India's self-portrait

Rising intolerance, use of violence to suppress voices of dissent, political violence replacing debate, lynch mobs having a free run are the frightening developments in new India. This is in striking contrast to the history of our civilisation which has always nourished debate and disagreement. We can no longer hold moral high ground as the role model for Third World nations when the forces of darkness are striving to tighten their grip.

The composite culture that enriched our civilisation is under threat as never before. The values that guided the founders of our nation are being denigrated. These disturbing signs have alarmed people who have grown up in freedom.

In this scenario, all right-thinking people have to speak up, to prevent despair. This is what Nayantara Sahgal does. Two years ago, she returned the Sahitya Akademi Award she had won for Rich Like Us, a novel with Emergency as the backdrop. Her act was in protest against the Akademi’s silence on the murders of writers and rationalists M M Kalburgi, Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare.

She is unsparing in her criticism of the rulers trying to lead the nation away from the path laid down in the Constitution. She is in the forefront of the ongoing protests against the assaults on the freedom of expression and democratic rights. She firmly believes that the country is shrinking into a Hindu monoculture and terms Hindutva as a distortion of Hinduism.

Sahgal’s latest novella, When The Moon Shines By Day, is a continuation of the stream. The short work is intensely political, echoing contemporary events. The nonagenarian niece of Jawaharlal Nehru conjures up the image of an India under majoritarian rule where people greet one another with ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’, where a department called ‘Directorate of Cultural Transformation’ presides over ghettos where Muslims are condemned to live in, where cow carcases are used as a form of protest. It is a place where books not in conformity with official line are taken off the shelves, where mobs lynch people they suspect of eating or transporting beef.

Fiction here is a camouflage for conveying critique of present-day events. Politics being the natural subject for her fiction, Sahgal writes about things she feels strongly about and brings to life how people feel in the troubled times we are living in. Hers is a wider canvas, though restricted to 167 pages.

She tries to view the present in terms of the past, the inter-war Europe when fascist rulers came to power in Germany, Italy and Spain. Nazi Germany’s attempt to produce a pure Aryan race to lord over human race is juxtaposed with the call to patriotic Hindu women to have at least five children to create a master Hindu race.

In the novella, there is Kamlesh, a retired diplomat-turned-writer, who speaks about the Taj to a book club he is invited to address. It is the subject of a book he is researching. Kamlesh faces the music for his anti-war views. The book club with four women in their forties — Rehana, Nandini, Aruna and Lily — meets every week to discuss a book of their choice.

This ingenious plot enables Sahgal to introduce an array of topics, ideas, and characters. As an activist with Asians Against Torture, Rahana faces resistance. Her domestic help Abdul feels it is safer to assume a Hindu name, Morari Lal, in the street. Opening day of an art show at Batliwala’s gallery is wrecked by a bomb. There is Franz Rohner, a German who is weighed down by his country’s Nazi past, who asserts that all revolutions, and all dictatorial regimes, follow the same pattern, that they “copycat each other, even to their craze for uniforms to carry out their commands. Black Shirts, Brown Shirts.” He warns Rahana on what lies ahead. “Our past is your future,” he says. He has no doubt that his Indian friends have a long fight on hand against the forces of darkness who are destroying all that India stands for as a multicultural society.

When the Moon Shines by Day uses the example of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ to exemplify how art can reveal the truth. Guernica was the scene of gruesome bombing during the Spanish Civil War. Sahgal says authoritarian regimes are afraid of art because art survives. The characters in the story feel bewildered by disturbing signs of change, but don’t quite know what to make of them, since such things are alien to the India they have grown up in. A violent world is anathema to those who cherish the idea of an Indian state based on humanistic and progressive values.

The book is an incisive portrait of contemporary India. The celebrated writer’s flawless prose adds to the readability of the book.

WHen the moon shines by day
Nayantara Sahgal
Speaking Tiger 
2017, pp 167, Rs 360