June 23, 2002

It’s a shame that for anything great ever done in the subcontinent there has just got to be a cheap version that follows it. This is exactly the case with the novel under review when compared with Shashi Tharoor’s earlier and superb The great Indian novel. While the latter was a modern classic by any standards, the novel under review is only a more contemporary — read cheap thriller made in Bollywood — take on the partition-related political history of the subcontinent.

Flaunting a too romantic, oversimplified and wishful Indian nationalist/unionist view of the ground reality, the plot — as if by a sinister design and thus confounding the author — only confirms why we had the Partition of India in 1947 and why Pakistan has survived to this day.

A twist in destiny is dangerously disturbing because it confirms a whole lot of stereotyping of the old Indian National Congress’ ideology as explained by the official Pakistani historians in the history books, which constitute the compulsory Pakistan Studies syllabus in our schools and colleges. While most enlightened Pakistanis shun this obscurantism and chalk it down to the absence of democracy in this country, it is shocking how the Indians have happily lived with this myth-making all these years in spite of democracy.

The novel begins with the partition conveniently averted as an obscure nationalist worker manoeuvres to steal Jinnah’s X-ray report from a Bombay clinic, which gives the Muslim League leader only a year’s lease on life. When Nehru and Patel are made aware of this great divine intervention, they back out of the Mountbatten partition plan in June 1947. Thus, India stays united, Jinnah dies a heart-broken man a little over a year later, and Bapu Gandhi is not heard of thereafter, because he perhaps becomes irrelevant to the post-Independence politics.

By the end of the novel, a self-proud India has exploded its nuclear devices at two ‘historic’ sites — Pokhran and Chaghai — and is ready to join the big five on the UN Security Council as a sixth superpower. But this does not happen all that smoothly. The last pages labour at purging India of the separatist Muslim insurgents, who still wanted to carve out a Pakistan, as if out of sheer spite. This is made more menacing by other facts: the world’s largest secular democracy has a charismatic young Muslim woman as its home minister besides a Muslim CBI chief, and several other Muslims as cabinet ministers. The superficial way in which history has been dealt with in the novel is almost frightening. The injury is accented further by the terms and the language used when Muslims are shown interacting in the drama. The Muslim separatist/terrorist outfit, for instance, is called Quome-e-Majlis, literally meaning ‘the nation of convention/meeting’, whatever gibberish that means.

On the ideological front, there is a naive longing on the part of the author for India’s reunification. Most of the drama — read terrorism — takes place in Karachi and Rawalpindi, and the two cities are patently patronized and romanticized. The crooks, mainly the Muslim home minister’s traumatized husband as the mastermind and a Muslim army captain (a victim of unrequited love by a Hindu girl) as his bother-in-faith and crime, fail in their sinister plot of creating Pakistan on India’s 51st birthday because Mother India’s more faithful Muslims remain her loyal children. It is these goody-two-shoes who foil the evil designs of their vicious siblings.

Clearly, despite overtly being naive and wishful, the novel conveys a frightening message to India’s minorities, Muslims in particular: ‘You may not be required to worship Mother India, but she must be obeyed and shown to be obeyed.’ This tyranny on the part of even the so-called liberal secular majority is quite stifling and reeks of a majoritarian parochialism — hardly a vision for a secular democracy wishing to join the superpowers’ club.

Sadly for India, it is this ilk of her children who have refused to let their aging mother age with grace, and made her suffer a juvenile passion for a grandeur they have not quite managed to earn for her.

A twist in destiny
By Sujata Sabnis
Roli Books, M-75, Greater Kailash II Market, New Delhi-110048
Tel:091-11-646 7185
Email: roli@vsnl.com
Website: www.rolibooks.com
ISBN 81-7436-204-5
335pp. Indian Rs285

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