Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines as an Indian English Novel

The present paper is an attempt to analyse how Amitav Ghosh’s Sahitya Academy Award winning novel The Shadow Lines is a representative Indian English novel. It throws light on the phenomenon of communal violence and the way its roots have spread deeply and widely in the collective psyche of the Indian subcontinent. The origin of the spread of this toxin in the system of the subcontinent was the birth, spread and acceptance of the two nation theory and its culmination in the partition. From then the polarized essentialization of identities became established as truth in some corners. This paper shows how The Shadow Lines penetrates the discourse of communalism and assays it on the touchstone of rationality.

 India, as a modern nation state, was born after an amputation on 15 August 1947. It was partitioned on the same day. So, we got freedom that came with a very heavy cost: the cost of generation of two nations on the basis of religion. The two nation theory was ratified fifty percent on the Indian subcontinent by the formation of Pakistan on the basis of Islam, with a vision of creating a holy state for the Muslim umma. The other fifty percent was perpetually questioned due to India’s declaring itself a secular state. Yet, the two nation theory does raise its hydra-head, time and again, in the form of violence that is somehow liked to one’s (accidental) professed religion of birth.

A Hindu or a Muslim who’s had the fortune (?) of being born in the subcontinent is handcuffed to his religion of birth. His identity formation internalizes religious prejudices and stereotypes about his own self and about others. Social programming, thus, also has the effect of magnetized domains in one’s persona, arrayed according to one’s religion. But then, there is the Enlightenment ideal of the rational man: the man who stands apart from, even against all kind of social programming and pressure, applying his reason to choose what’s right. Religion and polarities based on it are then questioned. Only truth remains at the end of such questioning.

Writers may or may not be totally or partially rational, depending on their own bent of mind.
Moreover, some may be irrational and rational in varying proportions, in different
texts/contexts at different times. Religion and reason have played their various roles in the
novels produced by the soil of the subcontinent post-1947. Indian English novel has been
enriched by the intersection of the two spheres of religion and reason, as literature
originating out of the points of intersection has proved itself as satisfying, or at least,
disturbing and interrogating at times.

Out of the cornucopia of the Indian English fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines happens to be a piece of art. It has been hailed as a masterpiece and awarded the Sahitya Academy Award. It really reflects the central tendencies of the Indian English fiction and is a key representative text of the sub-genre of partition fiction. It can be linked to Chaman Nahal’s Azadi and Khushwant Singh’s A Train to Pakistan because of their themes being similar – the imposition of the two nation theory by the elite on the masses, and the violent response originating thereof. Not very strangely, all these novels end with a definite condemnation, direct or indirect, of the division of humanity on the basis of a mere accident: religion. Amitav Ghosh’s TSL goes one step ahead of earlier partition novels: it not only takes 1947 and interrogates it, it goes beyond that and touches 1963-4 to work on the theme of communal violence and riots. Moreover, it treats the question of the generation of nations and validity of the process and its results in a comprehensive manner. Thus, it turns out to be a
prototypical Indian English novel – emerging out of, and addressing the issues of the
contemporary milieu. Yet, one characteristic that distinguishes it is a strong stream of
rationality that runs through the narrative in the form of the voices of the narrator and of
his mentor and role model, his hero: Tridib. It all begins with Tridib’s declaring: “If you
believe anything people tell you, you deserve to be told anything at all” (8). Tridib teaches
the narrator, and through him, the reader, how to see and experience the world (13) by an
active creational participation of his imagination. Tridib wants his nephew to use his
“imagination with precision” (16).

