Ben Okri says, “Storytellers are the singing conscience of a land, the unacknowledged guides.” For him, the life of a nation – its health, its spiritual strength – can be deduced from the stories the nation tells, the stories it suppresses, the stories it sanctions.Unlike historians who work with the past; the storyteller’s job is to weave individual sufferings into the fabric of time, connecting the past, the present and the future. History mostly revolves around leaders, winners, kings. It condenses individual grief and trauma in objective reports and cold statistics. But for the storyteller, ordinary suffering is supreme. In violent times like the Partition, war, communal riots, the voices that get erased due to fear and circumstance, and the experiences that are reduced to footnotes form the writers’ material. Their task is to observe, listen and put the unspeakable down.No wonder, literature remains the place where ordinary grief, disenchantment, and suffering get the fundamental dignity of being recorded and memorialised. That literature became an important way to memorialise the bewildering rupture of Partition is significant. It is also significant that more than English, the bhashas – Hindi, Urdu, Bangla – spoke most eloquently about Partition horrors.Mother tongues are the languages of our dreams and our mourning. Noted historian, Mushirul Hasan says, Partition literatures constitute “…a cultural archive of first-hand information, experiences and vivid impressions..” without which, the anguish, uncertainty, loss, confusion faced by those afflicted, can never be understood. Gyanendra Pandey of The Subaltern School of Humanities calls the inability of History to record ordinary suffering “the chasm between history and memory.’ The Subaltern School of Humanities, founded by Ranajit Guha, Shahid Amin, Gyanendra Pandey and others, asserts that this chasm can be bridged only by dipping into oral histories, written first person accounts, songs, folklore and literature – where the emotional and psychological echoes of collective violence continue to reverberate.In his preface to the four volume anthology Stories about the Partition of India, Alok Bhalla says, “Partition fictions bears witness to the sorrows of the exiled…but refuse to surrender to any bullying ideology….there are hardly any communally charged stories preaching hate and calling for annihilation of other religious groups written in any of the languages of the subcontinent.” Hindi-Urdu novelists of post partition era – Bhishm Sahani (Tamas), Rahi Masoom Raza (Adha Gaon), Yashpal (Jhootha Sach), Krishna Sobti (Zindaginama, and Gujarat Pakistan se Gujarat Hindustan), Amrita Pritam (Pinjar), Rajinder Bedi, Kartar Singh Duggal, Joginder Paul, Rajee Seth, Intizar Hussain, and Qurratulain Hyder – likewise chronicle the violence, the silence, and the trauma, along with the loss, the bewilderment. This literary feast is not surprising, given that modernist Hindi-Urdu literature came of age in the early decades of the 20th century, and determined its role through the founding of the Progressive Writer’s Group or PWG, in 1935, by Premchand, Nirala, Manto, Chugtai and several others. This ethos of “a critical engagement with the political-social upheavals of the time” has influenced subsequent generations of writers as well.Contemporary Hindi literature constitutes an archive of experiences of contemporary religion, caste, gender and ecological violences. It catalogues the effect of violent public discourse on private spaces and on individual psyches. They talk of channels of greed irrigated by violent discourse. Between their pages, individual anxiety, grief, social uncertainty and absurdity get a place to be. They link economic liberalisation with the politics incubated by it. They show how the creation of a bogey enemy is essential to corral and fence off of the financial gains and to ensure that patriarchy and caste hegemonies stay intact.Invasion of politics in intimate spaces in Geetanjali Shree’s Hamara Shahar Us Baras“We had started talking as if there really were only two identities and everything was either Hindu or Muslim.” (translation mine.)Geetanjali Shree’s narrator in this novel, tells the story of ‘that year’ when her city starts witnessing frequent communal disturbances. A time of uncertainty and dread when the old and tried and tested ways of living got kicked aside.Narrated in a breathless, fragmented voice by a narrator who says she’s not a writer but someone who is simply taking down whatever people say, the novel’s narrative style mimics the external situation of the fragmentation in the city. The focus is not on incidents, but on fleshing out the shocked silence, the paralytic huddle of intellectuals, and the tongue-tied incomprehension of professional writers who do not know how to respond. That year she says, “the Hindus left amicability.” The Jagdambe Math that lay hidden in a shrubbery on one side of a playground across from their balcony, emerged from the shrubbery – first with a saffron flag on top, then with a mela, then a loudspeaker, that got louder and louder in its chants and slogans – and started marching over the playground. The narrator who is neither a professor nor an intellectual like her friends, goes on trying to write how the events outside are wrecking the most intimate and sacred parts of them. Whether they talk or studiously avoid talking of events, Shruti and Hanif, the interfaith couple, and Sharad and Hanif colleagues and friends, find the air between them vitiated. The derailment of ordinary lives in Rakesh Kayasth’s Rambhakt RangbazSet in the backdrop of imminent rath yatra in a small town mohalla Aramganj, the novel deconstructs Mandal-Kamandal politics of the heartland through the story of a popular Ram worshipping Muslim tailor, Ashiq Rangbaz, whose life is thrown into chaos as an altered discourse takes over the mohalla. People he has been with all his life, suddenly start asking new questions.“Akhilesh had asked on his face, ‘We all think of you as a Hindu. Who do you think you are, bey?’The answer came, ‘Whatever my Ram ji has made me, I am that only. Why do you take tension?’‘Meaning, Ram ji made you a mulla?’‘Yes, think that only.’‘Incredible, the things you say. Is that even possible?’