Chapter Five Emergency Allegories

DRAFT - please do not cite or circulate Chapter Five Emergency Allegories – from Mode to Genre Ayelet Ben-Yishai University if Haifa / Cornell Society for the Humanities February 2018 [Allegory] allows for instruction, for rationalizing, for categorizing and codifying, for casting spells and expressing unbidden consumptions, for Spencer’s “pleasing analysis” and, since aesthetic pleasure is a virtue also, for romantic storytelling, for satirical complication, and for sheer ornamental display. To conclude, allegories are the natural mirrors of ideology. (Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, p.369) In 1972, three years before the declaration of Emergency, O.V. Vijayan, Malayali author and renown political cartoonist then living in New Delhi, began work on a scathing and ribald satirical allegory of political corruption. Written in Malayalam, the novel Dharmapuraanam was set to begin serialization in July 1975. However, history had other plans, and Vijayan, not wanting to court trouble overtly, waited until 1977, when the Emergency was lifted, to begin serialization. For reasons both political (the satire spared no-one, neither on the right nor on the left) and moralistic (the novel was both sexually and linguistically explicit), Dharmapuraanam was met with public and critical disapproval and the novel was only published in full in 1985. Its English version, The Saga of Dharmapuri, was translated by the author and published by Penguin Books in 1988.1 The novel - it must immediately be said - was shocking in its content: an unrelenting and revolting litany of violence and degradation, a grotesque portrayal of political power as an obsession with excrement, sex, and eating (often all at the same time). 1 See Vijayan’s “Author’s Note” The Saga of Dharmapuri p.8. While Vijayan repeatedly told this story of the publication - stressing that his novel preceded the events it was satirizing, it remains unclear how much of the novel was written or revised during the Emergency and in its immediate aftermath. In 1992 he said, “It was begun before the Emergency, but it was a portrayal of the events leading up to Emergency” (Pillay 93). Ben-Yishai Emergency Allegories Revulsion, or disgust, was the novel’s goal; as Vijayan explained in a 1992 interview, “I was in search of the Ultimate verbal obscenity because the objects of my criticism -- the state, war, political and personal domination, the trivial motives beneath the grand historical posture of Kings and Presidents -- were not merely sociological aberrations, but obscenity rooted in the spirit itself” (94). And yet according to Vijayan, while the spirit is immanently obscene, it also carries within itself its potential salvation, personified in the novel by the incongruous appearance of a spiritual healer - Siddhaartha, introduced in the novel’s Glossary as “Not the Buddha of history but a parallel creation” (160). The allegory’ like many others before it, is thus made up of two parts: a grotesque political satire coupled with a spiritual conclusion or frame narrative. While the two parts never really work together in the novel (at least to my mind), Vijayan regards them as inextricable; their coexistence marking the specificity of the Indian case from other modes of tyranny: It will be inappropriate to compare [The Saga] with the portrayals of tyranny done in Latin America or Eastern European fiction. There was no Indian tyrant. There was only the Indian hedonist. Power was held and defended as a means to almost frivolous gratifications. In other words we had a terribly inefficient tyranny, and an inefficient resistance. (93) According to Vijayan then, the Emergency is characterized by its ludicrousness, its ineffectuality, and its superficiality, which ultimately - in Indian culture - must cede to spirituality (hence the appearance of Siddhartha). This, he continues, is “the great Indian principle of enlightened failure” (93). In other words, spirituality, figured as reincarnation, sets Indian authoritarianism, as well as Indian existentialist angst, apart from its counterparts elsewhere in the world. “[T]he Hindu certitude of rebirth … gives an altogether different dimension to political despair” (94). I will return to this politics of disgust and to the temporality of rebirth later, but would here like to say that while this spiritual view might be appealing, the novel itself, as I’ve already hinted, does not really uphold it. While Siddhaartha might in fact offer an “enlightened failure,” the spiritual framing of the novel does not really seem to provide a horizon of possibility, a complement, or an antithesis to its agents of revulsion and obscenity. Notably, Siddhaartha fails in the novel because of 2 Ben-Yishai Emergency Allegories his passivity, the very same passivity and ineffectuality against which Vijayan rails when he denounces an “inefficient resistance” (94).2 What then does The Saga of Dharmapuri offer in the face of tyranny (inefficient or otherwise)? The 1992 interview quoted above might hold a clue. After