Literature and Politics

The present paper proposes to explore the  play of power-politics between community and nation, freedom and power, democracy and religion and identity and nation formation, with reference to the  happenings in the Indian subcontinent from 1980 to the present. The violence against the Sikhs in 1984    unleashed a highly complex and fractured narrative of hatred and revenge moving across national boundaries and involvement of diasporic funding as well as infiltration by foreign agencies.

It was egged-on by the events of the 90s, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the genocide in Gujarat, this time targeting the Muslims, which has created the phenomena of ‘refugee’in the homeland and holding  a whole community to ransom.

Working mainly with   Anita Rau Badami’s novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee’s The Sorrow and  the Terror,  Meher Pestonji’s Pervez and three films : Gulzar’s Maachis, Shonali Bose’s Ammu and  Rahul Dholakia’s   Parzania*, the paper hopes to examine the working of this power dynamics within a religio-political discourse, its traumatic affect on the individual psyche, its political fall-out in terms of  nation-construction and the sense of inevitability the narrative seems to contain. Is this literary and filmic discourse a counter-discourse? How does it define reality? Does it work with plural selves and  recollected memories or with imagined spaces?  How do these narratives imagine the nation?

These and related issues dealing with  colonial aftermath and patterns of governance, narrative structures and evocation of past memories will be considered hoping to work out some meaning in these responses to violence, a great deal of it either state generated or fuelled by rightist wings