Identity Formation, Polarization and The Shadow Lines

 

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (henceforth TSL) is a very strong and clear critique of the shadow lines that divide humanity – geographically and at heart. It does so very subtly and artfully. India’s partition was the beginning of the chain of deterministically linked events whose sphere of influence had a radius of more than just a few decades or a few thousand miles. There are many ways in which the arbitrariness of the creation of frontiers that contain the modern nation states is laid bare in the novel. Moreover, the underlying principle of the two nations theory that resulted into the partition of India is challenged.

The rise and development of communalism at any place, along with the role it plays in an individual’s self-recognition and respect is a very complex phenomenon. TSLshows how the partition of Bengal drove Hindus away from East Bengal and Muslims from even up to Bihar just because of a cruel joke of their fate. Jethamoshai and the Muslim mechanic’s father resisted all attempts at identity revision through indoctrination in the name of communalism and stayed exactly where they had spent the largest part of their lives. But then, they were very strongly indoctrinated in their own way and their old identity acted as an antidote to the invading variety.

Hindus and Muslims as two distinct and different categories, nay totally antagonistic entities, were “created” in the modern times. In the past, the identities of people came naturally through their immediate geographical and human environment, and not through the imagined categories of nationality or religion. People had roots in the soil of their places, that they had been inhabiting for generations. For them, those who belonged to the “us” category were generally those with whom they shared their present and past – the people around whom they had grown up. Then the ties were more local in nature and also more immediate and tangible. As Anderson puts it, nations – the imagined communities – were artificially created in the modern times.

From Al Biruni to Jinnah, it has been asserted that Hindus and Muslims are two distinct, even antipodal, identities. The line of thought existed from the beginning of their communal contiguity and bore fruits in the form of partition. The very process of an individual’s identity formation was coloured from the base. Through an unprecedented demagogic effort of colossal proportions religion and aggressive defense of the same were linked to the very identity of an individual as a highly desirable trait. The narrator of TSL obliquely points towards the importance of an elemental kind of power to unleash the inner violent animal as a kind of boon. He admires Robi because he is the unacknowledged king of the campus, also because “ while they had to find their way through a fog of ordinary confusions … he … was wiling to defend those inconvenient, often ridiculous, scruples which they could only too easily be persuaded to forget. That was why they, and I, both admired and feared him” (TSL 51).

Robi’s strong defense of his position without any hesitation, when compared to the weakness of will and resolve of those who admired his will, reveals a curious and nearly universal social phenomenon. Human beings have an instinct, like that of many other mammals, by which they recognize alpha males and then follow his lead. It is evolutionarily programmed and increases the chances of the survival of the species. The alpha male has some acknowledged superiority over others – something that makes others fear and respect him and look at him as a natural leader in times of need. In normal times social transactions that involve the acceptance of leader in times of need. In normal times, social transactions that involve the acceptance of leader-follower position take place within boundaries created by rational thought and the characteristics needed to be chosen as a leader fall in the realm of what is seen as cultivated behavior.

Therefore, social/intellectual skills learnt in the process of growing up in the society decide one’s position as a leader. In the times governed by irrationality or in the circles whose main logic is arbitrariness, the social/intellectual skills are substituted with the very fundamental kind of physical power and one’s capacity and willingness to use that power. In other words, the capacity for violent action determines one’s acceptance as an alpha male in the group. Their power is directly proportional to the actual damage they are believed to be capable of doing to the system and their level of ferociousness is inversely proportional to their rational control over their own self. In fact, they flaunt their irrationality and accentuate the traits of ferociousness through which they define themselves, differentiate their identity from that of others and assert their superiority and direct hegemony.

Their position is never permanent as there’s always a possibility of the rise of someone else to their position or of the group’s rejecting their claims to superiority. Yet, for the span in which they command, their position is unassailable. In a given social dynamics, such persons also happen to be those who get the backing and support of the political and economic edifice of the society,as the elite needs to keep them under their indirect control most of the times and under direct control in times of crisis when they actually need to unleash the power of violence upon the society. The history of riots in post-partition India indicates that such elements and their nexus with the elite play important role in either starting communal riots or blowing them out of proportion.

Communal riots are planned in the Indian subcontinent. It’s a very dangerous and sweeping kind of a generalization, and I am fully aware of the possible existence of many very strong exceptions. Yet, until I assert: communal riots are planned events. Aligarh, Varanasi, Delhi, Garhmukteshwar, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, the Punjab – in “n” number of cases, it has been proven beyond any doubt – riots are planned and executed with a precision and focus that surgeons show in an operation theatre. The exact mechanism of the process leading to the massacre of tens, hundreds, thousands … millions of people may vary, but there always is a mechanism. Without a perfected mechanism it becomes impossible to damage the society at such a large scale. The planner of riots get success because the pattern is decentralized and self-propagating. Train to Pakistan is always mirrored in train to India, both full of corpses. Narrations of arson and killing of Hindus find echo in those perpetrated upon Muslims. Performed in cold blood, not at all for religion or revenge, such mirrorings are nothing but planned.

The abnormality of the violence of the normal people lies precisely in its being there, more so, in case of the forms of large scale violence. Communal violence may be seen as polarization based on religion but it is never simply so. Politics and economics are almost always involved with religion. An incident of the theft of the Prophet’s relics was first politicized and then transported to the other side of the subcontinent to finally being used for the economic gains of the powerful: all in the name of religion. In TSL the motorcycle mechanic wants Ukil Babu out of the equation, so that he can have the whole house under his control. The common people and thoroughfare suddenly turn hostile. Robi finds “trouble” for which he had been on a look out since morning. The heightened emotional state of the rioting mob was planned as they had been waiting for the car they had planned to ambush. A similar state is visible in case of those who’s attacked the narrator’s school bus in Calcutta. In the simplistic way of thinking, acts of atrocity are attributed to communities as such, without any kind of discrimination regarding those who were involved and responsible for it and those the majority that was not. A common Hindu or Muslim does not suddenly turns violent, at least, not commonly. There are key persons who plan riots with the people linked to them to execute the plan. Thus, riots follow a pattern and their success depends on either the failure of the government machinery or its passive/ active involvement in them.

The failure of the administrative machinery originates from the very nature of the system. The Indian police force and administrative system aren’t grass-root type. Their basic function is to act on the basis of the information received after the event has taken place. Although informants are there and they do provide prior warning and indications, preemptive action has never been the forte of the Indian system of administration. Moreover, the active involvement of some arms of the forces has been proven in many cases. In the novel too, the rioters are shown to converge at the point of action in a silent and methodical manner, and the police is never shown intervening in any way. This definitely puts a big question mark in front of the very idea of humanness in its essence as being a definite and positive, or even an existent, thing.

Liberal humanism sees the essence of human nature: something universally and definitely present in human beings without any exceptions. If it is true, divisions on any basis must be fundamentally unjustified. The two nations theory would fall flat. Many years before postmodernism started challenging essentializing grand narratives, there was a large body of thinkers doing the thing in a similar manner, drawing arsenal from history and philosophy alike, along with from theology. Muslims and Hindus were portrayed by some as culturally mutually exclusive categories. They had lived for over a millennium sharing the same geographical space. Those who wanted to prove the universality of something like human nature wrong emphasized how their religious practices, social institutions and customs and historical orientation were distinctly different. The human subject was substituted with the Muslim/Hindu/Sikh subject. Thus they created a fragmented metanarrative (and not many mini narratives) with each fragment essentialized and presumed to be unquestionably homogeneous. Against the monolithic and the fragmented metanarratives stood the mini narratives of regional affiliations – each claiming its independent validity. “Everyone lives in a story… because stories are all there are to live in, it was just the question of which one you choose” (TSL 118).

A story is not always fictitious. Nevertheless, it bears the cross of fictitiousness. Otherwise, there’d be no need to add a qualifier before it as in “the true story of his life”. The truth quotient (TQ) of a story notwithstanding, narratives, that too, episodic ones, are what we remember of our own life and that of the other people’s. The mind looks at the drama enacted on the stage of the world and stores images and impressions to make sense of the whole thing after arranging it in some sort of pattern for later recollection. The pattern is of narratives. These narratives keep maturing with time and addition or deletion of details keeps being done. Stories are very real and they perform the function of storing data for quick retrieval. Moreover, the events, things and people receive colouring and get filtered with the passage of time. A coherent version of “truth” is formed in the process. It has its own TQ and is independent of what had really or originally happened. Past lives in stories only. So does future, and the present time is so fleeting that its slippage into the past is just a matter of moments. Thus, it is stories we live in, either our own or that of other people.

Finally, the metanarratives proved more powerful and Pakistan was created as a Muslim state and India emerged as a secular body. Both engulfed all mini narratives. Sixty-five years after independence/partition, both unitary and two nations theories stand belied and belittled by the harsh realities of internal colonization of the subaltern by the elite. The ideal of a multicultural spectrum has been challenged by one colour fighting the others in order to engulf the whole range and to convert the spectrum into a monochrome. It calls for a validity and veracity check of a multi-nation theory that’d replace the inadequate two nations theory and annihilate all universalizing claims of liberal humanism. The time has come, not to see whether the two nations theory was right or wrong, but to analyse whether it had courage enough to call for a full disintegration of all megaliths in favour of region/caste/class/tribe/language based group.

 

References:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006. Print.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. Web. n.d. Scribd.com. 12 October 2012. Pdf. [TSL in the text.]

 

 

Heteroganeity, the Two Nations and The Shadow Lines

Academically oriented non-populist kind of writing needn’t always be boring and impersonal, contrary to what Q had prescribed nearly a century ago in his guidebook on style. “I” may transgress its boundaries and enter the scholarly discourse meant for an exclusive and elite clientele: the scholars in any specific field. All this, without totally sacrificing the apparent objective and the non-narrative nature of what is generally and normally accepted as a scholarly article. The article that aims at and claims to have a disinterested safe distance from “I”, is actually radiating from it. More the reason to embrace it wholeheartedly and letting it enter the discourse. Therefore, “I” has sailed the sea of doubts and come to the core of the I-dentity expression problem in scholarly discourse and I write on Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (henceforth TSL), while relating my article to the idea of nation and to its meaning emerging out of the volcano of the violence of 1947 and afterward in the Indian subcontinent.

I grew up in quite non-Wordsworthian, densely packed and populated localities (called the mohallas) of the Varanasi riverbank. Our mohalla and the neighbouring ones were blessed (or cursed) with a very heterogeneous communal constitution. My grand-paternal house is in a lane that has a purely, and for its inhabitants proudly so, Hindu population till date . The lane that runs parallel to it and the two lanes that follow, are purely Muslim populated. Long years of co-existence in a competitive decade (I can’t go beyond my personal experience, in order to avoid errors and to stay close to “I”) had given rise to a very ambiguous and confusing kind of a Janus like friend-foe relationship with an equal proportion of both the antagonist feelings in a very dangerous kind of equilibrium. The fear, or paranoia, of death in the hands of the “Other” was always overhead, dangling with the thread of provisional normalcy. I found it to be firmly founded: the fear, not normalcy, in a system of citizen protection that nobody trusted. I very vividly remember how my impressionable years were filled with an unplanned, effective and ever pervasive propaganda aimed at the centre (me) from many important adult care-givers and from my peers. Creation of identity, that very much depends on the us-them divide and the clear-cut definitions of the periphery of the circle of life named “us”, and the centre “I” is a long and subtle process. I, in a sense, was confirmed in my Hinduness just because there was a need felt by the points belonging to the circle of us, to let every individual point of the so believed same essence fall within it – fixed strongly and forever in location. Ironically,at least, the clear cut phenotypical contrast between the poles of black and white races does not exist in the Indian subcontinent between the followers of Hinduism or Islam. Any one may very easily pass for the other, as far as the externally observable features are concerned. Thus, confirming the us-then identity separation becomes critically and centrally linked to the survival of the collective identities of the communities. It is at this point where the narrative of TSLintersects the narrative of my “becoming’ a Hindu.

A school bus, a normal looking street with normal looking people on it, even one’s safe class room in the modern sacred sanctum of school: they may all suddenly turn threateningly hostile and dangerous, as happens in life and TSL. The narrator’s experiencing fear and his first exposure to the us-then divide is very much proto/arche typical and may even be seen as having some essentially and universally present traits. The two-nations theory, highly artificial and invented relatively recently, that was projected as primordial by those who traced it back to the medieval period of Indian history, had founded its way into the Jungian collective un/sub conscious and established itself there firmly. Although Fanon rejects the “un” part of the term, the idea continues to live. So, the presence of the two nationss in one’s geographical sphere, quite naturally, leads to a sharing of space and mutual mistrust, enmity and hatred (as love is not proven through any stretch of history/imagination). The Andersonian axiom of the nation’s being imagined in nature finds its full vindication in the Indian subcontinent as Hindus and Muslims – almost identical in all respects but one – try to give definition, fixity, permanence, currency,and finally, reality to it. To do that, shadow lines ought to be drawn. Lines between the two nations confirm them in their own eyes be they drawn with ink or with blood, be they solid and clear, or just shadow lines.

