|
|
While it is to be expected in those works coming out of the 1930s or the period immediately following the joys of Independence and the horrors of Partition, it is perhaps surprising just how long this wrestling match has continued. If there is a unifying thesis in this book, it is that this is the case because the writers come from that class of English-educated candidates for the IAC, military and business leadership which was the self-appointed (and colonially produced) maker of modern history in the subcontinent. We may detect, at times, not just pride in this association, but also frustration that the social agenda hijacks writing onto a social realist bandwagon of moral uplift (those earnest 1960s novels of social reform represented by Kamala Markandaya and the “tractor” movies satirised in Midnight’s Children), and guilt (increasingly in the contemporary writers?) that the mantle of leadership has not been taken up—that writers have gone off into entertainments and overseas travels, leaving the making of history to a bunch of ageing, increasingly corrupt, and dangerously parochial politicians. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August can be taken as an instance. Nonetheless, the texts show an engagement with the history of the subcontinent that works almost in inverse proportion to the distance of the writer from his or her material—so that a writer like Bharati Mukherjee, hell-bent on making herself and her characters over into Americans, ends up digging into the legends of Aurangzeb’s empire (The Holder of the World), or the New York- and London-based Gita Mehta excavates the folk history of the Narmada River (A River Sutra). Arundhati Roy, berated for selling her soul and style to global postmodernity, actually combines the reformist zeal of earlier novels with “hip” playfulness, but the mix in The God of Small Things is still centred around “The History House”, and that house is haunted by the White ghost of Europe.
Hegel’s philosophy of history is of a physical force driving events, a momentum that is also spiritual, impelling individuals and states to fulfil their potential and rise to a transcendent freedom (19) in which rational thought and self-expression realise the “genius” (Geist) of the self, the era, and the collective.