearly conveying the most subtle dislocations and emotions” (iv). Of course, some of these nuances are lost in translation. 7. Talbot writes of Partition fiction, “Historians of Indian indepen¬ dence have been much more reluctant than their colleagues in other fields to utilize such creative outpourings as source material. There are, of course, methodological problems in the use of literature, but it is curi¬ ous that standard historical accounts of Partition have not seized on this rich vein of material to begin to uncover the human dimension of the experience” (38). For Talbot, this seizing consists of reading literary texts straight, as though fiction serves to mirror unambiguously the “human dimension” lacking in political accounts of Partition. 8. Intizar Hussain also chronicles Partition through the exploration of homelessness and exile. “An Unwritten Epic” is the story of a novel 208

NOTES TO PAGES 93-97

that cannot be completed. Through a series of diary entries, the narrator/wnter describes his flagging desire to create; the hero—an actual neighbor, a bully with whom he is familiar—is killed and beheaded when he single-handedly tries to lead a riot. The narrator eventually escapes both writing and the “morass of politics” by running a mill; he becomes a “responsible citizen” free from the burdens of representation. 9. Clare Hanson has argued that the “short story has been ... the chosen form of the exile—not the self-willed emigre, but the writer who longs to return to a home culture which is denied him/her” (3). But Han¬ son’s claim verges on the generic essentialism I seek to avoid, because it reduces literary form to a narrow response to a political and cultural dilemma. I would ask, then: Why, exactly, is the form suited to the con¬ dition of exile? Are there not a number of twentieth-century novels writ¬ ten by authors who long to return home? 10. Theodor Adorno writes, “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (Minima Moralia 39). In the modernist imagination—of which Rushdie considers himself an important inheritor—to be with¬ out home is to achieve an intellectual and moral authority. Adorno fur¬ thers insists that “the traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable” (38). Homelessness is thus a melancholic triumph—some¬ thing Manto himself suggests when he speaks of his decision to leave the city he cherishes, Bombay. The religious and ideological underpin¬ nings of Pakistan seem unsettling to him; it is as though he deliberately chooses a home that can never be a home. 11. Often translated as “ The Return” or “ The Reunion, ” but the words “Khol Do” are best conveyed in English as “Open It,” echoing the phrase uttered by the doctor. 12. Mann locates an affirmative model of female selfhood in the work of Mahasweta Devi (though Devi’s stories do not deal with Partition): “As she sunders the nationalist ideological construct of ‘India’ as the chaste, asexual goddess-mother through her realistic representation of the rape and exploitation as well as resistance of individual women, she also employs a narrative strategy that challenges patriarchal textual mod¬ els that reify female victimization and reduce the violated woman to a symbolic cause” (136). Thus for Mann, the experiences of women in South Asia require a literary realism that Manto and his forebears have failed to provide. Mann believes Devi’s fiction is even more significant, given her activist credentials—she is an organizer of tribal women. We return, then, to the issue of the writer-citizen I raised in the first chapter. Is the work of the writer who “joins” more worthy of 209

NOTES TO PACES 98-108

critical attention—and more politically progressive—because that writer is socially engaged? 13. Jamila Hashmi’s “Exile” is an interesting example of a Partition story that does present the voice of a female survivor. The narrator recounts her own abduction, rape, and marriage. She still lives with the man who assaulted her, and she has no recourse, no means of achieving freedom. The narration is elegiac and questioning, but the protagonist has no way of explaining what has befallen her. 14. The critic Gopi Chand Narang not only bestows this label on Manto’s fiction but says, further, “Manto takes no sides, holds out no pleas. He only reconstructs the spectacle of life as it passes before him. With ruth¬ less objectivity, he unmasks those hypocrites who masquerade as the custodians of society and who day and night dole out parrot-like moral homilies, but are in fact the lords of oppression and solely responsible for the degradation of women” (2). In this account, Manto further appears as an uncompromising critic of bourgeois morality, but Narang fails to con¬ sider how Manto, in so doing, very much takes sides. The act of“unmask¬ ing” hypocrites is a political and ethical act, not a “dispassionate” one. 15. Margit Koves rehearses the rather familiar claim that Manto’s work, especially “Black Margins,” “demonstrate^] in various ways the inten¬ tion to avoid moralisation. The absence of the narrator in the ‘Siyah Hashe’ stories ... successfully protects] the reader from coming under the moral authority of the narrator. The author of the ‘Siyah Hashe’ volume is an observer who transcribes events without commentary” (2150). But Koves neglects to consider the way in which that observational objectiv¬ ity is constructed and then undermined. The reader may not come “under the moral authority” of Manto, but that moral persuasiveness is every¬ where evident. Koves does say, however, that “Black Margins” challenges “passive acceptance as a primary response to reading” and that it “pro¬ vokes” the reader to consider the story’s gaps and silences. 16. Krishan Chander, a Progressive and a writer of Partition stories, employs a train as narrator in “The Peshawar Express.” The train becomes the “neutral” witness to repeated slaughter, but the device quickly becomes strained. The narration is full of oaths and exclamations about the innocents who are killed. Chander emphasizes—and, indeed, overemphasizes—a universalist notion of lost humanity and brother¬ hood. The end of the story describes a girl who desires to serve her coun¬ try but is “martyred” while reading John Strachey’s book on socialism. Needless to say, the story seems cloying in its repeated invocation of inert political ideals, but it is a useful example of one kind of alternative to 210

