The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature

237 Pages·2007·1.45 MB·English

by  Anna Guttman

The Nation of India in Contemporary
Indian Literature
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10.1057/9780230606937 - The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature, Anna Guttman
The Nation of India in Contemporary
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the nation of india in contemporary indian literature
Copyright © Anna Guttman, 2007.
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:
5
Anna Guttman, “Compromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru’s 3-0
Multicultural Nation-State: Constructing National History in The Discovery 1-0
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of India,” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History 0
2
32, no. 3 (2003): 263–284, ©Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort ct -
Wayne, 2003. ne
Anna Guttman, “Syncretism as Secularism in Nayantara Sahgal’s Lesser on
C
Breeds,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40 (2005): 47–62, e
v
©Sage Publications Ltd, 2005. gra
Anna Guttman, “Translating Hybridity in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy,” Pal
Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 2 (2002): 61–71, y -
©Georgia Southern University, 2002. sit
er
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First published in 2007 by U
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ u
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175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and g
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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. hu
Companies and representatives throughout the world. o C
d t
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave ns
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Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. c
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom m - li
and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union o
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and other countries. ct.
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ISBN-10: 1–4039–8390–9 c
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ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8390–9 av
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the w.
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Library of Congress. w
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. al fr
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Design by Macmillan India Ltd. mat
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First edition: November 2007 yri
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
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Acknowledgments vi ve
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Introduction 1 P
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1 C ompromise and Contradiction in Jawaharlal Nehru’s ersit
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Multicultural Indian Nation 15 ni
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2 Vikram Seth’s Real(ist) India 35 Hu
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3 P arodying Nehru in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children u
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and The Moor’s Last Sigh 59 o
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4 All in the Family: Nayantara Sahgal’s Indian Home 89 se
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5 R eexamining Indian Nonalignment: Arundhati Roy’s m - li
The God of Small Things 115 o
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6 S tates of Dystopia: Imagining Future Indias in ect.
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Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh 135 co
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7 Unity in Diversity Beyond the Nation-State in Rupa Bajwa’s gra
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The Sari Shop 157 p
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Conclusion 179 m
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Notes 185 al fr
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Works Cited 205 m
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Index 223 yri
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Acknowledgments
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My gratitude is due to my PhD supervisor, Professor Shirley Chew, whose ve
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advice led me to Nehru and his work, and who guided this project at its algr
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inception. Thanks are also due to Chris Boswell, Caroline Herbert, John y -
McLeod, Robert Stanton, and Colin Winborn, all of whom read parts of ersit
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this book in its earlier version. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and ni
U
Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Council, and the ua
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University of Leeds, which provided fi nancial support during the course of ng
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my initial research. Further thanks to the School of English at the University Ch
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of Leeds and to its postgraduate community and to all those friends and d t
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family members who endured and supported me during my PhD years. Jan ns
e
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Cronin, Daniel Hannah, Frederick Holmes, and Judith Leggatt all provided m - li
valuable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript, and their assistance o
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is gratefully acknowledged. I also wish to express my appreciation for the ct.
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support of friends and colleagues in the English Department of Lakehead on
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University. Ananya Kabir’s thoughtful guidance and enthusiasm for the ve
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project was key to both the form and content of this book. Stuart Murray algr
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also provided assistance and encouragement. Jessica Blaauw’s editorial assis- w.
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tance is also greatly appreciated. My loving husband, Daniel Hannah, and m
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my daughter, Talia, are invaluable sources of inspiration and support. al fr
Finally, I thank Julia Cohen and Farideh Koohi-Kamali for their guidance eri
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and assistance, and all those at Palgrave Macmillan who were instrumental m
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in bringing this book to fruition. g
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Introduction
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One way of defi ning diversity for India is to say what the Irishman is said ne
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to have said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were singular or Co
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plural, he said, “Singular at the top and plural at the bottom.”1 av
