Madness and Discontent:: The Realist Imaginary in South Asian Literature
Madness and Discontent:: The Realist Imaginary in South Asian Literature
Madness and Discontent:: The Realist Imaginary in South Asian Literature
Just behind Mangaraj’s house, there was a large orchard opening onto
a big pond, with coconut trees planted all around its edge and banana,
jack-fruit, mango and ou trees further behind. A fence of young bamboo
surrounded the orchard like a fortress wall. Few people are as selfless
and altruistic as Mangaraj: even the market in Gobindapur owed its
existence and prosperity to him. Without his orchard’s bounty of fruits
and vegetables – coconuts, bananas, brinjals, pumpkins, green chilies and
so on – the market would have presented a much sorrier sight. Nor was
anyone allowed to put his vegetables up for sale until the produce from
the zamindar’s orchard had all been sold. That was of course as it should
be. Would it have been fair to sell inferior goods before high-quality
produce? Besides, the market belonged to the zamindar, and the gifts of
pumpkins, brinjals and bananas he received on festive occasions, such as
the Oriya New Year, all went straight to the market (Senapati 42).
pierce through the veil of madness to expose the kernel of truth that lies
within it. These works, thus, offer a new way of imagining political dissent
in literature outside the limited category of “social realism”. Together with
Senapati and Premchand, these texts tell the story of a rich South Asian
literature of resistance, literature that is a political democratic project to
represent the struggles of the poor and the disenfranchised – yet one that is
also powerfully aware of representation as a perennially incomplete project.
Manto’s Madness
We see a similar theme in Khol Do, another Manto story about the sexual
violence of Partition. The kernel of this story involves an incident that is
not narrated in the story but left implicit – which is the gang rape of Sakina,
a young abducted woman, not by her abductors but by her rescuers. We
read about her rescue and then the narrator details her father’s frantic
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search for her and only when father and daughter are reunited do we
begin to ascertain what happened to her in the intervening time. In the
hospital bed, where she lies semi-conscious, the doctor tells the nurse to
open a window. Upon hearing that command, “Sakina ke murda jism mein
zubish hui. Bejaan haathon se usne izaarband khola aur shalwar neeche sarkaa
di”. The story is entitled Khol Do to emphasize how these two seemingly
innocent words – open it – become the site not only of the crime, to the
girl who is repeatedly asked to open her shalwar, but also of the memory
of the crime, where we and the doctor understand what happened to her
only when we see her reaction to those words. Again, the violence here
is not only in the gang rape but in the way words themselves carry the
story of unspeakable violence. The violence is not an isolated incident
but has pervaded language itself.
“A Magic Race”
Can Manto’s stories be called realist? Critics who focus on the horrors of
Partition violence read these stories as a sort of record or testimony of the
brutal realities of the time – and in the examples I have discussed here,
that is at least partly the case. However, the core of both these stories lies
in something else, which is the transposition of the individual crime into
the realm of representation itself. Both stories rely on a double-meaning
of their titular phrases – and that word play is precisely the point (this is
why it is so disheartening to see the translation of Khol Do in the English
collection Mottled Dawn titled “The Return”; the point conveyed by the
title is completely lost). In both cases, language itself becomes the site of
violence. Among other things, this raises the question of the author’s role
in political critique. If words bear the trace or taint of violence, then how
can language ever be used in the service of political critique?
But even in [these writers’] work there were elements of the fabulous,
for example in Toba Tek Singh, Manto’s great story of the partition of the
sub-continent’s lunatics at the time of the larger Partition. One of the
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Rushdie wants to redeem Manto from the scourge of realism here but
formally, this description functions as a bulge or distention in what is
otherwise a straightforward polemic celebrating fantasy over realism. On
one hand, Rushdie wants to lump Manto with Premchand, Anand and
Chughtai but at the same time he wants to distinguish Toba Tek Singh as
distinct from the “committed realists” because of its innovativeness. He
wants to put Manto in a different – I will say higher – category because
of his exploration of the psychological realms of madness, which for
Rushdie bespeaks a more profound engagement with the problem of the
real. Yet, at the same time, in his passage he asserts the realism of the
story twice: when he states that Toba Tek Singh’s madness “was also the
madness of the time” and that the breakdown in his speech “represents
not only his personal communications breakdown but our own”.
Mohammed Hanif’s 2011 novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti takes up this
question of realism, madness and social protest that Rushdie leaves open
and unresolved in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Contesting the linear narrative
by which realism must necessarily be transcended by modernism, Hanif
brings a deadpan, dark humor to his representation of Alice Bhatti, a
Replacement Junior Nurse at the Sacred Heart Hospital in Karachi. The
novel’s mode is a gritty realism – where violence is represented without
hysterics and without the usual invocation of pity or sympathy, even
when describing the most brutal scenes of torture, violence and death.
Characterization is also, for the most part, flat – we do not get to know
the characters in all their dimensions and therefore, we do not particularly
sympathize with them in the way we might in conventional realism. Rather,
characterization is exteriorized – so the body becomes a key indicator of
character, rather than interiority or the psyche. Take the following passage:
Alice Bhatti first sits on the edge of the chair, feels dizzy, then fears
that the chair might slip from under her and she will end up sprawled
on the floor with her legs splayed in the air. She moves back in the
chair, the chair squeaks and she puts the file in her lap, then picks it up
and clasps it to her chest. Then realizing that she is making a spectacle
of herself, she puts it back in her lap and thrusts her hands under her
thighs, to stop them from trembling (Hanif 5).
This passage appears early in the novel; we know nothing of Alice yet.