NOTES TO PACES 110-113

Manto’s work, for here is a story that is equally “argumentative” but that deploys argument in the name of social and political mourning. 17. J ohn Rodden, in The Politics of Literary Reputation, a lengthy exam¬ ination of George Orwell’s position as public intellectual, writes of the process of manufacturing a literary icon. Not only did Orwell posthu¬ mously inspire fervent identification among writers and critics (like Lionel Trilling) but, by the 1980s, his very name had entered the popular lexi¬ con (Rodden xii). That name came to be overloaded with political and ethical freight as partisans on both the right and the left claimed him as one of their own. Manto’s translator Khalid Hasan writes of Manto’s “Orwellian” heroism in facing his critics and in committing himself to social protest. In truth, however, Manto occupies no such legendary place in South Asia. The real critical work of recovering the “uses” of Manto remains to be done. 18. Rather than revel in political commitment, Manto reveled in the ardor he could muster through sheer linguistic force: “The building of the palace of independence will not be accomplished by the blood of the victims of communal riots or by showy propaganda of selfish leaders.... We must get rid of riot-loving leaders, and curses should be showered from every direction on those who, at every turn, stifle the throats of the hopes and cries of the young men of the nation” (cited in Flemming 139). 19. In Beghair Unwan Ke, Manto writes a foreword in the form of a letter to Nehru, mocking him for his mythical aura. “Panditji [Nehru], there’s no doubt that you are a great personality. You are the Prime Min¬ ister of India. You are the ruler of the country which was formerly mine. You are everything. But pardon me for saying that you have never cared for this humble person (who is also a Kashmiri)” (cited in Bismillah 178). Sarcastically calling attention to his ajad Nehru’s common familial ori¬ gin in Kashmir, Manto almost childishly suggests, here and in the rest of the letter, that Nehru, despite his socialist rhetoric, is unconcerned with the plight of his citizens. In Manto’s eyes, Nehru is a member of the English-speaking elite that has even abandoned its native language. 20. Once again, the story’s title in English proves problematic. A number of translations, including the one I will cite here, employ the title “Colder than Ice,” the phrase Manto uses at the conclusion of the story to describe the protagonist’s lifeless hand. But I choose to revert to the literal rendering of the Urdu tide, “Cold Meat,” because this is a title shorn of any delicacy. 21. Priyamvada Gopal writes of the transformative energy of Manto’s project: “It is precisely in Manto’s attempts to work out the necessary rela211

NOTES TO PAGES 121-124

tion between an individual’s critical processing of his own experience and the sociopolitical order at large that a newly-entrenched political and legal system came to seem an untenable challenge; indeed, therein lay the ‘obscenity’ of Manto’s work. Like many writers of the time, Manto gives us stories of women who have been the victims of brutal gendered sex¬ ual violence. But what, he finally seems to ask, of the men who are as much a part of these processes?” (247)

3 Murderous Fictions 1. Rushdie, responding to Zia’s death in a way more nuanced and serious than the rumored comment quoted at the outset, writes, “When a tyrant falls, the world’s shadows lighten, and only hypocrites grieve; and General Zia ul-Haq was one of the cruellest of modern tyrants, what¬ ever his ‘great friend’ George Bush and his staunch supporter Margaret Thatcher would have us think. Eleven years ago, he burst out of his bot¬ tle like an Arabian Nights goblin, and although he seemed, at first, a small, puny sort of demon, he instantly commenced to grow, until he was gigantic enough to be able to grab the whole of Pakistan by the throat. Now, after an eternity of repression (even the clocks ran slowly under the pressure of Zia’s thumb), that sad, strangulated nation may, for a few moments, breathe a little more freely” (“Zia ul-Haq” 53). But even here, outside the realm of fiction, Rushdie depicts Zia as a figure of comic fantasy—ludicrous and menacing. 2. Anderson famously writes, “In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined polit¬ ical community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sover¬ eign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the [mind] of each lives the image of their communion.... The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of [nations], encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elas¬ tic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind” (6-7). For Rushdie, then, Pakistan, though “limited” and bounded, fails as a nation because its members do not have a clear sense of their “communion.” 3. These are the adjectives that the critic Sara Suleri employs. In her dense discussion she argues that the narrative is “ill at ease” with “its own sense of fabrication” (The Rhetoric of English India 178). Moreover, “the novel’s unhappy relation to the molecular profusion of fact that con212

NOTES TO PACES 124-126

stitutes political discourse is Shame’s undoing. A text of such nervous self-consciousness is of course aware of this undoing, and attempts to collaborate in its own unraveling in a series of complicated disclaimers” (179)-

4. I am drawing here on the work of Maire ni Fhlathuin, who, in sur¬ veying the consequences of the affair of The Satanic Verses, argues, “By an ironic reversal of the intentional fallacy, the author becomes the cre¬ ation of the text. In the aftermath of the novel’s publication, a major con¬ cern for many participants in this affair has been the construction of an author to fit a particular reading of the book” (277). I would extend this claim to cover Rushdie’s earlier work, most especially Shame. 5. In a more careful consideration of the writer’s exilic stance, Ray¬ mond Williams makes a distinction between exile and vagrancy, calling the former a position with principle and the latter a kind of “relaxation.” But for Williams even principled exile is not without its contradictions, for it distances the intellectual from “actual” suffering. He writes, “To belong to a community is to be part of a whole, and necessarily to accept, while helping define, its disciplines. To the exile, however, society as such is totalitarian; he cannot commit himself, he is bound to stay out” (291). 6. Timothy Brennan has argued that Rushdie is perhaps the fore¬ most member of a group of “cosmopolitan commentators on the Third World who offer an inside view of formerly submerged peoples for target reading publics in Europe and North America in novels that comply with metropolitan reading tastes” (“The National Longing for Form” 63; emphasis in original). 7. Along the lines of Brennan’s claim, M. Keith Booker asserts, “The particular techniques and strategies Rqshdie employs in his fiction cor¬ respond to those that have been popular among critics in recent years.... Indeed, Rushdie’s critical prominence in the West is related in a very direct way to the turn toward political engagement that has marked Western literary criticism in recent years” (2). Booker thus suggests that Rushdie’s high reputation in the West has depended on the fact that he has capi¬ talized, consciously or not, on critical trends and on the general sympa¬ thy for “postmodern,” self-reflexive fictions. As Aijaz Ahmad’s critique demonstrates, Rushdie’s reputation in South Asia itself has never been a settled thing. 8. John Rodden has spoken persuasively of the myriad cultural forces that go into the production of a literary reputation. In his analy¬ sis of George Orwell’s posthumous co-option by critics across the polit213

