Communalism Is The Very

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

India has always been a multi-racial, multi-caste and mutli-lingual country. Massive and awful differences have been penetrated of the people under the appearance of caste and religion. The problem of socialism being partly religious, cultural and political in nature has proved to be a great social hazard resulting in fire of regional tensions and hate campaigns. Analytically speaking, the problem of communalism is, in reality, an emotional problem. Indian English novels on a large scale, deal with our national problems. These problems have received an intricate treatment by Indian English writers. It is one of the dominant thematic and Indo-nostalgic concerns of Indian English fiction. Now, Indian English literature exists, a new genre called partition fiction, highlightening the communalism of Hindus and Muslims. In Indian novels like Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, communal violence finds an agonising description. Basically, communalism is a reality which we are forced to face but which we wish to forget. It is a bi-cultural conflict between Hindus and Muslims resulting in a horrific contemporary history and culture. One of the grand functions of Indian English writers is to portray and reflect this social disease. In this accord, Jha Mohan (1981:117) comments:

…communalism is the very negation of the valued principles of tolerance, accommodation and cooperation; by its very nature it is a kind of political and religio-cultural reaction that weakens the existing social order and thought at times it may be looked upon as a movement, it is, in fact, neither revolution nor reconstruction.

If we try to discover the genesis of the novel, it is a major setback, which suffered India on 6th December 1992, when Babri Masjid was demolished by Hindu fundamentalists. It was a black day in Indian history. The event threatened the integrity of the nation on the grounds of communalism between the Hindus and the Muslims. It violated the guiding principles of Indian constitution. A host of Hindu fundamentalists became dictators. The self-appointed custodians told Indians that the land of India, that is, Hindustan belonged to only Hindus; Muslims and Christians were considered to be non-Indians. They had no right in Bharat. These activists converted India into Bharat and took the nation into the dark age of Indo-nostalgic communalism. The massacre and the genocide that followed the sensitive event, is captured by Shashi Tharoor (Interview: 2001) in the light of Indo-nostalgia, in his novel Riot: A Novel.

…it is based in part on a real story, but not the stains murder. I had become increasingly concerned with the communal issues bedeviling our national politics and society in the 1990’s… As a novelist, though; I sought an interesting way to explore the issue in fiction. Years ago, my old college friend Harsh Mander, an IAS officer sent me an account he had written of a riot he dealt with as a District Magistrate in Madya Pradesh. I was very moved by the piece and urged him to publish it… But his story also sparked me thinking of a riot as a vehicle for a novel about communal hatred since I have never managed a riot myself. I asked Harsh for permission to use the story of his riot in my narrative, a request to which he graciously consented at about the same time; I read a newspaper account of a young white American girl, Amy Behal, who had been killed by a black mob in violent disturbances in South Africa. The two images stayed and merged in my mind and Riot was borne.

Shashi Tharoor once again proved his formidable intellectual expertise and creative insight in his third novel Riot: A Novel, in 2001, to make a fictional operation of Indo-nostalgia. It is a story of ignited passions and communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, leading to the destruction of Babri Masjid (mosque) in 1992 on the allegedly sacred ground of Ramjanmabhoomi at Ayodhya in India. In this novel, Tharoor reinterprets and represents the heritage of history as a reference frame for the present. Being widely acknowledged as an experimental novelist, Tharoor experiments with the narrative form, chronicling the mystery of an American girl’s death in India. Though the novel is about the ownership of history, it is emotionally charged and intellectually provocative. It is about love, hate, cultural collision, identity, ideology and the impossibility of knowing the truth in the madness of religious and cultural nostalgia. It is set against the religious background of tensions in India, when Hindus and Muslims clashed in bloody riots over Ram Shila Poojan, the object of controversy being a four hundred year old mosque.

The novel was published when Indian writing in English was gaining numerous considerations and the pan-Indian concept of ‘Hindutva’ was struggling to repossess its identity. This struggle for reclaiming senseless identity inflamed communal riots all over the country which resulted into senseless killing. Amidst this highly explosive and aggressive spectrum of the contemporary period, Tharoor ventured to publish a novel with a controversial issue. The novel was published with two different covers and editions, one published in America and the other in India. The Indian edition has a touching cover page with a picture of riot, representing the scene of ‘Riot’- with flames and smoke from an overturned cart (Tharoor, The Hindu 1) and another with the picture of Taj Mahal; the former was for India while the latter was for western countries, bearing the subtitles as Riot: A Novel and Riot: A Love Story respectively. The background of the Taj evokes image of the Moghul empiric rule in India; while the cover page with an actual riot serves the readers to the negative of hatred. Moreover, the two different editions reflect the two faces of India- one defined by the harsh contempt and the other by gentle love. The stories representing the two different strands are drawn towards the final blaze, when the communal riot that rocks Zalilgarh, in Uttar Pradesh coincides with the murder of the American girl who is the protagonist in the covert love story traced in the novel.

The historical consciousness of the partition of India on the basis of religion and the teleology of Hindu nationalism has framed the modern discourse of Hindu-Muslim communalism and violence in India. A few gifted writers of Indian English literature have handled the rise of Hindu militancy in their fiction but Shashi Tharoor in Riot situates the undoing of an innocent American in the present context of Hindutva politics. The novel is about the potential fragmentation of the secular Indian populace, making it a worth reading and nostalgic tragedy. Commenting on the title of the novel Tharoor (Sectarian Violence in India, 2005) says:

I use the word "Riot" for the novel because it’s stark, its one word, it’s clear and simple. The riots, tragically, have been a phenomenon of our independent history for some time, and communal riots, that is, "riots between two religiously defined communities" have been a particular political problem in contemporary India.

