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Indian Literature in English-Lecture 07 Notes-Literature, Study notes of Indian Literature

Indian Literature in English-Lecture 07 Notes-Literature-Christoph Reinfandt Self-Conscious Narration, Great Indian Novels, Indian Politics, Indira Gandhi, Alok Bhalla, Partition of India, Harper Collins, Fiction in English, Literary Co-ordinates , G.V. Desani, Epigraph:, H. Hatterr, Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, Midnight’s Children, Shame (1983), Shashi Tharoor, Raj Kamal Jha

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SS 2008 UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN



Indian Literature in English: An Introduction

Lecture 7: Self-Conscious Narration

1) After Independence: Co-ordinates

2) The Opening Move:

G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948)

3) Great Indian Novels:

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981)

Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel (1989)

4) Literature in English and Indian Politics:

Raj Kamal Jha, Fireproof (2006)

1) After Independence: Co-ordinates

1947 at midnight, 15 August, India gains independence, with Nehru as Prime Minister; partition, mass migration expulsion; Pakistan becomes Muslim country; severe fighting over Kashmir 1948 Gandhi assassinated by orthodox Hindu fanatic 1965 Nehru dies, his daughter Indira Gandhi becomes PM 1965/66 second Indo-Pakistani war over 1971 Kashmir civil war in Pakistan (East Pakistan > Bangladesh): mass mi- grations; Indo-Pakistani war won by India 1975 - 77 Emergency Rule gives PM Indira Gandhi dictatorial powers 1984 PM Indira Gandhi assassinated by two of her Sikh guards after moving against Sikh separatists in Punjab; her son Rajiv Gandhi becomes PM 1990 Hindu march to Ayodhya; mass rioting in many cities Rajiv Gandhi as- sassinated by Tamil suicide bomber 2002 mass rioting in Gujarat (more than 1000 killed)

SS 2008 UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN



Alok Bhalla, ed., Stories About the Partition of India. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1994 (pb. 1999) The partition of the Indian subcontinent was the single most traumatic experience in our recent history. The violence it unleashed was unprecedented, unexpected and barbaric. Provoked by the hooligan actions of a few, the vengeance that ordinary Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs wreaked on each other coarsened our social sense, dis- torted our political judgements and deranged our understanding of moral rightness. The memory of those days is branded so deeply in our souls that it still provokes us into irrational behaviour and careless thought. The real sorrow of partition was that it brought to an abrupt end a long and communally shared history […] The stories collected in these volumes […] are […] witnesses to a period in which we fell out of a human world of languages, customs, rituals and prayers into a bestial world of hatred, rage, self-interest and frenzy […] How we […] read these stories, based upon our own presuppositions, will determine the kind of politics we choose to practice in the future. (xvi/xlixf.) Literary Co-ordinates (Fiction in English):

  • intermittent beginnings in the 19th century
  • getting into stride in the 1930s and 1940s between realism (R.K. Narayan), naturalism and modernism (Mulk Raj Anand), and a re-negotiation of Indian narrative traditions (Raja Rao)
  • fully-fledged modernist reflexivity introduced by G.V. Desani
  • ‘national allegories’ vs. ‘home fiction’
  • ‘genres of modernity’

SS 2008 UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN



MUTUAL INTRODUCTION (3)