The Indian nationalism and the two nations theory, both found fruition on the same day by a strangely vulgar (for some people) quirk of destiny. Were they born of the people – the masses – or of the select few with vested interest. In other words, who benefited the most after the drawing of the shadow lines, the masses or the elite? There are some related and relevant questions that accompany the previous one. Whose movement were these – of the elite or the masses? In cruder terms, what percentage of Indians actually participated in India’s Struggle for Freedom? What percentage of the Hindus/ Muslims were actively involved in the two nations debate? And the crudest question of them all: what percent of the Hindu/Muslim/Sikh population was actually slaughtering, burning and raping their “other” in the communal riots that the subcontinent witnessed in the first half of the twentieth century? Who will reply? Risking irrelevance and unrelatedness, even absurdity,another question may be asked in expectation of finding a parallel to the previous ones: what percent of the present indians were actively involved in the anti-corruption Anna Hazare movement? What percent of Hindus/ Muslims/ Sikhs were involved in the communal violence that happened in 1984, 1989-92, after 2000 etc.? Is there any answer? And if there isn’t any, how can one be so sure about the mass appeal and acceptance of an idea (as plebiscite or voting are not available to make the picture clear)?

In the face of such an insurmountable theoretical obstacle, one is tempted to use personal experience as an incomplete yet viable alternative. Introspection, oral interviews of a representative sample population, analysis and comparison of the reports in newspapers, use of statistical data etc. are the possible means that may throw some light on the situation. They help the best when the past is close enough to be recalled accurately and vividly. Literature happens to be an account of life in many instances. Partition was an event that gave rise to a huge body of literature – factual and fictitious – related to what people had seen and experienced in those times. In its magnitude and reach it far surpasses the Holocaust, yet, it has never been presented in a comparably adequate manner. TSL takes up the theme of communal violence that was the most predominant one in partition literature and relocates it in 1964, as seen and experienced mostly through the eyes of two ten year old children: the narrator and Robi. Both the children had experiences fear of the most visceral kind – the fear of death resulting out of violence. Such a cruelly arbitrary and unpredictable termination of one’s life as a very strong and immediate possibility is bound to generate fear that sinks deep into the unconscious to return later, whenever the waves of trauma rock the one who had felt it long after the actual event had occurred. Robi admits being tormented by the scene of Tridib’s death long after the event. He could never be free of the effects of that trauma. The narrator too could never forget the chasing mob and his predicament in the school bus. Such experiences – rare and very strong – shape one’s personality; or, to put it properly: scar one’s psyche forever. Now, transpose the children’s experience to a real life one. Presume (realistically) that there’s a heterogeneous population of Hindus and Muslims who had lived for generations at the same permanent address in close proximity – close enough to be important for their contrapuntal identity formation, yet, not close enough to have understood one another properly. Such people, in the time of crisis, essentialize the identities of themselves and of others – with a swift, crystallization like process. Of course, the potential, or memory in its seed form, of such polar identity imposition and fixation is always present in their minds. The mechanism of such polarity actualization can also be seen in the supporters of various political personalities and sports fans pitted against one another. Violence isn’t unheard of in such “matches”. The same mechanism, albeit in a magnified and more heinous form, is seen in action in case of communal violence.

The Indian subcontinent was partitioned on the reason of the most irrational thing in the assembly line of human creations: religion. Thus originated the “loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror” (TLS 131). There’s one very special quality of a mirror image that differentiates it from its original, despite its being a near replica. The image is inverted at the point that joins it with the original. So, it’s the same and the opposite at the same time. Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent belong to the same racial and sociocultural stock: if not from the very beginning, then, at least, after all these years of homogenization, those who originally were of a different racial stock or sociocultural background were assimilated in the main body of population and culture. From his similarity was created contrast by an inverted Godlike power of creating ex nihilo. It was essential that the contrast be created, both for those coloured saffron and those coloured green. As the flag of secular India has both the colours with in equal areas of importance and prominence, the extremists with vested interests needed to tear the flag apart and hijack the constituent religions away for their personal gains. Religion – or a pretence of it – took over the nation and the two nations theory was established. From Al Beruni to Allama Iqbal, a line of thought was traced that proved theory naturally right. The rise of Hindu nationalism too helped it in no small manner. Although its aim was an “Akhand Bharat”, i.e. an undivided India, it did subscribe to the the two nations theory with its objective being a “natural” Hindu dominance over all the minorities in the Hindu India. As extreme position is always more shocking and its methods more spectacular than that of the moderate advocates of reason.

The extremists could call for “Direct Action Day” and actually convert rural and urban purely civilian spaces, untouched by the mania even of the two world wars, into battlegrounds, or worse, slaughterhouses. Millions were butchered before and after the partition of 47, either to expedite the partition or to gain maximum mileage from it. The epicentre of a riot could lie in the actual zone of rioting or thousands of miles away. Irrespective of that it caused considerable and irreparable damage. Quite normal people were transformed into thoughtless, mindless and conscienceless killing machines that murdered their targets identified as “them”, and then, effortlessly slided back to their very normal day-to-day functioning self. The ambiguity of this enmity – its artificiality – was underscored by the fact that the majority, like all the other times, remained naturally inert spectators and commentators only. Moreover, although statistically insignificant, yet a sizeable proportion of people chose to prove the two nations theory wrong by actually collaborating with their “them”, and by saving lives that they should have taken theoretically, or at least, allowed to be taken by remaining inert. The two nations theory finds its strongest critique in the multicultural models of nation thriving (with its own problems and limitations) not only in India, but also in democracies like the USA. Even up to the third quarter of the twentieth century, racial polarity and hatred based on it existed in the mainstream. Today, even if they do exist, they do not rule the collective consciousness of the people. Their ground realities may be different, but what they achieved may inspire and encourage us for a similar success in the subcontinent despite the chain of confrontations projected as rising from an essentialist and absolute contrast of religious identities. Until that is done, heterogeneously populated regions will always have a very strong probability of erupting into violent bloodshed even tomorrow. A mirror image can reflect exactly what appears on the other side because it is linked to it permanently.

References:

Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. Web. n.d. Scribd.com. 12 October 2012. Pdf. [TSL in the text.]

 

The Two Nations and The Shadow Lines

The states of rootlessness and being rooted are the two options to choose from when it comes to one’s existence at macro level. One is not totally free to choose in most of the cases, but the hard determinism that absolutely denies free will as totally powerless against social programming finds its refutation in the pattern of exceptions and in the absence of any set pattern of the development of one’s relation to one’s roots. As Anderson very rightly pointed out, the sense of belonging to a nation, nay, even the idea of a nation are constructed. Their not being natural or innate is very clearly proven by the infection of the two nations theory that set into the system of the two newly constructed nations of India and Pakistan in 1947. Neither is superior in any way. Any claim to superiority is based upon the hidden assumption of the now established modern tradition of secularism’s being better than the state’s preferring any specific religion over others.

India is a secular democracy and Pakistan is a Muslim one – on paper. Any state can declare itself secular, but nations are their people and no state has the power to make people internalize secularism and make it their faith over and above their religion of birth. India and Pakistan arise from the same stock, and the way religion is observed by a common man doesn’t differ much just because someone decided to draw an arbitrary line separating them. Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (henceforth The Shadow Lines) proves the same through its narrator’s and comments and through the words and actions of its main characters viz. Tridib and Tha’mma. The novel, just like the history of the two nations, proves the two nations theory totally wrong. In fact, theories work only as long as they are able to keep up with practice. They ought to be discarded when they fail doing so. The nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries saw the establishment of racial discrimination. People believed in the race theory and acted on the basis of their beliefs. What happened then may help understanding the common mechanism of the rejection of theories that are prescriptive and prohibitive. The Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity were used against racial discrimination by those being discriminated against. Public opinion was moulded against racial superiority or inferiority and, finally, the theory was discarded. It may appear so simple on paper but it took centuries of struggle and sacrifices by people, both celebrated and unknown. The struggle is by no means over yet, but it has achieved considerable success. The same is not the case with national/religious essentialization and polarization. India-Pakistan, Islam-Hinduism, Friend-Enemy… these categories are fed and programmed in the minds for such a long time span that they finally create the illusion of being eternal and natural. Jethamoshai in TSL rightly challenges the assurance of the polarities that the arbitrary and ephemeral (if time is taken in its entirety) shadow lines of national frontiers create.

How do people claim that a “natural/inborn” incompatibility exists between Hindus and Muslims? How, even if that incompatibility does exist, also means that it’ll result into a separation that will encroach all over the public sphere, beginning from the extremely private one? Whether one worships Ishwar or Allah or one’s an atheist, how does it affect one’s productivity, performance, job satisfaction, leadership qualities etc. – all the little practical things that account for the most sizeable part of a person’s life? Observing certain religious customs and rites does not mean that a person is fundamentally incompatible with another. The two nations theory was fundamentally flawed in being non-progressive and oriented towards past with blindness towards present and future. Today’s future oriented, gainfully employed and satisfied citizens of a democracy wouldn’t yield their life, reason and free will to any such theory. Conservatives are declining in proportion to total population as youth today is more career oriented and (thankfully) materialistic. Material success and spiritual fulfilment with a progressive view of the world is what they want. Media has created s definite environment that lets the belief mentioned in the previous line flourish in minds.

Yet, it was media that had planted the damaging idea of polar division in the minds of the masses in the first place. The whole charade of the pan-continental religious solidarity could be created and maintained owing to the fact that people could know the existence of any such idea through its dissemination. The history of occurrence of communal violence has been sporadic, located in pockets that are geo-temporally separated in the past. With the development of the means of transport and communication, news and ideas travelled and spread over large areas very fast. Thus it became possible to indoctrinate the impressionable masses and to mobilize them by calling for Direct Action or Black Days that cause the violence that’s shown in TSL. Rumours too could spread at an alarmingly fast pace as technology made it easier. Communal riots, in their most terrible and lethal form, affecting a very large area became possible only when they could be so orchestrated. They follow a pattern. Places have histories of riot patterns that’s repeated in many ways as time goes by. The violence that 1964 saw, and that’s portrayed in TSL has a point of inception and growth, similar to a random instance in Varanasi from 1977 when the religious processions of one community passing from a densely populated locality of the other community had been the point from which riots are reported to have begun – be it the Muharram tazias or Durga/Kali idols.

Moreover, it has also been reported that the police (or, at least the PAC) had played crucial role in either actively assisting the rioters of their own religion actively/passively or carrying out the whole thing themselves. Their absence is the common factor between Robi’s and the little narrator’s trysts with communal violence in TSL. So, the question that needs to be answered is: “How is even the police indoctrinated?” If that is naïve then another question may be asked: “How does one expect any force’s not being indoctrinated when it is composed of social beings?” The indoctrination and initiation into religious allegiances, and later into bigotry, begins in the childhood. As the members of the police force also belong to a religious community, if they aren’t inoculated against religious indoctrination through its secular counterparts. Although both secularism and religions are man made and demand faith from their followers, secularism is freedom crystallized in comparison to the amorphous anarchy of religion. Is that so?

Now, freedom’s desirability is a post Enlightenment value, and it’s socially constructed too. Therefore, no choice between secularism and religions can be made as both are inherently equally good or bad. There are opinions against religions giving justifications in their being inherently violent, which is true in case of the Abrahamic religions with their faith in the old teastament. Religion was used to justify the Crusades and many wars. So, religion is bad. All the modern wars, including the two World Wars, were fought for non-religious reasons by secular armies. So, secularism is equally bad. But then, wars aren’t started by the people who are killed in them. Their real origin lies in the heads of those in power, and their real reason is the nature of power itself. The same can be said of violence in its many modern manifestations – communal riots being one of them. They are linked to religion but they do not purely originate from it. Their roots lie in the socio-economic soil of the given time and place. People who indulge in violence during the riots do not do so because of their strong faith in their religion. They do so because of a mass paranoia leading to their involvement in mass violence in the majority of cases. The planning and leading masterminds do not fall under the category mentioned just now.

Theirs may be another kind of psycho/socio-pathology. They plan arson, looting and bloodshed in cold blood and their motivation combines economic, political and social factors. This is clearly reflected in TSL through the Mu-i-Mubarak theft and its use by the politicians who wanted personal political benefits out of it. The incident occurred in Kashmir where there were no cases of communal violence . Instead, all the communities protested against the government together. There was a reaction in West Pakistan and Black Day was declared in both its parts. Khulna in East Pakistan was the first place where violence erupted. Soon, the chain reaction covered the whole of Bengal: West and its mirror image, the erstwhile East one. Time and again a stray incident’s being used as the nucleus of call to action that’s translated into violent and planned action has been seen being repeated. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and now, Christians – all have been victims of communal hatred and violence in the Indian subcontinent. No community is an island and no event or country is isolated. The shadow lines of the frontiers ironically linked Pakistan, Bangladesh and India even more strongly, in a very intimate kind of love-hate relationship.

“With the making of Pakistan the Muslims … threw off the yoke of double chain of slavery, viz., British imperialism and Hindu dominance in the South Asian sub-continent ” (Mirza 2). What is the chain of slavery being mentioned here? The one of British imperialism is obvious and easy to understand. The other one of Hindu dominance needs a thorough analysis and justification before its claim is accepted as established. Islam had entered India shortly after its birth in the deserts of Arabia. Its full impact was felt only when those following Islam presented a clear danger to the predominantly non-Islamic India. I’ve abstained from using the word Hindu here because it’ll take some definition before the term is applied retroactively. Obviously, at least some of the people designated as Hindus today did not know themselves to be so, some five centuries ago. The genealogy of the very word Hindu derives from a foreign imposition, that too, a corruption of the word Sindhu (Indus) designating geographically those who inhabited the lands beyond the indus river, as seen from th Arabian peninsula. It had nothing to do with their religion. The heterogeneity of the peoples who inhabited the land known at that time as India defied any attempt at a simplistic and monolithic categorization. A land that gave birth to thousands of sects following the devotion of thirty-three crore gods and goddesses and infinite number of local deities and traditions, could never be given a name that denied it the variety. The British were the first to insist upon this kind of clasification on a large and systematized scale. Before them, the Mughals and the Marathas did recognize the categories of Muslims and non-Muslims, for the payment of additional taxes viz.the zaziya, but they did not put all the non-Muslims under the umbrella term of the Hindus. Neither did the British do it. They only categorized the colonized people on the basis of caste, creed, tribe etc.

