Family as a Space of Political Resistance in the Context of the Indian Emergency – Reading Rohiton Mistry’s A Fine Balance in Juxtaposition with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Ms Shamayita Sen, Department of English, University of Delhi, Delhi
‘…the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society’ (Frederic Jameson quoted in Peter Morey, Fictions of India 161)
Political events have often moulded and affected personal or familial bonds and family history. Thus, quite appropriately, Fredric Jameson argues that third world literature links the fate of individuals to the ‘fate of his or her collectivity’ (Morey 161) as third world lives are community oriented unlike the west. The two novels under scrutiny in this paper, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children painstakingly etch this connection. The paper will look into this essential connection of the personal with the political and provide an alternate reading of the family as a space of resisting political turmoil.
Among other Indian historical and political events, the Emergency (1975-77) is portrayed in both the novels in detail. So, it would be best to discuss the nature of the Indian Emergency before I get into the details of the novels. Vijay Prashad aligns the period of Emergency with fascism – ‘In the Indian case, fascism came with the Emergency and departed at its demise’ (Prashad 37). Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared Emergency with the claim that the nation was required to be protected from ‘ultra-militant subversive groups’ (Prashad 36), and in the process muffled every possible voice of political resistance. Caught at electoral malpractices, Indira Gandhi had no other way to secure her Prime Ministerial position but to announce all her critics and oppositions as anti-nationalist threats to democracy and development of the nation. In their novels, both Rushdie and Mistry hurl scathing criticism at the Prime Minister’s policies, viewing the Emergency as a dark phase in the history of post-independent India.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay Gandhi played a vital role during the Emergency. His five point programme addressing social issues had affected and violated more lives than any direct contemporary political violence. It is important to take note of this for a better understanding of the issues dealt with in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Among other agendas of the five point programme, ‘Family Planning’ and ‘Slum Clearance’ were to deal with the social problems of poverty and inequality peacefully. Instead, violence was enforced to get sterilization done and slums cleared. In Unsettling Memories,Emma Tarlo points out how the government ‘encouraged illicit deals in human infertility’ (Tarlo 82) – government terminologies were all jumbled up so much so that family planning became akin to sterilization and sterilization was defined as voluntary (Tarlo 80); similarly, garibi hatao (slum clearance) became garib ko hatao,a clarion call that removed and evicted the poor rather than eradicating poverty. Vijay Prashad highlights the main set back of the five points programme, that all of them took ‘on the effects of the problems, not the causes of the problems’ (Prashad 52). People were lured into sterilization with an offer of plot allotment (Tarlo 80), or even in exchange of minor gifts of ghee and clocks (illustration, Tarlo). High officials could get a promotion by motivating, or rather by forcing someone else to get sterilized (Tarlo 81, 148). Also, it becomes visible that both sterilization and eviction were forced upon the lower strata of the society – it sent out a message that the government purged its population on the basis of economic and caste differences, thus deciding which genes were to populate the country and which genes required eradication (Tarlo 148). The above mentioned facts are established by Emma Tarlo through her interviews and conversations with people who were directly affected by the Emergency.
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance depicts the political ambience of India marred by a semi-totalitarian rule. Corruption and torture shape the socio-economic conditions of the country and personal relations among citizens. The novel portrays the disintegrating lives of four friends – Dina Dalal, a young Parsee woman trying to maintain her freedom as a dressmaker; her lodger, Maneck, an old school friend’s son from the north; and two tailors, Ishvar and his nephew, Omprakash. Each member of this quartet tries to transcend the constraints of birth, caste and sex in the modern, urban society. The novelist tries to stitch the past and the present, the interference of the political in the personal by referring to contemporary social, historical and political events like caste violence, Partition, Emergency and the Sikh riots in India. He portrays the unnamed city (possibly Bombay) as a city of rootless people. The city is a character in the novel, a microcosmic depiction of the dilapidated state of the country, where only the moneyed class is able to get its work done.
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is written earlier to Mistry’s A Fine Balance and is considered to be a direct response to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Rushdie sketches Emergency as a moment of regression or stagnancy in development and progress in the larger narrative of the democratic history of India. Both the authors echo the idea that if only Emergency could undo its negativity and reconcile into the Democratic structure of the country, the fine link between personal peace and political activities could have been achieved. The intersectionality of the personal and the political is starkly visible in Rushdie’s novel where his protagonist, Saleem Sinai is the metaphor of India, his body is the map of the country and his family history is concomitant to the history of the sub-continent.