On his regular visits to India; his homeland, Tharoor confesses that the only thing that disturbs him mostly is the ‘Rising intolerance in India.’(Silence! It’s a Riot) he wrote extensively about communal issues in the newspaper columns and his many books. As a novelist, he sought an exciting way to discover the issue in his fiction. He traces the genesis of the novel Riot to the Sikh riots followed by 1989 Hindu-Muslim riots. Many basic facts about the management of the riots are based on the actual account of the Khargone riot in central India. Elaborating on the backdrop of the novel, Tharoor (Sectarian Violence in India, 2005) avers:

In the Riot, in my novel, the trouble starts when this agitation is beginning. There was no foreigner killed in the riot, and the American girl is entirely fictional as are all the relationships and characters in my novel. But the bare bones of the riot are based on the real fact.

The specific point in history that Shashi Tharoor has chosen for his Indo-nostalgic purpose is the riot that reverberated in Uttar Pradesh in 1989 in the context of the Babri Masjid / Ram Janmabhoomi controversy. His intension was to revive this largely forgotten year in Indian history. Thematically, the book calls up images of the past through Indo-nostalgic technique and informs how it is responsible for many of the communal flare-ups that define the contemporary Indian time-space. With this deft blending of fact and fiction, Tharoor sets up a montage work, to enable readers to get the entire scenario into perspective. He selects bits from history and present day communal consciousness and weaves them together with bits from his productive imagination to create a quilt that is, ‘intellectually and emotionally charged’ (Book Jacket Review) with Indo-nostalgia. However, Riot is a brilliant experiment in narrative form. Using the framework of investigating the mysterious death of Priscilla Hart, an American social worker, during the riots, Tharoor uses the matrix of his novel to enable multiple voices to interact and in the dialogic process that evolves and takes hold of the text, the readers themselves are drawn towards an understanding of the real issues at stake and the politics behind the communal violence and hatred in this land. Tharoor privileges many factions on the variegated communities to express their views and even the most fanatic ones are allowed a space to express their nostalgic grievances.

The novel begins with a series of newspaper reports in the New York Journal. The first one from Delhi dated Monday, October 2, 1989, reports the death of Priscilla Hart, an American volunteer, who is in Zalilgarh, a small district in Uttar Pradesh, working with the non-governmental association HELP-US. She is stabbed and beaten to death reporting an obscure cause for her death. The story is set in recent troubled times of communal tensions in India. The author adopts a mixed narrative mode, to tell the story. Tharoor (The Hindu, 2) himself remarked about the plot of the novel.

The plot of the Riot unfolded through news paper clippings, diary entries, interviews, transcripts, journals scrap books, even poems written by characters – in other words using different voices, different stylistic forms for different fragments of the story.

At one level, Riot is about the explosion of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, but at another level, the novel is about an Indo-American encounter. Priscilla Hart, the heroine of the novel, is an American. As far as the choice of American characters in his novel is concerned, Tharoor (The Hindu, 2) says:

My fiction sometimes appeals in different ways to Americans and to Indians, but the whole point about literature, surely, is that while it rests on specificities of time and place, it must appeal to readers beyond those specifics.

Priscilla has come to India as a doctorate fellow to investigate India and to create awareness among the people of the country about population control. She comes to India when the country was hypersensitive under the pan-national disease of communalism. Amidst these hypersensitive conditions there develops a love story of Priscilla and Lakshman, the district collector of Zalilgarh. Their love story extends against the backdrop of the Ram Shila Poojan campaigning and ends with Priscilla’s unresolved murder mystery. The novel centers around the character revealing the various problems, India was confronting with. Every character in the novel stands as a dogma expressing its views to expose Indo-nostalgia.

India as a nation comes alive through Priscilla, Rudyard Hart, Priscilla’s father, Randolph Diggs, the New York Journal reporter. These entire Americans have different intentions behind visiting India. Tharoor has taken a synoptic view of the social conditions of India through Priscilla Hart. The character of Rudyard Hart, the senior Marketing Executive with Coca-Cola, who has been in India in the late seventies, explores an industrial facet of India in those days while the character of Diggs investigates the religious and political side of India. The character of Ram Charan Gupta articulates Hindu ideology whereas Moh’d Sarwar explores the Muslim views. The District Magistrate V. Lakshman and the superintendent of police, Gurinder Singh asserts bureaucratic limitations owing to the political interruption. Gurinder Singh reminds us of the organised orgy of slaughter, fire-raising and looting of the Sikh community after the death of Indira Gandhi. Tharoor (Behal, Interview: 2001) admits:

…in Riot what happens of course is the ultimate collision of violence. But violence which involves both people saying this is who we are and this we are not. This is what we hate about you and this is why were going to do this to you. And at the same time at a visceral level, people defining who they are and how they are not and also what they are prepared to live and die for. And it seemed to me that this series of collisions could be best be presented through different perspectives and voices from as wider range of experiences as possible.

Tharoor’s characters are Indo-nostalgic caricatures which stand for particular points of view. The radical Hindu, the fundamentalist Muslim, the American and the secular administrators, all these characters explore the past of India to put forth its consequences during the contemporary period. It is through these characters, Tharoor makes every aspect of India alive through Indo-nostalgic rendering. However, Tharoor has used major non-Indian characters, which are bound to influence the way the book is recognised both in the U. S. and India. Tharoor (Behal, Interview: 2001) explores his genuine intention behind creating non-Indian characters in the fiction:

…because very often we define ourselves in relation to others.