It was the Hindu nationalists themselves who had created and applied the term retroactively for self-referentiality. The rise of Hindu nationalism, that Nehru saw as communalism, owed a lot to the European idea of nationalism and its bases – religion, culture, language and a shared past, and the most central of all – a constant circulation of an idea (viz. Hinduism) to make it permanent in the minds of both Hindus and Muslims. Ironically, around the same time emerged the coherent ideas of Sikkhism and of the solidarity of the untouchables too, that undermined the territoriality of a monolithic Hinduism. Essentialization was essential for those who propounded that solidarity amongst the co-religionists was essential for standing strongly against their opponents. They assumed homogeneity and tried to erase all kind of differences, at least when it came to the acceptance of the existence of those fissures in public. The upper caste/class Hindus dominated the discourse of Hinduism as the subaltern could/did not speak – probably because he did not even enter the arena of the discourse as he existed on a completely different plane and the fundamental question for him was not of an India, Hinduism or freedom. The question was of his survival. He didn’t have the luxury to sit back and think of the big issues like nation and religion when they only belonged to his internal/external colonizers – the white and brown masters-enemies. Te same is true about the later designated scheduled tribes of India. Thus enters the fissure of questioning in the structure of nationalism. Doubt over the validity of the idea of nation, be it from an unnamed subaltern or Jethamoshai of TSL, is useful in exposing the fallacy of assuming a homogenized and equal spread of the acceptance of the idea.

References:

Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. Web. n.d. Scribd.com. 12 October 2012. Pdf. [TSL in the text.]

Mirza, Sarfaraz Hussain. Hindu-Muslim Confrontation: A Case Study of Pakistan 712-1947. Lahore: Nazaria-i-Pakistan Trust, 2009.

 

Nation, Religion and Violence in The Shadow Lines

 

In Taza Khudaon Mein Bara Sub Se Watan Hai

Jo Pairhan Iss Ka Hai, Woh Mazhab Ka Kafan Hai

[Country, is the biggest among these new gods!

/ What is its shirt is the shroud of Religion.] (Iqbal)

Nationalism is the grandest of all essentializing grand narratives originating out of the Enlightenment Project. Reconciling it with reason must’ve been very tricky, to say the least. Reason, applied ruthlessly and to its logical conclusion, has the power to lay bare any designs to counter or hide truth. It’s not a faculty, but a method, in which mind has to be trained and then kept on guard and in constant practice so that its use is ingrained in habit. Liberty, equality and fraternity – the progeny of the Enlightenment thought – were more of romantic inventions than pure hard reason. Equality isn’t natural at all. Neither is it desirable evolutionarily, or else, there’d be no natural variations. Nature produces things inherently unequal, yet essentially integral parts of the overall system for which even a microscopic unicellular amoeba is vitally important. Human beings imposed themselves on nature while creating their civilizations and their anthropocentric values. So, they “reasoned” that “all are born equal and should remain equal” or some such formulaic slogan. Repeated chantings and printings of the slogan fixed it in the collective consciousness in such a manner that the creation and establishment of the myth of its naturalness was the very next naturally logical step in the process. Left to its own resources, history proves that human beings have a natural tendency to form mutually exclusive groups and indulge in cruelty and violence against those who make “them”. Greed and violence being evolutionarily ingrained in human nature, it becomes imperative that fraternity be invented and invested with naturalness. It was done.

Democracies all over the world pride themselves for providing “liberty” to their citizens. Liberty: of and for what? What does a dispossessed gond tribal, relocated because of inhabiting the inundation zone of a huge hydroelectricity dam that’ll produce electricity to run air conditioners of those who have money and voice, do with liberty? What kind of liberty does he have? Liberty to end his miserable life? Even that has been snatched by the society that has made it unlawful and sinful. So, the overrated triad of liberty, equality and fraternity were wrong fundamentally, and unnatural too. On that weak foundation was erected the whole social edifice of the modern age. It had to lead to crises that we are facing today, not to mention the two world wars only. The very identity of the modern man is associated with nationalism. Any jolt to this foundational identity bolstering idea may cause irreparable damage, as the narrator of The Shadow Lines (henceforth TSL) points out about Tha’mma, a “modern middle class woman… [who] would thrive believing in the unity of nationhood and territory… that history had denied her in its fullness” (TSL 48). The imagined nature of nationhood makes it entirely artificial. Moreover, this invention of the Enlightenment Europe had always been challenged in many ways by events that go against its basic tenets. The already existing groups based on language, religion,culture etc. are all man made and they have to be subsumed into one large body built on a strong sense of belonging to the nation. All the bases for group identity and solidarity formation mentioned above are artificial, but the chronology of their introduction according to the need of humanity, individual or group, makes one more important than the other, e.g. language is the means through which we understand religion, culture and nation. So, it is more fundamentally required than others, and so on. Their artificiality remains hidden and to the common sense they appear innate. Yet, in the novel it is Tha’mma who ironically exposes the charade called nation by equating the effectiveness of its establishment with bloodshed all around.

She tells the narrator: “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 … That is what you have to achieve for India” (TSL 47-8). how much blood will be enough to draw the borders? Will that of nearly six million people do? Did the English give more? War as a form of rationalized or fetishized violence may be their religion but they do not seem to take so much of pleasure, pride and interest in bloodshed as to specialize in it. India and Pakistan have done so with gusto with wars that were declared and have dates, and the undeclared and more dangerous warfare being carried out even today. Moreover, they have institutionalized another form of bloodshed – just to counter Tha’mma’s homogenizing powers of wars. They have drawn communal riots as a line that runs parallel to wars in the same colour: red. At least the secular pretensions of India aren’t maintained by Pakistan – it was created on religious grounds. Yet, as far as communal violence is concerned, India that’s secular by its constitution lags behind in no way. So, what has all the bloodshed achieved for the subcontinent: just the convenient rallying cries of religious fanaticism used to distract the eyes of people from the internal problems? Huge chasms based on region, language, caste, class and religion are discernible in the intranational conflicts in the whole subcontinent. What has war, or violence taken to the doorsteps of the common man achieved for them? Tha’mma’s theorization sounds good and may have appeal for the irrational part of mind, but once it is seen through the lenses of reason, its weakness becomes obvious. Europe and Enlightenment gave the idol of nation to us, but we have been worshiping our various gods parallely to the newly born god. The emotional appeal of nationalism that saw the creation of the whole modern Europe may be said to have failed to produce similar effect in the Indian subcontinent. The fundamental reason behind the failure of the European brand of nationalism may be because the European brand of secularism, the son of Enlightenment that’s given sustenance by reason, had no place here.

Interestingly, religion itself, as a coherent construct, as against the secular sphere, is a European infusion. Its Sanskrit equivalent dharma is just as much oriented towards one’s conduct in the world as it is oriented towards one’s position secured in heaven after death. Secularism, as understood in Europe, could never survive in the nation that took every area of life as belonging to different circles of a Venn diagram intersecting to from a complete central section that must, by definition, have religion in it. Of course, Hinduism may not have been the taxonomic category provided to that “religion”, yet the very heterogeneous sect based body of thoughts and practices later designated as Hinduism could easily be discerned from other religions of the subcontinent. Islam was the very first firmly monotheistic religion of the book reached the soil of India as early as the eighth century. Recorded instances of differences with Islam posit something like a religion (Hinduism) contrapuntally. India was inhabited by a very diverse set of peoples, as history reports. Even those who could be categorized as Hindus were by no means a homogeneous category. Yet, when it came to the creation of essence based on differences, they did see themselves as belonging to a stream that was not the same as that of Islam.

Therefore, the constructionists’ clam of the modern/ colonial construction of Hinduism does not hold water. The idea that took centuries to develop and solidify, even though it hadn’t its modern name,could never be denied the acknowledgment of its existence. The huge body of Hindu literature – both religious and secular in the European’s eyes – that didn’t make a part of the Buddhist, Islamic etc. heritage, as a set of difference, did make a concrete and coherent body. The existence of the body isn’t questioned or questionable. It’s there for all to see. Various un- Islamic/ Buddhist etc. religious practices fell in the category of Hindu practices that that the Christian missionaries were so fond of attacking e.g. sahmaran (later named suttee). Such practices were never confused with any other religion’s arena by those who belonged to Christianity or to any other popular Indian religion. Instead of being a religion of book with definite and solidified codes, Hindu dharma was fluid till its interaction with the modern world, especially with Christianity that necessitated its taking a definite form. That there was a need for it to claim its fixed centre is proven by the fact that all varieties of socio-religious reformers of Hinduism either accepted the Vedas/ Upanishadas as its fixed centre or synthesized such a centre by reinterpreting older forms in more modern ways e. g. Satyarth Prakash. As a reaction to the monolithic religions of the books, Hinduism (as the reformers saw it) was projected in its essence as monotheistic, revealed and of a book. The English interaction with Indians in the capacity of colonizers/ proselytizers/ civilizers did become the root cause of this change by providing a platform for interaction between Christianity and Hinduism. Thus they acted as catalysts, if not as reacting substances.

Even after getting the fixed centre and working definition, the points at the periphery of Hinduism could never be fixed or defined. Even today, unlike Islam or Christianity, it is very difficult for a Hindu to lay hands on a book that’d teach him the basic tenets of his religion. At least for an average Hindu, there isn’t any such guide. Moreover, an atheist Christian is a self-contradictory term, so is an atheist Muslim. An atheist Hindu is quite logical, possible and acceptable. I am one. There are so many totally contradictory flows of currents in what is known as Hinduism today that even a Hindu will find it difficult to distinctly define himself. A Muslim has no such difficulty or uncertainty because he a strong footing. India undermined the strength of that footing. It saw a fusion of religious practices to such and extent that the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh division was blurred. Of course, a Hindu did not praise Allah or a Muslim Wahe Guru, but in their daily life and social practices, there emerged a hybridization, e. g. the Meos of Alwar remained nearly undefined till 1947 they had converted to Islam yet had retained the traditions and practices of their Hindu past (Pandey 39). The tribals of India, a site contested by the newly formed proselytizing spirit of Hinduism pitted against the religions of the book, still remain a highly sensitive topic. The tombs of Sufi saints had strong following from among the followers of all religions. The Christian missionaries had seen it themselves that Roman Catholicism in India had to adapt itself by assimilating local customs etc.

Despite all the heterogeneity and a history of assimilation, the twentieth century witnessed the construction of monolithically projected religious affiliations and ideologies that held the sway over one quarter of the world’s population i.e. South Asia. It was the Indian subcontinent on which the seeds of communal hatred were sown and naturally, the harvest of the communal riots was rich. A communal riot is both a force of nature and (un)civilization. It is very much a force of nature that, ironically, is artificial in origin. Its naturalness lies in the collectivisation of the raw, evolutionarily ingrained animal instincts of survival and self-propagation at all costs, even at the cost of blood- own or others’. It is a force originating in one’s social programming that engraves the us-them divide very deeply in human minds. Therefore, it belongs to the human (un)civilizations too. As a mark of indictment, (un) must be placed before anything that originates a riot. This natural (un)civilized force raises its Hydra like heads only when it’s a time of a clearly perceived and widely recognized and accepted threat that leads to crisis. Hence, it may be termed as a kind of whiplash generated due to a collective paranoia that is pre-designed in the individual human being’s psychological hardware, as it’s human nature to be gregarious and to strive for continuation of life: that of the individual and that of those in the sphere of “us”. Thus, a collective paranoia, based on a collective memory of the communal history – as shaped by the political and media powers of the time – results into a communal riot. The land that gives sustenance to such a phenomenon can never claim its being civilized.Thus was negated South Asia’s centuries old claim of its inherent and essential spirituality, humanity and its ancient and great civilization.

References:

Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. Web. n.d. Scribd.com. 12 October 2012. Pdf. [TSL in the text.]

Iqbal, Muhammad. “Bang e Dra”. Web. n.d. iqbalurdu.blogspot.in. 12 November 2012.

Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Print.

 

 

Constructedness of Nation and The Shadow Lines

The innateness of the survival instinct shouldn’t be confused with the social constructedness of the antagonistic identities in the so called struggle for survival – the clashing communities/ castes/ classes. One depends on genetic coding, refined and passed on through evolution, whereas, the other is just social programming. Once the “us-them” circumference is well defines, violence may easily be engineered by an appeal to the basic instinct of self-preservation in a pre-emptive or reactive manner. A man who repudiates his past will soon have no present or future either. The present moment is but slipping into the past and the future onto the present. So, the one sure thing about time, as it is lived and understood, is the past that casts its shadow over the present and future. It is the mirror in which one’s images and actions are permanently etched. By looking at the past closely, one may understand oneself better. The narrator of The Shadow Lines (henceforth TSL)is doing something similar. He is doing more than just that. He is also exposing the collective, conscious, even planned oblivion of the riots of January 1964 in particular, and riots in general, and using language to convey his inner life and that of his Tha’mma in words that he knows will never be adequate.

