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BOOKS
A Passenger To India
It's payback time in history and Shashi Tharoor
places himself in the centre of action
By S. Prasannarajan
Memory is art's
alternative to history, but in Indian fiction it's a lost province, so
remote from imagination. The distance between the grammar of inheritance
and the texture of existence continues to be such a dead void in an otherwise
swelling narration of the Indian novel in English, a notable exception
being Amitav Ghosh-Salman Rushdie, self-confessedly a bastard child of
history, is much more than an Indian novelist. Not that India is a zero-gravity
zone for the remembering novelist; rather, its solitude and sorrows, its
telluric tantrums and Babelic brio are as ancient as the story-didn't
someone say five thousand years of solitude? No, Shashi Tharoor didn't
say that. But he does say something that magnifies the space a novelist
occupies in a world condemned by history: "We live, the late Octavio
Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: how
one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of
my fiction. History, the old saying goes, is not a web woven with innocent
hands." Though another novelist had said it better: "The struggle
of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
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RIOT: A NOVEL
By Shashi Tharoor
Viking
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 272
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Riot is the struggle
of Shashi Tharoor against his history-scarred homeland, whose passions
and pathology are constantly challenging his conscience. More than that,
they are challenging his storyteller's craft as well. For, Riot is almost
riotous, and captivatingly so, in its narrative struggle to come to terms
with truth, historical as well as personal, intimate as well as distant.
Maybe the immediacy of the context-the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation-cannot
afford a linear narration culminating in a resolution, maybe this passage
to India has to be less Forster and more Faulkner. A whodunit with a heavy
political text, Riot is told through newspaper reports and scrapbooks,
interviews and testaments, diaries and letters, every piece a slice of
truth, but the sum of it all, in the end, looks like a sculpted lie India
can't live without.
 It
begins with the death of Priscilla Hart, a 24-year-old American volunteer
with a population control programme, in Zalilgarh, a wretched town in
Uttar Pradesh, in the time of a Hindu-Muslim riot on Ayodhya. Who killed
Priscilla, herself a refugee from the memories of her father's sins and
lovers' apathy? Tharoor is not here to pronounce judgement; rather, he
is here as the choreographer of a riotous movement, staged simultaneously
in hearts and on a land that is wracked by history and periodically swayed
by mythology. And the players include: Priscilla's parents, currently
divorced, mother an intellectual type, father a Coca-Cola executive for
whom the ultimate salvation is a Coke imperium ("I'll tell you what
your problem is in India. You have too much history. Far more than you
can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history like a battle axe,
against each other. Whereas we at Coke don't care about history. We'll
sell you our drinks whatever your history is. We don't worry too much
about the past. It's your future we want to be part of."); an American
reporter chasing the Priscilla story; the district magistrate and the
superintendent of police of Zalilgarh, both Stephanians; a Hindu nationalist
who is living for the rehabilitation of Ram in Ayodhya; a left-liberal
Muslim historian and quite a few bit players. Everyone has a story to
tell and every story is as much Priscilla's as it is the narrator's. It
is the chronicle of a death freely told.
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EXCERPT
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From Priscilla Hart's scrapbook
July 16, 1989
Learned something interesting about the
Hindu god Ram, the one all fuss about these days. Seems that when
he brought his wife Sita back from Lanka and became king, the gossips
in the kingdom were whispering that after so many months in Ravana's
captivity, she couldn't possibly be chaste anymore. So to stop the
tongues wagging, he subjected her to an agni-pariksha, a public
ordeal by fire, to prove her innocence. She walked through the flames
unscathed. A certified pure woman.
That stopped the gossips for a while,
but before long the old rumours surfaced again. It was beginning
to affect Ram's credibility as king. So he spoke to her about it.
What could Sita do? She willed the earth to open up, literally,
and swallow her. That was the end of the gossip. Ram lost the woman
he had warred to win back, but he ruled on as a wise and beloved
king.
What the hell does this say about India?
Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent
than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And
when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she'd better
not count on the man's support. She has no way out other than to
end her own life.
And I'm in love with an Indian. I must
be crazy.
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The riot is more than political and so is Priscilla's
death. It's a riot defined by equal amounts of adrenaline and hormone.
Priscilla's secret relationship with district magistrate Laxman is the
hormone part set against the adrenaline part of religious hate. An Oscar
Wilde-quoting, poetry-writing, unhappily married but family-caring Laxman
is the man Priscilla wants to be with. Their twice-a-week rendezvous at
the Kotli, an abandoned historic ruin, is an updated Passage to India
cave where the frisson is not all that civilisational but abundantly carnal.
Laxman, an emotional bore and an intellectual simpleton, has a higher
sense of duty, professional and personal, which is in constant combat
with his desire and dream, personified in Priscilla whose longing he can
only match with bad poetry and an immensely irritating Wilde. Kotli is
his fantasy as well as escape, though, Priscilla has no escape from the
ruins of her own emotions. Perhaps, as Laxman says in one of the rare
moments of originality, there is no wrong place or wrong time, "We
are where we are at the only time we have." And with the wrong lover.
The other riot, stereotypically Indian, between
mad Hindus and ghettoised Muslims, over a non-existent temple and a masjid
existing on the divinely wrong place, is accidental, as far as Priscilla's
murder is concerned. But it is central to Tharoor's memorial service,
his dissent and angst. To make the riot, loosely based on the Khargone
riot during the Ram Shila Poojan programme in 1989, and its genetic history,
a clash against his own conscience, Tharoor introduces the worst Hindu
stereotypes, entities from some oriental backwater. This from the so-called
Hindu fanatic: "You are only too ready to trumpet the great achievements
of the Mughals, their art and architecture, but in fact they mostly stole
from Hindu talent; did you know that the Taj Mahal was really a Hindu
palace?" Set against him is the liberal voice of an Iqbal quoting
Muslim historian, apparently inspired by a Delhi University professor
who has done research on Ghazi Miyan: "Someone ought to do a PhD
on the role of Islam in the sanctification of Ram, but I wouldn't take
a life insurance policy out on him these days." This self-righteous
liberal lamentation makes the politics of this political novel, an adjective
Tharoor will definitely disown, rather black and white, and airbrushes
the gray patches of history from the margins of the page of protest.
This is a problem with the writer as the conscience
keeper, an honourable tradition stretching from Europe to Latin America
to South Africa, unless you are, say, a Mario Vargas Llosa, as in Death
in the Andes, or a J.M. Cooetze, as in Disgrace-the worst case being the
post-Wall disillusion of Gunter Grass. Tharoor, The Great Indian Novelist
who has written some indifferent fiction since then, stages a comeback
worthy of celebration. He has the words, the means, the story and, of
course, the conscience, but his dissent, the moral rejoinder, is in a
hurry to identify the bogeyman. Still, he is audacious enough to be at
the centre of a moment in the payback passage of history.
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