NOTES TO PACES 127-131

ical spectrum who declared him to be a conscience for the century, Rodden detects a cultural hero system at work (10). In their unabashed and unre¬ strained praise for the artist-hero, Anglo-American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century upheld Orwell as an ethical guide. The New York intellectuals, in formulating a new “unifying” cosmopolitanism, sought a detached ethical position from which the excesses of both left and right could be critiqued. 9. See, most notably, Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations. See also Michael Sprinker, ed., Edward Said: A Critical Reader; Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch, eds., Intellectuals in Politics. 10. Abdul JanMohammed speaks of such figures as “border intellec¬ tuals” and makes a distinction between those who are “syncretic” and those who are "specular.” The former group, which includes Rushdie, bridges two cultures in its articulation of new experiences, while the lat¬ ter, exemplified by Said, is caught between two cultures, never at home, and thereby forced to use an “interstitial cultural space” as a point from which to critique institutions and to reconsider their own identities (97). I would slightly revise JanMohammed’s claim because Rushdie in fact exhibits the qualities of both the syncretic and the specular intellectual. His work brings together South Asia and England, Hindu and Muslim literary traditions as well as Western ones, but he is equally concerned with his own status within the in-between space of the border. The vol¬ ume of his writings on the subject suggests that he is deeply, almost obses¬ sively, worried about coming to terms with the problems and rewards of “homelessness.” 11. R. Radhakrishnan offers another critique of the postmodern from the South Asian perspective. He calls for a return to “authenticity” and defends the notion of “essentialism,” arguing that it has been debunked by Western theorists but remains vital in South Asia and the rest of the Third World, where it serves the strategic interests of defining cultural identity and cultural belonging. Radhakrishnan also calls for the creation of a “third space,” an intellectual position associated neither with West¬ ern postmodernism nor with indigenous fundamentalisms. He argues that migrant writers and critics (Rushdie and Homi Bhabha among them) are unable to occupy such a space. They have no positive political clout because they are caught between different kinds of knowledge, between different cultural formations, and thus fall back on a cynical relativism. 12. For a thorough survey of Pakistan’s history, see Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan; Christina Lamb, Waiting for Allah. 13. For further discussion of Shame’s argument, see Timothy Bren214

NOTES TO PACES 131-137

nan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, the first book-length study of Rushdie’s oeuvre. See also Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie; D. C. Goonetilleke, Salman Rushdie. 14. Brennan goes so far as to say that Shame, in comparison to the earlier novel, “is simply meaner, seedier, a bad joke” (Salman Rushdie and the Third World 123). The title of Brennan’s chapter on Shame, “The Artist as Demagogue," encapsulates his disappointment with the novel and with the author’s sometimes strident argument. 15. M. D. Fletcher makes the interesting argument that Shame con¬ stitutes an “apologue”—a work that employs satire in order to produce a “formidable statement," which in this case deals with the misogyny of Pakistani culture. 16. In the West, interestingly, the original reviews and subsequent critical responses to the novel were quite positive. To generalize, Shame’s reception in the United States and England consisted of a devaluation of the political and a celebration of the satirical. For example, Robert Tow¬ ers notes in his influential review, “The political allegory may prove a stumbling block to those readers who prefer, more or less, to take their fiction pure, without recourse to history. My own feeling is that the mate¬ rial of Shame is sufficiently entertaining to stand pretty much on its own” (23). In a more thorough critical response, Linda Hutcheon attends to the novel’s quality of “historiographic metafiction,” arguing that a post¬ modern text does not consist merely of the play of surfaces and of pas¬ tiche but deals significantly with history and the problem of narrating historical events. But Hutcheon still fails to consider specifically the polit¬ ical valences of Shame, for she is most interested in its mode of formal experiment. 17. When Ahmad’s In Theory appeared, in 1992, it immediately sparked a vociferous debate. The journal Public Culture sponsored a forum for discussion, devoting an entire issue to responses to Ahmad (includ¬ ing his rebuttal). That issue, aside from its coverage of the political storm, is a revealing document of bruised egos and theoretical vituperation. One notes, with some dismay, the way in which Ahmad and others attempt to build intellectual reputations on the basis of name-calling. Both Edward Said and Fredric Jameson were asked to contribute, and both refused to go to the trouble of writing against Ahmad. Nor did Rushdie defend his novel against Ahmad’s specific charges. 18. Sara Suleri, in The Rhetoric of English India, also points to the ludi¬ crous narrative logic that guides the novel. Like Ahmad, she believes that the novel deploys too many “unlikely twists” and inventions, continually 215

NOTES TO PAGES 139-148

testing the credulity of its readers. Shame is thus Rushdie’s personal and grotesque fantasy; for Suleri, it is a literary exercise more damaging than the colonial fantasies of Kipling and Forster, the earlier British novelists she considers (178-79). 19. Maire ni Fhlathuin writes, “The outraged reaction to The Satanic Verses is a perfect example of‘the return of the subject,’ as the process of rewriting, interpreting and interrogating the author and his work is carried out by those who felt themselves subjects of his satiric inven¬ tion” (282). 20. Inderpal Grewal argues that Rushdie’s feminist project is wholly undermined by the fact that the narrator’s voice is the only one that is heard, and women’s voices are always refracted through his. Such a read¬ ing seems to ignore nontextual narratives like those constructed by Rani Harappa, Iskander’s suffering wife; she knits a series of eighteen shawls that depict her husband’s infidelity and excesses. Grewal writes that “the violence of Sufiya in Shame nurtures a distrust of any oppositional prac¬ tices engaged by women” (138). Her argument assumes that readers take the novel to be a realist one in which Sufiya’s violence is entirely repre¬ sentative of the full range of women’s political options. 21. As I have already mentioned, Linda Hutcheon argues that a text like Shame deploys “historiographic metafiction”—it interrogates the idea of consensus and disallows totalizing narratives. Such metafiction valorizes the provisional and the ex-centric, those narratives that subsist on the social and cultural periphery. This kind of postmodern text “inscribes and then undercuts both the autonomy of art and the referentiality of history in such a way that a new mode of questioning comes into being” (56). 22. Rushdie sees the relation between writer and reader as a wholly constructive and affirmative one. He writes, in defense of the novel form, “What is forged, in the secret act of reading, is a different kind of iden¬ tity, as the reader and writer merge, through the medium of the text, to become a collective being that both writes as it reads and reads as it writes, and creates, jointly, that unique work, ‘their’ novel. This ‘secret identity’ of writer and reader is the novel form’s greatest and most subversive gift” (“Is Nothing Sacred?” 426). But it is not clear why the act of read¬ ing and the joint identity of writer and reader must both be “secret.” What is hidden by this act? Is such a relationship always forged? Does not Rushdie suggest elsewhere that the novel is also a place for contention and debate—a place where reader and writer might diverge? These ques¬ tions Rushdie does not answer in arguing that free speech—and the novel, most centrally—are “sacred” and worth defending with one’s life. 21 6

