Troubled Testimonies

Terrorism and the English novel in India

Meenakshi Bharat

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780815396086
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317333791
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the 9/11 attacks terror has established its permeating hold on society's psyche. Creative writing, a popular and visible cultural witness to the strain, has taken up this destabilization with remarkable regularity. Troubled Testimonies focuses on the Indian novel in English, deriving inspiration from these disturbances, to essay a unique grasp of the cultural make-up of the times and its reverberations on the sense of self and belonging to the nation. This first full-length study of terror in the subcontinental novel in English (from India) places it in the world context and analyzes the fictional coverage of the spread of terrorism across the country and its cultural fallout. The enigmatic coming together of the contemporary with the anguish of loss and betrayal unleashed by terror occasions a significant redefinition of the issues of trauma, conflict and gender, and opens a fresh window to Indian writing and the culture of the subcontinent, and a new paradigm in literary and cultural criticism termed 'post-terrorism'.

Lucid and thought provoking, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of South Asian literature, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, history, politics and sociology.

1
Under the Shadow of Terror

The contemporary Indian novel

First came the scream of the dying
in a bad dream, then the radio report,
and a newspaper: six shot dead, twenty-five
houses razed, sixteen beheaded with hands tied
behind their backs inside a church …
As the days crumbled, and the victors
and their victims grew in number,
I hardened inside my thickening hide,
until I lost my tenuous humanity.

I ceased thinking
of abandoned children inside blazing huts
still waiting for their parents.
If they remembered their grandmother’s tales
of many winter hearths at the hour
of sleeping death, I didn’t want to know,
if they ever learnt the magic of letters.
And the women heavy with seed,
their soft bodies mown down
like grain stalk during their lyric harvests …

(Ngangom 1995: 41)¹

In being, thus, forced to become a reluctant witness to the terror being unleashed in the world, Robin Ngangom, a Meitei poet from the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, seems to have touched a defining chord of our times. Having himself voiced this terror in his poetry, his words ring truer with the forced recognition that ‘terror’ seems indeed to have become a decided cultural marker not only in the world, but quite piquantly on the Indian subcontinent. Our todays seem to have become characterized by the problematic identification between the output of our creative imagination and the sweep of violent ideological politics, which reveals itself in the widespread acts of terrorism and the disturbing, ‘regular’ outbreak of terror-generating riots that have been plaguing the nation. The erstwhile correlation between art and life, acknowledged spontaneously and quite unproblematically in ‘good’ times, with the easy acceptance of rubrics such as the ‘Renaissance’ and ‘the Golden Age’, is very convoluted and difficult today. In the past, the assertion that the greatest periods of creativity have been periods of prosperity and peace – veritable golden periods – had been much bandied around and quite readily accepted. However, with the deepening confusions generated by the contemporary phenomenon of anarchic turmoil, locating creativity and identifying the potential for cultural resurgence has become a challenging and deeply problematic task.

The loss of this earlier facility of easy and direct identification of cultural signposts has been further aggravated by the sweep of globalization. The overrun of the world by terror has ensured that the minds of intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike, of both thinkers and creative minds, feel the pressure and the need to engage with the long shadows of the subject of terror. In more curious ways than any other aspect of today’s world, the theme seems to have emerged as an extremely discomfiting leveller that subjugates and overwhelms people, regardless of their race, position or ability. A further corollary to the rise of the importance of the contemporary in this quarter is that the roots and growth of creativity necessarily come to be located in these violent underpinnings. In the Indian sub-continent, especially, where acts of terror frequently punctuate our days, the cultural repercussions have been many and inescapable. Significantly, one of the most popular and visible cultural witnesses to this strain – the literature of the country – has taken it up with remarkable frequency. It is the recurrence of this theme in contemporary literature in English from India that I plan to address in the course of this book, believing that in understanding it and its reverberations on the individual’s sense of self and belonging to a particular nation, there lies a unique key to the cultural make-up of the times.

To take as a starting point Foucault’s observation that ‘the forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts’ (Foucault 1977: 154), it emerges that the compulsive treatment of violent face-offs in the shape of terror assaults and riots becomes extremely significant, for these are nothing but the random, chaotic events of which Foucault speaks. It is evident that the literature of the times in India, especially fiction, fulfilling the demands of its quasi-historical role, takes extended note of these events. Seen in this light, the novels written in response to such violence become an embodiment of the impetus and the effort to chart the new contentious trajectory that the history of the nation seems to be taking. Indeed, it is by doing this that they call into question the commitment of individuals to the nation, even as they assault their sense of ‘self’, which is itself under threat from the disquiet resulting from these repeated acts of terror and rioting. These novels, in noting the ominous regularity of such acts, become troubled testimonies to these disruptive onslaughts and their violent reverberations.