His knowledge of the inadequacy of language comes from his experience of the fact that “Every language assumes a centrality, a fixed and settled point to go away from and come back to… which permits the proper use of verbs of movement” (TSL 98). Home is the point from which one goes away and comes back to. It is that fixed and settling point that guarantees not only the proper functioning of the central verbs of movement but also of identity formation and preservation. When that fixed point itself went away from their lives, the refugees faced not only a crisis in their language but also in their identities and lives. The emotional succour that the idea of home provides. Even when one is away from home, just by being there, was lost for them forever. It had taken generations to build the sense of belonging and attachment to home. The alienness imposed on their home and the imposed home in an alien land created a dilemma for them. They had to decide whether to keep or leave the idea of their old home as home. They also had to decide whether to transpose or reject the idea of home onto the new houses of theirs.

Some chose to leave their homes of centuries to go to an unknown land that was now their only designated and acknowledged motherland: India. Some chose otherwise and stuck to their choice tenaciously till the very end. Tha’mma’s Jethamoshai was one such person. He chose to stay back and not to obey the diktats of those in power. He decided to walk his own path and make it in the walking. Guided by his animal instincts of insecurity and hatred, he stayed back and on. When his son came to take him to India, he said: “suppose when you get there they decide to draw another line somewhere?… Where will you move to?” (TSL 139). Ravings of a lunatic? Empty blithering of a defunct brain? Or, an incisive indictment of the way power is snatched away from the common modern man by the nearly omnipotent state? Or, even deeper and more fundamental than that: the powerlessness of an individual – any individual – compared to the power of the society and its institutions? The individual sacrificed to the altar of collective will has been the story of civilizations, or, at least, the stories allowed to survive. Militantly individualistic social and political strains of action were erased from the pages of history; their intellectual foundations pushed towards the abyss of oblivion – so that history could not be formed with them, thus, obviating any chance of its repetition.

Jethamoshai happens to be the only individual in TSL who refuses playing with the hand fate had dealt through the decisions of the powerful. He resists to write his own mini narrative against the grand narrative of nationalism. He doesn’t subscribe to the idea of “India Shindia” (TSL 139), and has only contempt for his sons who moved away just because somebody decided to draw a line on a map – a line that had nothing to prove its existence on the real, tangible and material plane of being. A line, the unseen line, the shadow line, that existed only in one’s imagination, became central to the formation of millions of scarred lives. Jethamoshau used “his” imagination to undo the creation of those lines and the aftermath too. He stepped aside and back at the same time and let the net of time and space pass through – without ever catching him and delivering him to the basket called India(Shindia!). He stayed where he’d recognized his identity and died there too; making no compromise with his identity, keeping it intact in face of all adversity.

It’s true that his malignity towards his brother’s family and his will power sustained him, yet, his one act of rebellion converts him from an individual to a symbol. He becomes the symbol of the crisis of modernity – of the idea of an individual’s independent, “local” roots,as against his national affiliations and loyalties. Most of the people drifted towards their national identity – willingly or unwillingly – but Jethamoshai remained resolutely locally oriented and rooted. For him, the only space he cared to exist in, to spend his remaining span of life in, was his intimate local sphere of Dhaka – circumscribed by his house and the High Court – with his identity at the centre. Both the periphery and centre were simultaneously dissolved by and for those who chose to move. The common people just went on living their kind of life of powerlessness after they shifted. They knew their powerlessness and acknowledged it too.

There were few who stuck to their old pattern of life. They knew their power and got it acknowledged by time. The narrator’s grandmother had wanted to know whether there’d be any indicator to show that one had crossed the border. She wanted to know what the partition had actually achieved and created. She found out that both the sides looked the same as before and the partition did not change the soil and climate. Puzzled, she asks: “What was it all for then – Partition and all the killing and everything” (TSL 97). She wanted to know the reasons. The question presupposes the presence of a logic in history, presuming history provides justifications in the hindsight. Well, it does not,because it is just a narrative, and like any other narrative, its justifications originate in the minds of those who arrange events in a meaningful manner to validate their interpretations and justifications. The curious case of the Partition provides historically significant fuel sufficient to run the machines of justification of both secular and religious zealots of all hues. In Pakistan, it was the culmination of what history had always been pointing to – the holy land, exclusively reserved for the umma, as dark green side saw it. In India, it was like snatching away of the topping from the cake for many, especially on the dark saffron side. In both the countries, for those who remained undecided or for those decidedly for the undivided secular tricolour, it was nothing short of a national tragedy and a painful lesson history had taught. Yet, history happens to be just another human convenience, an invention like religion, and teaches only what one wants to learn from it; nothing more or less.

Jethamoshai says to his son who had come to take him to India: “I don’t believe in this India-Shindia” (TSL 138). He places a very fundamental and relevant question mark against the very concept of nation, also against the national fervour and conviction due to which people have faith, upon which they centre their identity. The old Ukil Babu questioned his son’s certainty about absurdly and inherently uncertain things – the shadow lines. The logic behind the drawing of lines separating one nation from another defies the very definition of logic, at least, in the Indian subcontinent. Partition (the second one) of Bengal into the West Bengal and East Pakistan was based on an apparently logical reasoning – the Muslim dense districts went to Pakistan and India got the Hindu majority ones. So simple, yet, when the history of the two partitions of Bengal is looked into, the veneer of simplicity vanishes and the real, rich complexity of the scenario becomes clear. The 1905 Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal saw nation wide protests with such vehemence and tenacity that in 1911 it had to be repealed. But, within a span of just three decades, that very Bengal raised an even louder voice, backed with action that included violence, for the partition of Bengal.

The mechanism of such a change was not discernible to the masses that were swayed by the calls of the demagogues or the so called leaders of the respective communities. Jethamoshai calls for an opening of eyes and a hard and long look into the very mechanism that led to the creation of “India-Shindia”. How could he believe in it – just another social construct, self-divided, hastily created, promptly altered and completely preposterous? If it wasn’t self-divided, how did it create mutually exclusive lines of thought on both the poles of the communal structure? If it wasn’t hastily created, then how, within just thirty years (1905-35-71) there was seen a volte face in the Bengali geopilitical idea of India? If it’s not preposterous, then how does one explain the Hindus of Bengal both opposing and favouring communalism both on the basis of logic and emotion, and the Muslims doing the same? The masses do not sit back and analyse before they actually start responding to the calls of the masters of propaganda – their political opinion moulders and leaders. The British rightly believed that the self-designated leaders, or, even those with mass appeal and acceptance could and would exploit and mislead the masses for either their personal material gains or for ideological games. The fallacious identification of an individual known as leader with those appropriated/designated as followers dangerously simplifies a very complex scenario. Moreover, assuming or imposing selflessness on them is again fallacious. So, the elite hijacked the whole social apparatus that raised sound against injustice. They did so for and on the behalf of their definite inferiors. The Bengali bhadralok propagandized that they were representing the chhotolok too, i.e. there was a monolithic structure of the society. After the communal award of 1935 the urban monopoly on leadership was severely undermined and there appeard a whole set of leaders from the rural Bengal. Yet, neither urban nor rural leaders spoke for the subaltern – although they claimed to be doing so all the time. So, when the Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha asked for a partition of Bengal on communal lines, it should not be assumed that they were speaking for the subaltern, although they would have people believe exactly that.

There were definite advantages for the elite – both Hindu and Muslim, traditionally established or newly sprung up – in partition and the creation of two units that’d be led by the elite itself. It happened exactly they’d planned. The controllers and wielders of power got what they wanted if “not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially” (Nehru). Probably, even they had not expected to get success in such a short span to such an extent. For the common man, the White European imperial power finally gave reins to the brown Indian internal colonizers. The truth remains that colonization, entrenched systemically, remained where it was. Jethamoshai’s incisive and shrewd mistrust of the arbitrariness of the internal colonizers is quite natural and correct. He points towards the unnatural arbitrariness of the very concept of nation, and,even more, of its boundaries. It proleptically points towards the partition of Pakistan itself. With the birth of Bangladesh language, culture and belonging to the sonar bangla would finally prove more powerful than the basic premises of religion and homogeneity of the two nations theory. Yet, ironically, the plight of the minority did not change due to the change in the fundamental reason of the nation’s formation.

 

References:

Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. Web. n.d. Scribd.com. 12 October 2012. Pdf. [TSL in the text.]

Nehru, Jawaharlal. “Tryst With Destiny”. Web. 14 August 2011. wethepeople-barakvalley.com. 12 November 2012.

Religion and Violence in The Shadow Lines and Midnight’s Children

Violence – its genealogical and archaeological analysis and its open or hidden incitement – happens to be an important part of both TSL and MNC. So does the challenges it poses to the internal world and its anchorage in an externally verifiable and absolute reality. 1964 and 1971 in East Pakistan provide the centres for the set of events that lead to violence and a challenge to what the narrators see as real in the two novels. Religion as the rallying point for propaganda happens to be the common strategy in both the cases. MNC is directly linked to TLC at two crucial points of ’64 and ’71. Dr. Aadam Aziz, insinuates Saleem in MNC, was the person responsible for the disappearance of Mu-i-Mubarak that lead to the widespread riots of 1964, one that took Tridib’s life at the climax of TSL.

1971 was definitely a turning point in Saleem’s internal life. It was the year of his return to his own old self. It was the year that completed his war experience and that of his life. By the end of that year they’d witnessed with their own eyes “many things which were [simply] not true … not possible” (191). How could they see what wasn’t true? Or, how could they witness that which was impossible? But they did. He was destined to meet the magicians and Picture Singhji, the people “whose hold on reality was so absolute … they never forgot what it was” (203). The very people who performed them did not believe in the reality of magic tricks. That’s why Parvati – the real witch – never reveals her true secret to them; as her powers do not fit in with the things of everyday reality, just as Snotnose’s revelation of his hearing (before left was equal to the right one) the voices of the angels. The clever witch lived but the naïve boy preferred truth unknowingly and instinctively. Did he learn from his experiences and start mixing plausible lies with possible truths, substituting the impossible truths? Did he learn that truth is, what’s taken as truth, and there’s nothing like truth per se. Eloquence and craft as necessities for survival in the real world must have shown their strength to him. Or, did they just fail to register their importance in his mind? Because he continued revealing all the impossible truth – or lies that were probable, who knows? Wisdom came with a lot of experience. Thus he explains the boy soldiers of buddha’s team falling victims to “the influence of legends and gossips” (178). The world is understood through a process of continuous reimagining that connects one’s past memory with the grasp of one’s present and projection of the future.

 

The question asked in MNC is answered in TSL as “people … who have no home but in memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection” (TSL 124). It is recollection that infuses life into the life that they had lost to the past – where they want to return but can’t, ever. The recollection of an idealized past is the only salve available to them that they apply on the wounds of separation at the points of severance from the nucleus of their identity. Of course, they can’t remember every detail related to every thing or person of their past. It’s neither needed nor desirable. Too many details about too many things will just clutter the memory. They have very strong and vivid recollection of few things and persons deemed fit for such a remembrance. They reconstruct their homes and people, years after both have been lost, just to be able to live their moments of happiness that they’d thought to be eternal and had lost due to a cruel joke of those in power, that sent them to a permanent nightmare on the very night the rest of India was celebrating as its biggest festival. Thus they also reconstruct reality and the root cause behind all happens to be the violence that violently uprooted them from their home in reality and transplanted them across the shadow lines to some other realm where everything had a new face, a new definition.

Independence too was invested with some new shades of meaning. What kind of independence was it? Independence to hate “them” whose identity had been fixed recently by the accident of their lying on the other side of the mirror/border/shadow lines? It was not the first time that theory was preceding practice, that preplanned, concerted action was undertaken for a kind of psychological warfare whose only objective was to create mass paranoia and hysteria due to intensified and purely induced fear psychosis. They need to recollect, as they had lost what they had valued so highly. They had lost because of their being powerless and because the powerful had chosen to first divide and then rule their separate, newly acquired domains. The task of division on paper was left to the “civilized” men but the task of actual drawing away of the mask from the face of separation, dark blood red in colour because it was filled with the blood of millions of innocents, was left to those who wanted blood of their newly established enemies. The chain of murders did not stop there. The bloodlust had entered the lives of “normal” people. It was there to stay, as one permissible, nay, desirable kind of violence in the collective subconscious, only to lay dormant until the time came for its rise. The time did come, again and again, in the subcontinent of hatred. The very normal people, the inhabitants of Dhanmundi, killed Robi’s brother and other two innocent persons before going back to normal, quotidian, even boring existence of theirs, or like the people who first chased the narrator’s bus and then stood smiling at its escape: the blood shedding machines. The two nations theory, famously revived and reinvented by the Muslim and Hindu extremists of the subcontinent in the first half of the twentieth century, so ingenious and so insidious in taking hold of both the communities, had gained its final end by galvanizing masses into action. Blood was shed again and again, proving Pygmalion like, that the two nations theory was finally proven right.

