Incendiary Circumstances (7 page)

It is the direction of the gaze that identifies this as a story not of an exodus but of a dispersal, the story of an irrevocable sundering of the dual bonds that tie members of a community to each other and to other like communities. In the experience of an exodus there is an unspoken ambiguity: the sufferings of displacement are
tinged with the hope of arrival and the opening of new vistas in the future. A dispersal offers no such consolation: the pain that haunts it is not that of remembered oppression; it is rather that particular species of pain that comes from the knowledge that the oppressor and the oppressed were once brothers. It is this species of pain, exactly, that runs so poignantly through the literature that resulted from the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. We know, from that line of Boethius which Dante was later to give to Francesca da Rimini, that among fortune's many adversities, the most unhappy kind is to nurture the memory of having once been happy.

This is where recollection turns its back on history, for it is the burden of history to make sense of the past, while the memory of dispersal is haunted always by the essential inexplicability of what has come to pass; by the knowledge that there was nothing inevitable, nothing predestined about what has happened; that far from being primordial, the enmities that have led to the sufferings of the present are new and unaccountable; that there was a time once when neither protagonist saw the other as an adversary—a time that will be irrevocably lost with the dissolution of the history that made it possible for many parts to be a whole.

That which I, in the fever of my pride, am struggling to put into words has been much better said in Agha Shahid Ali's poem "Farewell":

 

At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed to perfect me:
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory...

 

There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.
There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.
If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible in the world?

 

There is nothing arbitrary, then, about the ending of Selvadu-rai's novel—the story ends here because it must. To carry it any further would be to link it to the present and the future, to imply the possibility of a consolation. And this, of course, the writer could not do, for the reason that there is no greater sorrow than the recalling of times of joy is precisely that this is a grief beyond consolation.

 

In 1983, at the time of the Colombo riots, I was hard at work on my first novel,
The Circle of Reason.
I was living in New Delhi, where I had succeeded in finding a minor appointment at Delhi University. Some of my colleagues and mentors at the university—Veena Das and Ashish Nandy, for example—had close connections with human rights activists in Sri Lanka. They were thus able to acquire many of the documents, records, and testimonies that were produced by Sri Lankan researchers. Newspaper accounts of the riots were shocking enough, but the picture that emerged from these independent reports was more menacing still. They left no doubt that some parts of the machinery of state had been used to target a minority population. I don't remember whether we asked ourselves what would happen if this pattern were to spread through the subcontinent. The question was perhaps too grim to pose in an India that was beset by insurgency, calamity, and terror.

A year later, with Indira Gandhi's assassination, the tide crested on our own doorsteps. I remember that day graphically: I remember taking the bus across Delhi; I remember the eerie silence in the university, I remember the evil that gleamed in the eyes of the thugs who began to attack Sikhs wherever they could find them. I have written about these events in detail elsewhere (see "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,"
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) and will limit myself here to noting only the close parallels between the patterns of violence in Colombo in 1983 and in New Delhi in 1984. In both instances, inexcusable crimes were committed by insurgent groups in the name of freedom; in both cases, the information-gathering function of government was turned to the sinister purpose of targeting minority populations; in both there were clear instances of collusion between officials and criminals.

Through the riots and their aftermath, I, like many of my friends and colleagues, worked with a citizens' relief organization called the Nagarik Ekta Manch. After the immediate crisis was over I returned to the manuscript I was working on. This novel,
The Circle of Reason,
was the story of a journey, and its central section told the story of a group of immigrants—South Asian and Middle Eastern—living in a fictitious oil-rich sheikdom in the Gulf. Looking back today, it strikes me that
The Circle of Reason
could, within the parameters that I have used here, be identified as an exodus novel, a story of migration in the classic sense of having its gaze turned firmly toward the future. The book ended with the words "Hope is the beginning."

I was working on the last part of the book in 1984 when the riots broke out. After the violence it was a struggle to bring the manuscript to a conclusion: my attention had turned away from it. Unlike Shyam Selvadurai, unlike the Sikhs of New Delhi, I was not in the position of a victim during the riots of 1984. But the violence had the effect of bringing to the surface of my memory events from my own childhood when I had indeed been in a similar situation.

Somehow I did manage to finish
The Circle of Reason,
and soon afterward I started the novel that would eventually be published as
The Shadow Lines.
When I began to work on the manuscript, I found that the book was following a pattern of growth that was exactly the opposite of its predecessor's.
The Circle of Reason
had grown upward, like a sapling rising from the soil of my immediate experience;
The Shadow Lines
had its opening planted in the present, but it grew downward, into the soil, like a root system straining to find a source of nourishment.

