Conclusion the Study of 'Construction and Contestation of Nation in Indian

Conclusion

The study of 'Construction and Contestation of Nation in Indian English Fiction' was undertaken with the purpose of understanding the notion of nation underlying the texts and the alternative collectivity imagined therein. It has been carried out in this study by attending to three dimensions: the construction of collective identity, contestations of hegemonic construction of collective identity and visions of collective identities beyond the nation. Novels studied are all canonical texts and this selection was intended to enable a perspective into the 'mainstream' approaches to the issue of nations and nationalisms. The study does not present a detailed analysis of the novels in relation to the various content or form related aspects of the novel. For example, it does not enter into the exercise of exploring the psychological make up of characters, or the examination of the language used by the authors. Such and other investigations are employed in the study only in so far as they have a bearing on the issue under consideration. The idea behind restricting the scope is to keep the focus firmly on the issue being pursued. Three frameworks are adopted for the study. These frameworks are aimed at enabling a view of the notion of nation emerging at different historical junctures and in relation to various developments. However, the selection of novels for study under each framework is guided not by their year of publication or writing but by the period the stories relate to. As a result, while the novels discussed in each chapter have been published at various dates, they all concern themselves with roughly the same historical period. The first framework, 'Nation Formation', is the moment when the notion of nation as a new form of collectivity is emergent. Hence novels selected are from among those that deal with a historical period when in South Asia a transition was underway and people were re-imagining their collective identity. All the four novels studied here indicate the transition by locating the characters initially in traditional social situations such as traditional caste community or regional and cultural community. The narratives then go on to

330 trace the movement of the characters into a new form of collectivity, a larger community of distant togetherness. For example, in Chaman Nahal's Azadi the characters are firmly located in their Punjabi culture with reference to music, language, dress, food as well as other social practices. The narrative then traces the transition to 'nation' as the collective identity adopted by them after coming under the influence of nationalism. In undergoing this transition they alter their relation to the earlier collective identity, disaffiliating themselves from it in some respects. The ambivalence in Lala Kanshi Ram regarding his language - his choice of Hindi as his language for official record while in his daily life he used either Punjabi or Urdu - indicates this. It is significant, and part of the argument of this study, that they do not completely severe their ties with the regional identity, engaging in a complex negotiation of the claims of filiations and affiliations. Thus, this framework examines this negotiation underway at the time of the emergence of 'nation' as a new form of collectivity in the subcontinent. In addition to this, the novels studied here employ basically the social realist mode of novel writing. The second framework, 'Nation Building', situates the investigation in a period after the end of colonial rule when there is congruence between the nation and the state. The novels studied here narrate stories taking place, roughly, in the 1960s. This period is chosen because this allows for two kinds of enquiry: it is a couple of decades away from the anti-colonial nationalist fervour and the postcolonial nation-state had already established its hegemony by then. This would provide a perspective into the responses to the new collectivity, 'nation', that is now well-entrenched as a chief form of collective identity. Secondly, this is the period of emergence of literary modernism in Indian English literature. Of the three novels studied, two follow the modernist idiom, while one, Rama Mehta's Inside the Haveli, sticks to the social realist form. Even the other two, though modernist in tone and structure, weave in social realism in some ways. This framework enables a view of the relation between the metanarratives of nation building - national integration, progress, modernisation, etc. - and the responses to homogenised national identity. Here,

331 the processes of both conformation and confrontation with the 'national identity' become the focus of investigation. The grounds on which these twin processes are undertaken reveal the ideas informing the collective identity. For example, in Sahashi Deshpande's novel, That Long Silence, we find the unequal impact of the nation's modernisation and industrialisation projects on male and female characters. Jaya, the protagonist, is excessively burdened by her husband's enthusiastic participation in these projects and in his ambition for upward social mobility. This burden disallows her own self to develop a sense of worthiness. The gendered projects of national progress reveal in this novel the subjugation of women in the name of the 'nation'. This results in Jaya confronting the construction of national identity. Yet, caught in her class/caste determined social situation, she conforms to the hegemonic construction of that identity. Thus, we notice 'nation building' as a juncture fraught with the tension between the metanarratives of nation building and the diverse claims of identity by different social groups. The third framework, 'Nation and beyond', refers to the rapidly changing historical juncture, when critiques of nationalism are emerging. The 1980s and after is a period when under the emergence of globalisation processes, the ideas of nationalisms are subjected to severe scrutiny. The role of the state is eroded in certain spheres with the disembodied powers of globality coming to regulate the flow of money and service undermining the authority of the state. Therefore, this framework enables an investigation of not only the critiques of nationalism but also the alternative imaginings of collectivity. In this framework the three novels selected for analysis narrativise different temporal junctions. The crisscrossing of the temporal and spatial planes is constitutive of the ambitions of these novels. Nevertheless, the choice of the novels is consistent with the purpose of this framework, of examining criticism of nation as a collectivity and visions beyond the nation. For example, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines is a novel that presents a criticism of the ideas of discrete identities that drive nationalist claims of homogenous collectivity. On the other hand, the notion of free individuals circulating in an