NOTES TO PAGES 149-153

23. Frank Kermode writes, “Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd. This is testimony to its vitality, a vitality dependent upon its truth to the set of our fear and desire” (123-24). Kermode highlights the par¬ adoxical form-giving that lies in the act of representing destruction. Apoc¬ alypse is, as he puts it, “a permanent feature of a permanent literature of crisis” (124). 24. As Timothy Brennan has argued, Shame can be read on one level as a rewriting or even parody of the Qu’ran. The novel subverts hieratic speech, which forms the basis of the Qu’ran, challenging what Rushdie perceives to be the authoritarian impulse of the sacred text (Salman Rushdie and the Third World 124). I would add, however, that in the novel’s last explosive moment, the subversive irony dissipates, and Shame vir¬ tually becomes a secular version of the sacred text, tragically positing its own judgment and apocalypse. 25. He says, further, “What I have wished to say ... is that the point of view from which I have, all of my life, attempted this process of liter¬ ary renewal is the result not of the self-hating, deracinated Uncle-Tomism of which some have accused me, but precisely of my determination to create a literary language and literary forms which the experience of formerly colonized, still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expres¬ sion (“In Good Faith” 393). 26. Brennan comments usefully on the nature of misreading in the case of The Satanic Verses. He writes, “What catapulted the novel into a matter of state .. . were charges that relied on the public presumption of inadequacy in two types of reading communities. The first was an osten¬ sible misreading (or more often, nonreading) community of naive Islamic faithful—the ones who had had, it was said, the audacity to burn the book without reading it, without even being capable of savoring the joys of an ironic literary knowledge. The second—much more localized and second-stage set of commentaries—was a supposedly ill-informed com¬ munity of critics from the metropole who sought to comment on the affair without personally knowing Islam or the Islamic world" (“The Cul¬ tural Politics of Rushdie Criticism” 107). Brennan goes on to offer a way out of this war of interpretations. He seeks some way of reading the novel that is not a matter of being “for” or “against” it. 27. Aamir Mufti usefully argues that the novel is unique in its gar¬ nering of such a large and complicated public response. But, further, “the novel even requires [such a response]. ... the novel’s political project, visa-vis contemporary ‘Islam’—to intervene in the public political conver¬ sation within the Muslim world—required breaking out of the minuscule 217

NOTES TO PAGES 153-161

Anglophone audience to which the English language writer in South Asia is traditionally confined” (52). 28. A Japanese translator was murdered in July 1991. 29. See Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism, for a discussion of the collision of literature, politics, and religious identity. 30. In 1988-89, before the murder of the Japanese translator, Mus¬ lim protesters in both India and Pakistan were killed when police opened fire on them. 31. For Homi Bhabha, the novel powerfully complicates the idea of a national culture. Its central characters only ambivalently identify with a national past and a national language. It creates “a margin of the uncer¬ tainty of cultural meaning that may become the space for an agonistic minority position. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the repre¬ sentation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound per¬ plexity of the living” (The Location of Culture 167). 32. Sara Suleri has argued, “Rushdie performs a curious act of faith: he chooses disloyalty in order to dramatize his continuing obsession with the metaphors that Islam makes available to a postcolonial sensi¬ bility. .. . The author well knows that faith is obsolete to his discourse, but must struggle to explain why the betrayal of faith should be so nec¬ essary to an unbelieving, postmodern narrative” (“Contraband Histo¬ ries” 223). 33. Philip Engblom offers a Bakhtinian reading of the novel’s for¬ mal subversiveness, concluding, “It is in the fluidity, the unfinalizable openness of carnivalization and dialogicality that Rushdie himself finds the means to break out of the imperial containments of official, metro¬ politan, monologic versions of the Western novel” (303). 34. Rushdie’s cinematic inclinations go further. As Brennan remarks, “cinema [is] so often in his novels, but [it is] also o/them in the fast-cut¬ ting, blurry close-ups and the melodrama” (“The Cultural Politics of Rushdie Criticism” 115; emphasis in original).

4

The Momentary Pleasures of Reconciliation

1. The English word “life” does not quite capture the nuances of the Tamil word uyire. Therefore, in my translation of the song, I have used two words, “life” and “beloved.” Though awkward, such a transla¬ tion better approximates uyire as it is used in the lovers’ address. 2. Gupta also writes that the song is one of the ways “in which the popular film struggles to overcome the built-in naturalism of the cinema, 21 8

NOTES TO PAGES 163-169

and to bend this medium, developed in a western technological society, towards its own pre-industrial, mythical style of discourse” (59). I shall explore the tensions in Bombay between this kind of discourse and the discourses of modernity. 3. Chinanda Das Gupta writes, “Minorities are not altogether absent from popular film, but are invariably shown as lone do-gooders without family ties so that the problem of daily social interaction between fami¬ lies, fraught with the risk of fall from the moorings of caste, religion, language, region etc., [does] not have to be faced” (271). Bombay deals squarely with the issue of the conflict between families, Hindu and Mus¬ lim; but, as I will elaborate, the film’s idealized version of family is one with no religious, linguistic, or regional affiliation whatsoever. 4. Referring to the controversy surrounding films like Bombay and Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, which seek to address "topical themes,” Khalid Mohamed argues that in the film industry, “there has been a long¬ standing tradition to reject the bold and the adventurous in favour of the conventional and the gutless. No wonder political cinema or films that deal with topical issues that affect us all [have] never been on the filmmaker’s priority list. As matters stand today, they never will [be]. The slight¬ est sign of dissent or even objective description ignites backlash. Since film-making is expensive business, the tendency is to play safe rather than risk acrimonious opposition and with it, financial bankruptcy” (13). I intend to consider the ways in which Maniratnam’s films take certain political risks while also playing it safe. 5. As Sara Dickey explains, “When I first went to Madurai, I believed that cinema’s popularity would make it easy to get people to talk about films and filmgoing. It quickly became apparent, however, that for all its popularity cinema does not enjoy unequivocal support, even among its most frequent viewers. Many say it undermines traditional values, and even those who go most often and praise favorite stars most vociferously among friends may not admit their passion to others for fear of social censure. Viewers praise actors and actresses one moment and malign their morals the next. Filmmakers who have made fortunes from audi¬ ences disparage viewers’ prurient tastes” (6). 6. Ashis Nandy writes of the cinema that popular film “has to be, to the extent possible, everything to everyone. It has to cut across the myr¬ iad ethnicities and lifestyles of India and even of the world that impinges on India. The popular film is low-brow, modernizing India in all its com¬ plexity, sophistry, naivete, and vulgarity” (7). 7. Madhava Prasad has explored in detail the prohibition of kissing, 219