India was witnessing the growing communalism in politics and also its consequences when the novel was published. Moreover, the novel is deeply concerned about the increasing split between Hindus and Muslims. Tharoor cuts out a pitiable figure of motherland with his master device of Indo-nostalgia, experiencing the struggle of reclaiming a national identity when the world was heading towards the globalisation. The sad plight of illiterate women in India is flashed across the mind through the eyes of Priscilla and her mother Katherine. The story of a white woman falling in love with India and an Indian is masterly handled to expose the old tradition from Passage to India to Heat and Dust and many master books in Indian writing in English. When Tharoor was asked about the pitfalls that, he avoided and the influences; which he used for his depictions. Tharoor (www.tharoor.in) replied:

…I know this will strain credulity, but I actually did not think much about it. Of course, I was aware that Priscilla Hart might be seen as one more in the long line from Adela Quested through Daphne Manners and on, but I was writing about a different period, the colonial connection was absent and there was no rape metaphor in my novel. I am on record as asking, with reference to those earlier novels, why, if rape had to be a literary metaphor for the colonial connection, a British woman had to be the victim of it rather than an Indian. My novel is not about a torrid East-West encounter in a colonial setting; it’s about today’s people in our increasingly globalizing world, where collision and confluence seamlessly cross national and ethnic boundaries.

Shashi Tharoor has used two distinct voices to prove Indo-nostalgia and how history can inflame communal passions and how it can also alleviate communal hatred. An analysis of Ram Charan Gupta’s views as recorded in Randy Digg’s notebook would reveal how hard-core, unscrupulous ideological positions could harm Indian society by flaming up sectarian passion among the unsuspecting believers of a creed. Since he is a scheming man, with eyes on the vote bank, has no doubt in presenting an imagined version of history that posits Hindus of India as a wronged people. For him, September 15, 1989 was a unique day - a day when the Hindutva forces launched the ‘Ram Shila Poojan Programme’. On that sanctified day, bricks inscribed ‘Ram’ were consecrated at the local shrine, to be transported to Ayodhya to rebuild the Ramjanmabhoomi temple, which was allegedly destroyed by Babar to erect his own huge Mosque. His inflammatory allegations provoking Indo-nostalgia are:

In Ayodhya there are many temples to Ram. But the most famous temple is not really a temple any more …it is the Ramjanmabhoomi, the birthplace of Ram …but if you go to the Ayodhya, you will see no Ramjanmabhoomi temple there. In olden days a great temple stood there. A magnificent temple …but a Muslim king, the Mughal emperor, Babar, not an Indian, a foreigner from Asia, he knocked it down. And in its place, he built a big Mosque which was named the Babri Masjid…naturally; our community was very much hurt by this …for hundreds of years we suffered under Muslim yoke, then the British came and things were no better. We thought then that after independence, everything would change. Most of the Muslims in Ayodhya left to go to Pakistan. The Mosque was no longer much needed as a mosque. Then the miracle occurred. Some devotees found that an idol of Ram had emerged spontaneously in the courtyard of the mosque. It was a clear sign from God. His temple has to be rebuilt on the sacred spot. (pp.52-53)

But Indian government dismissed all his statements as illogical and refused to grant permission for the temple. The temple was locked so that neither the Muslims nor the Hindus could worship there. Ram Charan Gupta and other Hindu fundamentalists condemned the government’s stand and its injustice. Ram Charan and his party leaders said against this stand of government:

We have had enough. It is the peoples wish that the birthplace of Ram must be suitably honoured. We will rebuild the temple. (p. 53)

In response to their commitment of rebuilding the temple, bricks from every village were brought to be taken to Ayodhya. He also spoke of the excitement of young men and women making flag, placards, posters and preparing ‘pennants in holy saffron’ on the eve of the great procession to Ayodhya, he intermingled his narration with volleys of abuses against the Muslims. He tells Diggs:

You have to understand their mentality. They are more loyal to a foreign religion Islam than to India. They are all converts from the Hindu faith of their ancestors, but they refuse to acknowledge this, pretending instead that they are all descended from conquerors from Arabia and Persia or Samarkand. Fine- if that is so, let them go back to those places! Why do they stay here if they will not assimilate into our country? They stay together, work together, pray together. It is what you American, I know, call a ghetto mentality. (pp.54-55)

These testimonies made against the Muslims by Ram Charan Gupta are the marks of intense communalism growing in the minds of the Hindus over the pan-Indian concept of nationalism. Another injustice that he points out has been done to Hindus is that they divided India to create the "accused Pakistan". He has a deadly regret that some of the greatest sites of the Hindu civilisation – "the ancient sites of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the world’s oldest university of Takshashila, even river Indus from which India got its name…are all now in a foreign country." (p.55) His words and its aftermath has incited Indo-nostalgia and kept communal passions aflame.

His R. C. Gupta’s shower of cruelty does not spare even the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He condemns Nehru as ‘a Muslim loving brown Englishman’ who gave them to follow their own personal laws which privileges a Muslim to have four wives at a time. Again a striking facility is granted that, Muslims are paid for by the government to visit Mecca. He wonders why the tax paid by Hindus should go to helping Muslims get closer to a foreign God. (p.55) Moreover, the worst is that, a Muslim with four wives each is "out-breeding Hindus." He is angry about decision taken by Indira Gandhi during emergency; she drove young Hindu men for compulsory vasectomy, while Muslims resisted even family planning as it was against their religion. (p.55) What is most threatening under these circumstances is that, Muslims would soon outnumber Hindus in India. So his party’s agenda is to defeat secularists who have insulted Hindus and he adds most raucously that until they raise ‘the forces of Hindutva to power’ they would never be able to teach these Muslims a lesson. (p.57) Besides, he makes Diggs to know about Sadhvi Rithambhara, another woman preacher of Hindutva foyer, making a trenchant Indo-nostalgic consolidation:

Muslims are like a lemon squirted into the cream of India. They turn it sour. We have to remove the lemon, cut it up into pieces, squeeze out the pips and throw them away. (p.57)

Hindu nationalism or Hindutva is an ideology that endeavours to create a distinct Hindu identity among all Hindu irrespective of their internal social, cultural and regional distinctions. Drawing inference from Savarkar’s vision of India in a civilisational form, the proponents of Hindutva mobilise Hindus by invoking the commonness of ethnicity, race, religion, territory, history and culture that overrides all other differences. The search for an integrated Hindu identity results in the assertion of cultural and spiritual superiority of Hinduism in a highly politicised context. Echoing the Hindutva ideology in an Indo-nostalgic sense, R. C. Gupta says:

The non Hindu people in Hindustan…must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country wholly subordinate to the Hindu nation, claiming, deserving no privileges, much less any preferential treatment - not even citizen’s rights. (pp.123-124)

Tharoor’s second dominant voice to reveal Indo-nostalgia is Professor Mohammed Sarwar. He is a liberal historian. He is in Zalilgarh as a part of his research programme on the life of Syed Salar Mausd Ghasi popularly known as Ghazi Miyan, who was a highly revered Muslim warrior - a saint in Zalilgarh, respected and worshiped by both the communities. His conversation with Lakshman, the District Magistrate of Zalilgarh, instructs how history can be used to alleviate communal passions. He revives Muslims of the past, who served the Indian community selflessly. In his opinion, such historical researches could contribute greatly to easing off sectarian ideas among the Hindus. He reminds and revives Lakshman some notable Muslim figures worshiped even by Hindus, such as Nizamuddin Auliya, Moinuddin Chisti, Shah Madar, Shaik Nasirruddin and Mohammed Iqbal who wrote the patriotic song ‘sare jahan se acha hinduastan hamara’ (pp.66-67) The Professor does not represent Muslim ideology but he believes that historians with a secular view, have a duty to retrieve historical figures, especially Muslims from stupor to create Hindu Muslim unity.

The greatest strength of Riot is that it presents an authentic Indo-nostalgic picture of various forces that are scrambling for supremacy in India, the forces of secularism tolerance and compassion on the one hand and the forces of communalism, fundamentalism and fanaticism on the other. The depiction of the Hindutva movement could not find a fairer and more accurate portrayal than in the voice of Ram Charan Gupta, the firebrand Hindu chauvinist who feels that the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum of the Mughal emperor and his wife, is a Hindu temple. In the novel, Professor Sarwar, modeled on the actual historian Shahid Amin of Delhi University, expresses views of secular Muslims in India. Denying any attempt to balance the Hindu-Muslim debate, Tharoor (Chowdhury: 2001) says:

Sarwar is a Muslim believer in India’s pluralism but he is by no means typical of, or meant to be, "representative" of, majority Muslim opinion. He’s an ex-communist, a historian and a newly rediscovered faith in his own religion. This mistake is in seeing him as a sort of mirror image of Gupta, who’s a straightforward Hindutva politician of whose personal life we hear little. Merely because one is Hindu and the other is Muslim doesn’t mean we must juxtapose and compose them that way.

Some striking pages from the transcript of Randy Digg’s interview with professor M. Sarwar disclose that Maulana Azad was also a secular Muslim who believed in an united India and opposed its division on communal grounds whereas Mohammed Ali Jinah was Oxbridge educated and who enjoyed Scotch and Pork and who barely spoke Urdu and married a non-Muslim girl had solicited a separate nation for Muslims. He asserts that Moulana was a more authentic representative for Indian Islam than Jinah was. He dismissed talk of partition arguing that Muslims were entitled to the whole of India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, just as the Hindus were. If we analyse the two farthest poles of India we come to know that, ‘Kashmir’ is a Muslim name whereas ‘Kanyakumari’ is the Hindu name both uniting the land of India, provoking Indo-nostalgia, with their same share of culture and ethnicity. Sarwar further adds that, Moulana Azad did not accept the Pakistani idea of "a narrower notion of Muslim nationhood that confined Indian Muslims to a truncated share of the heritage of their entire land." (pp.108-109) Professor Sarwar emphasises that Muslims of India are as patriotic as their Hindu brothers:

You can understand why some Indian Muslims are more viscerally anti-Pakistan than many Hindus, especially North Indian Hindus with their romanticized nostalgia for the good old days before partition. (p.109)

Moreover, Professor Sarwar gives an example of Mohammed Currin Chagla, who was India’s foreign minister during the 1965 war with Pakistan, made a speech in parliament during the Bangladesh war of 1971. His regretting Indo-nostalgic remark is that:

Pakistan was conceived in sin and is dying in violence. (p.109)

His Professor Sarwar is an Indian Muslim with intense passion of Indian nationality. He loves India intensely and ready to sacrifice for her. Some words from the scrapbook of Randy Diggs, in an interview, show his intense Indo-nostalgic gratitude to his country:

…I love this country. I love it not just because I was born here, as my father and mother were, as their parents before them were, not just because their graves have mingled their bones into the soil of this land. I love it because I know it, I have studied its history, I have traveled its geography, I have breathed its polluted air, I have written words to its music. India shaped me, my mind, my tastes, my friendships, my passions. (p.112)

Further he adds suggesting his Indo-nostalgia:

I take my children to the latest Bollywood blockbuster and laugh as the Muslim hero chases the Hindu heroine around the tinsel tree. I avidly follow test cricket and cheer for my hero, perhaps the best batsman in the world, Mohammed Azharuddin and I cheer for him because he is on my team, the Indian team, and not because he is Muslim …I cannot tell you how much it meant to me when he scored a century for India against Pakistan, in Pakistan. One day he will captain India Mr. Diggs, and he will make every Indian proud because no one will notice, despite his name, that he is Muslim. (p.113)

After his principal Indo-nostalgic voices, the Hindu R. C. Gupta and the Muslim Professor Sarwar, Shashi Tharoor uses Lakshman’s conversation with Priscilla Hart, to speak out his mind on communalism. Lakshman wonders why Hinduism, an essentially liberal faith should want to defile a Muslim shrine to authorise itself. He wonders why Muslims are being assaulted for something that happened over four hundred and fifty years ago. He rightly remarks that:

It is because politicians of all faith across India seek to mobilize votes by appealing to narrow identities. By seeking votes in the name of religion, caste and region, they have urged voters to define themselves on these lines. (p.45)

According to Tharoor, a hegemonic discourse of Hindu-Muslim communalism exists in India, which has corrupted not only history but also penetrated nostalgic memory, contributing to the production and perpetuation of communal violence in the country. In the course of struggles for power, during British rule, this intensified and culminated in the division of India in 1947 on the basis of religion. A discourse of Hindu-Muslim difference was created that has struck deep roots in both communities and acquired a partly self-sustaining momentum that at the same time continues to be fed by political competition. Lakshman while explaining Priscilla, his nostalgic sensitivity for India, he says:

Why should today’s Muslims have to pay a price for what Muslims may have done four hundred and fifty years ago? It’s just politics, Priscilla. The twentieth century of deprivation has eroded the culture’s confidence. Hindu chauvinism has emerged from the competition for resources in a contentious democracy. (p.45)

Thus, the primary cause of communal riots in India is the pursuit of political advantage. Despite the contrary attempts of secular nationalist leaders and historians, a divisive history of India has acquired a hegemonic place in the school textbooks and in the national mythology, which defines the millennium-long arrival of both the religion of Islam and Muslim arms into the subcontinent as a foreign Muslim conquest. In this regard, Chatterjee (1993:74) comments:

…despite the fact that probably ninety-five per cent of the Muslim population of the subcontinent is indigenous and descendants of converts to Islam, Islam is considered in the history of the Indian nation as a foreign element.

Lakshman exposing Indo-nostalgia tells Priscilla that the Hindus could be right. There could have been a temple there at Ayodhya over which Babar built a mosque. But it is rather uncivil for Hindus, of the present enlightened age to repeat what the Muslims of the sixteenth century did in a fit of ignorance and fanaticism. Such narrow mindedness could only provoke violence and tarnish the image of Hindus across the world. He feels that, Hindus need to uphold the dignity of their religion by validating what Swami Vivekananda proclaimed at the World Parliament of religions at Chicago, quoting an ancient Indo-nostalgic and Hindu hymn:

As the different streams have their sources in different places, all mingle their water in the sea. So, O Lord, the different oaths which men take …all lead to thee. (p.146)

In order to devise the need for open-mindedness and collective harmony, Shashi Tharoor introduces another voice that links readers to another facet of India’s troubled history. In one of the many interactions between Gurinder Singh, the superintendent of police and Randy Diggs, he narrates the story why he continued to be a cop. It is the story of another riot in India during Indira Gandhi’s emergency period. He remembers with unveiled poignancy the storming of golden temple, a place sacred to the Sikhs to flush out terrorist who were fighting for Khalistan, a separate state for Sikhs. The ‘Operation Bluestar’ by the army, threw the temple into shambles and hurt the Sikh sentiments so deeply that even the anti-Khalistan fractions of the Sikh community rebounded in protest. Khushwant Singh reacted by returning the government his civilian honours. (p.192) instead of curbing Khalistan terrorism, the Golden temple massacre abetted it, which later climaxed in the assassination of Mrs. Indira Gandhi by her Sikh security guard. The assassination led to a wave of violence. Angry mobs roamed the cities in search of ‘Sikh blood to spill.’ (p.194) Gurinder Singh remembers nostalgic sentiments, how his own nephew Navjot and his father were torched to death in a car by anti-Sikh mobs. He imagines with pain the anguished face of the little boy "starting in disbelief as the flames consumed him." (p.195)

Gurinder Singh was so angry at what happened that he wanted to resign and join the Khalistan army to avenge his nephew’s death and also the wrongs done to the other people of his Sikh community. Had it not been for his father’s deep sense of tolerance and commitment towards communal harmony, he would have left the police force. His father’s words ring in his ears and they guide him when he is out to manage riots. His father had pointed to the smiling photograph of Navjot and remarked with nostalgia:

The boy will always live in my heart he said softly "but somewhere in India, there is another grandfather like me whose only hope for the safety of his grandson lies in the thrust that he places in you and the policemen under your command. Do not, Gurinder, do not even betray that thrust. (p.198)

Some of the chief concerns of Riot involve the questions of identity in a political or religious sense and the question of allegiance. Hinduism is a religion which has practised tolerance for over 3000 years. Every single faith known to humanity, with the possible exception of Shintoism, has been welcomed in India. The proponents of other religions, like Christianity, Judaism and Islam, suggest there is no way to salvation except through their lord and that everyone else is in error (Cole: 2001) In contrast to them, Tharoor (Cole: 2001) provoking Hinduism in an archetypal Indo-nostalgic way, says:

The key to Hindu vision is the unknowability of truth; Hinduism is the only religion that doesn’t claim to be the only true one.

In the novel, Lakshman says that, "Hindu fundamentalism" is a contradiction in terms "because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals, no organised church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book." Shashi Tharoor feels that it is a travesty of the Hindu faith to reduce the soaring philosophical quests of Vedanta to the petty bigotry of political identity. "It is a betrayal of Hinduism by those who claim to speak in its name." (Eswar: 2005) In the novel, Professor Sarwar, avers over the nationalism of Indo-nostalgia:

The national mind has been afflicted with the intellectual cancer of thinking of "us" and "them". (p.114)

Thus, the novel is about collision, collision between issues, collision between individuals, collision between mobs and cultural collision in particular, in this case, the Hindu-Muslim collision.

However, the novel spins around a twenty-four year old, slim blond blue eyed, Indo-nostalgic an American volunteer, Priscilla Hart, with the non-governmental association HELP-US; whose initials stand for health, education, literacy, population and United States. She was a young lady with New York University for her doctoral degree and had come to India as a part of her research. She was closely involved in developing female population control. She not only fell in love with India abut also she was too much committed and engaged in the problems in India. She was intensely interested in the population control and in the rights of women. Her father’s posting brought her in India. Commenting upon her good character her father Rudyard Hart embarks:

Priscilla was a gem, an angel, a person brought onto this earth to do good. (p.2)

When, Priscilla was killed, her mother, Katherine, fifty-two years old, a high school teacher of English, could not tolerate the loss of her only daughter. She was in an intense mourning. She expresses her agony on her sad demise. Expressing her passionate love and commitment towards India, she says:

Priscilla wanted to work everyone together; she was determined to make a difference in the lives of the women of India. (p.3)

Her sad demise was a shock for her organisation HELP-US. Her fellow associates remember her with a deep sense of fellow-felling and miss her. In a state of missing a hardworking and committed research fellow like Priscilla, Lyndon Galbraith, the president of the organisation HELP-US says:

She touched a lot of people here with her evident sincerity and compassion. She will be greatly missed. (p.3)

Priscilla came across a number of things about India. She not only saw Indians but also came across Indian bazaars, Indian movies, Indian temples and the lower class Indian people with their poverty. She actively worked for the social service league, and helped blind children at the catholic orphanages and always cared for the ‘underside of the society.’ But during her stay, at India, an incident changed her life and her mind developed a strong current of hatred against her father, when she found her father in bed with his secretary Nandini. This led them towards divorce between Katherine and Rudyard. Priscilla felt regretful and could not forgive her father:

…but I cannot forgive him. Not just for taken for granted. But also for being careless enough and thoughtless enough to do it there. In Mom’s and his bed, on that afternoon, and letting me find him. I hated him finding like that. (p.79)

After nine years, Priscilla came to India at Zalilgarh, a district town in Uttar Pradesh. She found nothing changed; except the increase in population. Zalilgarh occupied a special place of reference in the scrapbook of Priscilla. She was so enthralled by the place that she composed a poem on the town of Zalilgarh with all its mist of dust, cowdung sidewalks, rusting roofs, walls with red betel stains and angry black slogans with dirty brown men in their dirty dhotis. Tharoor captures the essence of Indo-nostalgia about Indian locality, cuisine and culture at Zalilgarh in U. P. through the poem of Priscilla:

Mists of dust on crumbling roadsides

Cowdung sidewalks, rusting roofs

Bright painted signboards above dimly lit shops

The tinkle of bicycle bells, the loud cries…

…Roll out the chapattis for dinner,

Pour the children drinks of sewer water

Serve their men first, eat what’s left

If they’re lucky, and then submit unprotected

To the heaving thrusts of their protectors

Abusers, masters. One more baby comes

To wallow in misery with the rest. (p.15)

Her poem shades a significant light on the Indian people with their dresses and routine habits, in the bumpy and dusty landscape of that part of India. It also explains the pathetic predicament of women in India and the dominance of patriarchy over the social system. When Priscilla meets to change the women at Zalilgarh, she felt plenty of difficulties. Nothing helped her to achieve her targets and to complete her tasks. So in the concluding lines of her poem, she prays the almighty to empower her to fight against these adverse conditions and request to offer her ample time to make difference. Some pages from her personal scrapbook read:

…Give me strength, oh Lord to make things change.

Give me the time to make a difference. (p.16)

The laziness in the office makes her more regretful. Her project director Shankar Das and her assistant Kadambari make her work more complex. Shankar Das is more concerned with statistical figures rather than practical achievements. The centre for Priscilla became an ‘ineffective place’ whereas her filed work became ‘upsetting development’ particularly in the case of Fatima Bi who had aborted her eighth child. After knowing this, her husband, Ali charges down the centre angrily with eyes bloodshot and red screaming. ‘I will kill the foreign whore.’ In all these harsh circumstances, Priscilla’s hope rests on Lakshman, the only man with whom she could share everything. In her first visit with him, she felt herself captivated towards him with her heart, body and mind. She herself candidly confesses a distinct Indian personality of Lakshman:

…Lakshman has a rich, soft voice, not smooth like a radio announcer’s but slightly husky, like raw-edged velvet. There was something about his voice that reached out and drew me in, something that was both inviting and yet reassuring. It was a voice like a warm embrace, a voice that was seductive but not seducer’s. (p. 19)

Priscilla goes mad with her love for Lakshman knowing that he was a married and had a daughter. She found in Lakshman someone caring and loving with whom she could talk and discuss anything. Kisses, love making and intellectual inputs reinforced their resolution to cling each other against the tougher social and personal front. It was as much as swimming against current. Their visit at Kotli helps them to understand each other in every way. Her excitement and dedicated love towards Lakshman, she expressed unhesitatingly:

…until I met Lakshman, and talked and connected with his kindred spirit, and said goodnight and I found myself flooded with the sense that I was missing something so bad I could taste it. (p.21)

In their consistent visits, they used to share everything. Their talks range from culture, history, politics and the ritual of marriage in India. Their relationship develop to such a passionate extent that Lakshman at times thinks of deserting his wife Geetha for Priscilla with whom he plans to shift to America. But the age old tradition, desists him from doing so and he confesses this to Priscilla. Tharoor, through the confession of Lakshman, represents an indebted nostalgia of an Indian husband not only for his wife and daughter but also for his own country, his own motherland:

…forgive me, but I must end our relationship. I love you but I cannot leave my wife, my daughter, my job, my country, my whole life, for my love. (p.239)

Priscilla accepts it and plans to leave India after meeting Lakshman for the last time at Kotli. She believes that, their shared love would be strong enough to pull Lakshman out of his placid marriage; however, she fails to understand the sustenance that Lakshman derives from the stable arrangement of a traditional Indian family. The last meeting with Lakshman proves fatal for her. The fatal error of falling in love with the exoticism, that Lakshman suggests but only partially embodies, makes her remorseful. In a letter to her friend Cindy, Priscilla writes expressing her nostalgic feelings for Lakshman:

…loving Lakshman filled every pore of my being; it gave me a sense of attachment, not just to a man, but to this land. (p.242)

Tharoor presents the existing hypocrisy in the institution of marriage, in India, through brief but heartrending relationship of Lakshman and Priscilla. The relationship makes the readers to question and ponder themselves over the issue of marriage in India. However Geetha, Lakshman’s wife finds out about her husband’s affair with Priscilla. She visits the Shiv Mandir on every Saturday, where Swamiji resides. To get rid of the problem she speaks to Swamiji:

…what can I do Swamiji? I cannot talk to him about this it would kill me if I had to tell him what I knew! I can only turn to God, Swamiji, and to you. Please conduct a special puja for me to help me keep my husband. (p.227)

Tharoor opens up an Indo-nostalgic vista of the superstitious attitude of a traditional wife and her commitment towards her filial duties. An Indian woman is always ready to save and protect her family from defamation. She leaves every problem to God to resolve, keeping an intense faith and bhakti in him. At the same time, Tharoor through the portrayal of Geetha, remarks another facet of Indo-nostalgia, that is, an Indian strong faith of fatalism on which the people build the castles of their lives and achievements. Geetha is ready to pay any amount to relieve her husband from the amorous shackles of Priscilla:

…I don’t care about the expense; I don’t care how you do it. Use tantra, do the tandavaa, use anyone and anything you want, Swamiji, but please don’t let this foreign devil-woman with my husband. (p.227)

It sounds quite abnormal but it has been and still is a pertinent attitude of an Indian woman however she may be educated. Indian women are intensely nostalgic, tradition and family bound. On the other side, Priscilla is very eager to create her own world with Lakshman, with an insensible attitude about his married life. She convinces Lakshman boldly:

…I don’t care whether you lived in a thatched hut with no running water or grew up in a mansion. I don’t care if your parents drove a Mercedes or brushed their teeth with twigs. I love you. Not your family, not your village, not your caste, not your background, only I love you. And that’s all matters to me. (p.89)

Priscilla is aware of the high tides on the mental horizon of Lakshman, yet she kept on providing him the ventilation he so badly needed. She conveniently overlooks the vital distinction between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’. According to her mother, Priscilla had the tendency to see things in people, which they did not see in themselves. At another level, Priscilla is well aware of the destiny this relationship held for her. Priscilla herself admits the same, in her note to Lakshman:

You have not taken a risk in this relationship, at all. But I have. It was my risk to take, to fall in love with a married man, and I did, and I take full responsibility for it. I’m sorry about that ink splotch; I am crying as I write this. But I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I want your love, not your pity. (p.207)

It is the western image of Lakshman which attracts Priscilla who talks, writes, reads and thinks in the way, he desires. Their love develops against all adverse conditions. They create their world of caring each other through their regular and consistent visits. But their love, rather than providing them pleasure and peace of mind puts both of them in tremendous confusion and mental strain. Priscilla, in a state of dismay, conceals herself about her idea of true love and sensuality.