Tridib puts his finger on the exact point of balance between rational self-programming and
social conditioning, with a tilt towards one’s self. He knows that the choice is clearly
Blakean. If one does not create a parallel and powerful alternative, one is designed and
destined to be a mere part of someone else’s system, and “we… [have] to try because the
alternative … [isn’t] blankness … if we didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free of
other people’s inventions” (21). Well, other people seem to be “inventing” quite a lot of
things; especially in the Indian subcontinent, and the novel takes them up – one pivotal
invention after another. In this, it happens to be an Indian English novel. One of the
inventions it effectively questions is the very idea of nationalism – both directly and
indirectly. The direct mode can be clearly seen in the narratorial comments. The indirect mode is observed when people reveal, with a lot of irony applied on them, fallacies in their
reasoning. When the narrator’s grandmother talks about the British who’ve “drawn their borders with blood” (51) approvingly, she forgets to mention that the amount of blood spilled for, while, and after drawing the lines dividing India and Pakistan has an exponential relation to that shed through all over Europe. Yet, ironically, she is shown yearning for bloodshed in war (only), as if the mode of bloodletting changes its colour or the pain while its being shed – by or from another human being. She never considers the facts that 1947 saw millions butchered in India and Pakistan because of their being Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs. Communal riots are insignificant because they are not as spectacular, memorable or permanently recorded as wars. She’s not the only one holding such opinion. There are others too. The narrator’s cousin Ila clearly declares that riots are “local things after all – not like revolutions or antifascist wars, nothing that sets a political example to the world, nothing that‘s really remembered” (8).

 

When reason is applied to it, one finds how Ila and the narrator’s grandmother use a devious and lopsided logic to discount the life/death of the people who do not become a part of the events that’d go on to the pages of history as wars: revolutionary or patriotic. Their life is declared meaningless, as their death is belittled compared to that of the martyrs of wars. The narrator’s class mate Malik finds riots terrible but not at all comparable to wars, and the reason he gives for that is their being local in nature (142). Theirs is the dominant discourse of history that sees events related to one another in a causal chain and that chain does not allow the existence of any less than spectacular link in it. Local events, viz. the events that are not linked directly to something of major political, economic or cultural importance, events whose agents aren’t known as names of importance, aren’t at all significant. They belong to the zone of oblivion from which they arise and into which they break down. It is the destiny of the multitudes of India – the nameless, faceless, history-less, insignificant millions with no past and no future; and absolutely no present. Their life and death generally never make it to the news, and when it does, their independent identity is not important in itself. They are used simply as tally marks in statistical tables. TSL could have risen only from such a soil that breeds only apathy arising from a colossal, disgusting and all engulfing darkness that envelops everything. It’s a major Indian English novel that carries as its theme the flavor of the subcontinent. Another major recurring theme of Indian English novels, that’s also present in TSL, is the portrayal and questioning of the polarization of mankind based on a glib essentialization of us-them type based on religion. It is this kind of misleading essentialization that creates reality that’s not at all true – “a reality that existed only in the saying, so when you heard it said, it did not matter whether you believed it or not – it only mattered that it had been said at all” (129). Thus, Hindus create their Muslims in their mind, who have nothing to do with actual individuals. Their creations are essentialized, simplified, easily understandable automatons with characteristic and responses designed for demonization of the worst kind. Muslims create their Hindus in a similar manner, albeit with different major essentialized traits, but with the same final effect – unreal and formulaic demonization.

 

So, be it. Hindus and Muslims, when it comes to filling in the colours within the area that makes “them”, use black colour very liberally, with its direct implicit association with evil, sinister, somber etc. In TSL, the little narrator, his friends, and many others had no problem acting on the rumors of “them” poisoning the water supply of (so ridiculously and hyperbolically) the whole Calcutta (128). Nobody had time or inclination to test the validity of the rumor masquerading as a fact on the touchstone of reason; nobody that is, but the narrator, in his revisiting of his past. Against the anonymity and amorphousness of “them”, stands the clearly and deeply etched images of the actual or would be perpetrators of communal violence on the minds of two children – Robi, who saw them butcher his brother, grand-father, and a poor rikshaw puller, and the narrator whose school bus was followed by a rioting mob who could not stop it and then stood laughing, “with their arms around each other’s shoulders” (131). One incomplete and one complete act of violence make centres around which a major part of the flashbacks is structured. These centres exist as points emanating fear in the narrative that seeps into the mind of the reader, especially when it finds resonating emotions there. It is not just any kind of fear that TSL deals with, but a very specific and unique kind of fear that’s not comparable to any other kind: “It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets one inhabits, can become suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood” (131). Thus is established the abnormality of a sustained state of normalcy. Thus is challenged the expectation of a common man from the society he lives in – in fact, the very foundations of the formation of social institutions and structures is shaken. Security and stability do not exist when one is not sure of one’s immediate environs in time and space. The basic needs of the physiological and psychological well being cannot be ensured in such circumstances and humanity recedes to the pre-civilization humanoidism. Such a state of being relates only to the most pressing question in hand – the question of survival the very next day. India, rather the whole subcontinent, has reached such a state, time and again, just from the end of the Second World War till today. No, not wars, this article points only towards the communal riots between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and now, even Christians. “It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world … 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” (131).