The name is H. Hatterr, and I am continuing… Biologically, I am fifty-fifty of the species. One of my parents was a European, Christian-by-faith merchant merman (sea- man). From which part of the Continent? Wish I could tell you. The other was an Ori- ental, a Malay Peninsula-resident lady, a steady non-voyaging, non-Christian human (no mermaid). From which part of the Peninsula? Couldn’t tell you either. Barely a year after my baptism (in white, pure and holy), I was taken from Penang (Malay P.) to India (East). It was there that my old man kicked the bucket in a hurry. The via media? Chronic malaria and pneumonia-plus. Whereupon, a local litigation for my possession ensued. The odds were all in favour of the India-resident Dundee-born Scot, who was trad- ing in jute. He believed himself a good European, and a pious Kirk o’Scotland parishioner, whose right-divine Scotch blud mission it was to rescue the baptised mite me from any illiterate non-pi heathen influence. She didn’t have a chance, my poor old ma, and the court gave him the possession award. I don’t know what happened to her. Maybe, she lives. Who cares? Rejoicing at the just conclusion of the dictate of his conscience, and armed with the legal interpretation of the testament left by my post-mortem seaman parent, will- ing I be brought up Christian, and the court custody award, the jute factor had me adopted by an English Missionary Society, as one of their many Oriental and mixed- Oriental orphan-wards. And, thus it was that I became a sahib by adoption, the Chris- tian lingo (English) being my second vernacular from the orphan-adoption age on- wards. […] Knowing that the most deserving party needing help was self, I decided to chuck the school, get out into the open spaces of India, seek my lebensraum, and win my bread and curry all on my own. […] From that day onwards, my education became free and my own business. I fought off the hard-clinging feelings of my motherlessness. I studied the daily press, picked up tips from the stray Indian street-dog as well as the finest Preceptor-Sage available in the land. I assumed the style-name H. Hatterr ( ‘H’ for the nom de plume ‘Hindu- staaniwalla’, and ‘Hatterr’, the nom de guerre inspired by Rev. the Head’s too-large- for-him-hat), and, by and by (autobiographical I , which see), I went completely Indian to an extent few pure non-Indian blood sahib fellers have done.

SS 2008 UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN



I have learnt from the school of Life ; all the lessons, the sweet, the bitter, and the middling messy. I am debtor both to the Greeks and the Barbarians. And, pardon, figuratively speaking, I have had higher education too. I have been the personal dis- ciple of the illustrious grey-beards, the Sages of Calcutta, Rangoon (now resident in India), Madras, Bombay , and the right Honourable the Sage of Delhi , the wholly Wor- shipful of Mogalsarai-Varanasi , and his naked Holiness Number One, the Sage of All India himself!’ (31-33) Hell, what is Truth? as one P. Pilate once asked. Posterity expects: and no dam’ use funking the issue. But can words ever communicate Truth – whatever it is? All words are pointers, indicators, symbols: and there isn’t a single word in any lingo, dialect or doggerel, which is absolutely cast-true, suggesting in the exact infal- lible, Truth. […] What do you expect of a damme writer of words, anyway? Truth? Hell, you will get contrast , and no mistake! (274f.)

3) Great Indian Novels

Salman Rushdie (*1947 Bombay) Novels: Grimus (1975) Midnight’s Children (1981) Shame (1983) The Satanic Verses (1988) Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) Fury (2001) Shalimar the Clown (2005) The Enchantress of Florence (2008) Essays: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981- 1991 (1991) Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992- 2002 (2002)

SS 2008 UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN



I reply with more questions: is history to be considered the property of the partici- pants solely? In what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map out the territories? Can only the dead speak? I tell myself this will be a novel of leavetaking, my last words on the East from which, many years ago, I began to come loose. I do not always believe myself when I say this. It is part of the world to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only by elastic bands. [...] The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. [...] My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off-centring to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate. [...] I [...] am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion [...] that something can also be gained. (28f., original emphasis) But suppose this were a realistic novel! [...] By now, if I had been writing a book of this nature, it would have done me no good to protest that I was writing universally [...] The book would have been banned, dumped in the rubbish bin, burned. All that effort for nothing! Realism can break a writer’s heart. Fortunately, however, I am only telling a sort of modern fairy-tale [...] [N]obody need get upset, or say anything I say too seriously. No drastic action need be taken, either. What a relief! (69/70) Shashi Tharoor (1956 London) _Reasons of State_ (1982) The Great Indian Novel (1989) The Five-Dollar Smile and Other Stories (1990) Show Business (1992) *India: From Midnight to the Millenium and Beyond (1997/2006) Riot: A Love Story (2001) *Nehru: The Invention of India (2003) *Bookless in Baghdad and Other Writings about Reading (2005) *The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India, the Emerging 21st Century Power (2007) (*non-fiction)