However, we learn a great deal from it nonetheless: about her own
feelings of vulnerability as well as the culture of violence – in particular
violence against women – which she inhabits; thus in her nervousness
at the job interview she imagines herself “sprawled on the floor with
her legs splayed in the air” as a perennially potential victim of sexual
violence. Her fear of being a “spectacle” and her need to efface herself
by hiding her hands in various recesses of her body register the effaced
subjectivity of her womanhood on the surface of her body. Thus,
although we never know Alice Bhatti, her body becomes an index to
the social crisis – in Karachi, in Pakistan – at large.
There is another element to this description, which is the question of
Alice’s sanity, called into doubt by her dizziness, her trembling and her
“fears that the chair might slip from under her”. As any reader of Rushdie
will notice, this is quite different from the kind of magical realism that
allows Saleem Sinai to hear voices in his head or that prevents Moraes
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there was not a single day – not a single day – when she didn’t see a
woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt,
hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband, brother protecting his
honor, father protecting his honor, feuding farmers settling their water
disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments,
it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body (96).
She avoids eye contact; she looks slightly over people’s heads as if
looking out for somebody who might come into view at any moment.
She doesn’t want anyone to think that she is alone and nobody is
coming for her. She sidesteps even when she sees a boy half her age
walking towards her, she walks around little puddles when she can
easily leap over them; she thinks any act that involves stretching her
legs might send the wrong signal…. She never eats in public. Putting
something in your mouth is surely an invitation for someone to shove
something horrible down your throat (98-9).
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In a world such as this, how do we draw the line between insanity and
simple pragmatism? Yet, following Foucault, Hanif mobilizes a dialectic
concept of madness, which is not only presented as a loss or as something
to be mourned; perennial madness also elicits moments of surprising
tenderness, born in the “pure reason” that lies at the heart of madness.
Teddy, for instance, is “a crime-scene cleaner, comforter, errand boy,
towel holder, cheerleader, doorstopper, gun-cleaner, replacement court
witness, proxy prisoner, fourth card player… and a companion for the
passengers on their last journey” (101) – that is, to their death but it is
he who elicits the only “tender moment” (81) in Alice’s short life or who
makes her feel when he ushers her with eyes closed out of a rickshaw for
their surprise wedding that “she wishes for a lifetime of alighting from
rickshaws with his hand on her back” (87). These are not moments of
break from the larger madness but are enabled only by the twisted world
of those conditioned by incessant insanity (who else would get married
on a nuclear submarine?). Alice’s earlier misrecognition of Teddy for a
“charya” thus reveals itself not as misrecognition at all but as a moment of
recognition, both of a world of everyday madness and as the possibility
for love that lies within it. As Teddy tells her, justifying his line of work,
“‘We live in dangerous times. We live in a dangerous place. It’s better to
know the danger, to work with it, to tame it’” (162). This could be read as
another form of madness – like Alice’s paranoia, or even, at its extreme,
Kulwant Kaur and Ishwar Singh’s exuberant eroticism amidst Partition
looting: a means of getting by, rather than battling the system. However,
Hanif does not present it only as resignation – or, to be more accurate, it
is a futurity that lies within resignation. It might not be a political protest
or a battle but it is a means of invigorating the everyday with meaning.
modernist shock; they are not meant to present horrific scenes to shake
readers out of their political apathy – they comprise, rather, an aesthetic
of numbness but not without a political purpose. Through this numbness
we see more clearly than ever the reality of everyday violence; we register
it simultaneously as a breakdown of realism and a prerequisite for a new
realist vision that emerges out of it. That madness is sanity and sanity is
madness which is simultaneously bleak and reassuring – that was Manto’s
realist vision. Hanif’s, too, is a realist vision branded by everyday violence
– that is at once devastating and simultaneously optimistic.
Thus, we can read the novel’s ending not as a strange recourse to the
supernatural but a following through on the productive epistemologies
of madness. The possibility of a vision of the divine perceived on the
horizon is no more insane than a world of self-inflicted wounds, dead
babies coming back to life or sweepers finding slime-covered peacocks
in city sewers and where people count themselves “lucky enough not
to have the worst job in the city” (64). This is the new realist imaginary.
References
• Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
• Hanif, Mohammed. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Noida: Random House, 2011.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. Colder Than Ice [Thanda Gosht]. Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches
and Stories of Partition. Trans. Khalid Hasan. New Delhi: Penguin, 1997. 23-29.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. Khol Do [Hindi]. http://naikahaniyan.wordpress.
com/2010/12/05/urdu-short-story-khol-do-by-sadat-hasan-manto-in-hindi/,
accessed October 15, 2014.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. The Return [Khol Do]. Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and
Stories of Partition. Trans. Khalid Hasan. New Delhi: Penguin, 1997. 11-14.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. Thanda Gosht [Hindi]. http://adaabarz.wordpress.
com/2010/12/05/urdu-short-story-thanda-gosht-by-sadat-hasan-manto-in-hidni/,
accessed October 15, 2014.
• Manto, Saadat Hasan. Toba Tek Singh. Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing,
1947-1997. Eds. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West. New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1997. 25-31.
• Premchand. Godaan: The Gift of a Cow. Trans. Gordon C. Roadarmel. New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2002.
• Premchand. Sahitya ka Uddeshya [The Purpose of Literature]. People’s Art in the
Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice. Delhi: Jana Natya Manch, 2000. 74-87.
• Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh. New York: Vintage, 1995.
• Senapati, Fakir Mohan. Six Acres and a Third (Chha Mana Atha Guntha). Trans. Rabi
Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, Paul St. Pierre. New Delhi:
Penguin, 2006.