NOTES TO PACES 170-172

arguing that it is caught up in popular film’s contradictory desire for and disavowal of modernity. 8. See the introduction to Sara Dickey’s study for a complete dis¬ cussion of these statistics. 9. S. Theodore Baskaran, summarizing the clout of the film indus¬ try, writes, “Over the seventy-nine years of its existence, Tamil cinema has grown to become the most domineering influence in cultural and political life of Tamil Nadu” (i). 10. But Fredric Jameson provides a framework through which we can consider the political valences of modernist texts and products of mass culture. He suggests that modernism reacts against repetition (and familiarity) while products of mass culture, including film, thrive on rep¬ etition and the generic signaling that accompanies it. He goes on to insist that both modernism and mass culture attempt to repress social anxi¬ eties; modernist texts provide “compensatory structures” through a par¬ ticular aesthetics of individual consciousness, and mass culture constructs models of social harmony. Thus both a modernist novel and a popular film “have as their underlying impulse—albeit in what is often distorted and repressed unconscious form—our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived” (Signatures of the Visible 34). As must be plain from my analysis thus far, I do not agree with Jameson’s assertion that modernism and mass culture repress social anxieties, but I do believe that they both possess the kind of utopian impulse he describes. 11. Rosie Thomas was among the first critics to warn against the easy dismissal of Indian popular cinema as escapist. She argues that critics need to begin to consider cinema on its own terms. Touching on Hindi-language film, she says that the movies bring “vast’ pleasure to large audiences: “The spectator is addressed and moved through the films primarily via affect, although this is structured and contained by narratives whose power and insistence derives from their very familiarity, coupled with the fact that they are deeply rooted (in the psyche and in traditional mythology)” (130). 12. Arjun Appadurai speaks productively of the potentialities inher¬ ent in “imagination.” He seeks to reverse the thinking propounded by the Frankfurt School, which insists that mass culture (and the industrial capitalism that undergirds it) stultifies its audiences and acts as a kind of opiate. Appadurai argues that “where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency” (7). Here he also makes a distinction between imagination and fantasy: “The imagina¬ tion . . . has a projective sense about it, the sense of being a prelude to 220

NOTES TO PAGES 172-173

some sort of expression, whether aesthetic or otherwise. Fantasy can dis¬ sipate (because its logic is so often autotelic), but the imagination, espe¬ cially when collective, can become the fuel for action. It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neighborhood and nation¬ hood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape” (7). It is certainly possible that Appadurai over¬ states the agency actually afforded by popular cinema, but his optimistic rendering of the imagination is worth celebrating. 13. A. V. Rajagopal, surveying Tamil cinema from the 1930s onward, writes of the terrible drought that followed the golden period (the 1950s and 1960s). Then he adds, in a bit of uncritical praise, “One redeeming feature in all this depressing scenario, however, is the emergence of Maniratnam as one of the great directors of our times. Unlike many other of his clan who have earned a name and a fame in the Tamil film industry and ended just there, Maniratnam’s works have transcended all barriers of language and territory” (115). Another survey, the glossy and highly entertaining history of Indian film So Many Cinemas, equates Manirat¬ nam’s importance in contemporary cinema with his ability to stir up con¬ troversy (Garga 290). 14. The province of Kashmir, considered one of the most naturally stunning places in the world, has been the source of heated dispute between India and Pakistan from Partition onward. In 1947 the fate of Kashmir was uncertain. A vocal portion of the predominantly Muslim population of Kashmir demanded to join Pakistan. The reigning maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, a Hindu, resisted these demands. Pakistan subsequently invaded the province, after which the maharaja decided to sign the Instru¬ ment of Accession to the Indian Union. Prime Minster Nehru of India sent troops to Kashmir, and Pakistan's’ forces were pushed back. The United Nations helped broker a cease-fire agreement in January 1949. The United Nations’ efforts to have troops withdrawn and to organize a popular vote for self-determination have continued to be unsuccessful. Significant clashes between India and Pakistan broke out in 1965 and again in 1971. The Kashmiri separatist movement reemerged in 1989, and India increased its troop deployment in the region. Beginning in early 1990, tensions increased sharply, with violent clashes between Indian troops and proseparatist groups. India continues to claim that Pakistan has been secretly training terrorist cadres to destabilize the region. Pak¬ istan maintains that India wields authoritarian and illegitimate power over the province. 221

NOTES TO PAGES 175-177

15. Alongside Bharucha’s critique of Roja I would place an interest¬ ing historiographic claim by Gyanendra Pandey. In an article about mil¬ itant Hinduism he remarks that “nationalist discourse, and with it what is called communal discourse in India is always political—however much it pretends to speak in the ‘non-political’ language of religion and community (or naturalness)” (“Which of Us Are Hindus?” 268). I agree quite wholeheartedly with Pandey but hasten to add that such national¬ ist discourse is never straightforward or univocal. It is often contradic¬ tory, and our attempts to analyze such discourse, either in the political realm or in popular culture, must take that ambivalence into account. 16. I take this definition of Hindutva from Peter van der Veer’s study of communal conflict, Religious Nationalism. Van der Veer quotes V. D. Savarkar, the Hindu nationalist leader of the early decades of the twen¬ tieth century: “A Hindu means a person who regards this land of Bharat Varsha, from the Indus to the Seas, as his Father-Land as well as his HolyLand that is the cradle of his religion” (1). The argument that Roja feeds into the agenda of Hindutva is most forcefully espoused by Tejaswini Niranjana, who suggests that the film tacitly supports the view that Indian citizens must “integrate into . . . the hegemonic Hindu nation, and all the groups which are out of the ‘mainstream’ are said to engage in vio¬ lent activity intended to destroy the nation” (80). But in fact Roja does not “speak” so univocally, and even if it did, we cannot simply assume that its viewers take such a message at its face value. 17. In his classic essay on film musicals as entertainment, Richard Dyer claims, “To be effective, the utopian sensibility has to take off from the real experiences of the audience. Yet to do this, to draw attention to the gap between what is and what could be, is, ideologically speaking, playing with fire. What musicals have to do, then (not through any con¬ spiratorial intent, but because it is always easier to take the line of least resistance, i.e., to fit in with the prevailing norms), is to work through these contradictions at all levels in such a way as to ‘manage’ them, to make them seem to disappear. They don’t always succeed” (229). 18. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckinridge employ the phrase “zone of debate” in their introduction to Consuming Modernity, a volume that treats elements of public culture in South Asia. They further define pub¬ lic culture as “the space between domestic life and the projects of the nation-state—where different social groups (classes, ethnic groups, gen¬ ders) constitute their identities by their experience of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday life. . . . This zone of contestation and mutual cannibalization—in which national, mass, and folk culture 222

