Literature and Politics

In this paper, I am interested in the issue of ‘smallness’ and what an investment in the small events of literature might do to our larger picture of a recessionary world mired in chaos and corruption.  My specific example is from the exciting arena of Indian writing in English.  While in any given year, the Booker short list may include one or more writers from the Indian subcontinent, the politics of global literary publication and reception regimes are such that ‘small’ examples of writing do not really garner enough critical support.  I take as my case-study the work of Neelum Saran Gour, who occupies an interesting intermediary space in the realm of Indian writing in English.  According to the Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (ed. Lorna Sage), Gour’s “writing should be seen as a signal contribution to a nascent regional fiction in English,” and in my estimation, is much closer to the idiom of small-town mentality that predominates current Indian political concerns.  Whether in the recapturing of the fear of the Chinese during India’s war with its much larger neighbour in 1962 or in the evocation of 11 ‘ordinary’ lives lost in a terrorist bomb blast in a small-town in the midst of nowhere in India, Gour’s work is a constant attempt to narrate history and make a gesture towards what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would call the “vanishing present” (1999).  An attentiveness and sensitivity to her provincial, or what is known as mufossil, writing tells us more about globalization than the brand-new-coin flashy and broad-sweep gestural works of subcontinental fiction that dot the shelves in the centre and the metropolis.  I offer readings of Speaking of ’62 (1995) and Sikandar Chowk Park (2005) that speak to the conditions of possibility of secularism as well as communal paranoia in the world’s largest democracy.