Living
Through History-Kesavan’s LOOKING
THROUGH
GLASS
Fasiha Sultana
The colonial
situation generated social and political ferment in the country. A writer
sensitive to these vibrations tried to recreate or re-interpret the past.
Initially his effort took the shape of historical romance. When life is seen
and evaluated in the context of history and historical personages become the
characters, the historical novel takes shape.1 Then with the rise of
the freedom movement, the writer began using events from the contemporary
history. As R. K. Dhawan reflects, “the growth of the historical novel
coincided with the intensification of the struggle for Indian freedom
especially after the first world war.”2 The post nineteen forty seven novels dropped the garb of romance,
and incorporated history, politics and culture using fantasy, satire and
humour.
Mukul
Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass incorporates the tremendous Indian past
with the present. Kesavan uses the accumulated facts to tell about the past and
recapture a bygone era from the vantage point of the present accessible to
one’s observation. He constructs a picture that is partly a narration of
events, partly a description of situations, an exhibition of motives and an
analysis of characters. It is a powerful novel set in the troubled forties—the
era of India’s partition and independence. The novel is deeply concerned with
the politics of the Indian subcontinent and presents with an exceptional honesty
the realities of the public history.
Kesavan
teaches history. He brings his knowledge of history to his creative writing.
Speaking about the tasks of a novelist and a historian R.G. Collingwood says,
“the novelist has a single task only: to construct a coherent picture, one that
makes sense. The historian has a double task: he has both to do this, and to
construct a picture of things as they really were and of events as they really
happened.”3 History is full of events, issues and adventures that are
exciting enough. The historian loves the past for its own sake and tries to
enliven it. A novelist creates the life of yesterday by trying to understand
the thoughts and problems of persons and transmuting them into stories. In
order to provide a coherent and meaningful whole the novelist has to
judiciously use the facts of history. Thus a novelist using history re-enacts
the past through an imaginative reconstruction. The historian investigating any
event in the past makes a distinction between what may be called the outside
and the inside of an event. By the outside of the event is
meant everything that can be described in terms of bodies and their movements.
By the inside of the event is meant that which can only be described in
terms of thought. The historian’s work begins by discovering the outside of an
event, and the novelist’s work begins by remembering the event as an action and
his main task is to think himself into this action to discern the thought of
his agent. Kesavan as a historian and novelist uses the accumulated facts to
tell about the past and capture the life of a bygone era. Looking Through
Glass is the story of a number of people who, though acting and reacting
according to their individual nature are caught up in the freedom struggle. Its
narrator is a young photographer unconcerned with history. But history makes
him her own in a literal way and he finds himself in the deep end of nineteen
forty-two. Out of a miraculously intricate web of memories, he improvises a
life, assembles a world, builds a moving story and thus lives through history.
Let me examine the individuals and their human relationships irrespective of
religion, and Kesavan’s use of history in the novel.
The narrator
is a Hindu as we find him traveling in a train carrying his grandmother’s ashes
to be immersed in the holy Ganga, Benaras, according to her will. When the
train makes a halt at river Gomti, the narrator gets down to capture a few
memorable scenes but slips and falls into the river and is saved by Masroor. After
regaining consciousness he finds himself in an old house built before the
mutiny, dislocated both in time and place and is forced to live with the
improbable. He meets several people who give shape and character to his new
life. Ammi is the editor of “Khatoon,” waiting for her vanished husband
Intezaar. She never understands why things need to change. She likes the world
as it is. Masroor her son, considers his father’s disappearance an act of
cowardice. This is evident when he says that his father “instead of helping
India find her way, managed to lose himself.” Masroor remembered Intezaar not
as a gentle father or a vanished pilgrim, but as a “barren poet, an absurd
adult who went round losing himself, a dilettante who had failed to live up to
his future.” Masroor did not wish to repeat history and spent every waking
minute of his life in making the prescribed “destiny of Ganjoos” a reality:
“there
wasn’t a cause or party that he didn’t make his own. He joined the Congress, he
joined the Muslim League. In the elections of 1937 he ran errands for both.
When the two fell out, he stayed with the Congress because Nehru should have
been his father. Now he distrusted all the parties; he just wanted to help keep
the peace.”(31)
Asharfi, his
sister gets bonded into a relationship with Parwana. She expresses her love
through her paintings of “gopikas in Brindavan” with hers and Parwana’s faces.
Haasan, a close friend of Ammi’s family, evidently bears a Muslim name but is a
madhwa Brahmin from a south Indian town of his name. He ran away from the
obsessive, fanatical outlook of his people.