NOTES TO PAGES 178-183

provide both mill and grist for one another—is at the very heart of pub¬ lic modernity in India" (4-5). 19. In his critique of Roja, Ravi Vasudevan describes the consumerist desires at the heart of popular cinema: "The song montage of‘Chhoti si aasha’ [the Hindi translation of the Tamil ‘Chinna Chinna Assai’] plays with exactly this range of desire and choices and then displaces the vari¬ ety of reference points into a female energy centered around conjugal¬ ity and nationhood” (“Other Voices” 47). But Vasudevan does add that the agency of the consumer and the potentially subversive aspects of con¬ sumerism should not be dismissed. 20. In the same interview, Maniratnam makes a rather revealing claim about national feeling: “There is no need to feel insecure about Indianness. If you have it, and love it, you will not lose it. This feeling of belong¬ ing is like belonging to a home. To feel patriotism for your country is like caring for someone you love” (Ganguly 72). Thus he equates patri¬ otism not only with domesticity but with a kind of familial love. 21. Aijaz Ahmad describes the BJP’s actions in Ayodhya as a “stag¬ ing of a fascist spectacle and an attack on the Indian constitution.” He makes a distinction between Indian and European fascism, suggesting that the latter “speaks rarely of the economic instance and fashions its ideological discourse along categories of‘nation’ and ‘community,’ seek¬ ing to obtain an identity between these two categories . . . through the methodical use of violence as a political instrumentality” (“Radicalism of the Right and Logics of Secularism” 37). Victoria Farmer has analyzed the ways in which Hindu nationalists have appropriated imagery from popular culture to create “a shared symbolic lexicon around which polit¬ ical forces could mobilize communarpractice” (102). She points to the phenomenally popular television serials The Ramayana and The Mahabharat. Similarly, Fareed Kazmi (14-16) describes the savvy BJP tactic of employing a team of lyricists who wrote popular music with political themes that lent credibility to the party. 22. Peter van der Veer productively describes the way in which reli¬ gious nationalism cannot be so easily defined or explained by Western conceptions of the nation. He believes that it is modernity itself which is contested by religious nationalism. Further, this kind of nationalism relies on a symbolic and privileged sense of space; hence the crisis in Ayodhya: “Sacred centers are the foci of religious identity. They are the places on the surface of the earth that express most clearly a relation between cosmology and private experience. A journey to one of these centers is a discovery of one’s identity in relation to the other world and 223

NOTES TO PACES 183-185

to the community of believers—a ritual construction of self that not only integrates the believers but also places a symbolic boundary between them and ‘outsiders’” (Religious Nationalism n). 23. Ashis Nandy has offered the most forceful intellectual critique of secularism in South Asia, declaring that secularism is “ethnophobic” and, far from being a philosophy of tolerance, attempts to use the state to contain religion. In this way, it is modern secularism that has permit¬ ted the rise of violent religious nationalism and ideologically charged faith (“The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance”

71-73)24. The Indian Film Censor Board’s insistence on cuts in the film occasioned great deliberation about censorship in India. Ravi Vasudevan describes the actions of the board in reshaping the final version of the film: “It would seem that the censors operated through a mixture of considerations regarding the film’s portrayal of the state, its impact on diplomatic relations and on the sentiments of the Muslim community.... Thus the cutting of references to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and ‘Islamic state’ must be related to diplomatic prohibitions. .. . The suggestion is that the depiction of certain incendiary anti-Muslim rhetoric and actions might inflame passions, presumably of the Muslims rather than of the Hin¬ dus” (“Bombay and Its Public” 53). Vasudevan goes on to describes some cuts in detail, suggesting that the excisions confused the logic of the film’s narrative. 25. Nehru also writes, in The Discovery of India, “India must there¬ fore lessen her religiosity and turn to science. She must get rid of the exclusiveness in thought and social habit which has become like a prison to her, stunting her spirit and preventing her growth. The idea of ceremonial purity has erected barriers against social intercourse and nar¬ rowed the sphere of social action” (447). These words, written three years before Independence, summarize some of the crucial views that under¬ pinned the rationalist statism which characterized his time in national office. 26. Vasudevan writes of Maniratnam’s heroes, “Although Roja and Bombay solicit quite different sentiments, both arise from a similar sub¬ jectivity: that of a hero presented with the characteristic notations of pro¬ fessional identity, cosmopolitanism, ideological humanism, rationalism, and the marginalization of religion,” and he describes one distinction between the films: “In Bombay, the hero finds himself stranded on the margins of a social space inundated with genocidal identity conflicts in which he is ultimately pitted against Hindus. Alienation from the Mus224

NOTES TO PACE 188

lim other is here subordinated to alienation from a self which has been left behind” (“Bombay and Its Public” 62-63). Incidentally, in both films the hero is played by the same actor, Arvindswamy. 27. As Vasudevan argues of the film, “Apparently contrary to the ori¬ entation of the narrative to the modern, in its basic understanding of cul¬ tural difference the film lies squarely within the dominant representation of communal relations in Indian cinema and popular narrative” (“ Bom¬ bay and Its Public” 47). For other such critiques, see Chitra Padmanabhan, “ ‘Money’ Ratnam Walks the Razor’s Edge to Sell in a Communal Market,”; Namrata Joshi, “The Film Represents Reality!”

