On 15 August 1947, India gained formal independence from British colonial rule. On the eve of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would soon be India’s first Prime Minister, stated in a now famous speech: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”1 However, the country’s awakening from slumber, from the long histories of colonialism and imperialist subjection to socio-economic and ideological freedom, was not and could not be a smooth one.2 The decade of the 1940s saw several enormous moments of national crisis—the Second World War, the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the communal riots in 1946–1947, and the 1946 naval mutiny in Bombay, just to name a few. The year of independence was bloodied with gruesome violence due to the partition of the colony into two countries, India and Pakistan. In the decades that followed, India would have wars with China and Pakistan, would encounter wide internal discontent surrounding language and caste issues, and agitations from peasants , students and the working classes on issues of food shortage , unemployment, inflation, and poverty. In the 1970s, these crisis conditions would be aggravated by a corrupt Congress Party stewardship led by Indira Gandhi which, in order to save its own image and political priorities, would declare a state of internal emergency in the name of safeguarding democracy from chaos.
The present book looks at the turbulent period of the first thirty years of Indian history after independence, between 1947 and 1977. It does not read these years as isolated from what came before because of the historical rupture of independence. To the contrary, it seeks to understand how the economic and political crisis in the late-colonial period shaped the social conditions and cultural values in the postcolonial aftermath. It reads late-colonial as a temporal marker denoting roughly the second quarter of the twentieth century, shortly before the formal ending of colonialism. Although independence is the nominal break between the late-colonial and the postcolonial, the book argues through a reading of a longer framework of historical crisis and catastrophe , of structures of domination and acts of resistance that there is hardly a notable conceptual or categorical break there. Rather, this whole period appears as a time of crisis-in-continuity.3
The main framework of this book is built around literary works of the three catastrophic events —the 1943–1944 Bengal famine , the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement , and the 1975–1977 Indian emergency . Catastrophe is understood to be “an event causing great and usually sudden damage or suffering.”4 While the term has been recurrently used for environmental issues, I use catastrophe here to mean a historical event resulting in tremendous violence and damage of human and nonhuman lives. I argue that the above-mentioned events are “historical catastrophes” as they are linked with the long-term agrarian and food crisis in India which began from mid-nineteenth century onward with the British colonial changes in agriculture, irrigation, and revenue laws . They have made tremendous impact on life and living in postcolonial India . My understanding of modernity in this book arises from its relation with the colonial-capitalist modernisation programme and its (historical) catastrophic repercussions in the postcolonial period. I employ an original method of reading long-term crisis and its link with catastrophic events here. Drawing variously from Louis Althusser , Fredric Jameson , Shahid Amin , and Veena Das , the book argues that a historical event is as much a crystallisation of a long-term socio-historical crisis as it is an interactive amalgamation of different contemporary spatio-temporal events . Although these events have emerged from a particular crisis and led to related events, they are specific in their nature, character, and orientation. The book further contends that their specificity and relatability can be best understood by the aesthetic and fictional techniques of memorialisation and representation that they have given birth to. A close reading of these fictional techniques, the book posits, can offer us enabling insights into the deeply connected yet highly heterogeneous histories of Indian postcolonial modernity .
The main contention in the book is that novels have represented the relationship between crisis and events through an innovative use of realism . While realist form has been used to address the immediate socio-economic crisis and the dynamics of postcolonial optimism and disillusion, a number of highly experimental and diverse modes have been employed to reproduce the deep impact and the specific nature and orientation of the events. I show here that the choice of these modes which range from melodramatic, metafictional, quest, to urban fantastic , magical realist , critical realist , and others (many of which are conventionally understood as anti-realist or non-realist) is deeply historically shaped. Their experimental condition is marked as much by the form and nature of the events as by the proximity of the novels to them. Because my focus in this book is to study through the diversity of realist modes the orientation and function of catastrophic events and related socio-economic crisis, I group these modes around the events themselves and argue for different sets of realisms coming out of them, such as “disaster realism ,” “critical irrealism ,” and “emergency realism ” in the postcolonial context. Together, I read these realisms as catastrophic realism , which I argue is the aesthetic fabric of catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden vulnerable condition of life and living in postcolonial India .
