It’s Time To Invite The Dead To Populate Our Novels

Sometimes, to grapple with the present we have to engage with the past. I don’t mean a rehash. (Woh to ho raha hai.) What I have in mind is a close scrutiny of tradition, an exploration of myths, a deep dive into historical archives. Why? you ask. 

Because, for one, in India, the past is forever intruding upon the present. And yet, it is a syncopated vision of the past with its tropes of glory, communal harmony, ahimsa… Bapu spun us a story to which we could all cohere — how, after all, do you defeat a Raj whose toolkit was entirely dependant on dividing us? (Besides, ahimsa was such a pish posh way to illustrate to the world that Western civilisation would be a good idea, eh!) The historical truth however is that despite Gandhi’s successful experiment we are a people whose history is mired in cataclysmic violence. What we are also very good with is historical amnesia. Not our fault entirely: mass violence is numbing. Which is where the novelist steps in. (Reason two, if you’re keeping count.)

The task of the novelist is to transform general loss into a specific loss, to give us characters and their stories we can care about. I am at work on a novel set in the months leading up to the independence of India in 1947. Set in two parallel threads, in the two great cities of colonial India, Lahore and Delhi, this is a behind the scenes look at the negotiations, the give and take and the political skullduggery that gave India its freedom via the price of division. Consequently, it is also an intimate look at the friendships destroyed, the loves lost and the carnage that occurred in the sticky hot months of India’s hottest summer ever. Hopefully, the narrative will allow readers to make up their minds about topical assumptions of Nehru’s contributions and the Sardar-Pandit rivalry. (Reason three, and counting.) 

The past is never dead, Faulkner said, it’s not even past. (Who knew Faulkner was a closet Desi!) Khair, general elections 2019 have just got over, the journey ahead is long, and I invite my fellow writers, and readers: Why not reckon with that past, and invite the dead to populate our novels? I have been wining and dining and sharing multiple cuppa chais with Dickie, Jawahar and Vallabh, and it’s been one helluva ride! (Reason four, and ending. For now.)

Ladyz, gentlemen, mitron, lend me your ears... (With apologies to the Bard)

Ladyz, gentlemen, mitron, lend me your ears (arrey, kaan nahin kaatiye, bus suniye — I know we’ve got mighty handy with cutting of late)

I come to bury the Idea of India (which Indira put on ventilation many years back, and now Shri PMji is putting to permanent sleep), not to praise it.

The grandiose idea (secular amidst multiple ancient religions) birthed by the likes of Gandhi-Nehru, 

was a stillbirth when Gandhi was assassinated within the first year of independent India (achhe din version 1.1)  

But Nehru slapped it into some semblance of life, and let it be. Siri PMji 

has told you the Idea of India was bogus:

A Hindu land, Hindu from the golden age of the Vedas, what you mean sickular?

And grievously has India answered it.

Here, under leave of Shri PMji and the rest —

For he is Hindu, Bharat varsha is Hindu;

As is his party of all Hindu men and some (Hindu) women —

Come I to speak in ‘Idea of India’s’ funeral.

I learnt of the Idea of India in my Civics class when I by-hearted the Preamble to our Constitution;

But Shri PMji and his Godse-loving party insists it is an invalid idea;

And Shri PMji has a vision for achhedin and an army of bhakts (so stay in line, I must.)

The idea of India brought many glories to our nation:

An ancient civilization! the world’s largest democracy!

Home to all world religions! Home of non violence!

Did this seem invalid?

Yet Shri PMji says India is for Indians (and Babur-ki-aulad types shush!),

Cent percent Hindu, if Brahmin, better, 

If male, even more so.

I speak not to disprove what Shri PMji and his Bhajapa speak (and promise and trump about Make in India and the din of achhedin)

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love the Idea of India once, not without cause:

(You rioted at regular intervals — 1984, 1992, 2002 — but regained sanity, as if realizing that the good of India lay in a collective good)

What cause withholds you then, to mourn for the Idea of India?

Which Tagore described as ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,’

Which the Preamble (yes, that dusty old tarp that refuses to die, for me at least, a minority twice over: woman and Sikh) promised?

O judgement! thou art fled to an army of trolls,

And men who will protest the plight of fictional women,

And behead, burn and film a poor laborer because he’s Babur-ki-aulad, 

(Never mind that there are 500 years between the two, and hey, in the meantime we had the English too!) Bear with me;

My heart is there in the coffin with the Idea of India,

With Tegh Bahadur who gave his life for the Kashmiri Brahmins,

With the widows and children of ’84 who are still awaiting justice at the hands of their Hindu brethren,

With the women of India who must endure because they are not fictional or mythological but all too real,

With the Muslim woman who raised me, the Catholic nuns who taught me, my Hindu and Sikh family,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

And here, Mr Shakespeare, I must take your leave and recall one of my favorite poets, 

Bahadur Shah Zafar, beleaguered in Burma, who recalling his motherland India, waxed:

Bahut lambi hain raahein pyaar ki, aur zindagi kum hai …

So long are the paths of love and hope, they oft outrun our lives. 

So hope I must, even as I mourn…

© Manreet Sodhi Someshwar