The resultant effect of confounding and stalling the onward march of the nation in the way Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, had envisaged is no less disconcerting. The history of violent clashes notwithstanding, the gaining of independence was an accompaniment to the requiem of the holocaustic Partition, which cleft the nation into two communal parts – one, Muslim, and the other, Hindu – has ushered in a particular kind of disturbance that has made riots and acts of terror an inevitable part of the Indian existence. The Partition of the Indian subcontinent into two separate nations in 1947, which set up an abiding enmity between them, left the two countries squabbling for tracts of land near the borders and questioning the lines drawn by the retreating colonial master, who had little or no understanding of the cultural commixture of the two religious communities. This point is duly noted by Mirza Waheed in The Collaborator (2010): ‘there is [now] always an Indian and a Pakistani version of everything’ (TC 33). Over the years, the sibling rivalry of yore has hardened into an irreversible distrust of the other, and it is this unfortunate legacy that reveals itself in repeated conflagration in the form of riots within the country, and terrorist incursions into each other’s space, and it is this aspect of our contemporary predicament that Indian novelists witness and take up time and again. While Basharat Peer may starkly document the dramatic changes being wrought when he writes that ‘by the summer of 1990, thousands of young Kashmiri men crossed the Line of Control and they returned as militants’ (Curfewed Night 2010: 24), he also talks of the cultural after-effects in the excitement that their ‘stories’ generated. Deploying literary and aesthetic phraseology, he gives creative alibis for writing his internationally commended personal and ‘collective’ memoir, Curfewed Night. He says that ‘they were heroes – people wanted to talk to them, touch them, hear their stories, and invite them for a feast’ (ibid.: 24; emphasis added). His considered choice of words seems to suggest that the compelling reality that he is talking about begs fictionalization – indeed, it demands aesthetic commemoration in its vivid approximation to the excitement of the fictional world.

The disruptions in the progress of the nation’s development, marked by riots and terror incidents, are seen not only to rupture the individual ‘national’s’ sense of self as a national entity, but on being picked up by the novel, become ‘singular’ events that mark the narrative of the nation’s history. As such, then, the isolation of these events in fiction and the inscribed radical, interpretative, imaginative and meaningful treatment of ‘current’ events – in a manner quite distinct from the way the media handles them – become the enabling means of finding alternate ways of thinking about the past and of identifying the national self. The singularity, however dubious it may be, of these events as historical ruptures, the ‘disruptive events’ that Foucault indicated could make for meaningful political intervention (Young 2004: 120), draws attention to issues of decisive importance to today’s ‘Indian’. Hence, the extensive coverage of the theme in literature freshly highlights the niggling notions of nationhood, citizenship and allegiance to beliefs. This radical disjunction between disruptive events and the possibility of meaning that resides at the interstices of this cultural engagement becomes a characterizing mark of the contemporary Indian.

So, through art, we come to the inherent paradox of our times: these mean times are yet ‘historical’ in a pointed sense, demanding witness however distressing the process may be. Writing about terror and riots and giving them creative shape, despite the overwhelming abundance of media coverage and debate on the subject, has become an integral part of historiography, with the artist, the writer or the narrator taking on the mantle of the proxy historian in this regard, an ‘event’ recorder as it were. In a country that has seen a huge number of deaths due to terrorist attacks over the years and where political activity and the nationalist agenda necessarily have to take this into account, it is natural that the theme catches the imagination of the novelist. This is the fact that Bhavani Iyer recognizes and states simply: ‘Evocation of any country’s collective consciousness is usually mirrored in its popular art forms.’² In the present scenario, then, it becomes quite clear that if, in conceptualizing the present, these acts of terror are either suppressed or not recognized or even wilfully excluded, then the whole process of historiography would become a lie. In giving them creative cover in literature, they become the means of representing ‘the truth’ inherent in the present. It also validates the process of historiography. It is this torturous ‘truth’ in acts of terror that needs to be discovered by following the process with the explicit aim of working out the cultural trajectory. How does terror strike at the very roots of the forward moving ideology, and how, in turn, does contemporary literature negotiate with the slide-back implied by the terrorist onslaught? How does all this relate to the progressive Nehruvian model that had been set up for the nation with independence, and with the state-embraced notion of secularism? One way of initiating inquiry is by bearing ‘troubled testimonies’ and enunciating basic posers about how literature narrates the nation in these conflict-ridden, ‘terror-struck’ times. In the answer, however harrowing it may be, I discern the possibilities of the location of a new cultural model for understanding the nation.