January 1964 saw communal riots on both sides of the border of India and East Pakistan. It had all started with an incident that had taken place thousands of kilometres away in Kashmir. Curiously, there was no blood shedding in the valley itself. Propaganda had created ripples that had travelled to Khulna and from there to Kolkata, and from there, spread throughout Bengal as days of madness filled with blood. There was nothing curious or new about it. That very process keeps on repeating itself to the present date in the Indian subcontinent. People kill for the arbitrary and absurdly rigidly essentialized categories imposed on them from the outside. They find it adequate as an explanation that “they” have to be pre-emptively or reactively butchered before they are able to do any more damage to the body of persons that belong to “I and us”. There are various voices against such madness, but who listens while the blood lust is working on their mind? It is a writer’s duty, penance and acceptance of powerlessness on face of such an opposition that he chooses (only) to portray, with his own stand written all over, at times, the violence he fears or hates so much; as is believed. It may also be because he is fascinated by it so much: the primal blood lust rising its hundred heads somewhere deep in the recesses of the unconscious. Probably he does it in hope of raising the voice of sanity – belated, or as a very small step towards accepting his helplessness as a representative of reason against the powers of the lower parts of the human nature. Maybe it’s just a voyeur’s way of getting sadistic pleasure out of a vivid portrayal of violence and cruelty; unconsciously programmed of course. After all, writers are human too. The novels that portray communal violence have this feature in common. The violence is not there to aesthetically embellish the plot, although it does perform that function. It is there primarily because it has been the seed from which the very novel has sprouted. Or, rather, not the actual bloodshed, but the fear of danger to one’s own life, “that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one… can become suddenly and without warning as hostile as a desert in a flash flood” (TSL 131). Once one’s moorings are lost, there’s no surety of anything. The fundamental needs of physiological and psychological security are impossible to maintain or guarantee when madness enters the collective consciousness, pushing the doors of the unconscious forcibly open. The private spaces merge with the public ones and the private identities become one with the public ones to create an ugly blob of congealed (in)humanity that feeds on life to grow in size and power to kill more. One’s life is in danger even in the once safe house of theirs. So, the private space and identity have to be relinquished, with reason, for some time. It is essential before one adopts the identity and goals of a mass on rampage. No rational and fully functional mind can agree to bloodshed with such a scant consideration and with a complete lack of any respect for life. Reason must be relinquished sine die to do so. The absence of normalcy acts as a catalyst to this process and perpetuates both itself and its products in a manner analogous to the chain reaction in nuclear fission. Although there are many who never participate in the actual violence, and there are some who are against it – they generally remain inert. Thus they support their mad brethren indirectly. In rare cases, when one finds courage or madness enough to risk one’s life, following the diktats of reason and standing against communal bloodshed, one doesn’t find support, either from people or the government.

But then, how can a “sovereign, secular, democratic republic”, as the preamble of our constitution claims India is, allow riots rage in pockets of hatred and violence, year after year, death after death? Theory comes in handy here. It was assumed by the makers of the Imperial Administrative System that the members of the elite, chosen to rule in the name of the Queen, would act as machines programmed by the codes printed/instilled by training, i.e. purely theory based action with little room for an individual’s personal judgement and initiative. It suited the imperial machinery as the Raj had to be uniformly structured, firmly established and continuously asserted through the system. The external colonizers went away but they handed over the reins to the elite that they had constructed right out of the plans of Macauley. The new elite was free to colonize and exploit those who had been marginalized since the Raj era. The new colonizers perpetuated the efficient old colonial system of IAS and its state wise replicas. Therefore, the administration and policing of India depends on one assumption that’s very impractical and naïve in nature that the rulers, the holders of power over millions, will remain uncorrupted, because they are incorruptible even under all kinds of personal, institutional and social pressures.

Well, it is simply not happening. The parts that make the whole administrative system belong to the sea of humanity and they remain stubbornly like those they govern. No utopian class of administrator-philosophers are created here, as Plato had envisioned in his Republic. Instead, those who secure certain position in tests of certain mental skills are given the power to rule in India. Power only intensifies their natural (un)civilized traits and their paranoia and confirmed prejudices finally lead them towards a whole spectrum of violent actions that may even be indirect, at times, but is always dangerous and toxic. Their violence carries their authority and is used to support their “us” against their “them”. The mechanism has been seen in action time and again in India. The involvement of politicians and administrators in planning, executing and intensifying, at least, many of the communal riots that India has seen, has been proven beyond even a modicum of doubt. In the Varanasi riots, that I had been a witness to myself, and had followed the later developments first in the form of rumours, and then newspaper reports on the events in Varanasi and also in other cities in India, PAC and home guards, along with the police, to a large extent, acted en masse against “them” of their (and my) own community of birth: Hinduism. Thus, they clearly broke down the periphery of theory to enter the boundless arena of chaotic action that hadn’t one but several centres in those days of fear and blood lust. The very in(f/t)ernal mechanism of how it all starts and then goes on is shown in the Hazratbal incidence in TSLthat resulted into riots in India and Bangladesh through a kind of reflecting surface: their borders. Religion and violence, although not linked inherently, are linked with demagogues whose vested interests make it imperative for them. Be it communal riots of TSL or wars of MNC, violence is linked with religion in both the novels, not because of any conscious plan of the authors, but because of the reality of the Indian subcontinent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

References:

 

Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. Web. n.d. Scribd.com. 12 October 2012. Pdf. [TSL in the text.]

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Scribd.com. 12 October 2012. Pdf. [MNC in the text.]

 

 

Nation and Violence in The Shadow Lines and Midnight’s Children

The 1971 generation of Bangladesh (and the Indo-Pak wars) gave The Shadow Lines (henceforth TSL) an opening to the theme of nationalism. The 1971 war gave Midnight’s Children (henceforth MNC) the beginning of its rise towards its climax. Although riots (the core of the action of TSL) and wars (the core of the action of MNC, or, at least, of death) are two distinctly different things in themselves and have no surface relation with nation, there’s a method in their mad dance. That method and the violence are shared by the two novels. They also share the questioning of truth-lie, real-unreal polarities.

To begin with, the theme of nationalism will be appropriate. Theory versus practice polarity allows the existence of metaxy (that Avramenko sees as, the permanent middle ground) where one isn’t exactly and purely theoretical nor entirely practical. It is this metaxy where the idea of nation resides elusively and gleefully for a critical thinker to enter. For an individual who agrees to or is unwillingly moved by the collective will of the masses, there’s no theory, only practice both while performing individual role and also while acting as a unit of the masses: because to do is much easier than to sit back, to refrain from all external action in order to understand the real reason behind action. What does a nation mean in itself? What does it mean for one who believes in it? For me? Who gave me India and me to India? When? How? And, the biggest question of all: Why? My experience teaches me to steer clear (as Eliot would recommend with his Scylla and Charybdis analogy) of involvement with any extreme while reasoning.

So, I’ll not subscribe to the primordiality or inventedness of nation. I’ll assay my theory (to give it a discernible and respectable identity) on the touchstone of my personal experience to reach my (I admit in a postmodern, relativistic and anti-grand-narratives vein) version of truth. Religion, caste, nation: all are accidental, and not genetically embedded. Even then, the manifestation of whatever is genetically embedded depends on these. The external finally proves to be stronger than the core in this ironical and paradoxical case. Those externals are ascribed through the process of socialization during one’s identity formation. Unlike the claims made by the demagogues, no child is born an / Pakistani or a Hindu/Muslim. They are programmed carefully, preferably through co-option, by those who are already programmed. Respecting one’s national flag, anthem and history are taught and later assimilated, to be seen finally as arising naturally from within. The imagined nature of nationalism makes it possible to question the need and validity of such “imagination”. As Anderson, in his Imagined Communities, puts so insightfully, precisely and logically, that the birth of the print mass media coincided with that of nationalism as a common factor determining the identities of people imprisoned within the shadow lines of arbitrarily created national frontiers. Despite all heterogeneity, a kind of commonality, an essence, was said to be present in the people of a nation. The “us-them” dichotomy was established absolutely because of the vested interests that benefited from such kind of polarization. Nationalism substituted religion as the opiate of masses and the substitution was made possible by the Enlightenment dethroning of religion through a persistent rational questioning. Plato was proven right. It’s very unnatural for human beings, or, at least, for a majority, to remain rational for a long span of time, that too, consistently. Lapsing into the basic animalistic irrationality is quite natural. Any attempt at equating natural-unnatural with superior-inferior or good-bad will be misleading, although logically and culturally inferred and implied. So, the natural, illogical and real part of the psyche that controls the artificial, rational part most of the times, also happens to collectively control peoples and systems that have been generated initially by individuals and then become self-perpetuating and all sub/con-suming. Nation – the creation of man – subsumes individuals in its body to finally become the creator – father/mother-land – superior even to another son of man – God. In fact, the masses need creating such behemoths, such conceptual, multidimensional, monolithic juggeranuts, with a complementary need of sacrificing themselves on the altar of their own creations. Blood is the best and most powerful aphrodisiac for the satanic orgy of violence with cold-blooded mass extermination machines and methods, and riots and wars act as festivals that humanity(?) has been celebrating again and again in order to show its real nature to itself. History’s repeating itself – first as a tragedy and then as a farce – turns into some sort of redundancy when its repetition is repeated indefinite number of times. All calculations fail and history is obliterated from the minds of those who don’t have mind suitable enough to experience it, or memory capable enough to hold it.

Strangely, the protagonists of both TSL and MNC find it out for themselves that violence and humanity don’t speak the same language, and theirs is the language of humanity. Strangely and counter intuitively, the two novels also tend to indicate that nation and humanity don’t speak the same language by their treatment of the relation of their protagonists with the idea and reality called nation, people and the collective memory of a nation. The narrator of TSL finds it very strange that “we can only use words of description when they [riots] happen and then fall silent, for to look for words of any other kind would be to give them meaning, and that is the risk we cannot take any more than we can afford to listen to madness” (147). For want of comprehension, one tends to look for easy escape routes towards a semblance of coherence, as incoherence is very disturbing. Chaos inside the head that rings continuously as the raucous early morning alarm clock indicates that there’s something wrong with the state of one’s being. Meaning is the key to any such situation. Only meaning can magnetize the domain of chaos to finally arrange them in a manner that mind is able to comprehend. It takes a lot of courage – moral and intellectual – to wander in the dark deep caverns of the unconscious mind where the central meaning of all chaos can be found. It’s neither easy nor very pleasant to descend to that underworld, because facing one’s animal self is a veritable crisis that a person wants to avoid, or, at least, delay at all costs. Language, as Lacan puts it, and unconscious are structured in a similar manner. The meaning of the phenomenal world is deciphered using the system of language, the basic building block of life. The world is understood through language, and language falters in its job at many places in these novels.

In TSL there are people who compare riots and wars. For Ila, a riot is “nothing that sets a political example to the world, nothing that’s really remembered” (TSL 68). For Malik: “All riots are terrible… But… a local thing… hardly comparable to a war” (TSL 142). The local, (so) unimportant, ephemeral to the collective consciousness, politically insignificant riots lose in the contest for popular remembrance and portrayal to wars. Wars are written and sung about. They provide the opportunity to show one’s patriotism and to die for the father/mother land. War is an industry, a religion, even a way of life. A riot is not like a war. People try to push it to the unconscious; sweep it clean off the floor under the carpet, so that it isn’t seen, ergo remembered by anyone any more. There are some who try to remind others of riots but a common man never does so because he has a vested interest in continuation of the normal way of life with a boring consistency and predictability in the repetition of its cycles year after year. This phenomenon has a parallel in miniature in many families with a secret that has to be hidden at all costs. A riot has a parallel. It is not written or talked about freely and openly by common people who had shed blood or witnessed bloodshed. These people, directly or indirectly responsible, try to avoid reliving their collective shame and guilt by denying the existence of any such thing. Now wars are a class apart. They have been ideologically established. In more than two millenia of the recorded human history, wars have been accepted into the hearts of humanity as something that is glorious, especially the dulce et decorum est pro patria mori thing. The righteous war is an essential from of bloodshed- desirable in all ways. The Vedas extol Indra, the lord of war who destroys the enemy forts, without any kind of reservation. The Puranas and Smritis are all praise for the kshatriyas, the warrior clans descending directly (and very believably) from the sun or the moon. Histories, till the end of the the o;d historiography’s emphasis on individuals, were biographies of kings, generals and warriors. The epics – Greek or Hindu – are all about wars and the exploits of their heroes.

Thus, wars have been glorified in an established and systematic manner and have been written about ad nauseum. The huge volume of literature covering the two world wars is sufficient to prove the point. As Tha’mma tells the narrator, those dying for their nation get medals and “churches are lined with memorials to men who died in wars, all around the world… That’s what it takes to make a country” (TSL 48). The same never happens for those who sacrifice their lives fighting against communal disharmony. They never get any bravery award. That kind of respect is reserved strictly for those who sacrifice their lives selflessly and violently, following their superiors’ orders. For them are composed verses and it is with their story that films are made. It’s because they get their names permanently established that they are remembered – the martyrs of war. It’s because their individual and collected memories are effaced that they are not remembered – the martyrs and victims of communal riots. MNC shows the merciless and unbelievable betrayal of the trust of the warriors of faith by the Pakistani government through the way buddha’s companion reacts to what he clearly sees happening on the streets of Dhaka. He finds it impossible to believe, and even more difficult to put his ides in words. As if he is doubly struck by forces of modified nature of the modern times: violence and shock of the loss of faith. His state of mind is comparable to that of the little boys in TSL., the boys whose lives were changed because of riots that are different from wars because in wars the frontiers on which violence and madness reign generally exist somewhere “there”: at far away places. Riots remove all frontiers and their intervening distances. Violence and madness enter the sacred and safe domains of one’s neighbourhoods, and, very terrorizingly, threaten to touch one’s citadel: one’s home.

