'There Was No Looking Away' - Representations of Post-Partition Communal Violence in Indian English Literature

Lisa Freigang 'There Was No Looking Away' Representations of Post-Partition Communal Violence in Indian English Literature ISBN 978-3-86821-952-4 The partition of the Indian subcontinent into the states of India and Pakistan and the violence that occurred in its wake have been depicted in many works of fiction and received considerable attention from literary critics. Outbreaks of violence between members of different religious communities in India since then, however, have only more recently occupied the cultural and critical imagination. This study explores ten Indian novels in English published between 2001 and 2013 that address outbreaks of post-partition communal violence of the '80s, '90s, and '00s as their main subjects. Focusing on the historical and political contexts of the novels, the first part of the literary analysis examines how the texts negotiate the discourse on communal violence and question widespread narratives explaining its causes and triggers. The second pa rt concentrates on the challenges that emerge when representing violence in general and trauma in particular. It explores the aesthetic strategies used in the novels to represent 'the unspeakable' - such as magical realism, ekphrastic strategies, or the use of photographs as a means of 'picturing violence' - and reveals them to be a response to the societal amnesia surrounding communal violence and its aftermath. The study thus brings to light distinct themes and recurrent narrative strategies related to the representation of communal violence within the diverse body of fiction considered, which includes works by Shashi Tharoor, Githa Hariharan, Sujit Saraf, Raj Kamal Jha, Jaspreet Singh, and Chetan Bhagat.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.Introduction: Narrating Communal Violence in Contemporary Indian English Fiction1
1.1Representations of Communal Violence in Indian English Novels: Subject Matter and Objectives3
1.2State of Researc h6
1.3Corpus, Approach and Structure9

2. Communalism and Communal Violence in Post-Partition India12
2.1'When a Big Tree Falls, the Earth Trembles': The Anti-Sikh Violence of 198421
2.2Hindu Nationalist Mobilisation and the Ayodhya Dispute in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s25
2.3'We Have No Orders to Save You': The 2002 Anti-Muslim Violence in Gujarat33

3. Literary Representations of Communal Violence in Indian English Novels39

4. Settings, Triggers, Catalysts: Depicting the Contexts of Communal Violence51
4.1'Wielding History Like a Battle Axe': The Role of the Past and History Writing in the Production of Communal Sentiments52
4.1.1 Writing Nonsectarian Histories of Sectarian Strife in Shashi Tharoor's "Riot"53
4.1.2 'A Live, Fiery Thing, as Capable of Explosion as a Time Bomb' - History in Githa Hariharan's "In Times of Siege"61
4.2Motives and Explanations for Communal Violence67
4.2.1 'How Long Can He Live Off the Riots of '84?' - Politics and Pragmatic Interests in Sujit Saraf's "The Peacock Throne"67
4.2.2 'Never Big on Religion or Politics' - Chetan Bhagat's "The 3 Mistakes of My Life" and the (Im)possibility of Neutrality73
4.3'When a Combination of Things Happens at Once': Concluding Thoughts on Proximate and Indirect Causes of Communal Violence79


5. Narrating the Moment of Violence85
5.1'Don't Listen to the Dead' - Unreliable Narration and Magical Realism in Raj Kamal Jha's "Fireproof"86
5.2Picturing the Moment of Violence99
5.2.1 'You Had to See the Horror to Believe the Horror' - Photographs in Jaspreet Singh's "Helium"100
5.2.2 Ekphrastic Strategies in Githa Hariharan's "Fugitive Histories"106
5.3Concluding Thoughts: Modes of Narrating Moments of Violence116


6. The Aftermath of Communal Violence121
6.1'Prisoners in Our