Family becomes a space of direct resistance in Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Familial bonding provides solace against the external political mayhem. During Partition, the fear of the impending violence makes Isvar’s mentor, the Muslim tailor, Ashraf shout out to his wife – ‘I will do whatever is necessary to save my family’ (Mistry 125). One concludes that Ashraf realises that retaliating to contemporary violence and acting in accordance to his community is an action secondary to safeguarding his family and relatives. While fighting the Indian caste system back in the village, Isvar and Narayan’s father, Dukhi, feels alike. Dukhi belongs to the low caste of Chammar, they are tanners who make shoes from animal hide. Bearing caste atrocities for ages, Dukhi is determined to do the impossible. He sends his children to his Muslim tailor friend Ashraf as apprentices. In the process, Dukhi secures the future of his children, transcends the caste boundary, and prevents his successors from suffering the ignominy and ruthlessness that his clan had faced for decades. For me, this instance from the novel is the most important mode of resistance that a family can resort to. The home is essentially the first place that initiates political resistance. Later in the text, we see the Kolah family taking up a similar initiative. Maneck is sent out of town for his higher education so that he can live a better life without being dependent on his family business. The Kolah family tries to fight commercialisation which came as an accessory to Modernity in Indian towns. Choosing a professional life above one’s station is a means of shouting defiance against the age old class and caste hierarchy in India – it does not only dissolve boundaries, but also resists past crimes and class politics.
In contrast to the radical personal decisions taken by Mistry’s characters to resist and retaliate against socio-political malpractices, Rushdie hardly sketches active resistance. His resistance is mostly through words and subtle actions. A few instances can be cited from his Midnight’s Children. In the wake of Partition, most anti-Partition movements saw their demise. But, Adaam Aziz (maternal grandfather of Saleem Sinai who is the protagonist and the narrator of Midnight’s Children) throws open his house to provide shelter to a frightened Nadir Khan who escapes being murdered by an angry mob. Nadir Khan is the assistant of Mian Abdullah who hoped for a nation devoid of religious dogmatism, but instead gets assassinated. Nadir Khan remains hidden and protected in the basement of Aziz’s house for a few years, where he falls in love and through a secret ceremony marries his protector’s daughter, Mumtaz alias Amina. Nadir Khan seeks Adaam Aziz’s protection from religious and political violence and also secures for himself romantic love. Thus, for Nadir Khan, the Aziz household turns into a symbol of love and protection – for him, the space of the family withstands all political violence. A similar case is seen later in the novel when Amina brings Lifafa Das under her protection, to prevent the sudden rage of religious violence on the docile and vulnerable body.
The above mentioned episodes portray religious and political violence. They simultaneously portray a symbolic destruction of religious pluralism in the external world and an immediate alternative harbouring of the same within family spaces. However, after the birth of Saleem, religious plurality is celebrated in the novel through the metaphor of Saleem’s body. Being born at the very moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai becomes a physical representation of the newly born nation. His mode of resistance is through writing – through language, through criticism and magic realism. He juxtaposes all the major historical events of the country with his family history and believes himself to embody and voice different classes of people, thus encompassing the diversity that India represents. Saleem’s decision to write his story before he dies (or before his body disintegrates) is a demonstration of his discontent towards sufferings imposed on Indians during political events like the Jalianwallah Bagh massacre, the Partition, the Emergency, Indo-Pak war and while partitioning states on the basis of languages spoken. Saleem’s personal method of resisting external political forces is by integrating class, religious and lingual differences into a whole through his words, utterances and story-telling. Moreover, that he carves out his space of comfort at the pickle factory ensures his resistance to be engendered by familial affections.
Born at the very moment of India’s independence, Saleem is conscious of his historical centrality. Salman Rushdie or Saleem Sinai ‘virtually erases the thin line between documentary realism, journalistic analysis, and fable’ (Gupta 54) while narrating the story of three generations of the Sinai family history in close connection with the three phases of political history of the country – pre-Independence, Partition and post-Independence. We can mention a few historical events that Saleem moulds in accordance to his family history – his grandmother breaks her silence of anger and resentment on the day Second World War ends; like Saleem, his son Adaam is born on a fateful midnight – the night Emergency is declared; also, Saleem believes that the Indo-Pak war takes place only to annihilate his family. Quite early in the text, he writes, ‘one day the World War ended, Nazeem developed the longed-for headache. Such historical coincidences have littered, and perhaps befouled, my family’s existence in the world’ (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 24).
However, Rushdie actually provides the readers with an alternative history, or an individual’s rendition of political facts. The narrator, Saleem takes a step back when the author intervenes and at places both the voices merge giving us a ‘I he’ (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 419) – ‘I’ Salman, ‘he’ Saleem. Rushdie, in his title essay from Imaginary Homelands, states –
I must say first of all that description is itself a political act…. So it is clear that re-describing a world is a necessary first step towards changing it…altering a past to fit its present needs, then the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized. (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands)
The act of writing is not only a political act but it also re-creates history, or can even lead to creating an alternate reality. Individual stories often get muffled in the cacophony of universal experiences or national history. Writing one’s own story can encourage two consequences – either integrating one’s personal truth into the larger narrative framework of national history, or creating a parallel world of facts to resist the already established ones. Through Midnight’s Children, Rushdie strives for the latter. Though none of his characters actively participate in resisting governmental policies and other political forces, Saleem’s writing peppered with taunts and sarcasm directed to the government exhibits his political resistance of governmental malpractices.