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To A. K. Ramanujan, quoted above, India appears much like the sity -
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proverbial elephant as apprehended by the blind men: what one niv
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perceives is a function of where one looks. Ramanujan thus offers a
u
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a challenge to anyone who would attempt to represent India: to show India’s g
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unity and its multiplicity without letting one obscure the other. In using hu
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the homely image of a pair of trousers (rather than the more exotic ele- o
d t
phant), Ramanujan foregrounds the language of domesticity that is so much se
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a part of Indian nationalist discourses and contemporary Indian writing c
in English. And yet, the description of the trousers also evokes hierarchy; m - li
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is it possible to view the Indian nation in its diversity without privileging ct.c
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or yoking oneself irredeemably to a regional, religious, gender, or class nn
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perspective? ec
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This book examines the literary struggle to imagine the Indian nation gr
al
as a discrete community without overwriting its very real sources of hetero- w.p
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geneity. The bulk of this monograph focuses on contemporary writers of w
m
fi ction, who have seen the ideal of the secular, tolerant nation-state chal- o
lenged by phenomena ranging from the declaration of Emergency and sus- erial fr
pension of democracy in 1975–1977 to the rise of Hindu fundamentalism at
m
in the 1990s to the ongoing failure of development initiatives to address ht
g
both the depth and extent of rural and urban poverty. It also examines one pyri
o
of the major sources of this ideal, namely, the writings of India’s fi rst prime C
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.
10.1057/9780230606937 - The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian Literature, Anna Guttman
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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
5
Indian nation-state arguably lacks a national language. I present a brief history 3-0
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of the national-language debate and the problem of associating with the 11-
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nation any language used in India. Though this study focuses on fi ction writ- ct - 2
ten in English, it does not argue that English is the defi nitive language of ne
n
India or the only literary language of value. Nevertheless, English does occupy Co
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a unique position in Indian political and literary history. av
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The status and history of the Indian novel in English is the subject of Pal
the third section of this introduction. The novel occupies a special place y -
sit
in discussions of literary history and nationality, and, with the exception er
v
of chapter 1, will be the primary focus of this book. As the novel is an Uni
a
imported genre, however, the relationship between the novel and the nation Hu
g
in India cannot be the same as in the West. Furthermore, I contend that n
u
h
in order to understand the novel as an Indian national artifact, it is neces- o C
sary to scrutinize its link with other forms, particularly political writings. d t
e
s
As such, both in this introduction and throughout this book, I will be en
c
highlighting the connections between contemporary writers of fi ction and m - li
India’s nationalist leaders, primarily Nehru, but also M. K. Gandhi and co
Subhas Chandra Bose. ect.
n
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Nation gr
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w.
In his famous account of the rise of the nation, focusing primarily on exam- w
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ples from Europe and South America, Anderson stresses the essential moder- m
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nity of the nation and its association with what he terms print capitalism al fr
(commercial, print-based publishing in vernacular languages). In other words, eri
at
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for Anderson, the creation of national identities was inexorably linked to the ht
development of printing in the vernaculars. Though I do fundamentally agree yrig
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with Anderson’s fi guration of the nation as an imagined community—one o
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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
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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-
5
lonial perspective. 3-0
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This is not to say that Anderson’s formulation has no resonance in the 11-
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Indian context. Indeed, as I will show in chapter 1, Nehru felt that the absence ct - 2
of political independence hindered the realization of Indian identity, a view ne
n
echoed by Ravinder Kumar, who defi nes nationalism as the belief that Co
e
“political freedom strengthens the moral fi bre and heightens cultural creativity” av
gr
in a community.4 Yet the nation and the nation-state are not isomorphic; Pal
certainly, as Anderson’s account acknowledges, a sense of national commu- y -
sit
nity can precede political independence. Given the current ubiquity of the er
v
nation-state as a political form, however, it seems possible, at least in theory, Uni
a
that a sovereign state might exist without, or with only a very weak, sense Hu
g
of national community, or that the boundaries of the nation-state and the n
u
h
scope of the imagined national community may fail to correspond in signifi - o C
cant ways. These are not scenarios that Anderson addresses, but they may d t
e
s
well be relevant to considerations of Indian nationality. en
c
Several Indian critics maintain that as recently as the 1990s, more than m - li
forty years after the arrival of political sovereignty, the nation itself was, at co
best, still in its nascent stage. Rumina Sethi, for instance, complains that ect.
n
n
“although we have a political nation-state, the nation itself is yet to be co
e
born,” pointing out that many of the ideals to which the Indian nation-state av
gr
lays claim have been put into practice incompletely, if at all.5 Jaidev echoes al
p
w.
Sethi’s critique, noting that “nation-ness” will only be attained in India “if w
w
justice is realized along class lines,” an event that may yet be some ways m
o
off.6 In contrast, Aijaz Ahmad does not fi gure the Indian nation as a con- al fr
crete, realizable end, but rather as a “process . . . a terrain of struggle which eri
at
m
condenses all social struggles, so that every organized force in society ht
attempts to endow it with specifi c meanings and attributes.”7 In other yrig
p
words, the nation, for Ahmad, is forever in the process of being reimagined o
C
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
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