This book is about love, hate, the clash of cultures, ownership of history and the impossibility of knowing the truth.
DR. SUSHEELA. B
Riot: A Love Story is a departure from Tharoor’s previous works -less satirical and more of an exploration of religion, cultural differences and especially human relationships. Summing it up in a single sentence, Tharoor says that the book is about love, hate, the clash of cultures, his ownership of history and the impossibility of knowing the truth. Life at various levels like the individual, social, national and international levels are continuously forged and re-forged by their engagement with multiple aspects of violence and the often conflicting and competing ideas of identity. Also, it uncovers in Indian context the subtle interplay of the forces of violence in transforming the collective and individual experience of suffering. In the novel, Riot, published in 2001, Sashi Tharoor, articulates his sense, articulates his response to the growing communalism of Indian Political and civic discourse, through various perspective salient to Indian political, communal, religious, civil establishments.
The plot of the novel owes its conception to two diverse incidents of violence in two different continents; an account of riot witnessed by an IAS officer on duty Harsh Mander in remote obscure place in the state of Madhya Pradesh and an episode of racial violence in South Africa, which claimed amongst its unfortunate victims, the life of an American girl working with NGO. Agglomerating the predicament of researchers in investigating the occurrence of violence in Indian context is the baffling range of subsidiary involved in the dynamics of identity formation and the conflict potential ingrained in it. The writer eloquently brings to fore this dilemma when Lakshman, the District Magistrate of Zalilgarh, itemizes it for the benefit of the American social worker Priscilla Hart “I am an administrator not a political scientist, but I’d say there are five major sources of division in India -language, region, caste, class and religion” The spilling over of historical and mythological , personal and social and political and religious spaces into each other complicates the scenario and creates undesirable friction which lends momentum to conflict and is one of the cultural blocks of violence in India. Tharoor also experiments with multiple narrative forms to wrestle with the nuances of Indian identity and in the process, lays bare the dynamics of violence: cultural, structural and direct. The present paper attempts to locate the entrenched codes of structural violence in the socio-political fibre of the constitutionally secular society, which culminates into, the central crisis of the novel. It also in process interrogates the cultural complicity towards legitimizing and sustain such acts of violence.
The small unassuming town of Uttar Pradesh, Zalligarh, is the stage on which the plot of the novel unfolds. The town is the microcosm of Indian civil-political establishment, with a district magistrate Lakshman in charge of administration and chief of police Gurinder Singh at the summit of power. Both hail from different communities, yet believe in the essentially secular constitution of India. Although at the apex of the administrative body with access to immense power, these two seem to be unfavourably pitted against the bastion of communal arsonists like the rightist Hindu leader Ram Charan Gupta and his cronies at the end and Ali the petty Muslim government and his posses at the other end of the spectrum.
A detailed study of the novel locates structures of violence encoded in usage of language and the manipulation of the cultural codes generated and communicated in it. The multiple versions of the ballads of Ghazi Miyan in rural Uttar Pradesh are no longer viewed as benevolent example of Hindu-Muslim syncretism. In transient ambience of mutual distrust any vestige religious syncretism is viewed with suspicion and becomes a site for contention. The lopsided perspectives of both Mr.Hart and Mr. Diggs isolated Indian identity and culture into a monolith and perpetrate cultural violence as they block out the complexities and interval divisions that exist in the vibrant fabric of its society. The extent to which a foreigner can misinterpret the local social customs and moral codes which cash with their perception of life is demonstrated by the destine affair Priscilla carries with Lakshman the District Magistrate who has a full-fledged family with a wife who is distant and a child whom he adores. By violating the inviolable space of traditional Indian marriage, she displays her utter disregard for the values of social commitment, accountability and responsibility. The affair reverberates with the rhythms of conflict for her and Lakshman both. It earns the indignation of the local virulent Hindu leader, and her own Assistant, Kadambari. She earns the wrath of both Hindu and Muslim communities and pays with her life in the communal clash between the two. The tale of other characters Fathima Bi and Sundari interconnects with and intersects her saga at one or the other point of time with the experience of violence as the common factor.
Tharoor propounds Priscilla Hart, the idealistic young American volunteer with N.G.O Organization HELP-US involved with developing population-control awareness against the women of Zalilgarh, as the central protagonist. The novel begins with information of her death in the communal strife that engulfs Zalilgarh. Her extraordinary journey to the Indian heartland with a vision to create differences in the lives of the rural and poor Indian women she hardly understands, translates to cultural transgression and breeds aggression and hatred in the community she precisely tries to help. Kadambari the extension worker and her mother remarks: “You see Mrs. Hart,” She observe, “this is the real issue for women in India. Not population control, but violence against women. In our own homes, what good are all our efforts as long as men have the power to do this to us? Your daughter never understood that.”