Before taking my argument further, the space of the family in both the novels needs analysis to understand how familial bonds and relationships are created and sustained during times of hardship. Both Rushdie and Mistry portray characters who have been removed from their native places, and had been ‘on the move’ in a constant quest for home and an identity. An alternate home and generating new familial bonds become essential with the dismantling and disintegration of one’s original home and blood relationships.
In Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, all the major characters suffer an initial loss of home which pushes them to form new affective bonds in distant lands. Dina suffers humiliation and subjugation in the hands of her brother after her doting father dies and mother suffers from depression. Her courtship and short-lived marriage with Rustom is the only phase of happiness that life provides her with. Isvar and his nephew, Omprakash are left to each other as every other member of their family is murdered (tortured and burnt alive) as a result of caste politics in their village. Quite early on in their lives, both Isvar and Om start staying afar from their family and work as tailors, and hence are saved of the massacre. Maneck, the fourth in the quartet, moves out of his house as a child to get better education, returning only during vacations. His relationship with his father is strained. Moreover, Maneck’s family has been displaced from its native land during Partition. So, Mistry gives us a bunch of characters, each dispossessed and homeless, seeking comfort and security elsewhere.
Dina’s home becomes the place that ultimately houses this varied cast of people. Maneck comes to the city for higher education, but fails to feel comfortable in the hostel and is recommended to be a paying guest in Dina Dalal’s house. The tailors too have a tough time looking for accommodation in the city by the sea. They had spent nights outside shops, on pavements and in beggar camps. Like multiple other poor people, Isvar and Om get evicted from the slum due to the government’s endeavour to clear slums and beautify the city. While hunting for accommodation, the tailors are mostly shooed away by people who share Dina’s initial fear and suspicion. Dina hires the tailors for work but doesn’t allow them to spend a night at her place after they have been evicted from the slum. Maneck is now a boarder in her house, and we hear Dina telling him –…you’ve no idea what kind of crookedness exists in a city like this, a trunk, a bag…is the first step into a flat. Personal items stored on the premises – that’s the most common way of staking a claim. And the court system takes years to settle the case, years during which the crooks are allowed to stay in the flat. Now I’m not saying Isvar and Om came tonight with this plan in their heads. But how can I take the risk? What if they get the idea later from some rascal? (Mistry 305)
Dina Dalal’s reaction to Isvar and Om’s wanting to carve out a place for themselves in her varandah is fundamentally very different from Ashraf Chacha’s reaction, who willingly acknowledges the presence of Isvar and Narayan in his household as if they are a part of his family. We are reminded of Derrida’s Of Hospitality, where he suggests a marked difference between the host and the guest. The guest enjoys his position as long as he accepts the host’s authority ruling sovereign within the household. Also, it rests on the host’s disposition whether he is hospitable or hostile to the new entrant, that is, the host decides whether others are welcome within the premises of his household. Priya Kumar discusses these concepts in detail in an essay from her book Living Together – she writes, ‘Hospitality thus rests upon claims of property ownership and a reaffirmation of the host’s mastery….it has to do with how we relate to others—as our own or as strangers’ (Kumar 100). Dina and most of the city dwellers’ hostility towards the tailors are due to the fear produced from their desire to protect their identities and safeguard their ownership of property; and in the process, one maintains a safe distance from strangers.
However, the only respite from a tyrannous government is by forming affective relations. Mistry knits together people from different social classes and families to create a space of an alternate family that weathers all political storms and turmoil together. All the characters are fighting two battles simultaneously – their individual or personal tragedies and the political atrocities inflicted on them. It should be noted here that Ashraf’s and Dina’s final decision to provide for the tailors an alternate home comes only after they themselves have suffered the political mayhem of the country and realised the worth of the tailors in their lives. Narayan and Isvar being Hindus, protected Ashraf’s family against a violent Hindu mob in the wake of Partition when Hindus and Muslims were killing each other. And, Dina welcomes Isvar and Om in her home after she had incurred losses in her business as the tailors vanished. They were penalised by governmental agents and sent away in a beggar camp for sleeping on the pavement at night, and Dina gets affected indirectly by the contemporary government’s attempt to beautify the city and clear slums. Maneck, Isvar and Om make a home of Dina’s flat. The strength of their affective bond is reflected in Dina’s words through her reminiscence while she talks to her friend Zenobia. Dina had begun to see this group of four as her family, she thinks –
Could she describe for Zenobia the extent to which Maneck and Om had become inseparable, and how Isvar regarded both boys like his own sons? That the four of them cooked together and ate together, shared the cleaning and washing and shopping and laughing and worrying? That they cared about her and gave her more respect than she had received from some of her own relatives? That she had, during these last few months, known what was a family? (Mistry 550)
Forming surrogate relationships is the first step towards resisting governmental atrocities, barbarity and indignation on fellow citizens.