It was in this process that I came to examine the ways in which
my own life had been affected by civil violence. I remembered stories my mother had told me about the great Calcutta killing of 1946; I remembered my uncles' stories of anti-Indian riots in Rangoon in 1930 and 1938. At the heart of the book, however, was an event that had occurred in Dhaka in 1964, the year before my family moved to Colombo; in the unlit depths of my memory there stirred a recollection of a night when our house, flooded with refugees, was besieged by an angry mob. I had not thought of this event in decades, but after 1984 it began to haunt me: I was astonished by how vivid my memories were and how fully I could access them once I had given myself permission to do so. But my memories had no context; I had no way of knowing what had happened, whether it was an isolated incident, particular to the neighborhood we were living in, or whether it had implications beyond. I decided to find out what had happened. I went to libraries and sifted through hundreds of newspapers, and in the end, through perseverance, luck, and guesswork, I did find out what had happened. The riots of my memory were not a local affair: they had engulfed much of the subcontinent. The violence had been set in motion by the reported theft of a holy relic from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar. Although Kashmir was unaffected, other parts of the subcontinent had gone up in flames. The rioting had continued for the better part of a week, in India as well as the two wings of Pakistan.

The process by which I came to learn of this was itself to become a pivotal part of the narrative of
The Shadow Lines.
While searching for evidence of the riots, I came across dozens of books about the Indo-Chinese war of 1962. This was an event that had evidently created a torrent of public discourse. Yet the bare fact is that this war was fought in a remote patch of terrain, far removed from major population centers, and it had few repercussions outside the immediate area. The riots of 1964, in contrast, had affected many major cities and had caused extensive civilian casualties. Yet there was not a single book devoted to this event. A cursory glance at a library's bookshelves was enough to establish that in historical memory, a small war counts for much more than a major outbreak of civil violence. While the riots were under way, they had received extensive and detailed coverage. Yet once contained, they had vanished instantly, both from public memory and from the discourse of history. Why was this so? Why is it that civil violence seems to occur in parallel time, as though it were outside history? Why is it that we can look back on these events in sorrow and outrage and yet be incapable of divining any lasting solutions or any portents for the future?

Inasmuch as I addressed these conundrums in
The Shadow Lines,
it was in these words:

 

Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence. It is a struggle that I am destined to lose—have already lost—for even after all these years I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of a ruthless state—nothing like that: no barbed wire, no checkpoints to tell me where its boundaries lie. I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words—that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are not words.

The enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there can be no words without meanings—so it follows inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world ... where there is no meaning, there is banality, and that is what this silence consists in, that is why it cannot be defeated—because it is the silence of an absolute, impenetrable banality.

 

I can still feel the sorrow and outrage that provoked these words—emotions that owed much more to the events of 1984 than to my memories of 1964. Just as terrible as the violence itself was the thought that so many lives had been expended for nothing, that
this terrible weight of suffering had created no discernibly new trajectory in the history or politics of the region. When we grieve for the appalling loss of life in World War II, our sorrow is not compounded by the thought that the war has changed nothing: we know that it has changed the world in very significant ways, has created a new epoch. But in the violence of 1984—to take just one example—it was impossible to see any such portents. It was hard to see how a further partitioning of the subcontinent could provide a solution; on the contrary, it would create only a new set of minorities and new oppressions. In effect, it would amount only to a recasting of the problem itself, in a different form. In the absence of such meanings, there seemed to be no means of representing these events except in outrage and in sorrow.

It follows then that the reason that I—and many others who have written of such events—are compelled to look back in sorrow is that we cannot look ahead. It is as though the events of the immediate past have made the future even more obscure than it is usually acknowledged to be. Now, close on two decades later, I find myself asking, Why is this so? Why was it that in the 1980s, history itself seemed to stumble and come to a standstill?

The past, as Faulkner famously said, is not over; in fact, the past is not even the past. One of the paradoxes of history is that it is impossible to draw a chart of the past without imagining a map of the present and the future. History, in other words, is never innocent of teleologies, implicit or otherwise. Ranajit Guha, in a recent lecture on Hegel and the writing of history in South Asia, says, "It is the state which first supplies a content, which not only lends itself to the prose of history but actually helps to produce it." In other words, the actions of the state provide that essential element of continuity that makes time, as a collective experience, thinkable, by linking the past, the present, and the future. The state as thus conceived is not merely an apparatus of rule but "a conscious, ethical institution," an instrument designed to conquer the "unhistorical power of time." That is, since the nineteenth century, and perhaps even earlier, it is the state that has provided the grid on which history is mapped.

It was perhaps this politically insignificant but epistemologically indispensable aspect of time's continuity that was most vitally damaged by the conflagrations of the 1980s. Even before then, it had often been suspected that elements of the state's machinery had been colluding in the production of communal violence; after the violence of the eighties, this became established as a fact. It became evident that certain parts of the state had been absorbed by—had indeed become sponsors of—criminal violence. No longer could the state be seen as a protagonist in its own right. It is for this reason that I have used the self-contradictory phrase "civil violence" here, in preference to other, more commonly used terms: because these events signaled the collapse of the familiar categories of "state" and "civil society."

The flames created by our recent past are so plentiful that only poets noticed the unsung death of a teleology. "Everything is finished, nothing remains," writes Agha Shahid Ali of a poet who returns to Kashmir in search of the keeper of a destroyed minaret.

 

"Nothing will remain, everything's finished,"
I see his voice again: "This is a shrine
of words. You'll find your letters to me. And mine
to you. Come soon and tear open these vanished
envelopes."...