The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature

232 Pages·2007·1.408 MB·English

by  Anna Guttman (auth.)

The Nation of India in Contemporary
Indian Literature
This page intentionally left blank
The Nation of India in Contemporary
Indian Literature
Anna Guttman
the nation of india in contemporary indian literature
Copyright © Anna Guttman, 2007.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-8390-9
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
I would like to acknowledge the journals that kindly gave permission to
reprint the following previously published materials:
Anna Guttman, “Compromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru’s
Multicultural Nation-State: Constructing National History in The Discovery
of India,” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History
32, no. 3 (2003): 263–284, ©Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort
Wayne, 2003.
Anna Guttman, “Syncretism as Secularism in Nayantara Sahgal’s Lesser
Breeds,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40 (2005): 47–62,
©Sage Publications Ltd, 2005.
Anna Guttman, “Translating Hybridity in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy,”
Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 2 (2002): 61–71,
©Georgia Southern University, 2002.
First published in 2007 by
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DOI 10.1057/9780230606937
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
1 C ompromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru’s
Multicultural Indian Nation 15
2 Vikram Seth’s Real(ist) India 35
3 P arodying Nehru in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
and The Moor’s Last Sigh 59
4 All in the Family: Nayantara Sahgal’s Indian Home 89
5 R eexamining Indian Nonalignment: Arundhati Roy’s
The God of Small Things 115
6 S tates of Dystopia: Imagining Future Indias in
Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh 135
7 Unity in Diversity Beyond the Nation-State in Rupa Bajwa’s
The Sari Shop 157
Conclusion 179
Notes 185
Works Cited 205
Index 223
Acknowledgments
My gratitude is due to my PhD supervisor, Professor Shirley Chew, whose
advice led me to Nehru and his work, and who guided this project at its
inception. Thanks are also due to Chris Boswell, Caroline Herbert, John
McLeod, Robert Stanton, and Colin Winborn, all of whom read parts of
this book in its earlier version. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Council, and the
University of Leeds, which provided fi nancial support during the course of
my initial research. Further thanks to the School of English at the University
of Leeds and to its postgraduate community and to all those friends and
family members who endured and supported me during my PhD years. Jan
Cronin, Daniel Hannah, Frederick Holmes, and Judith Leggatt all provided
valuable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript, and their assistance
is gratefully acknowledged. I also wish to express my appreciation for the
support of friends and colleagues in the English Department of Lakehead
University. Ananya Kabir’s thoughtful guidance and enthusiasm for the
project was key to both the form and content of this book. Stuart Murray
also provided assistance and encouragement. Jessica Blaauw’s editorial assis-
tance is also greatly appreciated. My loving husband, Daniel Hannah, and
my daughter, Talia, are invaluable sources of inspiration and support.
Finally, I thank Julia Cohen and Farideh Koohi-Kamali for their guidance
and assistance, and all those at Palgrave Macmillan who were instrumental
in bringing this book to fruition.
Introduction
One way of defi ning diversity for India is to say what the Irishman is said
to have said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were singular or
plural, he said, “Singular at the top and plural at the bottom.”1
To A. K. Ramanujan, quoted above, India appears much like the
proverbial elephant as apprehended by the blind men: what one
perceives is a function of where one looks. Ramanujan thus offers
a challenge to anyone who would attempt to represent India: to show India’s
unity and its multiplicity without letting one obscure the other. In using
the homely image of a pair of trousers (rather than the more exotic ele-
phant), Ramanujan foregrounds the language of domesticity that is so much
a part of Indian nationalist discourses and contemporary Indian writing
in English. And yet, the description of the trousers also evokes hierarchy;
is it possible to view the Indian nation in its diversity without privileging
or yoking oneself irredeemably to a regional, religious, gender, or class
perspective?
This book examines the literary struggle to imagine the Indian nation
as a discrete community without overwriting its very real sources of hetero-
geneity. The bulk of this monograph focuses on contemporary writers of
fi ction, who have seen the ideal of the secular, tolerant nation-state chal-
lenged by phenomena ranging from the declaration of Emergency and sus-
pension of democracy in 1975–1977 to the rise of Hindu fundamentalism
in the 1990s to the ongoing failure of development initiatives to address
both the depth and extent of rural and urban poverty. It also examines one
of the major sources of this ideal, namely, the writings of India’s fi rst prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. How have the events of the nearly sixty years
that have elapsed since Indian independence challenged or reinforced the
ideals on which the nation was founded?
In order to understand the answer to this question, it is necessary to both
situate the question of representing India in contemporary theory and under-
stand the specifi c history of national self-representation on the subcontinent.
A. Guttman, The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature
© Anna Guttman 2007
