INDIA ON THEIR MINDS, INDIA ON OUR MINDS
In his description of the nation as an “ancient palimpsest” on which succeeding rulers and subjects have inscribed their ideals without erasing what had previously been asserted, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote that the idea of India was social heterogeneity acknowledged by history.
How are we the people holding on to this ideal idea of India? How are we the people safeguarding the Constitution, and ensuring that it will remain the governing framework of the Indian polity for the foreseeable future? What is the meaning and the price of freedom, nationhood, and citizenship? Are we allowing ourselves to only be carried away by the glitter and din of celebratory nationalism, or are we consciously pausing to take stock of the bitter, grim reality that is constantly challenges us today—the rising anxiety and intolerance towards fellow citizens; the lack of sustainable employment for Young India; the increasing gap between the rich and poor; a crushing climate crisis...?
India will commemorate its 76th Republic Day this year, an annual celebration marking the adoption of the Indian Constitution on January 26, 1950. Here’s a look at how 8 women, are among the many who witnessed, and participated in, the events leading up to the independence of India and who wrote about both, observed the birth of the nation and recorded that epochal moment, as well as its aftermath.
• Nayantara Sahgal • Qurratulain Hyder • Rashid Jahan • Ismat Chughtai • Attia Hosain • Kamlaben Patel • Lakshmi Sahgal • Saraladebi Chaudhurani
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There is history, and then there are stories, which more often than not, trump history. We instinctively think Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing and J.M. Coetzee when we think of South Africa, in the same breath as we think of Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Writers write their countries just as historians and revolutionaries do, they just write them differently. Like Gordimer and Lessing, Nayantara (Sahgal) wrote from an experience of colonialism. To write one’s country without affectation, without being patronising, writing with what Nayantara called ‘a certain tenderness’ is perhaps a woman’s way of writing. Essential, too, as ingredients in this endeavour are the ideas of nonviolence, secularism, freedom—both personal and political—and democracy; not merely as political goals for a country that has cast off the colonial yoke, but for creating a society in which women and the disadvantaged will find their rightful place. A feminist project, then. A writing life in which the personal, the political, and the literary are so intertwined as to be like three-ply yarn. A writer is not separate from what she writes. In Nayantara’s case, her individual story and family history became the means by which she could tell two stories at the same time: a fictional one that drew its material from her personal and political selves, and a ‘national’ one, about the making of modern India. Carrying politics—which was an emotional engagement for her— into fiction came naturally; it’s what she did because the material compelled her to. ‘It is what triggered my imagination,’ she told me, ‘it was my background.’
Politics and political events were not something happening only in the country, they were happening to us in our everyday lives. So... I suppose I’m the only person who has consistently used political backgrounds. Therefore, there’s a kind of chronology in my novels which go from Independence, depicting Indian hopes and fears as time went on. It wasn’t part of any plan that this sequence developed, but I discovered long afterwards, when I reread some of them, that they did form a kind of chronological sequence, from the high idealism of freedom to... well, disillusionment and decay, and the way it affected the country.
From October 1974 to May 1975 Nayantara contributed seventeen articles to Everyman’s. ‘Some words recur in the history of suffering,’ she wrote in her very first column, ‘and one of them is Bihar.’ Bihar had seen terrible famine, floods, drought, earthquakes and communal violence, to say nothing of smallpox and hunger. A grim list of natural and man-made disasters. But in 1973 Bihar acquired a new distinction, one that held out great hope for the whole country as a result of JP’s movement. It reminded the people of their precious obligation to rebel when faced with injustice and authoritarianism. ...
Re-reading her articles for Everyman’s, she wrote to me in 2013, to say she had often wondered since, whether she should have been quite so blunt and outspoken, made herself so vulnerable. But, ‘once again, I realised I could have reacted no other way to what I saw as the destruction of the idea of India.’ Nehru’s idea of India, that is. But also her own.
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In May 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to power in India after a stunning electoral victory, winning a remarkable 282 seats to gain an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha. For the first time in the history of the party, it was able to form the government without having to enter into an alliance with any other political party, should it choose not to. As unprecedented as the BJP’s tally was the Congress party’s total of 44 seats, its poorest showing ever in its history.
Neither result came as a surprise to Nayantara. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) had been in power for two terms and was beset with scams and charges of corruption in high places. The BJP’s coffers had been handsomely replenished by corporate India, waiting in the wings for a regime change that would work openly in its favour. Narendra Modi had campaigned and canvassed and electrified the electorate in order to wipe out the Opposition, to replicate Gujarat in Delhi. He projected ‘a muscular, macho leadership,’ Nayantara said, ‘there was high drama in all this, and it had an attraction for young and first-time voters.’ His message was aspirational, announcing an India that was technologically savvy, economically resurgent, unbound by politics-as-usual, ready to take her place on the world stage.
A New India, Modi said, implying the end of the old Nehruvian India—secular, democratic, plural, and culturally and ethnically diverse. To Nayantara that idea of India had signified a pledge made at Independence by all those who had fought for it, to forge a nation that stood for an alternative definition of politics, and a society that welcomed the promises of modernity while remaining culturally confident. What she apprehended now was an unmaking of that idea of India by those who had played no part in its creation; were, in fact, driven by an ideology that was avowedly majoritarian, that deplored the very notion of non-violence, valorised an aggressive, masculinised, cultural nationalism, abhorred diversity and had no time for consensual, participatory democracy. ‘The hundred-year-old RSS had waited a hundred years for power,’ she said, ‘and now its opportunity had come...’ ...
Nayantara’s detractors might complain that the greater part of her writing, fiction and non-fiction, simply extends and mythifies the cult of the Nehrus as the National Family, and the Nehruvian project for the country as the ideal to be attained. She is unapologetic about the latter; and regarding the former, one might say that even if one were to evacuate the ‘familial’ and the familiar from her novels, the foundation and superstructure would remain inviolate, for her main ‘character’ is India.
(Excerpted from India On Their Minds: 8 Women, 8 Ideas of India by Ritu Menon.)
Other books on identity, freedom, feminism, Partition and politics in India:
Partition:
No Woman’s Land: Women from Pakistan, India & Bangladesh Write on the Partition of India; Ritu Menon (Ed.) Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partiotion by Ritu Menon & Kamla Bhasin Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India by Deepti Misri Partition’s Post Amnesia’s: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia by Ananya Jahanara Kabir Torn from the Roots: A Partition Memoir by Kamla Patel
Politics, Identity:
Gaining Ground: the changing contours of feminist organising in post-1990s India by Sadhna Arya Why I Am Not A Hindu Woman: a personal story by Wandana Sonalkar Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak? Narratives of Resistance and Resilience; Nitisha Kaul & Ather Zia (Eds.) Gender, Caste and the Imagination of Equality; Anupama Rao (Ed.)
Fiction:
At Home in India by Quarratulain Hyder
In Her Own Words: Letters & Interview by Ismat Chughtai
Quit India! & Other Stories by Ismat Chughtai
Ship of Sorrows by Quarratulain Hyder
Chandni Begum by Quarratulain Hyder