Mistry’s characters try to mould their identities through their professions – Dina finds economic independence through dress-making, Isvar and Om are socially uplifted as they defy caste boundaries by becoming tailors. On the other hand, Rushdie’s protagonist is a hybrid. Saleem Sinai tells us that he ‘had more mothers than most mothers have children’ (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 337) and that consciously or unconsciously, all his life he had ‘sought out fathers’ (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 595) for himself. His biological or real mother Vanita dies at childbirth and other than his putative mother Amina, he has Mary Pereira as his surrogate mother. Mary’s act of baby swapping gives Saleem a new life – a life above the economic condition that he otherwise would have had to endure. Moreover, while working as an ayah in the Sinai household, Mary showers all her love on Saleem, which turns out to be a threat to Amina’s motherhood. Also, there is a presence of multiple father figures in Saleem’s life. Other than Wee, Ahmend Sinai and Methwold, Saleem envisioned Nadir Khan, Hanif, Zulfikar and Picture Singh as his fathers – Nadir impregnated Amina in her dreams, Hanif and Zulfikar are his uncles for whom Saleem is no less than a son, even the snake charmer Picture Singh, who rescues Saleem from Bangladesh, becomes another father figure. Saleem’s multiple parentage is a sign of his acquired identity. His quest is a conscious attempt to recognise and explore his real self, which is accomplished in his decision to become a writer and write about his nation, his family, his life and his body. His body acts as a text that had suffered and resisted various forms of national torment.
The characters’ loss of the security of home and family bonds in both the novels can be read in connection to the sterilization and family planning programme of the government. While homeless and disposed characters from Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children are in the constant pursuit of home, familial relationships and stability, the government launches campaigns to control population which soon turns into a governmental endeavour to regulate and prevent people from forming real familial relationships. Forced sterilization of Saleem and Omprakash deters them from getting involved in a marital relationship. Being sexually impotent, Saleem evades Padma’s seduction. On the other hand, Om’s wedding is cancelled after he gets castrated. In contemporary India, conjugal relationship was considered to be a strong affective bond, but dispelling even the slightest hope of it due to political pressures is the greatest tragedy depicted in the two novels. Thus, sterilization disregards and dismantles family and personal affiliations, and the peace and privacy of individuals. Moreover, in A Fine Balance, Isvar’s body disintegrates, his legs needed amputation to prevent the spreading of post-sterilization infection. This is a metaphor of the dilapidated condition of the nation itself. Under such circumstances, Saleem’s comforters like Mary, Padma and the premises of the pickle factory or Isvar and Om receiving regular meals from Dina are embodiments and gestures of generosity which are derived from alternate familial and affective relations. Such generous actions induce resistance to the Fascist governmental forces.
In comparison to subtle participation, writing is a more effective mode of resistance due to the permanence in the written words. Saleem, Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry take this path to voice their distaste for the contemporary political events. The Emergency had been the foremost reason behind the composition of both the novels. It had left citizens under a perpetual fear of loss of harmony of the nation; the figure of the Prime Minister was tyranny personified. With the use of realism, both A Fine Balance and Midnight’s Children are scathing criticisms of Indira Gandhi’s rule and the Congress party.
During times of political upheaval, sustaining familial relationships and creating other affective bonds help us sail through and bring about a country’s progress. Family or community formation is vital in building a nation and living well together. In that way, religious and ethnic multiplicity can be restored through its alternate harbouring within families. Thus, turning the family from merely a space of protection to a space that brews political resistance. And, specifically during the Indian Emergency, sterilization and its consequent dismissal of the hope of a conjugal relationship was a tragedy personally suffered by many contemporary Indian youths. So, creating alternate families and producing affective relationships, as depicted in the novels, become a major way of fighting the drudgeries of life and avowing the nation’s past political failures.
Works Cited:
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Kumar, Priya. “Beyond Tolerance and Hospitality: Muslims as Strangers and
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Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Print.
Morey, Peter. Fictions of India: Narrative and Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000. Print.
Prashad, Vijay. “Emergency Assessment.” Social Scientist. 24.9/10 (1996): 36-68.
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Rushdie, Salman. 1981. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage Books, 2006. Print.
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