TWO CHEERS FOR TWO FICTIONAL
SPILLOVERS
(On a curious look into The Ministry
of Utmost Happiness by Arundahthi Roy and Chronicle of a Last Summer by Yasmine
El Rashidi.)
Fazal Rahman
Reading two flawed masterpieces back to back is
definitely a curious accident. Two books, two worlds, sharing some features in
their own unique fashions, one of them familiar to all, yet one cannot fail to
appreciate a delightful coincidence when it offers itself: The Ministry of
Utmost Happiness by Arundahthi Roy and Chronicle of a Last Summer by the
Egyptian writer Yasmine El Rashidi.
MoUH is a pan-Indian novel, taking in its
stride almost all the battle-fronts boiling up in present day India, keeping in
the back ground its history right from Partition-cum- Independence resulting in
the birth of two nations, proceeding through the birth of a third in the form
of Bengla Desh, the Emergency, the anti- Sikh pogroms, the rise of the saffron
storm, the Babri masjid demolition, the Gujarat genocide, the Hazare movement and
the Modi- ascendancy. Just 75 pages into the novel and you have already been
through all these epochs and, the author being who she is, we are already on
the lookout for other action fronts, namely, the vibrant popular uprisings in
the country. Thus, the action moves to Kashmir, the cauldron of eternal unrest
in India, and takes on several of the major characters attached to the
enigmatic Tilo, and exposes the folly that is the military solution to a
politically spawned human tragedy. Past two third into the novel we begin to
ask: where is Bastar? And lo, here we go: So Long a Letter (apologies to
Mariama Ba), this time from a mother-turned-Maoist-turned-martyr, seeking the
well-being of the child that is mainly a stand-in to connect these widely, and
wildly, divergent worlds. One feels, perhaps, there is one singular let-down in
the case of the north-east conflict which alone has not received any
fictionalized aliases in the novel. Or, am I wrong? Did I skip a clue? Despite
all these artful pen-strokes, this is indeed a novel that is going to be the
definitive book so far in recording the many post-Independence historical
traumas of the country with a marked pan-Indian outlook.
The other book I stumbled upon right after MoUH
was Chronicle of a Last Summer by Yasmineh El Rashidi, the debut novel by the much
younger writer from Egypt. This one is less spacial, in fact there is one
single locality where the entire action takes place, namely, the
summer-scorched Cairo of three decades from 1984 to 2014. But what it lacks in
spacial diversity it gains in larger temporal magnitude, taking in its stride
the history of modern Egypt from the times of King Fuad in the early years of
the twentieth century right to the post- Arab Spring El Sisi regime. While the
pre- Nasser period is kept in remote back ground, the power transitions since
have been dealt with as intimately connected to the action. Mostly violent,
these transitions encompass every such epochs from the one that caused the
power shift from Nasser to Sadat, whose assassination then ushered in the
Mubarak regime. The rampant corruption and unrest during the period led to the
rift between the Brotherhood and the Communists and, also, the State and, in
tune with popular uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world, accelerated the
Revolution. All these turbulent epochs are mirrored in the fate of a singular,
sprawling family in which the protagonist comes of the age, from a six-years
old naive girl-child to a film-maker-turned- writer in her 30's, sharing
spiritual insights into the political zombie-land that was Egypt, with her
father-figure uncle and idealist left-activist cousin, who, like her
long-exiled Baba, has been through terrible phases of State repression and
protracted imprisonment. Yet, despite all the hardships he had endured, cousin
Dido still stands for political engagement and despises the protagonist's
stance of inaction and mute witness, including the writer’s career which he
thinks has no place in his homeland, though he is a voracious reader
himself. In fact, the key question the novel posits is about the disguise of
complicity in the form of silence. And yet, in the novel, the line between
idealistic revolution and anarchy born of frustration is very much thin indeed.
The brief over view above illuminates certain
similarities between the two novels. In all, it comes to this: both the writers
are deeply and passionately involved with the fate of their respective
countries and do not shy away from calling a spade a spade. Arundhathi Roy is
perhaps the most eloquent, sharp and fearless critic of Indian polity today
with a no-nonsense whiplash face-à-face with powers that be, be it the Supreme
Court or the very Empire seated in Washington DC. Equipped with the legacy of a
gem of a novel that one is tempted to call, after the fashion of her latest
offering, 'The Alchemy of Utmost Aesthetics', she had in waiting a world of
readers when she announced her second. And, knowing her unflinching
intellectual and political engagements in the issues raging anywhere in the
country during the two decades between GoST and MoUH, none had any doubts
whatsoever about what she would come up with for subject matter. And yes, she
has delivered. Perhaps a little too much. Like a cartographic representation of
the other India you wouldn't see in tourist manuals. The same holds true in the
case of the other novel in question as well. Chronicle of a Last Summer is only
one third of Arundhathi Roy's book in length, and is told in one single
narrator perspective as opposed to the many character- perspectives of the
bigger one. The gender issues addressed in both novels are drastically
different since MoUH takes in its ambit the limitless gender tensions embodied
in the first protagonist Anjum's hijra community, while the protagonist’s
predicament in CoLS is defined by the repressive attitudes of a patriarchal
society towards women and girl child. Nonetheless, the novel is not any less
ambitious. Yasmine El Rashidi is at pains to create a convincing narrative
voice to the protagonist since, as a girl child, she is denied of opportunities
available to her male counterparts in political engagements. The mute-witness
stance of the protagonist which cousin Dido deplores is therefore more of a
social making than any personal trait. As a journalist who grew up in Cairo,
Yasmine El Rashidi knew the social-political forces that informed the unrest in
the country and, being a woman, she also knew how that muteness in a girl child
was formed. Throughout the novel, under the pressures of creating the picture
of a people rendered helpless witnesses to a system marked by out-and-out
corruption and repression, the focus falls on perceived expositions of
political situations and thus politics overrides fiction. The result is that
fictional possibilities by way of characterization or creating an emotionally
engaging world that the family situation abundantly offers are largely ignored.
It does succeed in educating the naive protagonist both in the awed family
tradition and in the issues in the country at large, but teaching history, or,
for that matter, teaching anything, doesn't make good fiction. Clearly another
case of a flawed fictional ambition.
The moral: too much anger spoils poetry.
(08.07.2017)
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