Of course, these issues that exercise India have much in common with those of the world at large, which has revealed itself to be morbidly and compulsively fascinated with this disturbing topic. The West sees acts of terror – 9/11 having become a key ‘event’ – as bringing about, as Ian McEwan said in an interview a few months after that attack, ‘great changes’ in the world from which it has to ‘learn’ (Donadio 2005). Initially, the event that seemed, in its very reality, more fantastic and more creative than fiction itself, seemed to scotch the creative attempt by virtue of having simply outdone it. Small wonder, then, that the first shocked reaction was a mental repudiation of the creativity of fiction. While Martin Amis felt that post-11 September 2001, ‘all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation’ (Amis 2002), McEwan himself had bemoaned writers’ inefficacy in saying that he now found it ‘wearisome to confront invented characters’. His early, despondent, gut reaction to the horror of 9/11 found him seriously doubting the fictional. At the time, he could locate merit only in fact. Reeling under the shock of the outrageous terrorist attack, he felt compelled to say, ‘I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed’.³ Yet, it was not long before he found himself at the storywriter’s desk again – as did many others – engaging with the subject of terror and penning a novel on the theme. This novel, Saturday (2005),⁴ is one of many that came to be written in the wake of the incident.⁵ McEwan’s effort went on to illuminate a path for all who later attempted to write on the subject. The choice and the act of writing a novel on the subject comes as a renewal of faith in creativity and its possibilities even in the midst of the vitiating circumstances of terror activity. In the light of this, the fiction writer’s task comes to be invested with the unmistakable implication of its interpretive richness and the intimation that its insights are rare. Evidently, what fiction can do is something beyond the ability of mere fact: it can be a compassionate, yet dependable witness; it can take better stock of disruptions and change; and its lessons are unique.

Whereas McEwan’s novelistic abilities had been temporarily frozen by the enormity of the surprise terror attack on US soil, in India, living under the pervasive menace of guns and the constant fear of one’s own people turning against one, as in familiar Calcutta streets in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988),⁶ there is also the other unique and imminent danger of this terror turning ‘banal’, of coming to believe that there is nothing in it to excite the creative imagination. But it soon becomes apparent that even here, in India, the evidence of aesthetic witness intervenes as a reminder that this element of the contemporary merits special attention, that it is a task that must inevitably be essayed. Moreover, the multifarious narratives emerging in the country, quite often with conflicting interpretations, make for a rich, fruitful, critical matrix in which the art can thrive.

What, then, are the practitioners in the art of writing fiction trying to accomplish through their efforts? What do they create or recreate, write or rewrite, picture or re-picture? With creative writers imaginatively responding to the dangers that terrorism spells for the ordinary person and for humanity at large, it emerges that they are attempting to go beyond the basic and limited definition of terrorism. As they probe deep into the various possible origins of the actions, it becomes clear that the all too apparent, extended coverage that the theme has received in fiction, poetry, journalism or film (whether short, long, mainstream, independent or documentary) goes beyond mere acknowledgement of a contemporary phenomenon. There is an underlying dynamic that runs through these cultural indicators, and it defines the course they are to take. It becomes imperative for the cultural theorist to ascertain these pointers and to recognize the responsibilities which they entail. This was the recognition that underlay Pablo Neruda’s emphatic call to people to step out of their comfort zones to witness the violence:

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

‘Explico algunas cosas’
(I explain a few things),
Pablo Neruda, 1936–37

This creative call becomes a bidding not just to witness, but to participate and to share in a responsibility, however painful it may be. Neruda, in enunciating this exhortation to witness the terror overtaking the world, and by himself bearing ‘witness’ to it in his poetry, emphasizes its vital importance today, and it is this appeal that Indian writers of terror essay through their work. This double demand becomes the iteration of one of the most problematic paradoxes of our age: in these irresponsible times, creativity verbalizes the wretched acknowledgement that we are all liable, that we are all answerable.

In this fraught scenario, it is evident that the subcontinent as a whole has seen the publication of a significant number of novels on the subject of terrorism. The proliferation and subsequent success that fictional responses to terrorism in the West, especially in reaction to 9/11, have received has certainly been an added incentive to such writing in the Indian subcontinent. It is also a fact that the subcontinental nations – India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – have had more than their fair share of insurgency and terrorism in the years following their independence from British rule. This is a strong reason for the release of a slew of novels on the subject. Among these, despite the considerable amount of writing in Indian languages, the publications in English, the language that our erstwhile colonial masters left for us as a legacy, stand out simply because their reach has been more global.

From Pakistan, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007), A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) by Mohammad Hanif, A Wasted Vigil (2008) by Nadeem Aslam and H. M. Naqvi’s The Homeboy (2009) all approach and develop the subject differently. Hamid and Naqvi explore the psychological impact of a terror attack on cosmopolitan Pakistani men living in America who had, till then, been absolutely integrated, culturally and emotionally, with the society there, but who, with 9/11 and the subsequent backlash against Muslims, are forced to reconsider not only their relationship with America, but also themselves as Muslims and as Pakistanis. These broken, battered individuals are provoked to veer towards a reactionary extremism. Hanif probes a ‘terrorist’ plot to assassinate Pakistani president Zia-u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• My invented land
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Under the Shadow of Terror The contemporary Indian novel
• The Geographical Ambit of the Postterrorist Novel
• ‘Sad Paradise'1 Kashmir I
• ‘The Collapse of Paradise itself'1 Kashmir II
• ‘The Home Story'1 Terrorism in the heartlands
• ‘Terror International'1 Global terror and the postterrorist novel
• Formal and Thematic Ambit
• ‘Visual Reconstruction'1 The graphic novel and terrorism
• Gender and the Postterrorist Novel
• Trauma and the Postterrorist Novel
• Conclusion ‘Let me cry out in that void': reckoning postterrorism in fiction
• Bibliography
• Index