The Historical Context: The Theory of Modernisation and Modernity
In Modern India (1983), Sumit Sarkar tells us that the process of modernisation in India began in the nineteenth century, as the British started to systematically “underdevelop” India through deindustrialisation and the commercialisation of agriculture in order to turn the flourishing world market of cotton into a raw material for export to Britain.5 After Britain’s restriction on export to India in 1843, factory-machines for cotton production were imported, and agriculture was further commercialised with irrigation, railways, and the telegraph. Bishnupriya Gupta adds that although there was commercialisation of agriculture, irrigation was limited to particular sectors. It did not help the development of the agricultural sector as a whole. The turn to cash-crop production included priorities given to tea, jute, coal, and other profitable resources over those of the foodgrains.6 And, as economic historians such as Amiya Bagchi have argued, there was a strong case of racial discrimination in colonial policy, where the native industrial class’s entry into the production market was limited. Bagchi also reasons that the shift away from manufacturing (handicrafts and small-scale industries) to agriculture and cash crops brought down India’s GDP and curbed its growth.7 The modernisation of industries and agriculture contributed significantly to an unequal and uneven system of growth that made India , though a stable economy even during the mid-twentieth century, into an irredeemably poor one. The consequences were seen in a number of disasters in the late nineteenth century. As Sarkar writes, “The colonial structure, as a whole […] constituted a ‘built-in-depressor’ for India’s agrarian economy. The most obvious indication of this lay in the series of disastrous famines, in the 1870s and again in the late 1890s, the latter wave coinciding with the ravages of plague – while twenty years later even influenza managed to kill off millions.”8
What these studies indicate is that colonial modernisation always and by definition occurs in the “catastrophic” mode. The Bengal famine, with which my chapter readings begin in this book, has direct links with the changes in agricultural production, modernisation, and industrialisation in the colony. The Second World War, accompanied by climactic conditions, corruption among traders, and the operation of speculative capital, aggravated the situation. The post-famine society saw increasing deprivation, oppression, and eviction of the peasants by the landed elite. This resulted in the Tebhaga Movement (1946) in Bengal, which was part of a series of social movements in late-colonial India .9 Tebhaga was followed by a longer armed struggle by the peasants of Andhra Pradesh against the Nizam and the Indian armed forces, known as the Telangana Uprising (1947–1952).10 These insurgencies were organised by the peasants’ and workers’ fronts of the Communist Party, which was also instrumental in organising food movements in the cities in late 1950s and early 1960s. The crises in food and agriculture were escalated by inflation. Jawaharlal Nehru’s death and Indira Gandhi’s rise to power in the mid-1960s marked a shift in politics, especially in her heavy commercialisation of agriculture through the Green Revolution project which had the effect of making already rich farmers even richer. Gandhi’s economic reforms failed to address the wide uneven development in rural India, the unending peasant oppression, the new nexus between the landed elite , political heads, and the police, etc. As the old problems of deprivation and oppression continued, peasants in Naxalbari rose in arms in 1967. The uprising continued for five years until brutally crushed by the state . Soon, Gandhi, unable to tackle the crisis in agriculture, employment, inflation, and economy, and fearful of the rising dissatisfaction with her government, declared a state of emergency to coercively “discipline ” the postcolonial public and to pave the way for “neocolonialism ” in the name of development. Indian postcolonial democracy now entered a new phase of state authoritarianism and regimentation. Ranajit Guha wrote a fiercely critical essay on the emergency measures. In an argument similar to what Frantz Fanon wrote in “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in the late 1950s, Guha contended that true democracy never actually existed in India because decolonisation did not destroy the old colonial state , but only transferred interest and power from the British ruling bodies to the Indian ruling classes . The artificial and state-imposed version of democracy lost credibility when, five years after the l...