225

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237

INDEX

abduction and violence, 94-101

111—15; in modem literature,

activist scholarship, 13, 32-38, 53,

217H.23; in Shame, 148-51

203^15. See also archive

Appadurai, Arjun, 156,

Adorno, Theodor, 44, 209mo Advani, L. K., 173

220-2IHI2,

archive, 33-34, 53, 91-93, 203145,

Ahmad, Aijaz, 125, 135-39, :43’

206-7*11. See also activist

202-3^14, 215(^17, 2231^21 Ahmedabad violence, 194

222-23m8

scholarship Assembly of the Men of Good

Aiyar, S. S. A., 189

Taste, 86

Ali, Ahmed, 83

Auerbach, Erich, 115-16

Anandamath (Chatterjee), 42-43,

Ayodhya riots, 183,187,

44, 45-46, 203-4/^7

223-24)W2I-22

Anderson, Benedict, 212 n2 Another Lonely Voice . . . (Flem¬

“Bande Mataram,” 43

ming), 83

Bashir, 181,182, 187

Ansari, Qutabuddin Nasruddin,

Baskaran, S. Theodore, 22ong

194,196, 199-200

Baucom, Ian, 155

apocalypse: in Manto’s work,

Beardsley, Monroe C., 134-35

238

INDEX

Beghair Unwan Ke (Manto),

censorship: cinema, 168,169,

2iini9

219-20717, 2247124; Manto’s

belonging, Maniratnam’s state¬

trial, 112; Rushdie Affair,

ment, 2237120

151-53, 2177126, 2187128,

belonging/unbelonging, in

717130-33

Manto’s work, 81, 87-92,

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 37

93-94,

Chakravarty, Sumita S., 168-69,

IOO-IOI

Benjamin, Walter, 66,196

175, 201711

Berger, John, 192

Chamcha, Saladin, 154

Bersani, Leo, 31-32, 48-49

Chander, Krishan, 210-117116

Bhabha, Homi, 19-20, 89,156,

Chatterj ee, Bankimchandra,

184-85, 2187131

42-43, 45-46

Bhalla, Alok, 207712

Chatterjee, Partha, 203-4717

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 183,

“China Chinna Assai,” 173-74,

2237121

178, 2237119

Bharucha, Rustom, 173, 175

cinema: about Rushdie, 158; cen¬

Bhasin, Kamla, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80

sorship, 168,169, 219-20717,

Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 130,146

2247124; historical highlights,

“Black Margins” (Manto), 104-10,

166-69, 2217113; minorities in, 163, 219713; Mohamed’s

2107115 blood and borders, 46-47

criticism, 219714; popular

Bollywood. See cinema

ambivalence, 166-67,168-

Bombay (Maniratnam), 161-66,

69, 219715; regional compar¬

171,180-91, 2247124,

isons, 170-72, 220719; in

717126-27

Satanic Verses, 155-56, 2187134; spectator roles, 165,171-72,

Bomma, 39

^'190-91, 220—21717111-12.

Booker, M. Keith, 213717

See also Maniratnam entries

border intellectuals, 2147110.

citizenship, in Bombay, 163-64

See also exile works (generally)

citizen-writer dilemma, Ghosh

Breckinridge, Carol, 222-237118

on, 28-30, 40-41. See also

Brennan, Timothy, 213716,

representation entries

2157114, 2177124,7126, 2187133 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 52

Clifford, James, 38

Brooks, Peter, 14,179,187, 191

“Cold Meat” (Manto), 76,111-15, 2117120

Brown, Wendy, 19

collective amnesia, 16,109-10

Butalia, Urvashi, 78, 94-95

collective memory with stipulation, Cape, Jonathan, 61

!5 comedic representation, 145-46

Caruth, Cathy, 55

239

INDEX communalism, defined, io-ii

epistemological suffering, 52,

compensation and decompensa¬ tion, 6,31-32

2061116 ethics: of reading and writing, 15; and suffering, 4-5

complicity by writing, 26-27. See also representation entries Conrad, Joseph, 204119

“Exile” (Hashmi), 2101113 exile works (generally), 2051112, 20911119-10, 213115,

consumerism and cinema,

214111110-11. See also belong¬

223UI9

controversy, 15-16

ing/unbelonging, in Manto’s

“corrective vision,” 32

work; migration/migrant

critical event, defined, 25

sensibility

cultural technologies and suffer¬ ing, 11-12

Faiz, Ahmad Faiz, 25 Farishta, Gibreel, 154-56

Daniel, E. Valentine, 71-72

Farmer, Victoria, 2231121

Das, Veena, 25, 33-36, 53, 90, 95,

Felman, Shoshana, 7,12,198-99

96, 203116, 2061116

Fhlathuin, Maire ni, 213114,

death, representation’s paradox, 52-53, 63

2161119 A Fine Balance (Mistry), 17, 31-32,

decompensation: and Bombay film, 188; and compensation,

61-70 flag-burning scene in Roja, 174,

6, 31-32; defined, 5-6; Ghosh’s

176,178

narrator, 49-61; in Manto’s

Flemming, Leslie, 83,112, 208116

endings, 115; and representa¬

Fletcher, M. D., 2151115

tion, 71; in Shame, 148-49

Foley, Barbara, 81-82,102-4,

The Delhi Riots, 66-67 desire and suffering, in Shadow Lines, 54-61 Devi, Mahasweta, 209-10112

108, IIO-II, 121-22 Forster, E. M., 97,100 fractured fantasies, 176-78 fragment narrative, 28, 36-37,

Dickey, Sara, 171-72, 219115

109

Dilal, Dina, 62, 66, 70

Francisco, Jason, 80

Discovery of India (Nehru), 2-4, 5,

Freud, Sigmund, 89,100-101

2omni-2, 2241125 Dravida Kazhagam Party (DMK),

Gandhi, Indira: assassination

170

of, 13, 23, 25, 70-71, 77-78;

Dyer, Richard, 2221117

in Ghosh’s work, 46, 50; in Manto’s work, 105; in Mistry’s

emasculation, 69

work, 61, 62, 68-70; rule

Engblom, Philip, 2181133

characterized, 24-25; in

Engineer, Asghar Ali, 203115

Rushdie’s work, 61, 70-71 240

INDEX Gandhi, Mahatma, 77-78, 105

Ila, 41-42, 43, 47, 55-57,

Gandhi, Rajiv, 153

The Illustrated Weekly of India, 24

Gandhi, Sanjay, 61, 69

imagining and experiencing: cin¬

59

genre, 18-19

ema, 220-21H1111-12; narrator

Ghosh, Amitav: and I. Gandhi’s

in Shadow Lines, 41-45, 48

assassination, 26; on writer-

In an Antique Land (Ghosh),

citizen dilemma, 28-30

38-39, 204-51111

Ghosh, Amitav (stories/novels):