Murder – glorified and institutionalized in wars – seen at close quarters, does not appear so appealing or glorious any more. Transposed on one’s own self, unconsciously or consciously, violence loses its lustre and can only generate phobia or mania ranging from mild to intermediate to any of their extreme varieties. The constant tension generated due to the presence of antagonistic factions in proximity may have psychological manifestations ranging from temporary to permanent changes in one’s way of thought and action. Yet, “By the end of January 1964 the riots had faded away from the pages of the newspapers, disappeared from the collective imagination of ‘responsible opinion’, vanished without leaving any trace in the histories and bookshelves. They had dropped out of memory into the crater of a volcano of silence” (TSL 149). Why? Why is the pattern repeated again and again? Although it is about only riots in TSL, and wars in MNC, in the outside world’s context too, it can be seen happening with many other “sensational” pieces of news. The public interest is aroused and sustained for a short span only, after which must come something new. There have been few instances in which media and the intelligentsia have focussed on a moral outrage consistently, but such instances can be easily counted on fingers. Generally, people have a very short attention span, and the media, even shorter.

I can recall very vividly the riots of the 1990’s in Uttar Pradesh. There used to be curfews in the aftermath and newspapers and radio were the most popular and trustworthy sources of information for the masses hungry for it. What happened? Who attacked or murdered whom? How much more time would it take for normalcy to return? All these questions surfaced again and again. Earlier people had looked for the signs of trouble. In the later stages, once the shock value had given place to a settled ennui, people open their newspapers or turned on the radio with the hope that all signs of trouble would fade away. How long could the children have enjoyed their curfew imposed holidays? Not sine die. How long could the adults afford to stay away from their economic activities? Not sine die. But how long?

 

References:

 

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006. Print.

Avramenko, Richard G. “Bedeviled by Boredom: A Voegelinian Reading of Dostoevsky’s Possessed”. Web. n.d. nhinet.org. 12 October 2012. Pdf.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. Web. n.d. Scribd.com. 12 October 2012. Pdf. [TSL in the text.]

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Scribd.com. 12 October 2012. Pdf. [MNC in the text.]

The Way of Heaven in Amitav Gosh’s River of Smoke

“Our longing for the imagined health of the past must be a sign of the sickness of the present” (Bate 2). Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke looks back at a time in the past that is important as it is the site of contest for two ways of life, two different ways of looking at culture and nature and two very different set of peoples. The past it looks at is not totally free of rot. Yet, it has its moments of glimpses to a health that is not imagined but real. There are two pasts of China when one looks at the narrative: the reader’s past and the narrator’s past. The reader’s past includes the narrator’s past and present and the time between the opium wars and today. The narrator’s present is full of the physic-moral sickness induced by opium but his past is glorious, with a balance of yin and yang and oneness with nature. That’s not all, because there is an array of possibilities to be explored. When seen through the twin lenses of ecocriticism and postcolonialism the novel presents a wide and interesting vista. These two ways of looking at the world have been yoked together, not unnaturally or violently, but because they have a common denominator of questioning the exploitative nature of humanity, and demanding equality: for humans and for all the elements of nature respectively. Ghosh’s novel is informed by his critical gaze at the anthropocentric, Eurocentric and materialistic human beings in general, and the West in particular. The suffix –centric that is used in the previous sentence is quite dangerous. It is true, particularly in the case of this paper, that this suffix is generally attributed derogatorily in an ex post facto manner to an object that has been conclusively proven to be ridiculously, clearly and absolutely wrong. Copernicus et. al. proved the Aristotelian geocentric view of the universe wrong. The German High Criticism proved the absolute theocentric certainty of the Bible wrong. Ecocentrism challenges the humanist and Biblical anthropocentrism to prove it wrong, while ironically leaving the curse of –centrism free to work on it. The troika of Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz, and after them, the Enlightenment thinkers established it firmly (and anthropocentrically) that the human mind is the medium though which the world is created using reason and sense experience as guides. The modern scientific method of observation leading to hypothesis, experiments and formation of theories that are universally valid, even eternally so, was invented in the seventeenth century. That method seeped into the realms of knowledge now called sciences, including social sciences, critical theory etc. Very characteristically, one of the latest progenies of the method- ecocentrism – happens to be one of the most perceptive and harshest critics of the myth of the objective scientific method and of the grand narrative of the Enlightenment scientific progress. River of Smoke (henceforth RS) yields rich dividends to a logical ecocentric analysis but it must be kept in mind that it does the same from a postcolonial perspective too. In fact, it is a fictional work in the postcolonial post pastoral mould that keeps defying definition all the time. Curiously the writer/narrator attempts only to critique the exploitative free trade system of the Raj on a historico-economical basis. Yet, there are a plethora of critical possibilities that open up in the text and contain strands intertwined with the post pastoral convention and the (in)human exploitation of the earth and of the less powerful. In contrast to the characters that have power and exploit nature, there is a circle of people centred on nature. It contains Commissioner Lin, Pauline and her father, Penrose and Robin. Those closer to the centre – like Pauline and her father – worship nature, but the points on the periphery look at it as a substance for human consumption and utilization with aesthetic and economical advantages. People outside the circle have no time to think about a thing as unimportant as nature. People in the novel, except Commissioner Lin, generally view nature anthropocentrically. Commissioner Lin, one of the very few persons portrayed as totally devoid of the taint of evil, speaks axiomatically about the “Way of Heaven” asserting that people choose life over death and good over evil asserting their free will. The Commissioner, who may also stand for the Chinese wisdom that sees yin and yang or the opposing forces composing the universe, also strengthens the post pastoralness of his part of the novel in his recognition of the “creative–destructive universe equally in balance in a continuous momentum of birth and death, death and rebirth, growth and decay, ecstasy and dissolution” (Gifford 153). It is the way of heaven from which those who are out of the circle have strayed. They are the blind and mindless destroyers of nature. There is a complete continuum of positions taken inside the circle of nature: from its cognizant and sustainable users that are all anthropocentric to its worshippers qua nature, deep ecological to the core. The stream of anthropocentric knowledge that has been highlighted in the novel is horticulture, one of most refined branches of agriculture. All –cultures in agriculture, the science of sustaining human life on this earth through plant products are strongly anthropocentric. For instance, they neatly classify plants into weeds and non-weeds and instill in humanity the hatred of weeds, converting them into deadly and committed weed killers, although weeds are but plants, whose products have no mass demand in markets. Mr. Penrose was a devoted horticulturalist who had made fortune through his innovative and bold utilization of the natural resources of the world. He looked upon nature “as an assortment of puzzles, many of which, if properly resolved, could provide rich sources of profit” (RS 47). His practical approach towards nature can be judged rightly through his response to the wilderness that the Botanical Gardens of Port Louis had turned into. It was irksome to his eyes that the symmetrical beauty of an English garden was no more, in its place was nature’s plenty in all its varieties of vegetation from various continents. “In Nature there existed no forest where African creepers were at war with Chinese trees, nor one where Indian shrubs and Brazilian vines were locked in a mortal embrace. This was a work of Man, a botanical Babel” (RS 23). It was this man-made storehouse of botanical riches that had forced Penrose to include Port Louis in Redruth’s itinerary. Even while “mourning” for its fallen state Penrose was forming schemes of benefiting from whatever he could lay his hands on, as it had no owner. It was the same mentality with which the white races had always colonized and snatched lands from others. He was intensely and intelligently immersed in his work of making profit from plants, and this made him invent whatever made his work easier. The process of making technological advances so that nature can be exploited more easily was repeated in his case too. It was his purely egocentric gaze on nature that had enabled Penrose to extract a fortune from it. What troubled him the most was that the changing times had increased the number of competitors in the market of exotic flora; hence the extent of exploitation of nature too must have increased. Imperialism and colonization were the bringers of death and destruction of native flora, fauna, cultures and human beings. As Lenin had rightly pointed out in his “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, capitalism in its crassest and most dangerously exploitative form was called imperialism. So, it sucked the marrow out of nature’s bone after having fed on its flesh heartily. It had an insatiable appetite for profit and was essentially anthropo-, and generally, Eurocentric. For the Penroses of the world, the natural world around them aroused just a sense of curiosity, never awe. They are genuinely interested, but they don’t see any mystery in the phenomena of nature. In other words, they don’t fit in the scheme of the temple of nature as its priests. That role is left for the people like Pierre Lambert. To know better about the way he looked at nature and its majesty, one has to have an entirely differently cast mind. For him “the love of Nature had been a kind of religion, a form of spiritual striving: he had believed that in trying to comprehend the inner vitality of each species, human beings could transcend the mundane world and its artificial divisions” (RS 47). He was a botanist for whom horticulture was a form of spiritual communion with nature, nay, with the spirit of the earth. Paulette, trained by her father had inherited a worshipful love of nature. Lambert was her biological and intellectual father at the same time and she was made in his image, although not as purely ecocentrally and selflessly as he. She did find Penrose, her quasi-father with his resolve to extract a living from what nature had in it, a better fit in the order of nature than her father. Robin, with his artist’s sensibility and trained eyes that saw aspects of nature’s beauty missed by others, still remained atavistically ensconced in the Renaissance humanistic anthropocentrism. Penrose’s sons disappointed him because they had no interest in botany and plants were just like any other item of merchandise for them. Yet, he was different only in according nature comparatively more importance than them while remaining firmly anthropocentric. He was, after all, a western man and an imperialist too. In the beginning, “the cultures of most primal societies throughout the world were permeated with Nature-oriented religions that expressed the ecocentric perspective. These cosmologies, involving a sacred sense of the Earth and all its inhabitants, helped order their lives and determine their values” (Sessions 158). With the passage of time, amongst the religions and philosophies of the world, various eastern or pagan religions stayed close to nature while the western philosophy and religion became anthropocentric from the pagan ecocentrism and animism. It was Aristotle who had firmly established a geocentric universe with man at the top of the Great Chain of Beings: as Nature made plants for the use of the animals and both for man’s use. Penrose is a man, and for him nature is a source of things that he uses for his benefit. His ship is made in his image, with nothing fanciful and his eyes were always on profit that was huge. The plants he had chosen for the Chinese connoisseurs were handpicked from the Americas. antirrhinums, lobelias and georginas… the ‘Mexcian Orange’ and a beautiful new fuchsia… Gaultheria shallon, a plant both ornamental and medicinal, and a magnificent new conifer… Shrubs were not neglected either: the flowering currant, in particular, was a species for which Fitcher had very high hopes. (RS 47) He had planned to exchange the plants never seen in China for those never seen in the west, making neat profit in the process. All his inventiveness and his spirit were devoted to his own self and not to any other entity. He is just one of the many imperial explorers, horticulturalists and botanists who saw nature especially that of the colonies, as something to be acquired and exploited for profit. As is made clear in the novel, Holland and France were also making similar ventures in the field of horticulture. Sir Joseph Banks, the Curator of the King’s Garden at Kew, had collected plants for display from the remotest parts of the world. Only China, “– a country singularly blessed in its botanical riches, being endowed not only with some of the most beautiful and medicinally useful plants in existence, but also with many that were of immense commercial value” was not equally represented as it was not so heavily exploitable (RS 61). The reason behind it was that the Celestials were clearly aware of the value of nature and they did not allow the western barbarians to invade and destroy their nature. Even when some success brought them in possession of the much yearned for plant specimens, it was very difficult to transport them across the seas as the seamen who were in charge of the plants on board looked at the plants as some kind of “threat”, as their competitor who had eyes on the water that was essential for their existence. The imperial explorers/exploiters of nature had devised ingenious ways of doing their work. Explorers in the eighteenth century couldn’t take any live specimens with them, so they took dried specimens (seeds) with them. They even devised a “painted garden”, i.e. painted pictures of the specimens, some kind of a catalogue, to plan future exploitative excursions on. They finally did succeed in bringing the Chinese flora to enrich the European landscape. “Hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, flowering plums, tree peonies, the first repeat-flowering roses, crested irises, innumerable new gardenias, primroses, lilies, hostas, wisterias, asters and azaleas” were all Chinese imports (RS 73). To top it all came Cunningham’s find – the horticultural Holy Grail, the Golden Camellia – that was reputed to be the eternal font of youth. It is the search for this flowering plant that makes the most important sub-plot of the novel, with two of the five central characters involved. The novel focuses an ecocritical glance on the nineteenth century human exploitation of nature. In addition to showing how those who ruled, the imperial powers and the dominant human races, exploited fellow humans and nature, the novel also shows that nature is the voiceless and powerless entity that is exploited even by the most powerless humans. When Paulette looks at the island of Kowloon, what she saw is proleptic of modern man’s mindless destruction of the life sustaining nature: The vegetation was sparse and lacking in interest: such trees as there may once have been had been hacked down by the people who lived in the impoverished little villages that were scattered around the island’s rim. They had done a thorough job of it too, for almost nothing remained now but a few stunted trunks and wind-twisted branches (RS 120). She finds the sparsely populated Hong Kong more attractive. From where Redruth was anchored, the human habitations couldn’t be seen. Rice fields were everywhere and the mainlanders were not interested in such an island. Nature offered clean drinking water in abundance in the form of streams and the ships were drawn there because of the same. Even Paulette is not a nature worshipper in a totally egoless manner. The thrill one got in wandering in the forests of china and “be to botanize in these vast and beautiful wilds” attracted her a lot. It is ironical that the nurseries run by the professional gardeners on the island of Honam were the place from where all the plants introduced to Europe came, and not from the forests. The civilized barbarians were not allowed to come in contact with nature in China. They are denied this opportunity because the Chinese know their real intentions. One of the greatest power someone may have over something is the power to name them. it was this power that man had over nature and the power was exercised to its fullest when Linnaeus gave it the scientific format of classification and binominal nomenclature. It was the same power that made Penrose exclaim that she had found something new, and Paulette “discovers and names” Diploprora penrosii. Robin’s letter contrasts the crowded Canton with Honam, which is compared to a huge, green and wooded park. The tone clearly conveys his preference. He is there on his quest for the Holy Grail of Cunningham and Penrose. He is full of praise for the way in which the pots were “skilfully grouped to create an impression of a landscape… these natural features… endlessly mutable… reconfigured with the passing of the seasons, or perhaps even to suit the daily moods of its custodians” (RS 182). His praise is an epitome of self-contradiction. It is given to a heavily artificial panorama of nature that is changed according to the aesthetic choices, wishes and fancies of humans. The point is, that they intensify the effects of seasons and generate a concentrated kind of “artificial/pseudo” season in themselves. It is his celebration of the unreal that a Baudrillard would find very interesting. His mindset finds a correlative in the European’s taming of the wilderness, yet maintaining the pretense of nature in designing gardens, landscapes and improved “views”. Ironically, it is the same person talking about the possibility of the transfer of the Redruth consignment to an island: “plants were not meant to grow on ships, were they, Puggly dear? and it does seem cruel to deprive them of their natural element when it lies so close at hand” (RS 260). In the very next instant his anthropocentrism reasserts itself and he suggests that a nursery should be set on the same spot as it’d yield rich future dividends. The enigmatic painter has a visionary’s capacity to throw surprisingly accurate analyses reached through his intuitive sight. His connecting opium and flowers and equating the relation to the abstract ideas of evil and beauty is one such case. The city of Canton had gifted the western world with the choicest of the flowers and also changed the way it viewed gardens and nature. What it had got in return was the permanent curse of slavery to opium. He prophesys that one day, when everything else is forgotten, Canton will be remembered for its flowers that are “immortal and will bloom for ever” (RS 320). Ah Fey’s story is the point where the novel’s postcolonial concern meets the ecocritical one. The man who tells his story as a boy is known to Robin as Mr. Chan. The Eurocentric, anthropocentric men of the Western money making machines can only give contempt, mistreatment and hatred to a fifteen year old Chinese gardener. Although his had been the driving intelligence, success was attributed to a white man, Mr. Kerr. In contrast to Robin’s praise for the gardens of China, Ah Fey hates the best one of Britain. After the kind of treatment he received, to his eyes, Kew is “not a garden but an untended wilderness” (RS 265). Here, it is true, anthropocentrism is clearly discernible. Yet, in an ecocentric character like Ah Fey, for whom plants are more important than his own self, it is not a blemish. In fact, it acts as a medium to make the west’s “taming” and exploitation of nature and of the colonized peoples clearer. Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Picador: London, 2007. Print. Ghosh, Amitav. River of Smoke. 2011. n.d. Web. DOC. 27 November 2011. Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. Routledge: London, 1999. Print. Lenin, V.I. “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. May 1997. Web. 22 March 2012. Sessions, George. “Ecocentrism and the Anthropocentric Detour”. Deep Ecology for, the Twenty-first Century. Ed. George Sessions. Shambhala: London, 1995. Print.