repeatedly asking about the novel’s “obscenity,” the interviewer, C.G. Pillay, tries to understand the novel’s political referent: C.G.P.: Does the Saga of Dharmapuri lend itself to be construed as a fictional representation of the post-colonial realities in the third world countries? O.V.V.: It does and it goes beyond. It is a blind search for a civilizational alternative. More discussion on this will be pompous. (95) Vijayan here offers his literary experimentation as a form of political imagination, even world- building. While he realizes how audacious and pretentious (“pompous”) this could sound, it is clear that forging a “civilizational alternative” is a sincere goal of his writing, a sincerity I propose to take seriously. Moreover and conversely, the search for a civilizational alternative is to him inter alia a reconfiguring of literary forms: C.G.P.: Your environmental and ecological preoccupations necessitate a redefining of the scope of modern fiction. Would you comment on that? O.V.V.: This is what I described earlier as a search for a civilizational alternative. (96) I take this somewhat obscure formulation to mean that Vijayan’s political intervention might be found not in the existentialist political theology that it offers in the novel’s content (the spiritual response to obscene politics) but rather in the form in which he chooses to articulate this civilizational alternative - the allegory. Vijayan’s deep investment in form is reflected by the unusually wide range of genres in which he worked. His prominence as a Malayali novelist is rivaled by his national renown as a political cartoonist and short-story writer (four of these stories 2 See also Mathur 74. Vijayan sees the Emergency as a time of extreme withdrawal and thus calls it the “Eunuch voice of history.” Moreover, for him, the political passivity is endemic “Not only our cartoonist but also our litterateur, scientist and politician is too afraid to stand on his own feet” (“Cartoonist’s Workshop” 11) but also lethal: “Degeneration is shared by all those who figure in it, by the perpetrator of injustice as well as the victim. This is a lethal variant of tyranny, oppression through consent” (Pillay 95). See also TN Dhar, who reads Vijayan’s short story “The Feotus” as a comment on the “passivity” that characterized the Emergency (Dhar 231). Indeed, even contemporary conversations with Indian literary figures are often laced with a tone of regret at the lack of artistic resistance to the Emergency (see Aravind Mehotra, September 2017). 3 Ben-Yishai Emergency Allegories are about the Emergency).3 In the following chapter, I would thus like to focus on the politics of allegory as a response to the Emergency, moving with Vijayan from readings of allegories as modes of political representation to understanding allegory as a mode of political intervention. Between allegory and allegorical reading Vijayan’s novel is joined in this chapter by two other allegories: Arun Joshi’s The River and the City (1990) and Ranjit Lal’s Crow Chronicles (1996). These three allegories are similar in their subject matter: all describe societies struggling under the yoke of a callous, narcissistic dictator and his power-hungry coterie of ministers and advisers. All feature a declaration of a state of emergency to describe the way in which fear (of enemies without and within) is manufactured and cynically manipulated in society to gain ever more control and financial gain by an increasingly authoritarian and violent elite. Notably, The Saga of Dharmapuri and The City and the River both take place in an unspecified time, at once ancient (alluded to by their mythic registers), modern (helicopters, laser, and other technological markers), and timeless (doubly signified, first by their being of no specific time, and second by the spiritual temporality of rebirth).4 3 Each of his three novels has taken on a distinct genre, corresponding to his to his changing political worldview; each in turn changing the Malayali (and arguably the Indian) literary landscape. Thus, Vijayan’s early novel broke new ground in Malayali literature that, until the 1960s, was either romantic or written in a Soviet-inflected form of social realism (according with much Keralan politics as well as Vijayan’s own). His final novel was an exploration of spirituality that earned him much disdain from his political and literary fellow-travelers, some of whom accused him of succumbing to right-wing Hindu politics. The Saga of Dharmapuri bridges these two novels: an overtly political novel, undergirded by a distinctly spiritual worldview. 4 The temporal indeterminacy is less true of The Crow Chronicles which takes place in the contemporary present, albeit in an avian society. As a whole, the allegorical form and agenda of The Crow Chronicles seems less interesting in our context, as Lal - an avid bird-watcher and nature writer - seems more concerned with the virtuosity of writing a bird novel than with actually making a political point or intervention.

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