…through sex he found love and in love he found confusion, uncertainty, fear. Whereas I loved him from almost the first moment and felt nothing but certainty about him. The sex was just a means of expressing my love, a way of giving myself to the man I loved. (p.242)

Priscilla is baffled at the very notion of Indian marriage. She is against the idea of marrying someone whom you don’t know. In her opinion, to marry someone on the consent and selection of elders from the family cannot be the basis of lifetime commitment. So she does not expect it from Lakshman, since he was an educated and western in outlook. She feels regretful when she finds that, the man whom she loves from the bottom of her heart had no room for her due to the pressures of Indian customs. She felt that he has failed to understand her love. She calls Lakshman as ‘Mr. Right in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ All this results into the parting of loved ones, she admits in a state of nostalgic repent and repress:

…I saw so much in Lucky – a good man in a bad marriage, someone capable of love who had no opportunity to love until I came along, a man who hadn’t seen his own unhappiness fully until he met me. With me I think he realized for the first time that he hadn’t truly known love in his life and that could find happiness loving and being loved. Happiness, of course, at a price. A price that in the end he was not prepared–with his upbringing, his sense of his responsibilities, his inability to escape from Indian society–to pay. (p.241)

Tharoor paints through his innovative skill, the love of a father for his daughter in a purely Indo-nostalgic cast. It is Rekha, the daughter of Lakshman, who holds her father from deserting his family during the course of his intense love for Priscilla. Symbolically speaking, Tharoor has used the name ‘Rekha’ to suggest a line of control. Priscilla was aware of only one identity about Lakshman, that he was a passionate lover. Besides, he was a man of multiple identities, husband, father, District Magistrate, Hindu and a poet. Moreover, Lakshman plays a role of protagonist in the novel. He goes on quoting knowingly or unknowingly about her in the madness. In their first meet, the prevailing consciousness makes him aware that he should not do this being a married and responsible man. But as time passes, their consistent visits become a convention, a regular pattern for love making. He is attracted so intensely that her idea of leaving India creates panic in him. However, he is so habitual with her that he can no longer imagine himself without her even for a week. Expressing his intense nostalgic feelings for Priscilla, he says that, for him, she is:

…a consolation, she is escape, but she is more than that; she is a fantasy come true, the possibility of an alternate life. (p.155)

He gets so obsessed with her consolation that even at times, he thinks of quitting the job and family and moving to America for her. His nine loveless years with his wife Geetha, might be the cause of his attraction towards her. Sex plays a pivotal role in bringing them close. Geetha has a different feeling towards sex, she neither ignites nor welcomes, she is to endure rather than enjoy in a traditional way, an Indian woman does with her husband, ‘Husband as a God’. On the other hand, for Priscilla, it is a joy, a celebration, for which she gives as much as she takes. Thus, pleasure of sex becomes a carnal discovery for him with an endless delight.

Despite of all these passionate matters developed with her, Lakshman determines to end the relationship. He is not ready to give up his house, his country, his job, his wife and his beloved daughter Rekha, for Priscilla. It is his intense love and affection for his daughter, which withdraws him back from doing these things. His love for Rekha, wins over the love for Priscilla. He realises his filial responsibility and nostalgia:

…I realized, then that I could not deny these to her and still feel myself a worthy human being. That having brought her into the world, I had a responsibility, an obligation, to see her through those difficult years of growing up, secure in the environment of a predictable two-parent family structure. And that if I failed to fulfill this obligation in pursuing my own happiness, I would in fact, find no happiness at all. (p.240)

Priscilla’s unnatural and sudden death comes as a blow to Lakshman, retching his soul, heart and mind. It was Gurinder, who helped Lakshman to hide her identity by suppressing Priscilla’s scrapbook and her postmortem report. Besides, Gurinder, being a close friend of Lakshman conceals Priscilla’s pregnancy to prevent him from getting involved in a sex scandal; which could have cost him his job and defamation. Priscilla’s murder mystery is later resolved by pointing arrows of suspicion towards a number of characters. It could be Makhan Singh or it could be Ali, who swore to kill her or it could also be those responsible for the riot or even the Swami. But Lakshman blames it on ‘communal passion.’ Lakshman thinks that, his last meeting with her was necessary for she has something to tell him. Lakshman’s journal written under her intense nostalgia dated a month later reads:

Zalilgarh is burning, but she is oblivious of it, forgetting the world in her desire to see me. Her body is full of sentences waiting to be spoken, of moments yet unlived, soft and heavy as if awakening from a sleep of lingering dreams. She waits, as the darkness gathers around her like a noose…night falls on her like a knife…she would have fought furiously. She had one more reason to live…Gurinder had to suppress in the post mortem. She was carrying my child. (p. 265)

Thus, the ill-fated romance of Priscilla and Lakshman serves a much larger purpose in the novel to expose nostalgic feelings of love. It provides the limited and manageable context through which Tharoor poses questions about cultural identity and presents an impassioned plea for understanding and tolerance among cultures. On a large scale, Priscilla represents symbolically a western helping hand eager to improve the social conditions in India, being obsessed with the love for the land. At the same time, Tharoor’s mouthpiece Lakshman represents bureaucracy, which fails to form a cordial relationship with this western influence. Priscilla explores the rigid social conditions of India and questions the validity of the age-old traditions with utter superstitious blindness and ignorance. The institution of marriage is thread-barely condemned by Priscilla. Moreover, the social centers are considered for their inefficiency rather than work. In a symbolic way, this helping hand is killed with brutality in an age old ‘Kotli’. Kotli, in a sense, represents India, with glimpses of glorious past with a mirror ‘pitted back with age in places’, haunted, full of myths and legends. In an interview with Behal Suchita, on ‘cultural collisions’, Tharoor (Behal, 2001) exposes and emphasises why he chose an American girl’s love for married Lakshman:

… because a foreigner comes with a certain level of both innocence and a lack of understanding that helps illuminate for those who are trying to read a story like this.