Borders, Violence and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines

“Everyone lives in a story… because stories are all there are to live in, it was just a question of which one you choose” (The Shadow Lines 109)

 

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (TSL) is a story that arises out of the narrator’s reminiscences, recollected in tranquility and looked at with all the wisdom of the hind sight. It is about essentialization as a process, and its questioning in various ways. Essentialization is a very dangerously deceptive thing, especially when its purpose is a neat compartmentalization of human beings on the basis of subjective traits. Even then, sustaining the definition of water tight compartments of humanity becomes very difficult when homogeneity tends to erase the well defined boundaries, making them blurred and shadowy. One of the many appealing facets of TSL is the way it looks at the accident that descended on the pages of history: the creation of two nations on the basis of the incompatibility of two religious groups and their mutual hatred. East and West Pakistan were carved out of the British India on the basis of the two nation theory that totally opposed any possibility of co-existence. Boundaries were created and people were forced to alter their lives and selves to accommodate them to the conceptual nations that the powerful persons had created.

 

TSL shows the plight of the narrator’s grandmother and her loss of the sense of secure moorings; a point of reference to which one returns for assurance. Her loss was caused due to the borders imposed on her. In his Modern Political Geography Richard Muir defines boundaries that “occur where the vertical interfaces between state sovereignties intersect the surface of the earth…As vertical interfaces, boundaries have no horizontal extent” (qtd. inAnderson 172). Tha’mma would have been perplexed with Muir’s elegantly defined boundaries that only existed in the conceptual space. In her own simple way she “wanted to know whether she would be able to see the border between India and East Pakistan from the plane” (TSL 90). She wasn’t looking for a line as such, but for some indicator of demarcation.

 

Hindus and Muslims, unlike the White and Black peoples, have no phenotypical inherent traits to tell them from each other. They shared land, culture and more than a thousand years of history. They had lived together, happily or unhappily, peacefully or struggling for survival on the same resource base. They would have kept doing the same had their fates not been manipulated by those who had assumed God-head, with its power, will, means and knowledge. The gods had developed a line of reasoning that showed the two categories of Hindus and Muslims as completely irreconcilable and essentially antagonistic. Their ideas found fruition in the first nation of the world that was constructed purely on the basis of religion:Pakistan, or the land of the holy. The storyofpakistan.com asserts confidently:

As early as in the beginning of the 11th century, Al-Biruni observed that Hindus differed from the Muslims in all matters and habits…The speech made by Quaid-i-Azam atMintoPark,Lahoreon March 22, 1940 was very similar to Al-Biruni’s thesis in theme and tone. In this speech, he stated that Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, with different social customs and literature…He emphasized that in spite of the passage of about 1,000 years the relations between the Hindus and Muslims could not attain the level of cordiality.

The Muslim fundamentalists were inadvertently but ably supported by the Hindu right wing. Leaders ranging from Quaid-e-Azam to Guruji had supported and established in the popular imagination the mutually exclusive and entirely essentialist categories of Hindus and Muslims. Their efforts bore fruit by contributing towards the establishment of these categories as parallels to the imagined communities of nations.Andersondefines nation as “an imagined political community… inherently limited and sovereign”(6). Despite all differences and conflicts, the members of this imagined community have a strong sense of belonging. “It is generally recognized that the intelligentsia were central to the rise of nationalism in the colonial territories… [their] vanguard role derived fro their… literacy and bilingualism” (Anderson116). It was the intelligentsia who had started the process. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was one of the first to broach the issue of fundamental incompatibility. Allama Iqbal had called the idea of territorially divided loyalties to nations as one of the modern inventions and an enemy of the solidarity of the Muslim “umma”. He was right about the imaginary and inventedness of nations, asAndersontoo would assert five decades later.

 

History does not prove Iqbal’s claim of the solidarity of the inherently heterogeneous Muslim umma that cuts across innumerable linguistic and geographical boundaries right, as is clear from the present unrest in Pakistan itself.  The Hindu-Muslim rift was deepened, widened and clearly defined in the decades enveloping 1900. It is from then same time period that one may trace the unbroken lineage of the monster of communal hatred – communal riots – in the Indian subcontinent. The demographics specific to the subcontinent facilitated its origin and growth. Hindus or Muslims, whether they formed an absolute majority in a geographical region and felt secure in their numerical strength, or they were a minority, and the potential victims of persecution on the basis of the religion of their birth: in each case there was a way to communalize masses. The mass paranoia of the inevitable discrimination based on religion was fed and raised to a heightened pitch by those who had the most to benefit from such circumstances. Public fear was roused in order to gain political mileage and what came out of it was natural and logical.

 

Ironically, the partition of the two nations joined them even more closely and strongly. So strongly, that an event inIndia’s northern most state ofJammu and Kashmircaused riots in both Indian and Pakistani parts of the subcontinent on both sides of the border. The same happened after 8 December 1992, whileIndiawas spilling its blood, so wasBangladeshwhere “Muslims attacked and burnt down Hindu temples and shops … At least 10 people have died, many Hindu women have been raped, and hundreds of Hindu homes and temples have been destroyed” (“Chronology for Hindus inBangladesh”). One strong similarity between the two riots is the presence of the desecration of the religious symbols at their core: “the sacred relic known as the Mu-i-Mubarak – believed to be a hair of the Prophet Mohammad himself” and the mosques at Ayodhya, Mathura and Kasi or Varanasi (TSL 135). Politicians were behind inciting the masses into violent action, and in keeping the government machinery inert while they went on a rampage, on both sides of the borders of time and space. TSL has a number of lines of action and the one that’s red with blood is etched very clearly in its second half.

 

India’s test series againstEnglandwas to begin on 10 January 1964 inMadras. It was on that fateful date that the narrator of TSL was to taste what the fear of an unknown “they” meant. In his comparatively empty school bus he was introduced to the faith inducing powers of rumors. Most of the students had not brought water that day because the rumor of “their” poisoning all the water ofCalcuttahad already spread. The very psychology of the unchallengeable and pre-validated logic of rumors brings back to my mind the post riot curfew days of 1991, when morning rumors were congealed and solidified by the evening. In those days the two dailies: Aj in the morning and Gandeev in the evening, were the only source of local information for people thirsty for any snippets that could confirm or prove wrong whatever they had heard throughout the day. More than that, they needed objective justification of their own prejudices. Just like the little boys in TSL, they “did not need to ask any question… [they] knew the answers… it was a reality that existed only in the saying” (TSL 120).

 

TSL show violence through its presence in the background and its pervading the atmosphere, also through its turning into silence, through its conversion into a recurring nightmare, and finally, through the narration of the one graphical act of violence that left a permanent scar on the lives of its witnesses (Robi, May and Tha’mma). The January 1964 riots, that BBC rightly called “the first incident of religious violence since 1950” in India spread on both sides of the border. They are portrayed not so much as direct acts of violence as through the tension and fear created in the minds of the children (the narrator and his schoolmates in one case and Robi in the other). This tension and the unmentioned yet ever discernible fear create an atmosphere that becomes a character in itself – an important determiner of actions and lives. It is this tension and fear in the atmosphere that brings back to my mind a series of reminiscences from the Varanasi riots of 1991-92, the chaos, the heat, and how it was felt by those on the extreme periphery of any active involvement or loss. Fear is central in both the cases: of fictional and real lives. In TSL there is an elemental fear of violence that the children in the bus feel when they hear the noise of the rioting mob, and later when they were followed by one. They could not compare it to anything else in their experience and the narrator later opines insightfully:

 

It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world – not language, not food, not music – it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror (122).

 

Fear of that kind is ever present. Always ready to rise in the hearts of the trapped people, making them feel cornered enough to plan retaliation and contribute to the vicious cycle of violence that begets violence. A similar fear was in the air back in 1991-92 also. Instead of treating the parallel at an emotional and personal level, the present paper attempts to incorporate the analogical streams of 1964 and 1991-92 riots in showing their pattern. It does not try to hide differences, if there, e.g. one major difference between them was that the 1964 riots were relegated to the narrow columns of the last pages of the news papers, but the 1991-92 riots (coming right after the infamous 1989 Varanasi riot) was very widely covered and reported about. The narrator painfully realized it when he mentioned the riots of 1964 to his friends and they accepted being completely ignorant of it.

 

“Real” life enters fiction and a history treads cautiously into the orbit of narration when a historical novel touches a real life event. TSL’s narrative is woven around the historically real incidents with complete details of their occurrence. Everything is treated in such a manner that the reader is forced to suspend all disbelief willingly, effortlessly, even colluding with the narrator/writer; more so, when dates and numbers are woven into the story. 10 January 1964, when the first match of the test series was to begin, and its co-incidence with the riot’s entering the life of the narrator is a clever device. A detailed account of the events that led to the riots is given in the novel. On 27 December 1963 Mu-i-Mubarak disappeared. There were some incidents of people’s damaging public property, but their anger was directed against the government and not against any particular religious community. Moreover, the protesters belonged to all the religions. Pandit Nehru sent CBI to the valley and the relic was recovered. Yet the damage was already done. The Pakistani “religious authorities, usually so quick to condemn idolatry, declared that the theft of the relic was an attack upon the identity of Muslims.Karachiobserved 31 December as a ‘Black Day’, and soon other cities followed suit. The Pakistani newspapers declared that the theft was part of a deep-laid conspiracy for uprooting the spiritual and national hopes of Kashmiris, and rumbled darkly about ‘genocide’” (TSL 136).

 

In the East Pakistani town ofKhulnathe demonstrators against the disappearance of the relic turned against the minority Hindus and many lives were lost. As Trivedi reports, the riots soon spread all overEast Pakistan. The whiplash was soon felt inCalcuttaas refugees from East Pakistan fled toIndia. On 10 January, mobs went on a rampage, killing Muslims and destroying their property. Army was called when the situation went out of control. The violence was stopped and everything went back to normal, as the narrator declares: “By the end of January 1964 the riots had faded away from the pages of the newspapers, disappeared from the collective imagination of ‘responsible opinion’, vanished without leaving a trace in the histories and bookshelves. They had dropped out of memory into the crater of a volcano of silence” (TSL 138). Individual paranoia, worked onto a feverish pitch, had been and can be conjugated at macro level to create concerted and planned violent action called a riot. The Indian sub-continent had been a witness to many such planned blood baths whose origin lies in the establishment of the two nation theory in the collective psyche. Such were the fruits of the tree of hatred whose seed was sown around the beginning of the twentieth century.

 

 

Works Cited

 

“1964: Riots inCalcuttaleave more than 100 dead”. Bbc.co.uk. n.d. Web. 27 November 2011.