2 ● The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature
Therefore, in the fi rst section of this introduction, I briefl y situate this study
with respect to major theorizations of the nation, emphasizing the ways in
which the specifi cities of Indian history both coincide with and deviate from
more general theories of the nation such as that of Benedict Anderson’s
Imagined Communities. The second section focuses on the issue of national
language. Anderson emphasizes that the nation is a linguistic unit, but the
Indian nation-state arguably lacks a national language. I present a brief history
of the national-language debate and the problem of associating with the
nation any language used in India. Though this study focuses on fi ction writ-
ten in English, it does not argue that English is the defi nitive language of
India or the only literary language of value. Nevertheless, English does occupy
a unique position in Indian political and literary history.
The status and history of the Indian novel in English is the subject of
the third section of this introduction. The novel occupies a special place
in discussions of literary history and nationality, and, with the exception
of chapter 1, will be the primary focus of this book. As the novel is an
imported genre, however, the relationship between the novel and the nation
in India cannot be the same as in the West. Furthermore, I contend that
in order to understand the novel as an Indian national artifact, it is neces-
sary to scrutinize its link with other forms, particularly political writings.
As such, both in this introduction and throughout this book, I will be
highlighting the connections between contemporary writers of fi ction and
India’s nationalist leaders, primarily Nehru, but also M. K. Gandhi and
Subhas Chandra Bose.
Nation
In his famous account of the rise of the nation, focusing primarily on exam-
ples from Europe and South America, Anderson stresses the essential moder-
nity of the nation and its association with what he terms print capitalism
(commercial, print-based publishing in vernacular languages). In other words,
for Anderson, the creation of national identities was inexorably linked to the
development of printing in the vernaculars. Though I do fundamentally agree
with Anderson’s fi guration of the nation as an imagined community—one
whose imagining occurs to a signifi cant degree in works of literature—my
account departs from his at several points. For instance, Anderson argues that
the formation of the nation as an imagined community precedes, by defi ni-
tion, the rise of the state. I wish to posit, however, that the relationship
between the nation (imagined community) and the nation-state (a political
formation) is more fraught than Anderson allows. Nations, in Anderson’s
fi guration, must “take the form of states,”2 because the “sovereign state” is the
Introduction ● 3
“gage of freedom” in the post-Enlightenment era.3 His suggestion that the
state is the inevitable, and the desired, result of all nationalist imagining is,
however, premised on the universal acceptance of a particular set of post-
Enlightenment values. Broadly speaking, these values include, among others,
secularism and individualism, both of which have been widely challenged in
the postmodern period and may be particularly problematic from a postco-
lonial perspective.
This is not to say that Anderson’s formulation has no resonance in the
Indian context. Indeed, as I will show in chapter 1, Nehru felt that the absence
of political independence hindered the realization of Indian identity, a view
echoed by Ravinder Kumar, who defi nes nationalism as the belief that
“political freedom strengthens the moral fi bre and heightens cultural creativity”
in a community.4 Yet the nation and the nation-state are not isomorphic;
certainly, as Anderson’s account acknowledges, a sense of national commu-
nity can precede political independence. Given the current ubiquity of the
nation-state as a political form, however, it seems possible, at least in theory,
that a sovereign state might exist without, or with only a very weak, sense
of national community, or that the boundaries of the nation-state and the
scope of the imagined national community may fail to correspond in signifi -
cant ways. These are not scenarios that Anderson addresses, but they may
well be relevant to considerations of Indian nationality.
Several Indian critics maintain that as recently as the 1990s, more than
forty years after the arrival of political sovereignty, the nation itself was, at
best, still in its nascent stage. Rumina Sethi, for instance, complains that
“although we have a political nation-state, the nation itself is yet to be
born,” pointing out that many of the ideals to which the Indian nation-state
lays claim have been put into practice incompletely, if at all.5 Jaidev echoes
Sethi’s critique, noting that “nation-ness” will only be attained in India “if
justice is realized along class lines,” an event that may yet be some ways
off.6 In contrast, Aijaz Ahmad does not fi gure the Indian nation as a con-
crete, realizable end, but rather as a “process . . . a terrain of struggle which
condenses all social struggles, so that every organized force in society
attempts to endow it with specifi c meanings and attributes.”7 In other
words, the nation, for Ahmad, is forever in the process of being reimagined
and has no single, predefi ned end; the nation-state need not appear at any
fi xed point along its trajectory.
Indeed, Indian critics have also suggested that the relationship between
the nation and the nation-state should be rethought. Rekha Pappu laments
that though the nation is ostensibly the site of considerable theoretical
interest, it is the state, not the national community or its members, that is
most often the object of concern.8 In contrast, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak