Abstract
In this research paper an attempt has been made to show how Sahgal’s novel Rich Like Us presents a writer-specific version of history vis-à-vis the official history. It brings into focus the period of emergency in India during Indira Gandhi’s regime. At the same time, it also links emergency with the personal crisis of the main characters like Rose and Sonali. In that way, Sahgal projects the event of emergency as a kind of political sati.
Key-words: The emergency, sati, the personal versus the official version of history.
Among the women novelists of Indian writing in English, Nayantara Sahgal emerges as a powerful voice to challenge and question the "received" versions of history. She not only calls the officially-ordered 'histories' into question but also exposes the male dominated patriarchal power structures behind them. By delineating India's history and politics in her fiction, she creates an alternative discourse in order to subvert them and thereby construct her own writer-specific version. She achieves this purpose by using the various narrative techniques and devices and puts them side by side with the official discourse. Sahgal's fiction also centers on the political history of India and how it has affected the perceptions of ordinary men and women. Her main interest, however, remains to raise the questions of women and so the basic purpose of revising Indian history rests on her concerns with the social and individual problems of women and their search for identity. Sahgal herself overcame this problem through her writing: "I began, through the writing process, to unlearn all I had been taught including that overpowering mix called history-culture-religion and to discover who I was through the words I put on a page" (Point of View 32).
Such a problem of women's identity vis-à-vis social-political history of India is most overtly expressed in Sahgal's magnum opus – Rich Like Us (1985).
Sahgal dedicates her novel Rich Like Us to "Indo-British experience and what its sharers have learned from each other". The action of the novel dates back to the period of India's national Emergency during 1974-75 when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister of India. Shyamla A. Narayan comments that in contrast to Sahgal's earlier novels, it is in "Rich Like Us and subsequent novels that she makes full artistic use of political events by seeing them in the perspective of India's history" (17). Here Sahgal successfully dovetails the private and the public issues by copious references to the partition of India, Nehru's speech (in Chapter thirteen), Gandhi's non-violence and his insistence on Truth in direct contrast to the sordid and painful developments during the Emergency.
With such historical allusions, Sahgal combines the story of Rose and Sonali – both of whom are the victims of Emergency. Rose is an English wife of Indian husband Ram, while Sonali is an I.A.S. officer in New Delhi. Sahgal has deliberately chosen English characters, because history is never a one-sided matter, but entails a mixed story of diverse people. Sonali resigns from her position in order not to conform to the corrupt system of political machinery. After severing her connections with the official past, Sonali feels much more human in company with Rose. If Sonali suffers the injustice and wrong from the administrative set-up, Rose suffers not only the injustice but even death at the hands of fraudulent and corrupt Dev. In comparison with Rose, Sonali's character is three dimensional because she is at once an observer, participant and narrator of the Emergency and its impact on the private lives. She describes the lurid details of a constitutional breakdown and the consequences of an unethical exploitation of political institutions to subvert not only the parliamentary democracy established after a hundred years of the freedom struggle, but also the time-honored cultural and moral values in inter-personal relationships.
In telling the story of Rose and Sonali, however, Sahgal adopts the technique of shifting point of view in order to invest the story with a dimension of history. In fact, her knowledge of European and Indian history helps her in elucidating and illustrating the current events in the times of Emergency. Sahgal's attitude towards India's "hoary past" is frankly critical: " [T]he sanctity of hoary tradition had not kept Ram attached to his first wife " (Rich Like Us 40). Further, Sahgal also uses the narrative of history to emphasize the degree of degeneration that set in even among the once respected and effective Gandhians. All the courage that Gandhi had one time instilled in them seems to have evaporated into thin air. For example, the minister who clears the project of Dev claims: “[A] humble follower of Gandhi was what he still remained though the journey had taken him from Mahatma to Madam” (43). In stressing the brutal reality of the Emergency, Sahgal expresses her views about social and political oppression. She suggests that women's oppression has not changed in the society. She shows this by comparing the Sati committed by Sonali's great- grandmother to the cold-blooded murder of Rose which is euphemistically labeled as 'suicide'. About Rose's murder no question is asked or answered. On the other hand, the absolute surrender to a 'supreme' authority at first becomes the gateway to success for people like Ravi Kachru, but soon it becomes suffocating and oppressive as he later realizes. For Sonali, the only hope in this situation is to draw inspiration from the past and prepare for the future with greater conviction and dedication.
According to Jasbir Jain, "…. the thematic explorations of [Sahgal's] earlier work… continue in Rich Like Us, yet …. they are different in both character portrayal and narrative structure" ("The Novel as Political Biography" 52). Jain argues that in this novel Sahgal has thrust aside the autobiographical element and adopted the biographical approach instead. Here there are no protagonists in the conventional sense; what is depicted as the protagonists is India which provides a centre for different points of view to converge on. For example, for a shrewd businessman like Dev "….. Emergency is just what we needed….. It's going to be very good for business." (Rich Like Us 2). But for Sonali it is “…. ridiculous Emergency” (33). The narrative moves constantly between the past and the present through the consciousnesses of both Rose and Sonali. The main part belongs to the story of Rose narrated in the third person, with Sonali's first person narration moving to and from between past and present. From the narrative point of view, although the two strands adopt contrastive technique, yet both move backwards in time. Sonali's memories of the past and her father's dairy allow one to see the idealism nourished by itself; Rose has her own memories of England; of her English friends and her husband's business. Rose's memory raises the question of history and points to the veracity of history in the memory of the people:
"…. what became of past events and conversations, loving and hating and collection of emotions? Where was the evidence, except for people's memories, to show that they had happened, and did they get wiped out for ever when people died?” (Rich Like Us 127). Rose thinks that she could have answered these questions if she had some sort of proper education.
On the other hand, M. Kumaraswamy Raju maintains that Sahgal "… structures Rich Like Us on mythical pattern using The Ramayana and The Mahabharata as undercurrents"(79). Raju argues that "sati", the main motif of the novel, derives its sustenance and strength from the epical characters of Sita and Draupadi. Sahgal transforms them as metaphor for interpreting the character of Rose, Sonali and others. Sahgal insists on the need to re-examine and re-interpret the so-called mythical images of women and comments: [T]hrough the re-writing women do, new Sitas and Savitris will arise, stripped of false sanctity and crowned with the human virtue of courage. Then at last we will know why they did what they did, and how their lone, remote struggles can help our search for identity and emancipation" (Point of View 33). Deeply examined, it becomes clear that Sahgal turns to myth and archetype which recur in almost all her novels. In the words of Viney Kirpal, the story of Rose and Ram "is re-writing of The Ramayana from a feminist angle" (Women's Writing 173). For this reason one finds that the archetypal and mythical patterns surface in the narrative of Rich Like Us. Here the point of view of a given character is also used as narrative strategy which dominates the action of the novel. Represented through different centers of consciousness, the Emergency as a great political event is transformed into a powerful human drama.
Introducing the theme of "Sati" into the story of Rose, the writer seems to suggest that it is the story of several Indian widows by extension. In the name of the so-called sati, many women are murdered. It is not true to say that they commit voluntary suicide. The question raised at this point is – how voluntary are these voluntary deaths? In the novel, thus, one can see the parallel between the accounts of Sati found in Sonali's father's trunk and sati of Rose. In both cases, evidently, the deaths are not voluntary, but forced. Sonali learns how her grand-parents had fought against the atrocious custom of Sati and how they had regarded the British legislation as less than lip sympathy. Of course, the crusade took form of writing accounts of women forcibly thrown on to the funeral pyres of their husbands. Rose is put to death by the evil machination of Dev by pushing her into a dead well, but people are wrongly made to believe that she invited the death on herself.
By using such a double perspective in the story of Rose and Sonali, Sahgal attempts to subvert the official version of the Emergency. Sonali comments, “[S]ince June 26th officially all was well….” (Rich Like Us 21). So she exposes the objectives and the functioning of Emergency and reveals the strong nexus between politics, business and crime. During the Emergency, the country is shown to be ruled by "one and a half people" and that it is "…. a disguised masquerade to prepare the country for family rule" (29), a dictatorship to ensure family succession in a "republic". As a typical representative of the subservient press of the Emergency, one editor says, "Madam had in good faith thought it her constitutional duty to override the constitution" (94) and a lawyer gives his professional opinion that "…. the constitution would have to be drastically amended, if not re-written, to give Madam powers to fight disruptive forces and crush the vested interests she had been battling against since infancy" (94). The millennium had arrived disguised as an Emergency headed by a Mother Tsar (94-95), in whose support a number of delegations are going and her big toe is "already worn out with pilgrim kisses" (81). All this is a window-dressing for the repressive police raj let loose on the people. Fifty thousand to hundred thousand people are under detention without trial (77) and "citizens broken on the wheel for remembering their rights" (258). A citizen's hands are cut and he has to be a handless beggar for life (238). The suspicious Rose, as has already been seen, is silenced for ever. Farmers and workers are exploited and the resources of the whole nation are quietly siphoned off for the benefit of a few. There is exploitation galore here. In forced vasectomy camps, even the old and the unmarried are not spared. All this ugly reality is given cosmetic touches. There is "the myth of a rational, human top" (36) quite unaware of the ugly goings on and an appeal to which can possibly lead to redressal. There is a facade of discipline, punctuality and efficiency accompanied by a hypocritical public and private swearing by the ancient Indian scriptures, myths and ideals.
Furthermore, Saghal refers to the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" where the clever weavers dupe the Emperor into giving them gold to weave him a suit of golden clothes and though no one is able to see the clothes, everyone decides to keep quiet and continue with the pretence of seeing what is in fact nonexistent for fear of ridicule : “[So] long as it didn't touch us, we played along, pretending the Empress's new clothes were beautiful" (Rich Like Us 24). Rose also refers to this story and says: "[S]ounds like the emperor's new clothes to me …. First of all there's no car and then you nationalize the one there isn't. And in all these years what you're saying is there isn't even a model" (235). Sonali also understands what her father meant when he had warned her: "history would now be revised and re-written. All dictators meddled with history" (175). By telling the story of the Emergency from Sonali's perspectives, Sahgal constantly decenters the specious claims and opportunistic aspirations of its supporter. In setting Sonali's text against the supportive interpretations of the Emergency – against the speeches of the ministers, the populist slogans coined, the declaration of progress made, the figures of targets achieved- Sahgal resists closure and capture into the official version of history. She seems to suggest that such a form of political rhetoric, though fictitious, is effective because it is received as reality. Sahgal uses the technique of constant intrusion, however, to displace the politician's narrative and foreground her own meaning of democracy.
Set in 1975, Rich like Us is a fearlessly presented account of the harassment caused to all sections of people during this period the impingement of politics on the personal lives of most of the characters is portrayed as a brutal farce in the history of India. For instance, a play staged with Marxist leaning uses loud taped laughter to intrude into the text and to erode the dictator's claims. In that way the play/literature enables the powerless detainee to deconstruct the power, authority and the lies of dictator:
"First of all the dictator's chariot arrives. [T]he chariot turns into a car and then into a jet plane and through all this the dictator is arriving and he steps down to trumpets and fanfare and all the rest, and then instead of a big heil so-and-so going up, there's a long taped laughter, a huge barrage of it, that's all, then silence. Next he/she and by the way, one half of the dictator is he and the other half is a she – this is not sexist play – tells about what he/she is going to do for the people. Politicians are such bullshitters and this one starts bullshitting and after every few sentences when he/she stops for applause, there's this loud hilarious Ha! Ha! Ha! instead! And soon you have everyone bloated with laughter, because every time he/she says 'I shall banish poverty or watch me remove disparities', there's this colossal raucous cackle." (Rich Like Us 211-12)
The tone of Rich Like Us is evoked not only through the attitudes of the narrator but also through the deft employment of the irony which is subtle and somber. For instance, Sahgal's account of the minister's speech at the Happyola foundation ceremony is an apt illustration of this skilful use of irony. Such gentle but pointed irony abounds in Sahgal's treatment of contemporary society. It is the hallmark of her style that she sustains this tone throughout the narrative of the novel. What saves the narrative is the fact that the irony is mingled with a humor which dissolves the anger and softens the tone.
On the other hand, the narrative of Rich Like Us also involves frequent spatial and temporal tapering exercises. For example, London, Lahore and Delhi converge to a one "here" and several historical eras get compressed into 'now'. Chapters begin with comment on the present and not long before telescope into a distant past. The linkage, however, is established at the political-ideological level. Structurally, the chapter on Sati is a digression from the main plot, which is set in the mid-seventies when the emergency was in force. Nevertheless, like a pebble dropped in a lake, the account of sati emits concentrically widening circles of speculation. Sonali tries to make a connection between her grandmother's reflexive outrage and a scene that suddenly surfaces from her subconscious memory - the chance beholding of an individual's protest against the despotic measures of the emergency. In that way Sonali connects the theme of Sati with the issue of the emergency which serves as a kind of political Sati. The functional role of the Sati incident, then, is a genuine exposer of truth. It is a testimony to the fact that historical truth tends to get marginalized and entombed in private chronicles, while published history slants to suspected behind-the-scene operations of the emergency. In this sense, it offers an alternative history by challenging and subverting the official version of history.
Works Cited