“Inside the Whale” (Orwell),

In an Antique Land, 38-39,

127-28

204-51111; “Ghosts of Mrs.

intentionality, 14-15,102-4. See

Ghandi,” 28-29, 40-41. See

also representation; sincerity

also Shadow Lines (Ghosh)

International Guerrillas, 158

“The Ghosts of Mrs. Ghandi”

In Theory (Ahmad), 135-36,

(Ghosh), 28-29, 40-41

2151117

Gibreel Farishta, 154-56

intransitive writing, 7

Gilmartin, David, 88

“Invitation to Action” (Manto),

Godhra riots, 193-97

107-9

Goodwin, Sarah Webster, 52

irony, 9, 49-50, 54,144-45, *5°

Gopal, Priyamvada, 2ii-i2n2i

Ishvar (in A Fine Balance), 62,

gray zone, Levi’s, 6-7

63, 69

Grewal, Inderpal, 2i6n20

Ishwar Singh (in “Cold Meat"),

Gujarat violence, 193-97

76, in-12, 113-14

Gupta, Chinanda Das, 161,

“I Swear It” (Manto), 77

218-1911112-3 Jalal, Shahid, 112 Hanson, Clare, 209119

Jameson, Fredric, 6,171, 188,

Harappa, Iskander, 130,145-46

' ”202)13, 207-8113, 2151117,

Harappa, Rani, 2i6n20

2201110

Hasan, Khalid, 208)15, 2111117

JanMohammed, Abdul, 2141110

Hashmi, Jamila, 2101113

Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 88

Hindutva, defined, 176, 222ni6

Joshi, Shashi, 81

historiographic metafictions,

Joyce, James, 44, 48

202112, 2161121 Holocaust, 6-7

Kalwant Kaur, m-12,113-14

hope vs. apocalypse, Manto’s

Kaplan, Caren, 2051112 Kashmir conflicts, 2211114. See

work, m-15

also Roja

Hussain, Intizar, 208-9118

Kaul, A. N., 205-61114

Hutcheon, Linda, 202112, 2151115,

Kaul, Suvir, 56, 79, 205-61114

2161121

Kaur, Kalwant, 111-12, 1x3-14

Hyder, Raza, 129-30, 145-46 241

I N DEX

Kazmi, Fareed, 2231121

101, 2091110; as literary hero,

Kermode, Frank, 16, 83,115,

no, 2111117; on literature, 114; on Nehru, 2111119; obscenity

2171123 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 120

trial, 112; political detachment,

kissing prohibition, cinema, 169,

no, 2111118; and Progressives, 83-86,108; Rushdie on, 86-

219-20117

87; stories characterized, 17,

Kleinman, Arthur, 20-21, 30, 68,

76, 81-83, no-11,116,123

105-6,190,197

Manto, Saadat Hasan (stories of):

Kleinman, Jean, 68, 190, 197 Koves, Margit, 2101115

Beghair Unwan Ke, 211 nig;

Kumar, Rishi, 173-74

“Black Margins,” 104-10, 2101115; “Cold Meat,” 76, in-

LaCapra, Dominick, 8,14, 201112

15, 2111120; “Invitation to

Lahore asylum, 87-94

Action,” 107-9; “I Swear It,”

Lamb, Dori, 7,12,199

77; “Odor,” 84; “Open It,”

Laquiat, 174,175,176

95-101; “Out of Considera¬

Levi, Primo, 6-7

tion,” 106; “Toba Tek Singh,”

Levinson, Marjorie, 137

82, 87-94,104i Yazid, 105,

London riots, 155

108

Ludden, David, 10

margins, 20-21, 29, 30,105-6

Lukacs, Georg, 45, 64

mass culture vs. modernism,

Lumiere brothers, 167

Jameson’s framework, 2201110 mediazation of suffering, 190,

Maneck, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67-68, 69, 70

197 melodrama, 14, 162,179-80,

Maniratnam: on belonging,

187-88

2231120; films characterized,

Menon, Ritu, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80

18,164; on his films, 178;

metaphor, 50-51, 66, 85, 88-89,

political relationships, 173;

97

Rajagopal on, 2211113; violence

middle voice, 8

against, 164

Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 61,

Maniratnam (films of): Bombay, 161-66,171,180-91, 2241124,

128, 131 migration/migrant sensibility,

111126-27; Roja, 164,166,170-

19-20, 47-48, 93-94, 124-

71,172-80

25,127

Mann, Harveen, 97,113, 209-101112

Miller, J. Hillis, 144 mimetic contract, 102-4, 107-8,

Manto, Saadat Hasan: critics

121-22

on, 20811115-6, 210111114-15,

Mistry, Rohinton, 17, 31-32,

2111117, 212-131121; on exile,

61-70 242

I N DEX

Mitchell, W. J. T., n, 27

“Odor” (Manto), 84

Mohamed, Khalid, 219/14

Om, 62, 63, 64-65, 69

moral fatigue, 68,198-99

Omar Khayyam Shakil, 129,

morality vs. realism in cinema,

143-44, 146, 148-50

168-69

“Open It” (Manto), 95-101

moralizing, 82, 208/14

Orwell, George, 127-28, 211/117,

Morris, David, 206/115

213-14/18

Mouna Ragam (Maniratnam),

“Out of Consideration” (Manto),

172

106

Mufti, Aamir, 217-18/127 Mumbai, in Mistry’s work, 63-

Pandey, Gyanendra (writing on):

65, 68-69

aberrational perspective of violence, 54; archive, 53, 91-

Nandy, Ashis, 2i9n6, 224/123

92, 93, 206-7/11; fragment

Nandy, Pritish, 24, 25-26

narrative, 36-37; M. Gandhi’s

Narang, Gopi Chand, 210/114

assassination, 77; national

Narayan (in A Fine Balance), 63

discourse, 222/115; percep¬

Narayan (in Bombay), 181,182,

tions of Partition, 16, 83,109;

187

“reality” of riots, 77; repre¬

narrator, in Ghosh’s Shadow Lines: character relationships, 41-

sentation and responsibility, 27-28

42, 46-47; cultural crossings,

Partition: described, 75-77; fiction

42-47; desire and suffering,

generally, 208-9/17-8; in

54-61; dilemma of, 16-17,

Manto’s work, 81-83, 87-93;

30-31, 123; imagining and

personal narratives, 78-79;

experiencing, 48-50; Rajan’s

short fictions generally, 80,