‘When a chutiya like you can be made by Ram ji, then why not me?’It is not easy to trap Rangbaz with mere questions. Even so, why at all are these questions being asked? Why has their frequency gone up all of a sudden? Aramganj walas do not know why, but they suddenly have too many questions about Muslims in their hearts.” (translation mine)A Greek chorus of small town characters and their antics reveal diverse views on the emerging politics. It is not as though communal mindsets did not exist earlier in this mohalla beset with feudal, patriarchal and casteist characters; but suddenly they acquire a rallying point and a face. The real question is, whether this newfound Hindu unity imply an end of caste-divisions or simply a scuttling of caste politics?Uday Prakash: The absurd face of India’s growth story No contemporary Hindi writer better captures the cauldron of desperate inequity that the fastest growing economy and world’s fourth largest consumer market is, than Uday Prakash.His translator Jason Grunebaum says, “To read Uday Prakash is to witness profound displacement. It is a displacement unleashed by forces both imported and indigenous, in the India of today – global, hungry, late-stage capitalism steeped in centuries-old caste oppression – inscribed on the likes of sweepers, weavers, semi-retired judges, typesetters, servants returned from the dead, sick slum kids, and others unable, or unwilling, to fall in line.” Prakash’s surreal dystopias string together news headlines, history and poetry. There is no justice, poetic or otherwise in the economic dystopias of those living in slums and footpaths of society. Life is cheap, people are always dying. They drink discarded poison syrups and die, get killed in encounter killings (Tepchu, Dilli ki Diwar), commit suicide due to caste oppression (Mohandas), die screaming when forced to doctor post-mortem reports, or simply vanish.The spiffy, beautified, segregated city, in Geetanjali Shree’s Yahan Haathi Rahte TheA young employee in a multinational is intrigued by the figure of an old lady who he often comes across on the beautified promenade. Once elephants bathed on ghats where this promenade now exists. Who is she? From which part of the city? This side or that side? After the riots, the spiffy city has been split in two.“The riots made this city famous. Well, not the riots themselves, but the glitter and glamor that most definitely resulted from the riots. Had the city not been so jammed and jumbled, chaos would not have broken out. And if chaos hadn’t broken out, there would never have been such a cleanup. The factions were divided so neatly the city shone. One faction this side of the river, one that side, and each clearly recognizable in its place. As though factories had been built on either side to manufacture each faction’s particular costumes and masks, and absolutely everyone appeared only in their respective attire. Everyone wore their assigned uniform, and everyone wore the same mask. This side wore theirs, that side wore theirs.”Translation by Daisy Rockwell.The new found glamour of malls, high-rises and multiplexes sits on the ruins of the chaotic, composite, open-armed city that was. Even the plate-glassed office where the protagonist works, was once a haveli belonging to the same old woman whose bold craziness makes the homogenized new world uneasy. Terrorizing any designated ‘other’ to appropriate their land and Capital for ‘development’ and ‘beautification’ is a prerequisite for such selective, sterile growth. The true face of neoliberal capitalistic ‘development’ is made visible in this story.Portraits of neoliberal paranoia: Chandan Pandey’s Vaidhanik Galp (translated, ‘Legal Fiction’) and KeertigaanLegal Fiction, the first of Chandan’s ‘New India’ trilogy, picks the seams of a love jihad plot set in small town eastern Uttar Pradesh. The narrator Arjun’s encounter with the police, bureaucracy and local politics in Noma – where he has flown to help his ex-friend trace her missing husband, a Muslim professor in a local college – soon turns Kafkaesque. Nothing here is what it seems, and everyone from the police to local politicians work as one: so that victim becomes aggressor, complaint, confession.Keertigan, the second in the series, portrays the trauma of mob lynching through the narrative of two journalists, a man and a woman, who are travelling across north India to collect testimonies of mob lynching victims and their families. Over the course of collecting the horrific testimonies and over encounters with strutting culprits, the troubled male journalist starts seeing lynched men everywhere. They whisper to him in conference rooms, their family members haunt his dreams. As disjointed memories of violence, the helplessness of victims, their echoing, pleading voices and testimonies lay siege to his mind, he disintegrates.Cows and tribal politics: Anil Yadav’s GausevakAnil Yadav’s novella Gausevak portrays how political patronage has overturned the earlier solidarities of workers and downtrodden. Now, the tribals must either get “integrated” in the “new system” or get killed in encounters. An ordinary college going tribal youth Dhama Chero, manages to become a local panchayat level leader, and then dons the mantle of a cow protector, hoping it will enable him to get Hindu Party ticket to contest MLA elections.“With the blessings of the Goddess of Greed, a stiff competition went on among the police to extort more, and the (cattle) traders, to save more. The traders found newer ways to cross the police barriers, while the police tried to enter as many trucks as possible to check health documents of the animals and the arrangements for their fodder and water. Any laxity led to a case lodged under specific clauses of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, due to which the animals were held back for a few days. But the business never stopped. To work for the country on a more dependable basis, Dhama Chero had, thanks to his politics, set up a cow-shelter, and was now a registered cow-protector, “gausevak.”The mechanics that connect cow politics to upward mobility and quick profits are laid bare. Opting out of this politics can reduce a man to mere fodder in the perpetual brutal struggle between the State and the Naxalites. And yet, the price of co-option also keeps getting raised for ambitious youth like Dhama Chero.In these Hindi novels, the eye watching the march of events is not that of a baffled outsider, but of an insider; of someone caught in a nightmare they have no ability to control. Like Partition narratives, these stories record, bear witness, and also lament for simpler, more innocent times when all shades of humanity could exist in a matter of fact way. With courage and forthrightness, they perform the first duty of literature: “To tell us the truth about ourselves by telling us lies about other people.” They create not just psychic spaces, but initiate a much needed moral discourse about experiences that get buried in the noise of times.Rashwita Ravy is the pen name of the author, a literature lover.