In fact the terms “Hindu and Muslim” appear eclectic and loose when
applied to the characters in the novel. Makhandass inherits Syed Hussain’s
zenana, which becomes his own household. There were unconfirmed rumours
regarding the births of Kalidass and Charandass. Charandass for his love of Urdu becomes Intezaar. Haasan does not
differentiate between both the sects. At the national level are fights,
killings, riots and bloodshed in the name of religion leading to partition. But
at the individual level as the narrator puts it,
. . .like
other secular people in independent India I had been brought up to believe that
Religion was a private matter confined to the inner space between brains and
bowels... I was also taught that differences were unimportant since, we were
all identical in our essential humanity. (175)
The life that
fills the street with bustle, that makes every corner a place of wonder and
interest, the life that is sad and gay, weary and thrilling is captured and the
novelist makes a bygone age live again. He paints the forty’s life as a whole—
not man on his economic side, or man as a political animal, but man in all his
adventures. The narrator sees people, knows them, feels with them, peeps into
the world they live to understand their ways, their humour, their loves and
fears. Apart from the personal histories, Kesavan narrates the collective
history of a people. A series of historical events have been referred to from
time to time like the Satyagraha of 1930, the Civil Disobedience movement, Quit
India movement, Nehru and All India Congress party, Muslim League and its role,
Bengal and Bihar famine of the forties, the partition and the resultant
communal riots. Kesavan treats history
in a simple way. The narrator travels in a bygone era, and the reader follows
him as into a new world, sees what he sees and hears what he says. The age, the
whole life as it then existed is described. Apart from the conscious description
of the background, the peculiar conditions of the moment are also dealt with.
The narrator is a wanderer carried from one incident to another. He lives
through various incidents when in Lucknow. He reaches Benaras after being
caught in a procession trying to capture a rural police outpost at Madhuban.
While in Benaras rescues Parwana who was forced to commit ‘Sati’ on her
husband’s pyre. Parwana was saved by Gyanendra, a priest from Benaras, not out
of solicitude but to be cast in his film ‘Kamasutra.’ She was “ravaged in the
name of realism, then ravished for the sake of fantasy”(200). From there he
reaches Delhi and starts life as a waiter in a hotel. He moves to Simla at the
height of the freedom struggle only to return later. The novel thus is in the form
of a chain of incidents and is pre-eminently descriptive.
To the
characters in the novel, future is a mystery and an unexplored tract. They see
a hundred possibilities and they never know what surprise awaited them. But
paralleling this is the narrator’s constant awareness of history. Kesavan
ironically uses the historical awareness of the narrator to reveal his anxiety
and his feeling of superiority. He thinks:
I didn’t
have to take his word for it. I knew. Jinnah had got his Pakistan well before
the decade was out. On 14August 1947, to be precise, which made Pakistan one
day older than my Republic. My armies had fought three wars with that upstart
state and here was Masroor hoping that the resolution wouldn’t be passed, that
the August movement wouldn’t happen, that Partition wouldn’t come to pass. For
a moment I felt the joyless superiority of a ninety-year-old listening to the
enthusiasms of a child. (38)
Tension is
built between the known and unknown.
I wasn’t
worried for myself. I had been born a Hindu and in Delhi from all accounts it
was mainly Muslims who died...I was just worried for my friends in Lucknow. Not
for Haasan since he was a Hindu too, but for Ammi and Asharfi, and Masroor if they ever found
him. Four years from now 1 could lose them in one of two ways: they could get
killed in Partition riots, or they could choose to leave for Pakistan. (175)
The minute
details likely to be missed by a proper historian are recorded and preserved in
the novel through the first person narratives of the characters and are
emphasized from time to time by the comments of the principal narrator. The
narrator as a waiter meets the principal actors responsible for partition. He
questions Jinnah,
“Sir do
you really want the country partitioned”? Jinnah replies by scribbling a few
words on the paper that reads, “Barristers do not have opinions - they have
briefs.”(177)
History does
not always give us things like these for they are irrecoverable personal
things. But one knows they existed. And these are the very touches that turn
history into a novel.
The narrator
moves along with the historical characters giving one a feel of life of
the times. While he is describing or reflecting or narrating, the age seems
to present itself in its “atmosphere.” It may be a traditional muslim household
or the by-lanes and ghats of Benaras or the British beaurocratic behaviour- all
reflect the times.
Thus the
novel deals with human relationships in society at a significant time in Indian
history.
References
1. Syed Mujeebuddin, The Contexts of History and Art,
M. Phil Thesis, KU, 16.
2. R. K. Dhawan, Three Contemporary Novelists: Khushwant
Singh, Chaman Nahal, Salman Rushdie
(New Delhi: Classical Publishing Company, 1985) vii.
3. R. G. Collinwood, The Idea of History (New York,
OUP, 1956) 246. .
4.
Mukul Kesavan, Looking Through Glass (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1995) 342.
All further references are to this edition.