SS 2008 UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN



The Great Indian Novel basically depends on one single move in which the classical mythological text of the Mahabharata is displaced and superimposed as a pretext upon a historical narrative that reaches from the inception of the Indian freedom struggle to the end of Indira Gandhi’s emergency […] Jonathan Culler observes that Tharoor’s “retelling in modern form of the traditional narratives of the Mahabharata seems to re-establish their authority while suggesting that all Indian history is already contained in them, as if events were determined by their signifying structures. ” Culler, of course, is aware of the indeterminacy that such a signifying structure effects as it produces, in Tharoor’s text, a narrative that hovers between satirisation and sacrali- sation of the historical-as-mythology. What renders Culler’s reflections slightly unsatisfactory is his acceptance of the Ma- habharata as a given “story of origin” unproblematically available as a point of refer- ence from which an allegorization like The Great Indian Novel might proceed as if there were only one Mahabharata. A notion like this overlooks the constructedness of the epic as a unified entity that as such has historically emerged from 19th-century orientalist interventions aimed […] at articulating “Indian civilization [as] as a unified whole based on shastrik , authoritative tradition.” (Wiemann 2008, ms.p.88) Eighteen Books:

  1. The Twice-Born Tale
  2. The Duel with the Crown
  3. The Rains Came
  4. A Raj Quartet
  5. The Powers of Silence
  6. Forbidden Fruit
  7. The Son Also Rises
  8. Midnight’s Parents
  9. Him – Or, the Far Power-Villain
  10. Darkness at Dawn
  11. Renunciation – Or, the Bed of Arrows
  12. The Man Who Could Nor Be King
  13. Passages Through India
  14. The Rigged Veda
  15. The Act of Free Choice
  16. The Bungle Book – Or, the Reign of Error
  17. The Drop of Honey – A Parable
  18. The Path to Salvation

SS 2008 UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN



This afternoon, in the scant puddle of a shadow in the yard, half-covered by shreds of charred cloth, scraps of burnt paper, there lies a child’s book. It’s called Learning to Communicate (published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi). A brown patch in the top left-hand corner – possibly the work of fire and water, sun and shine – has seeped into each of its 124 pages. It’s a junior-school English workbook, its leaves marked by what’s clearly a child’s handwriting and sketches. All in pencil. The fly leaf where the child would have been most likely to write his or her name, address, maybe phone number, is gone. Torn off. On page 43, there is a poem called ‘The Town Child’ that has been underlined. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph. This is how the poem begins: I live in the town on the street, It is crowded with traffic and feet. The houses all wait in a row, There is smoke everywhere I go. There is only one thing that I love, And that is the sky far above. There is plenty of room in the blue, For castles and clouds and me, too. The child’s last entry in the book is on page 84. How many children were killed in Gulbarga isn’t known – police say the bodies were too badly burned to be identified. All of the above is fact. All of what follows is fiction. (vii-ix)

SS 2008 UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN



PROLOGUE (THE OPENING STATEMENT)

PART ONE: THAT NIGHT

PART TWO: THE DAY AFTER

PART THREE: THE NIGHT AFTER

EPILOGUE (THE CLOSING STATEMENT)

THE END (Author’s Notes on the events in Gujarat)

Bibliography Lecture 7:

Dengel-Janic, Ellen, Narrating Gendered Space: Anita Desai’s and Shashi Deshpande’s ‘Home Fiction’ (Diss. Tübingen 2008) Fludernik, Monika, ed., Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Lit- erature. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998. Jussawalla, Feroza F., Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in Eng- lish. New York et al.: Lang, 1985. Nanavati, U.M., Prafulla C. Kar, eds., Rethinking Indian English Literature. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2000. Padikkal, Shivarama, “Inventing Modernity: The Emergence of the Novel in India.” In: Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir, Vivek Dhareshwar, eds., Interrogating Moder- nity: Culture and Colonialism in India. Calcutta: Seagull, 1993: 220-241. Paranjape, Makarand, Towards a Poetics of the Indian English Novel. Shimla: Indian Institute for Advanced Studies, 2000. Reinfandt, Christoph, “Grenzüberschreitungen: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981).” In: C.R., Der Sinn der fiktionalen Wirklichkeiten. Heidelberg: Winter, 1997: 330 - 353. Riemenschneider, Dieter, The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934-

2004. Jaipur: Rawat, 2005. Stilz, Gerhard, Grundlagen zur Literatur in englischer Sprache: Indien. München: Fink, 1982. Stilz, Gerhard, ed., Indian Literature in English: An Anthology. Ms Tübingen 1987/88, 1998, 2004. [FB PE 012.053] Stilz, Gerhard, “‘Truth? Hell, you will get contrast, and no mistake!’ Sanitizing the In- tercultural Polylemma in G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948/72).” In: Flud- ernik 1998, 79-101. Wiemann, Dirk, Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English. Am- sterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2008.