 

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

 

“Chronology for Hindus inBangladesh”. unhcr.org. n.d. Web. 25 February 2012

Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. ebookee.org. n.d. Web. 27 November 2011. DOC.

 

“The Ideology ofPakistan: Two-Nation Theory”. storyofpakistan.com. 1 June 2003. Web. 23 February 2012.

 

Trivedi, Rabindranath. “The Legacy of the plight of Hindus inBangladesh- Part-VII”. asiantribune.com. 23 July 2007. Web. 23 February 2012.

The Forces of Light and Darkness in River of Smoke

“Without opium, Chinese history… would have been far different” (Brook 1).

 

Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke is a tale of people whose lives were linked to the history of opium trade. It has people of various nationalities that meet in Canton, where most of the novel is set. The action is set just before the first opium war, in a time when the edicts of the Chinese Emperor against opium were proving to be powerless because of the “deadly combination of expanding Chinese demand and skyrocketing British supply…[when] Lin Zexu was appointed imperial maritime commissioner in 1838 to stop the opium trade” (Brook 6). His tough measures culminated into the opium war (1839-42), that ended with a shameful defeat for the Chinese. It was this defeat, some historians claim, that opened China to the western influence and resulted into its modernization. Just like some claim that India benefited largely through its colonization by the British because they gave it the foundation of modern nationalism and all the basic institutions required to run a state effectively. As if India was a wilderness, sans any system, before 1757 and it would never have modernized itself had it not been colonized and exploited. At the end of the novel there’s Lin’s letter to Queen Victoria. It was published in Canton register and is presented in the novel very faithfully. It is a parallel presentation of the narrator’s point of view and sympathies. This statement is borne out by various instances and ways that are used in the novel to expose their true colour that is black.

 

Commissioner Lin was a scholar officer who appeared to have risen from the legends of ancient China– the incorruptible poet-philosopher and administrator of the Chinese civil services came to life in him. His actions consistently gave positive messages to the people of Chinawho had lost all hopes in mandarins. In opposition to the morally black merchants, his colour is white. Between the two extremes of morally white and black lie various other characters of the novel. The only white character in the novel that could be called honest is Charles King. He stood against his own race and had only his conviction in the call of his conscience on his side. Just like Commissioner Lin, he had made enemies amongst his own people, because opium was the font of wealth for many Chinese and foreigners alike and “in a world where corruption and greed are the rule, they are both incorruptible – and it is not surprising that this should be hateful in the eyes of their peers” (River of Smoke 317).

 

There was a foreshadowing of the future in Mr. King’s thoughts at the end. Several battleships had been mobilized. He knew that the ensuing war would change the scale of balance entirely. He had written a letter to Elliott in which he had petitioned for justice, in vain:

Justice forbids that the steps taken by the Chinese, to arrest a system of wrongs practised on them, under the mask of friendship, be made pretence for still deeper injuries. Interest condemns the sacrifice of the lawful and useful trade with China, on the altar of illicit traffic. Still more loudly does it warn against the assumption of arms in an unjust quarrel, against – not the Chinese government only – but the Chinese people. Strong as Great Britainis she cannot war with success, or even safety, upon the consciences – the moral sense – of these three or four hundred million people. (River of Smoke 320)

 

In the same letter he asserted that the white man’s trade in opium had dishonoured the name of Christian God among those they saw as the heathen races. It was given several disturbingly negative epithets in Chinese language and the Chinese people hated it and those who traded in it. Opium and its introducers to China were rightly and equally hated by the common Chinese men. It had not only ruined just China, but also another Asian country: India. There were huge land areas of “Malwa, Bihar, and Benares” where opium was mainly cultivated. The whole pernicious system was put into action by the powerful Empire over which the sun never set. The white man had come to civilize the brown and yellow races and had turned them into animals instead.

 

Mr. King saw the true nature of opium trade through the screen of ideology. He saw how the East India Company was behind opium trade that had full support of the British Parliament. The British opium merchants had full support of their society, whereas, every Chinese who used opium felt guilty and ashamed and hated it and disapproved of it. In addition to the white merchants and the Chinese people, there are Indians who play important role in the novel. The leader of all the Canton Indian merchants is Seth Bahramji.

 

Seth Bahram is a character who wants to side with the forces of light through being morally correct, i.e. white. He tries to do the same yet his actions yield results that make his intentions immaterial and push him into an endless chasm of blackness. He participates very actively in supplying opium to the Chinese people but then he was only a small part in the overall machinery. At more individual level of mismatch of intentions and actions, his cumshaw to Allow, as he had promised to do too Chi-Mei, actually pushed the boy into opium smuggling and finally led him to his death. His own son was nearly ruined because of his failure as a father. Yet he inspired loyalty in his employees in a way that is possible only when a man is good. Neel’s loyalty was won in the same way too. Bahramji is a very complex character who acts as the living battleground for the forces of darkness and light. It is within him that Ahur-Majda and Ahirman fight. There is no final victory until the very end of his life. He was destiny’s victim. He would have been an innovator; a hero, had he been born in some other country or time. He was a product of the forces of history and their tool too. He did not choose opium because he wanted to inflict damage on the Chinese people. His choice was dictated by the gospel of his age, the rule set by his masters, the religion of his making – free trade. Shireenbai had urged Bahram not to go toChinain his voyage that proved to be his last. She had insisted that she had confirmed reports of an impending war. Bahram had allayed her fears by telling her that he had met the Rear-Admiral Maitland himself and was assured that war was not a possibility.

 

Maitland had succeeded in cowing the Chinese officers with his two warships and had returned satisfied of his success to India. The things were to change with the turn of the year 1838. On December 31, 1838, the emperor formally named Lin his Commissioner to Canton. The commissioner reached Cantonsixty days after he had left the capital and “moved into the YiienhuaAcademy, and turned directly to local scholar-officials for help” (Fairbank 186). He did not meet the mandarins or address the people, as was customary. The first thing he did was taking stock of the situation in hand. He knew that his method was far from perfect. Those he favoured took advantage of their position too. Yet he used them for practical reason, as the official machinery could not be trusted. Lin came to believe, through his deliberations with his officers, that Lancelot Dent was the main culprit behind the opium trade and the biggest enemy of China. The list of names of the enemies of Chinathat Compton had shown Neel in River of Smoke is indicative of the Commissioner’s deliberations.

 

By the orders issued on 22 March, Dent was to be taken in custody. Two Chinese merchants were taken hostage. If Dent didn’t come for an interrogation, he was told, they had to be decapitated. The novel portrays very poignantly how they were betrayed by their white friends. They had worked in tandem for a very long period of time. Yet, when time came, the Englishmen didn’t think twice before delivering them to their sure death. They sensed a ploy in the arrest of the Chinese merchants until the end and when they did finally believe it to be true, they showed most open and shameless greed. They tried to wring out the price of the 1056 chests of opium that they had agreed upon to yield in order to save the merchants. Comptonhad also told Neel that the leader of the Canton Acchas was to be arrested with Dent because as all opium came from Hindustan. It was to send warning signals to those who traded in opium and those who supplied it to them. Neel proved it very rightly that the British controlled the opium trade completely; that cultivating it was their monopoly in Bengal. As they did not control the entire Bombay Presidency, they couldn’t monopolize its cultivation there. The money that Indian traders like Bahramji made accounted for only a miniscule proportion of the total profit. Most of the profit generated out of this smoke of death went to Europe and America. Even if all the Hindustanis stopped trading in opium, it’d still be grown and traded in. it’d become a British monopoly and would be supplied in the same manner to China. Moreover, the Englishmen would give up the Indian just to save Dent. He proved it by citing their behavior in case of their sacrificing, at least in their intent, their two Chinese friends Howqua and Mowqua. Neel very perceptively saw and proved how Seth Bahramji was not like Dent or Burnham, because he was a victim of his circumstances. Otherwise, “he would have been a pioneer, a genius even. It is his misfortune that he comes from a land where it is impossible even for the very best men to be true to themselves” (River of Smoke 288).
Captain Elliott had promised the opium merchants that Lord Palmerston’s government would pay the cost of opium that they surrendered. “20,283 chests valued at $ 9 million” was surrendered (Fairbank 188). The Canton blockade was lifted. It was to haunt the collective memory of Englishmen as another Black hole of Calcutta. It was to be used in a similar manner. The Commissioner was happy and confident about his success in subduing the white barbarians, as he had envisaged before starting his journey to Canton. He had demanded that all the foreigners sign a bond. As Cambridge History puts it, the “bonds would bring the barbarians under acknowledged Chinese jurisdiction” (168). They did not sign and Elliott demanded sanctuary fromMacau. He shifted there with all the merchants who were allowed to move out. The action inRiver ofSmoke ends at nearly this juncture of time. Neel reports later that he had returned more than a decade later to find the factories razed to the ground. The foreign merchants who returned after the Chinese were forced to give them all they had demanded built their new establishment quite far from it.

 

Burnham and his ilk offered legalisms to save Dent. They said that the commissioner had no
jurisdiction over them as they were the Queen’s subjects. The mandarin Weijuen exposed the
fallacy of their argument by mentioning that England did not exempt the foreigners from
observing the law of the land. Neither would China. This caused Mr. Dent to ask for the
intervention of Captain Elliott. Ironically, Dent and his Free Trade lobby insisted on total
non-involvement of the government in all their matters. When it came to his own life, he
welcomed government intervention very much. Mr. Charles King rightly remarked: “But Mr Dent! It is you and Mr Slade who have always wanted to keep Captain Elliott at a distance from Canton. Am I wrong to think that it was you who said that the involvement of a government representative would be a perversion of the laws of Free Trade?” (293).

 

The British representative Elliott came to rescue Dent from Macau. This exposed the real nature of the free traders. As Robin’s letter made it very clear that they were devoid of any sense of justice and the only thing they honestly sided with was their profit. Captain Elliott saved Dent and gave shelter to a criminal under the British flag. It was that action of his that
Gladstone later criticized severely in the Parliament. Elliott demanded travel permits For all
the foreigners. If denied, he intended to consider it as an act of war. Robin likened it to “a
dacoit leader marching into a courtroom and demanding the immediate and unconditional release of his gang” (River of Smoke 297).

 

The Committee had met to discuss their course of action. Commissioner Lin’s action was declared to be unique as it was the biggest instance of robbery that too on the basis of mere morality. To all the palaver produced there Mr. King only had to say:

 

You have neglected to mention a crucial difference between these precedents and the case at hand – which is that the property in question here consists of smuggled goods. The prohibitions of Chinese law against opium are of nearly forty years standing and their existence, and steadily increasing severity, is well known to all. Need I remind you, by way of comparison, that British law states that any person found harbouring prohibited goods shall forfeit treble their value? Need I add further that British law also states that any person who is found guilty of the offence of smuggling shall suffer death as a felon?’ (River of Smoke 306-07)

 

To Mr. King’s strong argument, Mr. Slade responded with one full of fallacies. He called names and invoked stereotypes and talked about the despotism and misrule of the Chinese Emperor. They rejoiced that years of failed negotiations would be made up with a “few gunboats and a small expeditionary force” (River of Smoke 307). The real importance of the British trade withChina was emphasized in the discussion as volume of their revenue fromChina was £5,000,000 and it was linked to that ofIndia too.

 

Bahramji was the only person present in the meeting who objected to the proposal all else agreed upon. Eventually he had to yield and was heart-broken, not because he had lost money, but because he had given his soul to the powers of darkness in return of nothing. His pain and anguish remind one of Dr. Faustus’ selling his soul to the Devil and finding out finally that it was for nothing. There was a cost for purgation and Bahramji had to pay it too, but the sympathy of the reader lies with the sinner at the end. As Neel had toldCompton, Bahramji had a largeness and generosity that his English counterparts hadn’t. The English merchants did not lose anything in the last count. It was Bahramji with his large heart who turned out to be the biggest loser of all. The victim of his time and place of birth, the genius, the innovator – Bahramji – worried about his name and how it would be viewed in future. He asked Zadig Bey:

 

When they make their future, do you think they will remember us… Do you think they will remember what we went through? Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learnt and the things we saw that made it all possible? Will they remember that their future was bought at the price of millions of Chinese lives? …And what was it all for, Zadig Bey? Was it just for this: so that these fellows could speak English, and wear hats and trowsers, and play cricket? …Perhaps that is what Ahriman’s kingdom is, isn’t it, Zadig Bey? An unending tamasha in a desert of forgetting and emptiness. (River of Smoke 313-14)

 

The forgetting and emptiness that Sethji was afraid of could not engulf him. He was remembered: in the tears of Neel and those who mourned him. Their loyalty was proof enough that he was not wrong on the personal front. Thus ends the novel one of whose central concerns is the concepts of right and wrong. It attempts to explore the various characters up to their core. Their moral nature is shown to be of the utmost importance in the novel. Although the most immoral and exploitative set of characters, the British merchants, emerge victorious in the end, the narrator’s sympathy is with the Chinese people. Commissioner Lin has been portrayed as the voice of reason and justice. Bahramji’s character has a complex richness and attraction to it, despite being morally wrong. It is an exact and balanced portrayal of the forces of history affecting human decisions and lives in a free play of determinism and free will.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Brook, Timothy and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. “Opium’s History in China”. Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan, 1839-1952. ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi.Univ. ofCalifornia Press:Los Angeles, 2000.
Fairbank, John K. ed. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Late Ch’ing, 1800-1911, Part 1. CambridgeUniversity Press:Cambridge, 1978.

 

Ghosh, Amitav. River of Smoke. Web. 27 November 2011. PDF.