She tries to empower the bucktoothed little woman Fatima Bi who lives an extraordinarily deprived life in a ghetto in the Muslim quarter with her seven malnourished children and abusive husband Ali who refuses to use protection and beats her up at the slightest pretext. But her attempts to help Fatima Bi is viewed as intrusion by Ali in his personal life. He just stops short of physical violence when he shouts at Priscilla and Kadambari. Priscilla struggles to break the malevolent cycle of domestic violence perpetrated on the hapless woman. The intricacies of the composite structures of violence woven in the mores and discourse of Indian society frustrate her simplistic quest for solution. The frame work of joint family structure, economic dependence and gender bias interpreted through the sanitized cultural codes of socialization, internalization routinization sustains perpetuation of exploitative patriarchal, communal and religious value system. It manacles the responses of women towards any single approach taken to improve their wretched condition.
Jingoism ghettoizes her identity into the bracket of a ‘foreigner’ the ‘other’ and alienates her from the society and people she works with. Categorised as a busybody foreigner, she is rendered invisible and thus vulnerable to the forces of violence. Kadambari, her assistant, is reluctant to accompany her in her sojourn to the muslim basti in response to the distress call from the eighth time pregnant Fathima Bi. The Government machinery probing the causes and causalities of riot categorise her death as just another unnecessary causality of the riot. Ultimately, she is the most unlucky and unlikely victim of the insidious codes of cultural violence.
Hierarchy and exploitation, which are fundamental to social structures, normalize violence. Violence is born and give birth to fear, anger, loss and power. Fatima Bi beleaguered wife of Ali and Sundari, sister of Kadambari and the victim of dowry violence, both belong to different communities, but are victims of identical patterns of cultural socialization and subjugation. Ali, Fatima’s husband hails from a minority community subject to suspicion and repulsion and serves in the lowest rung of Government service. He projects his repressed need for domination on his helpless wife, and holds complete control of her life. Priscilla records this in her letter to her friend Cindy.
The story of Sundari resonates with the same pattern of exploitation, physical, physiological and psychological that is legitimised by the cultural codes of obedience, submissiveness and subjugation to the values of patriarchal society. She is burnt by her abusive husband and in-laws for not producing a male heir and not securing enough dowry. The deceptive rightists’ ideologists seep inro the cultural values and spreads an exclusive notion of identity to sustain the flux of cultural violence. The failure of the State to address the multiple forms of violence, and the measures taken by them to protect the socially marginalized target group/people, amount to violence. After failing to persuade the slogan raising militant mob of Hindus from passing through the Muslim quarters of the town in their journey to Ayodhya to demolish a mosque and rebuild a Hindu temple, Gurinder the S.P and Lakshman the D.M decide to contain the Muslims in their ghettos to prevent the Hindus from insinuating and engaging them with violence. The delinquency of police in deterring and punishing the culprits of violence is another result of violence for the victims.
Meta narrative of cultural/religious purity espoused by Ram Charan Gupta and other rightists leaders is a way to cope with the fractured and diffused sense of identity at the wake of traumatic independence and partition of nation. These grand narratives, however, stifle other contending mini narratives of people like Prof. Sarwar about the richness of Indian identity and erode the vibrant plurality of Indian ethos. Coercion, brutality and violence are employed as a means to this end. In an edited volume on violence Das and Kleinman discuss this phenomenon.
Tharoor’s characters like Gurinder, his old father and Md. Sarwar, despite accepting their multiple roles and identities, do not wallow in confusion over their priority of allegiance amongst the identities they choose to define themselves. In the tragic Sikh massacre that followed the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, countless innocent Sikh lives lost in blind retaliation by the angry mobs. Gurinder loses his brother and young nephew to the mindless fury of bloodthirsty mob. His old father comes to his rescue. The speaker invokes Gurinder’s Sikh identity only to support his arguments on the importance of the role it plays in fostering his inclusive and broader Indian identity. Md. Sarwar stresses on a similar point when he underlines his notion of identity the way he perceives it to the journalist Diggs. The detailed analysis of the novel reveals that mere passive acceptance of multiple identities and pluralities is not much potent in dismantling the invasive configuration of cultural violence. In fact the cracks along the faulty lines of mosaic identity widens at the times of conflict and stress rendering it vulnerable to the structures of violence. The most inclusive identity at the top and others following the same order create scope for tolerance and space for acceptance of difference without involving the self in violence. For a stable and safe society, the people who cohabit in it should be in harmony with their multiple perceptions and complex roles within, to appreciate and tolerate truly the same outside.
The novel however is not a dry summery of statistics or impersonal data: on the contrary, it takes the episode from an intimate angle, focusing on a personal relationship that becomes entangled in a larger political imbroglio. At the same time, it experiments with various forms of narration: the narrative presents an assortment of fragments, bits and pieces of information, transcripts of interviews, newspaper reports and other factual data: these pieces ultimately form a collage, all the fragments presenting different aspects of the central event -death of a woman called Priscilla Hart. How did she die and what were the circumstances? The story is shown through the pieces in the collage like canvas, the mode of narration being as unusual as the tale itself.
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