'There Was No Looking Away'

Lisa Freigang 'There Was No Looking Away' Representations of Post-Partition Communal Violence in Indian English Literature ISBN 978-3-86821-952-4 The partition of the Indian subcontinent into the states of India and Pakistan and the violence that occurred in its wake have been depicted in many works of fiction and received considerable attention from literary critics. Outbreaks of violence between members of different religious communities in India since then, however, have only more recently occupied the cultural and critical imagination. This study explores ten Indian novels in English published between 2001 and 2013 that address outbreaks of post-partition communal violence of the '80s, '90s, and '00s as their main subjects. Focusing on the historical and political contexts of the novels, the first part of the literary analysis examines how the texts negotiate the discourse on communal violence and question widespread narratives explaining its causes and triggers. The second part concentrates on the challenges that emerge when representing violence in general and trauma in particular. It explores the aesthetic strategies used in the novels to represent 'the unspeakable' - such as magical realism, ekphrastic strategies, or the use of photographs as a means of 'picturing violence' - and reveals them to be a response to the societal amnesia surrounding communal violence and its aftermath. The study thus brings to light distinct themes and recurrent narrative strategies related to the representation of communal violence within the diverse body of fiction considered, which includes works by Shashi Tharoor, Githa Hariharan, Sujit Saraf, Raj Kamal Jha, Jaspreet Singh, and Chetan Bhagat. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction: Narrating Communal Violence in Contemporary Indian English Fiction 1 1.1 Representations of Communal Violence in Indian English Novels: Subject Matter and Objectives 3 1.2 State of Research 6 1.3 Corpus, Approach and Structure 9 2. Communalism and Communal Violence in Post-Partition India 12 2.1 'When a Big Tree Falls, the Earth Trembles': The Anti-Sikh Violence of 1984 21 2.2 Hindu Nationalist Mobilisation and the Ayodhya Dispute in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s 25 2.3 'We Have No Orders to Save You': The 2002 Anti-Muslim Violence in Gujarat 33 3. Literary Representations of Communal Violence in Indian English Novels 39 4. Settings, Triggers, Catalysts: Depicting the Contexts of Communal Violence 51 4.1 'Wielding History Like a Battle Axe': The Role of the Past and History Writing in the Production of Communal Sentiments 52 4.1.1 Writing Nonsectarian Histories of Sectarian Strife in Shashi Tharoor's "Riot" 53 4.1.2 'A Live, Fiery Thing, as Capable of Explosion as a Time Bomb' - History in Githa Hariharan's "In Times of Siege" 61 4.2 Motives and Explanations for Communal Violence 67 4.2.1 'How Long Can He Live Off the Riots of '84?' - Politics and Pragmatic Interests in Sujit Saraf's "The Peacock Throne" 67 4.2.2 'Never Big on Religion or Politics' - Chetan Bhagat's "The 3 Mistakes of My Life" and the (Im)possibility of Neutrality 73 4.3 'When a Combination of Things Happens at Once': Concluding Thoughts on Proximate and Indirect Causes of Communal Violence 79 5. Narrating the Moment of Violence 85 5.1 'Don't Listen to the Dead' - Unreliable Narration and Magical Realism in Raj Kamal Jha's "Fireproof" 86 5.2 Picturing the Moment of Violence 99 5.2.1 'You Had to See the Horror to Believe the Horror' - Photographs in Jaspreet Singh's "Helium" 100 5.2.2 Ekphrastic Strategies in Githa Hariharan's "Fugitive Histories" 106 5.3 Concluding Thoughts: Modes of Narrating Moments of Violence 116 6. The Aftermath of Communal Violence 121 6.1 'Prisoners in Our Own City ... in Jail at Home' - Borders and Displacement in "Fugitive Histories" 121 6.2 'The Past Refused to Become the Past' - Collective Amnesia and Family Matters in Jaspreet Singh's "Helium" and Shonali Bose's "Amu" 131 6.2.1 Archiving Memories in "Helium" 133 6.2.2 Divided Families and Lost Family Narratives in "Helium" and "Amu" 138 6.3 Concluding Thoughts on the Aftermath of Communal Violence: Trauma, Memory, Grief 145 7. 'A Depressing Thought: Are We Doomed Then?' - Imagining Communal Harmony in Narratives of Violence 151 8. Narrating Post-Partition Outbreaks of Communal Violence: A Conclusion 162 9. Works Cited 172