332 unbounded terrain of global space offers no hope. Therefore, in this novel, a sort of rooted internationalism is implied as the ahemative to the inherent violence of nationalism. Thus, this framework makes possible an engagement with the contestations of the homogenising impulse of nation imaginary and with the alternative visions offered in these novels. The study of construction and contestation of nation is carried out in this thesis with a specific understanding of the concepts of 'nation' and 'nationalism'. The first chapter, 'Nations and Nationalisms' has elaborated this via a review of the literature on these concepts and by working out a theoretical framework. Nation, I have argued, is a discursive field where diverse identity claims are invested. The diversity is caused by the condition of being of this category of collective identity. Nation is a modem identitarian form of collectivity though it has no novel and independent form in itself It forms itself through other existing forms of identity even as it dissociates from any one of those. The impact of modernity renders prevalent forms of identity inadequate to address the expansion in sociality though these are not completely abandoned either. The coming together of the different identity categories is a result of the coming together of people from different social, economic, cultural, linguistic and religious affiliations under the impact of modernisation - expanding the territorial base of a large population due to migration and the shrinking of distance through advancements in modes of communication. This diverse population has to adjust to the demands of new modes of exchange, interaction and co-habitation, in short, new forms of sociality. Coupled with this is the requirement of the capitalist system for large and bounded territorial units capable of regulating labour, governance and finance, which engenders the modem state. The congmence of nation and state conditions the form of collectivity called nation. I argue that nation is not merely imagined, which is an idea that focuses on the formation of familiarity across unfamiliar people. This view stresses the psychological aspect of identity formation. 1 consider that the coming together under nation as the collective identity is facilitated by concrete practices. The community formation is not entirely based on the

333 psychological desire and need to form a collectivity but also based on the material needs and circumstances. This means that the formation would be full of discontinuities and that there is not enough consonance as no one person can ever materially form association with all the rest. While this is true, we must not ignore the fact that the practices being referred to here are in diverse areas. The lack of continuity and consensus in fact is an important point because it indicates that nations are not homogenous within. Nation is a category of identity which is forever plural due to the diverse membership. Therefore, it is a form of identity that is never singular, always conflictual, and driven by contradictory perceptions of togetherness. Nation, hence it is understood here, is a contract across contradiction, a conflictual consensuality. Nationalism, I argue, is a discursive practice for the formation of 'nation'. I avoid the question which comes first, nation or nationalism, as I see both as not a complete severance from the former strategies of collectivity but as a disjunctive continuity. Because there are different and conflicting conceptions of collective identity, nationalism for ever remains in plurality, among other nationalisms, articulating other conceptions of identity. Thus, not only across the border of a state, but also within a territorial unit, or even within a small territory in a state, there are multiple nationalisms, each in confrontation with others, each attempting to establish its hegemony and each continuously negotiating with competing discourses of identity. This leads to two conditions of the operation of nationalism, hegemonic and contestatory. While all discourses of nationalism seek to become hegemonic, the one that has established its hegemony always works towards its perpetuation. The other discourses contest that hegemony and challenge it continuously. In the first chapter, titled 'Nation Formation', four novels relating stories from the pre-independence period are discussed. The analysis of Mulk Raj Anand's novel Untouchable focuses on the use of normative categories in the description of social values, the restructuring of Bakha by severing him from his social context and accommodating him into the upper caste chain of values, the partisan viewing by the narrative gaze that results in

334 individualisng Bakha in such a way that untouchability is not seen as a systemic problem, the restricted representation of the activity of the untouchables leading to the novel's silence on the agency of the marginalised untouchable society. The novel attends to the emergence of nation as a new form of collectivity. The view of the processes of the emergence of this collectivity discloses the politics of the novel: approximation of the identitarian space and an insistence on inscribing this space with the marks of socio-cultural values of the touchables. The analysis thus demonstrates how, in the novel, nation as a universalistic category of equalised citizenry does not emerge. In fact the novel reveals nation as a space for a continuous reproduction of the hegemony of specific social classes. The second novel studied in this chapter is R.K. Narayan's Waiting for the Mahatma. In the analysis of the social universe of this novel I have explored the use of differentiated narrative gaze and the operation of a principle of exclusion with respect to lower caste characters. The point here is not about the exclusion of the lives of a certain group of people. I stress the manner in which the ones who are represented have been treated in relation to the idea of collectivity. The findings of this analysis is that the notion of collectivity called the 'nation', the emergence of which the novel describes through its narrativising of Sriram's life, restricts that space to the upper caste communities and leaves out the characters from the lower castes represented in the novel. This again reveals how nation does not emerge as a universalisitic category of collective identity. The third novel discussed is Chaman Nahal's Azadi. In studying Azadi, I have tried to bring out how the disjunction between life practices and identity politics, divisive viewing of various communities, differentiated economy of viewing of male and female, reveal the construction of nation in exclusive terms. This novel also demonstrates the impossibility of the universalistic claim of national identity. While the novel depicts partition violence and searches for the reason behind the hatred between communities

335 perpetrating the violence, it also comes to reveal that partition is a sign of the contestation engendered by the diverse constructions of 'nation'. The fourth novel I discuss is Kamala Markandaya's Some Inner Fury, which deals with the gendered subjectivity under the colonial state and the traditional community. The novel traces the tension between colonial administration, on the one hand, and the nationalist forces on the other, the clash between traditional roles ascribed to a woman and the personal aspirations of women. In the course of contesting the authoritative discourses, the novel challenges both colonialism and patriarchy. But, the novel also reveals its own politics of appropriation and disrecognition with reference to the representation of the underclass. The novel represents the underclass and locates them in a crucial juncture in its plot structure. But the novel also submits this representation to disrecognition by maintaining a blind spot towards the structure of meaning of their activities. This is how in the novel the principle of exclusion emerges. Thus, the first chapter focusing on the emergence of the idea of nation as a collectivity, brings out the view that on the basis of the novels studied nation does not emerge as a universal collectivity. In the construction of a notion of collective identity all the four novels reveal the principle of restriction and exclusion. The principle of restriction is a result of the overcoding of the collective identity with the social and cultural practices of the hegemonic class. The second, i.e., the principle of exclusion, results in the impossibility of considering nation as a universal category of collectivity since all the people belonging to a collectivity are not given equal right of self-representation. The conclusion arrived at is that even as the freedom movement in the Indian subcontinent was underway, the category of 'nation' was hardly about freedom as a universal right of the future citizens of the 'nation-state'. The anti-colonial and a number of other socio-political movements under the rubric of nationalism are competing to claim for the 'nation' such identity marks that valorise their own socio-cultural codes.

336 The second chapter works within the framework of 'Nation Building'. Three novels have been studied in this chapter. Arun Joshi's The Apprentice is studied by attending to the manner in which it constitutes two structures of binaries: idealism vs. pragmatism and the responsibility of the state vs. that of the individual. Within these binary structures of values, the novel seeks to arrive at the right balance. It views the identity of the collectivity as fully resolved and takes for granted the hegemony of national identity. The novel raises ethical questions about the responsibilities of the state and the individual and places both on the same plane by suggesting the need for a balance between idealism and pragmatism in the activities of the two. The first person narrator, Ratan Rathor, structures his narrative as a confession and from the temporal plane of the moment of confession evaluates the past and present status of the country. Ratan's meditative narration of the failure of the nation, loss of honour, wasted lives, the need to learn from the past follies and so on are signs of the effectiveness of an affective structure that nationalism institutes to extract total loyalty of the subjects. The search for the right balance that Ratan undertakes in his narrative is thus implicated in the rhetoric of the honour, dignity, and progress of the 'nation', the fear of its failure intensifying that search. This obscures the divisions based on class, gender, and caste within that totalised identity of nation (which come to be represented but not evaluated). The result is that the moral economy of The Apprentice obscures the political economy as well as cultural conflicts by locating the interest of the individual in that of nationhood by mobilising a homogenised morality of nationalistic 'good'. The second novel studied in this chapter is Rama Mehta's Inside the Haveli. The analysis of this novel takes into account the institution of two temporal and spatial categories in the novel, one representing the traditional aristocracy inhabiting the haveli and the other representing the world outside it which is integrated into nationhood. The novel then goes onto valorise the former, defending its socio-cultural practices even as it brings out the oppression involved in them. Contrary to its initial claim of the difference

337 between the old city of Udaipur and the new township, the novel reveals processes of othering within the old city based on class and gender. It ends up contesting the homogenisation effected by nation on behalf of the aristocracy, the defence of which is made in the novel by defending its traditions. The novel, however, effectually silences the dissent based on class by portraying the generosity of the aristocracy. Thus, in this novel, contestation of nation as a modem collectivity is undertaken from the point of view of the aristocracy that is projected as 'traditional way of life'. The inherent violence in that form of sociality is subjected to erasure through an internal valorisation of its merits. Here we notice that in the debate about the clash between tradition and modernity when undertaken in relation to the notion of collectivity, tradition comes to represent the perpetuation of patriarchal hierarchy. This analysis reveals that the Utopian project of a single sense of collectivity for the people inhabiting the territorial plane of the nation-state is mirealized due to the diverse configurations of the nation-space. In studying Shashi Deshpande's novel, That Long Silence, I have attempted to engage with the contestation of homogenous identity emerging from gender perspective. The crisis in Jaya's middle class life foregrounds the burden of the metanarrative of national progress on women. The novel is read as an exploration of the denial of self-worth to women as they come to be imposed with the care of the irmer or domestic domain. The polemical aspect of the novel develops a critique of patriarchal construction of nation on the basis of the enforcement of silence on women. But, I argue, this thesis comes to be compromised in the novel because of the way in which it universalises women by disrecognising the class/caste hierarchisation of women represented in the novel. In locating the space of women, the novel prefers an axis across class/caste/region/time. The universalized space of gender deflects the conflicts in the terrain of cultural politics, especially in relation to the homogenous construction of 'nation'. The study of the three novels has been carried out by giving attention to the responses available in them to the role of nation-state, hegemonic

338 construction of 'nation' in terms of the socio-cultural practices of the brahminical patriarchy and the silenced presence of underclass in them. In all the three novels, it is the silenced presence of the underclass that undermines the polemical theses of the novels. The novels view state as being the central agent of permeation of power (true basically of Arun Joshi's and Shashi Deshpande's novels). By bringing the marginalised groups into the narrative universe, the narratives are attentive to the class and gender frameworks in the experience of marginalisation. In the exploration of the projects of nation building, each novel in its specific manner moves away from the problematic posed by the underclass represented within its narrative. The theme of responsibility in The Apprentice, the valorisation of aristocracy in Inside the Haveli and the universalising of the subject of patriarchy in That Long Silence are the modes by which the experiences of the underclass, the marginalised, are evaded. The textual analysis undertaken in this chapter evidences how in these novels the focus on nation-state's regulatory regime evades the role of hegemonic nationalism conditioned by brahminical patriarchy in perpetuating its hegemony. Even as we detect in the novels studied contestations of totalised national identity with reference to class, gender and traditional community, the reconfigurations implicitly projected in them are attached to the hegemonic identity groups. The third framework of 'Nation and beyond' is studied in the fourth chapter in relation to three novels: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. In my study of Rushdie's novel, I have attended to the subversion of the unitary notion of nation that takes place through both aesthetic as well as polemical codes. Among the aesthetic codes discussed in this analysis are: the duplicitous narrative (the confusion about the origins), the deployment of doubleness (simultaneous occupation of different sites of meanings - fiction/history, Saleem/Shiva, writing/telling, auto vs. other-biography), and the end-view perspective (Saleem's disintegration, diversity swallowing

339 oneness). The polemical codes discussed are: foundational myth, proliferation of meaning, thematic scepticism and fractured subjectivity of Saleem. Through these techniques Rushdie is able to present a debunking of the homogenous and totalised conception of nation which in real terms is restrictive. The novel emphasises the need to make nation a category of identity that is inclusive rather than exclusive. However, attending to the alternative conceptualisation of the collectivity one finds that the novel does not have much to offer. In Midnight's Children, the issue of collectivity is addressed within the colonial and national modernities with the polemical rhetoric of the novel critiquing the violence involved in cleansing from the space of the nation any traces of difference. The necessity of seriously reworking the nation imaginary is not undertaken in this work. The second novel studied in this chapter, Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, starting from its title, characterises the differences that nationalism constructs across nation-states as necessarily illusory and posits a cross-cultural and trans-national web of interaction to debunk the notion of discrete national identities. The narrative in its movement across temporal and spatial landscapes focuses on the relationships forged and the abiding quality of friendships. Weaving together stories of riots and romances, this novel rejects the paradigms of nationalism and individualistic cosmopolitanism. The argument 1 present here is that the rooted internationalism that this novel projects as the alternative to the nation imaginary invalidates local practices of collectivities and in viewing nationalism in a singular framework, it fails to identify the violence inherent in the hegemonic nationalism. The novel's refusal to factor in the discourses of contestatory nationalisms and their visions of collectivity only perpetuates the self-perception of the hegemonic nationalism, viz. that it is the sole framework within which to consider national identity. The third novel studied here is Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, which makes a different kind of intervention into the critique of nationalism as compared to the other two novels studied in this chapter. While

340 Rushdie and Ghosh pit personal memory against the grand narratives of nationalistic history, Roy deploys the small narratives and attends to the internal dissension with reference to class, caste and gender. The critique of the totalising tendency of the grand narratives are contested both at the aesthetic and polemical structures of her work. The novel presents the marginalised figure not only as the victimised but also as agents of power by attending to their abilities as well. She cares to invest meaning even to the non-victorious strategies of resistance and views the small acts of subversion that take place in the banality of everyday existence as being the potential sites of struggles against regulatory regimes. However, in The God of Small Things the structure of politics comes to be emptied out as the modes of engagement are atomised. Collective agency is displaced by the highly individualised strategies of protest. This rarefies the site of resistance and indicates a turning away from politics itself All the three novels discussed in this chapter severely indict the totalising power of nationalism and reject the exclusive loyalty that nation imaginary demands. These novels are unlike the novels studied in the earlier chapters in refusing to subscribe to exclusive and restrictive means of imagining collectivity. Their critique of the principles of identity politics inherent in the hegemonic discourses of nationalism in India is unequivocal. But when we attend to the alternative visions of collectivity in these novels we come across a problematic view as these novels either gaze at the global (as in Ghosh) or at the individual (as in Roy). Rushdie and Ghosh refrain from engaging with the discourses of contestations in India in their visualisation of the alternative modes of forming collectivity. Roy insists on individual acts of subversion without attending to collective actions. Thus, these novels upset the nation imaginary without upstaging its power. The study of these ten novels demonstrate the various strategies, both thematic as well structural, employed in them to emplot the construction and contestation of nation. The general pattern drawn through the analysis of these novels is that there are two basic responses; one, acceptance of the claim of nationalism over the collective identity in the modern society; two, rejection of

341 this exclusive claim. The acceptance is more clearly noticeable in the novels that focus on the pre-independence period; novels of the middle period, i.e., post- independent India before 1980s, engage in contestation of some or the other sort, chiefly to demand reconfiguration of the nation space. Among the third category of novels there is a complete rejection of the exclusive claims of nationalism on collective identity, as these incisively bring out the violence and injustice involved in such claims. One significant perspective regarding these novels is that they all engage with the issue of belonging to 'nation' rather self-consciously. This is evident in the polemical narrative codes. By this term is meant, the underlying argumentation in these novels regarding various issues raised up within the narrative. While in some it is subdued (Untouchable, Waiting for the Mahatma, Azadi, Inside the Haveli), in some others it is accented {Some Inner Fury, The Shadow Lines) and in the rest it is emphatic {The Apprentice, That Long Silence, Midnight's Children, The God of Small Things). My attempt has been to read the narratives at both levels - aesthetic and polemic - in relation to the topic of study. The novels studied deal predominantly with hegemonic nationalism. Some of the novels view nation as an identity that is beyond questioning {Waiting for the Mahatma, Azadi, The Apprentice). Some engage in a contestation, thus, displaying a desire to reconfigure the nation {Untouchable, Inside the Haveli, Some Inner Fury, That Long Silence, Midnight's Children). The rest reveal a desire to imagine a totally different way of configuring identity; in other words, they reject nation as a desirable category of collective identity {The Shadow Lines, The God of Small Things). It is the novels of the 1980s {Midnight's Children, The Shadow Lines, The God of Small Things) that reject the idea of discrete identities and suggest the diversity of identitarian practices of people. Their stress is on the plural condition of identity in social life, as against the rest of the novels studied here which work with the belief in discrete identities. The reading of the ten novels undertaken in this study is basically oppositional. One possible question to the kind of reading practiced in this study would be: can a single novel ever manage to represent a large country like India?

342 It may be pointed out that the attempt in this study has not been to look for representativeness. The very idea of nation which is understood here as being both diverse and incomplete means that such representations are not possible. Hence, the argument in the thesis is not at all that a particular novel has only upper caste characters, or only urban characters, and so on. My focus has been on what has been represented and the structuring of values therein. That is the reason why this study looks at suppressions and containment rather than exclusions; that is why there is a focus on the reconfigurations of collectivity within the texts rather than on discrete national identities. The argument in this thesis thus is that nation is always 'staged' - presented (performed as well as made present or made into a reality). Narratives are a component of this staging. 1 have in this thesis looked into one kind of staging, on a particular stage as it were, by selecting to investigate in some narratives the processes of constructing and contesting. There are other kinds of staging of nation, other kinds of narration of nation. The attempt in this thesis is to bring in the idea of the conflict of interest between different nationalisms borne of differing conceptualisations of 'nation'. I have tried to maintain a perspective from the below: not only from the point of view of those who have been 'subjected to nation', made subjects of nation-state, but also from that of those whose identity claims are refused, appropriated, marginalised or suppressed brutally. In India, the nationalism (at the 'national' level) that has established hegemonic status is the brahminical patriarchy. This, however, is not a unified singular discourse. It may better be seen as an alliance of various vested interests. One element of this alliance is that it is rooted in the system of caste hierarchy and patriarchy. Aijaz Ahmad has discussed the implicit valorisation of the 'high tradition' in most accounts/narratives of 'canonical' nationalism. He has pointed out that. We tend to ignore the fact that many of the tendencies which went into constituting what can now be described as our canonical nationalism were deeply implicated in various kinds of revivalism - and if they were not revivalist in the narrow religious sense, they nevertheless thought of the 'greatness' of India's past almost always in terms of its

343 dynastic splendours, its priestly pieties, its elite Sanskritic past.'

Against this hierarchy there have always been struggles. When nation as a novel category of collectivity under modernity emerges, the forces against the system of social hierarchy too redefine their strategies and begin a process of staking a claim on the form of collectivity that the future would hold. The anti-caste discourses apart, there have been other discourses of contestation. The impact of these discourses has been that hegemonic nationalism has had to continuously rediscover and redefine itself Neither the hegemonic nor the contestatory discourses are unitary, fully formed or essentially unchangmg. There have been changes in many respects - strategies, aspirations, grounds of contestations, constituencies, and even the projection of the self and other. Therefore these are continuous processes. In this thesis an implicit sympathy for the politics of the discourses of contestation is operative. Indeed, such sympathy has formed the operating perspective behind the arguments as well the analytical approach. The argument emerges from the realisation that in content as well as form discourses of contestation differ greatly from the hegemonic discourses. Therefore, the nature and quality of the collectivity forged by these discourses would not be the same as the one forged by the hegemonic discourses. Critiques of nationalism in India have emerged from various sources. The ones that have emerged from the discourses of contestation differ in their agenda greatly from the ones that have emerged in relation to hegemonic discourses. For example, one of the major critiques of nationalism, Ashis Nandy, operates from within the notion that nation and nationalism are unsuitable for India. His theorisations are based primarily on the nature and quality of nation forged by hegemonic nationalism. Studying Tagore's approach to nationalism Nandy points out: Unlike many others in his and our times, Tagore believes that the canonical texts of India - the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita - might be at the centre of India's classical culture but they do not constitute the heart of Indian unity or provide the basis of it. Here he differs radically from the likes of Rammohun Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and

344 an array of eminent 19th century thinkers who believed that the canonical texts of Hinduism defined the basis of Indianness. Indian unity, Tagore insists, is built on the thoughts and the practices of the medieval mystics, poets and religious and spiritual figures.^

He goes on to argue that Tagore's vision was to glean from the past of India ideas for its future. What is ignored by Nandy in this theorisation is that the unity Tagore finds in the mystics, poets, and religious and spiritual figures is not - it never was - material unity but a sentimental unity, at the psychological level. The material conditions of the medieval period did not necessitate material unity in "India", a territorial concept still ahead in the future. In studying Indian English novels with a perspective sympathetic to and formed by the logic of the discourses of contestation, I have tried to retain a notion of the local. But this is mainly strategic; this is not to suggest that these discourses demand localism, some do and some don't. But this has led to the view that critiques of nationalism need to move beyond considering only the hegemonic conceptions of nation and obtain greater edge to their critique of hegemonic nationalism and its impacts on social life by bringing in the frameworks of contending discourses as well. This is even more urgent when globalisation seems to become the easy alternative to nation as it presents a fierce challenge to nation. The approach adopted in this thesis is suitable to the reading of any Indian English novel and it may provide new ways of understanding the politics of the texts. This researcher feels that the advantage of the framework of this study is that it avoids a unitary view of nation and nationalism and responds to the discursive structures in the novels at the level of the diversity of people's politics. Studies of Indian English novels from this point of view enable us to chart the ideological grounds specifically. While this study is limited to the study of canonical texts, it is certainly necessary also to study texts which have been subjected to silence, texts that have had only a local reception and texts that articulate the imagination of collectivity of various minoritised social groups.

345 The arguments made in this thesis suggest that in Indian Enghsh novels 'nation' is not imagined in a universal register. Each novel focuses on a different form of collectivity and raises its own questions to other forms of 'nation'. This means that the representations of nation and nationalism in Indian English novels are diverse. Therefore, a historical view of the field of Indian English Fiction needs to attend to the various ideological positions and the numerous discursive structures that constitute this field. Historical studies of lEF have viewed its engagement with nationalism by concentrating on the effect of Gandhi on Indian English novels, the influence of Sanskritic high tradition on the form and content of the texts and the effects of modernisation processes. The findings of this study suggest that such histories of the field have restricted themselves to only the hegemonic nationalism. One area in which in recent times there have been serious revisions of this lapse is in relation to women. This study argues that in constituting the field of lEF attention needs to be paid to other discursive formations as well. For example, issues such as continuity and rupture in community formation, emergence of new forms of communities that break down the traditional notions of bonding, non-hegemonic views of the past, practices that defy the transnational global order, etc. Very interesting and valuable contributions have been made in the recent years to the body of criticism on lEF. For example, Priya Joshi studies the complex relation between colonialism, the production and consumption of English novels and the culture that emerges thereby. Meenakshi Mukherjee's The Perishable Empire similarly engages in a study of the relationships between colonialism, tradition, local literary cultures, and the interaction between English and other Indian language literatures. Tabish Khair has developed a novel framework for the study of lEF in his Babu Fictions. His framework enables us to understand the problematic representation of the underclass in lEF as well as its social location. The findings of this study contribute to the growing body of knowledge on lEF and particularly with

346 respect to an understanding of the notions of collectivity articulated in literary discourses. One of the limitations of this thesis, in fact, is that it has not brought in detailed descriptions and discussions of the discourses of contestation. The plan of this thesis did not permit me to do that. The fault lies with me for making a limited plan. Therefore, one area of future research in this coimection would be to discuss Indian English novels (or any other literary field), by subjecting them to scrutiny through theories emanating from the discourses of contestation. Such a project can draw from the discourses of those who are marginalised on whatever basis - gender, sexuahty, caste, class, profession, region, language, spiritual belief, etc. There is a vast amount of work done in this area in the social sciences. Literary field needs to do much more. In the field of Indian English literature much more can be done.

Notes

' Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. p. 276, ^ Ashis Nandy, "Nationalism, Genuine and Spurious: Mourning Two Early Post-Nationalist Strains", in Economic and Political Weekly. August 12, 2006. p. 3501.

347