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.

 

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.