Doctoral Dissertation
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Doctoral Dissertation in English Literature by Nora Anna Escherle, M.A. Religious Alterity and Violence in Contemporary Anglophone Novels by Indian and Pakistani Writers Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl Second Referee: Prof. Dr. Thomas Claviez | downloaded: 13.3.2017 January 7, 2013 Originaldokument gespeichert auf dem Webserver der Universitätsbibliothek Bern Dieses Werk ist unter einer Creative Commons Namensnennung-Keine kommerzielle Nutzung-Keine Bearbeitung 2.5 Schweiz http://boris.unibe.ch/95168/ Lizenzvertrag lizenziert. 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Im Falle einer Verbreitung müssen Sie anderen die Lizenzbedingungen, unter welche dieses Werk fällt, mitteilen. Jede der vorgenannten Bedingungen kann aufgehoben werden, sofern Sie die Einwilligung des Rechteinhabers dazu erhalten. Diese Lizenz lässt die Urheberpersönlichkeitsrechte nach Schweizer Recht unberührt. Eine ausführliche Fassung des Lizenzvertrags befindet sich unter http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ch/legalcode.de TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Abbreviations I Introduction 1 I.1 Why Look at Literary Texts? Comments on the Uses of Literature 5 I.2 Literatures of Partition and Communal Violence: Functions and Overview 15 I.2.i Partition Narratives 19 I.2.ii Fictions of Partition in English and in English Translation 24 I.2.iii Anglophone Fictions of Religious Alterity and Violence 28 I.3 State of Research, Research Questions and Hypothesis, Method I.3.i State of Research 29 I.3.ii Research Questions and Hypothesis 30 I.3.iii Text Selection 31 I.3.iv Method and Structure 34 I.3.v Declaration of Refraining from Instrumentalism 35 II Terms: Religion, Hostile Othering and Violence 37 II.1 Approaching the Concept of Religion 37 II.2 Approaching the Concept of Violence 43 II.3 Religious Alterity and ‘Hostile Othering’ 51 III.4 Religious Alterity, ‘Hostile Otherilng’ and Violence 56 III Context: Religious Alterity and Violence in India 58 III.1 Hostile Othering and ‘Routine Violence’ in India 59 III.2 Religions of India — Religion in India 61 III.3 Divisive Religions: The Partition of British India 67 III.4 Side-lining Religions: Secularism in India 72 III.5 Politicising Religions: Ideology and Politics of Hindu-nationalism 76 III.6 Hostile Religions: On the Discourse and Practice of Communalism 80 III.6.i The Ram Janmabhumi Temple Campaign 83 III.6.ii The Gujarat Pogrom 85 III.6.iii The Kashmir Conflict 87 IV Textual Analyses IV.1 “One man’s religion is another man’s poison.” Maturation and Loss in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India 93 IV.1.i Cracking India as a Revisionist Historical Novel 95 IV.1.ii Cracking India’s Perspectival Structure — A Dual Vision 96 IV.1.iii A Formation Novel of Lenny Baby and British India 101 IV.1.iv ‘Ice-Candy-Men’ — Denouncing the Politician’s Role in Fostering 114 Communal Violence IV.1.v Religion as Poison for Inter-Personal Relationships 119 IV.2 “All that matters is what people believe.” Truths, Beliefs and the Primacy of Perspective in Shashi Tharoor’s Riot 121 IV.2.i Riot as a Metahistoriographic Detective Novel 124 IV.2.ii Riot’s Perspectival Structure — A Plethora of Voices 128 IV.2.iii The ‘Priscilla Story Line’ — Detecting the Murderer 133 IV.2.iv The ‘Riot Story Line’ — Discussing Communal Violence 140 IV.2.v A Plea for Reconciling Diverging Truth Versions 149 IV.3 “A story of love that carries, within it, the story of his hate.” Guilt, Justice and Re-Individualisation in Raj Kamal Jha’s Fireproof 152 IV.3.i A ‘Riot Tourist’s’ Imagination Running Wild — Fireproof as 155 Metahistoriographic Crime Novel IV.3.ii Fireproof’s Perspectival Structure — Misleading the Readers by Restricting 163 their Perspectival Scope IV.3.iii The ‘Quest for Ithim’s Cure’-Story Line — Re-Individualising the 164 Perpetrator IV.3.iv The ‘Pogrom Story Line’ — Re-Individualising the Victims 165 IV.3.v Not Hindus and Muslims but Fathers and Sons 181 IV.4 “Maybe Kashmiriyat was an illusion.” The Demise of Communal Utopia in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown 185 IV.4.i Kashmiriyat in Pachigam 186 IV.4.ii The Love and Marriage between Shalimar the Clown and Boonyi as 188 Allegory of the Kashmiriyat IV.4.iii The Demise of the Kashmiriyat 188 IV.4.iv Shalimar the Clown, the Political Assassin 190 IV.4.v Local Myths, Global Realities, Glocal Nightmares 192 V Conclusion 194 VI Bibliography 197 VII Appendix 236 List of Abbreviations CI Cracking India (1991) R Riot (2001) F Fireproof (2006) SC Shalimar the Clown (2005) I Introduction I INTRODUCTION I become aware of religious differences. It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves – and the next day they are Hindus, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah — she is also a token. A Hindu. [...] my nuclear family [is] reduced to irrelevant nomenclatures — we are Parsee. What is God? (CI 101-2) “What is God?” asks Lenny Sethi, the seven-year-old protagonist of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India (1991), who is deeply perturbed about the changes occurring in her little world. Living in the city of Lahore in 1947, the Parsee girl is witness to the historical period around the partition of British India along religious lines, which resulted in the creation of the sovereign states of Pakistan1 and Hindustan.2 The question ‘What is God?’ conveys Lenny’s state of utter disorientation and doubt: If everyone around her is labelled according to his or her religion,3 consequently “dwindling into symbols,” what about god? Her world is shaken to the core as she realizes that she has to readjust or even abandon the very categories on the basis of which she was used to perceive the world before. Far from being concerned with theological issues, she simply wonders which label of religious identity would be attached to god. Lenny 1 does not question her beliefs or those of others; she is worried about the reductionist power of labels and what this labelling will do to the world as she knows it. Having been ignorant of religious differences before, she now experiences how those formerly unperceived differences become invested with meaning. Unable to grasp why these differences become significant in other people’s everyday lives and in her own life as well, Lenny observes the effects of what the Indian philosopher Amartya K. Sen calls “the miniaturization of people” in his study on Identity and Violence (xvi) — a process that is prone to “eclipse the relevance of other associations and affiliations through selective emphasis and incitement” (175). Sen, who promotes the view that 1 Pakistan was officially called the Dominion of Pakistan and came into being on 14th August 1947. In 1971, the armed conflict pitting West Pakistan against East Pakistan (two halves of one country) and India resulted in the secession of East Pakistan to become the independent People's Republic of Bangladesh while West Pakistan became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. 2 ‘Hindustan’ was officially called the Union of India (later Republic of India) and came into being on 15th August 1947. 3 I am well aware of the debates surrounding the term and the concept of ‘religion’ and will discuss them briefly in the following chapter. I do not, however, presuppose and look for any academic, sophisticated concepts of religion within the fictional texts that are my primary objects of research. It is the fictional representations of religion and religious alterity on the diegetic level, not scholarly discussions on the concept of religion, which are most important in the analyses. 1 I Introduction human beings are, and ought to be perceived as, “diversely different” (xvi), warns against the “divisive power of classificatory priority” (Sen 11) and refers to the “disastrous consequences of defining people by their religious ethnicity and giving predetermined priority to the community- based perspective over all other identities” (169). For Sen, the assumption “that people can be uniquely categorized based on religion or culture” is “a major source of potential conflict in the contemporary world” (xv). The child protagonist of Cracking India would most likely agree with Sen’s assertions. As Partition approaches, Lenny begins to relate how she becomes aware of the historical events and the political debates of the day and their growing impact even on her own everyday live. She witnesses how the motley group surrounding her beautiful nanny Ayah – men united by bonds of friendship and their unanimous adoration of Ayah despite a multitude of properties and characteristics in which they differ from one another – slowly but inexorably falls apart. Increasingly, the friends begin to disregard what they have in common while they are busy with stressing their religious differences. This process of what I term hostile Othering involves “the miniaturization of people” (Sen xvi) — a drastic change in mutual perception that has detrimental consequences: Eventually, the former friends reconstruct each other not only as the 2 religious ‘Other’ but as the hostile religious ‘Other’ and are willing to resort to cruelty, violence and even murder.