The very idea of one’s war with one’s own mirror image may sound very reassuringly absurd and removed from the reality – far enough from reality to appear ridiculous. Yet, the Indian subcontinent has proven ridiculous as real by actually fragmenting the subject along the fault line of religion as an essential category. Thus, human subject gave rise to a Hindu/Muslim/Sikh/Christian subject in the subcontinent with their abject loneliness completely and firmly established even before their taking birth as individuals in their social set up. No material base could dictate their existence and responses as class was annihilated and the vacuum thus created was filled in by an equally arbitrary category of religion. The war to annihilation between two classes was made more lethal, dangerous and interesting in the subcontinent. It was the war between two or more religions for the establishment of their respective hegemonies in zones of their numerical majority. Zones mean land inhabited by people with radii ranging from a small muhalla to a district, state, nation, region (continent-wise) level.

Violence, or its threat, rising out of the communal rift is a common phenomenon in the subcontinent. TSL portrays violence in India and Bangladesh – in Calcutta and Dhaka; but it looks at that violence as happening in India-Bangladesh/ Calcutta-Dhaka. The hyphens perform the function of joining two different geographical entities. The “reality of space… nations and borders” is questioned very effectively (141). The ideological/mystical strain apart, the novel shows at a very materialistically observable level, how an event that took place in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir gave rise to responses in Pakistan – both East and West – and thence originated a wave of violence that travelled across borders to reach India and return, with the process continued nearly ad infinitum. The sacred relic of Muslims of the valley, Mu-i-Mubarak, was stolen from the Hazratbal mosque on 27 December 1963. There were riots against the government and the police in the valley, with no communal overtones at all. Yet, Black Day was observed in Karachi on 31 December and ramblings of violence were distant but discernible there. The relic was recovered on 4 January 1964. A demonstration protesting the theft had turned violent in a small town of East Pakistan: Khulna. From there it spread to the capitals of the pre partition East and West Bengal, the two hearts of one Bengal that was carved into two with the knife of the two nation theory. The poison ivy that had given a rich harvest in 1946-47 was in no way dry or dead. Its harvest season would come again and again, and again, in India and in the two parts of Pakistan. When India alone is considered, that too only at around the turn of the millennium, one is able to make out a definite pattern of destruction. The sphere of religious animosity that constituted Hindus and Muslims prominently was slowly but definitely enlarged to include Sikhs and Christians too. Communal violence, rather mini-genocides, spread between Hindu-Muslim/Sikh/Christian communities.

The establishment of religion as an essential and centrally defining category bore fruits of hatred and violence in the subcontinent. There were voices of protest – both secular and religious – against the madness but madness was definitely more powerful, as it was more elemental and fundamental. Madness and the lust for human blood are evolutionarily programmed in homo sapiens since their origin as hunter-gatherers. The wildness was tamed by civilizations, for the time being and never fully, only to rise its head, time and again, in the form of wars and other modes of violence. Wars were legitimized through ideology; even made to appear honourable. The same process was followed, with the same reasoning of the righteousness of violence for a “right and just” cause against an evil opponent – simplified and essentialized. Moreover, people found it very difficult to discuss communal riots once they were over, “for to look for words of any other kind would be to give them meaning, and that’s a risk we cannot take any more than we can afford to listen to madness” (147). Listening to one’s own madness is not only difficult but it also enlarges the state or level of madness itself, because there are two very definite, albeit contrasting, possibilities arising thereof: either the madness is cured by developing an understanding (change in state) or it worsens (change in level). Both the situations unsettle the status quo, thus bringing in a kind of change that is drastic. Resistance to change is another evolutionarily programmed and deeply ingrained trait of the human species. Thus a pattern, of violence followed by a mechanism to obliviate its memory, is established that cannot be easily be broken. TSL, as a representative Indian English novel tries to see through, if not break through, both the pattern and the mechanism.

References:

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

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.

 

 

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.]