Religious Carnage and Shattered Lives:
Hariharan’s Fugitive Histories
Dr. Pramod Kumari
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Engineering College
Bharatpur, Rajasthan,
India
Abstract:
The present paper
explores the reasons of divisions among people divided on communal lines arisen
out of the happening of 2002 Gujarat Carnage and its aftermath on both the
communities involved in the clashes. The narrative of the fictional work Fugitive Histories brinks on the edge
of incidents of post 2002 Gujarat and the pang and plight in the life of its
protagonist Mala and the secondary character her daughter Sara and a girl named
Yasmin. Karl Marx’s dictum “religion as opium of masses” is quite visible here
which distracts the coherent and harmonious making of a nation. The extreme
animosity among both the communities gives rise to hatred. The split on the
basis of Bhabha’s “Heterogeneity” is quite visible here. It is the innocent who
always pay the price doesn’t matter who are the agitators.
Keywords: Carnage,
Religion, Aftermath, Human Lives, Animosity
Shashi Tharoor states in India Shastra:
The remarkable aspect of India’s cultural
heritage is how it continues to suffuse so many aspects of our lives even today.
Our geography, our festivals, even the names we give ourselves and our children
often have associations of mythological antiquity and significance. Indian
culture is marked by an unparalleled sense of diversity and Civilizational
continuity. Our heritage is not restricted to hidebound relics, it is a living
history in which we partake every day of our lives. (Tharoor 202)
India is a country with religious and
cultural diversities as well as political, social and economic situation of the
people in the region are equally varied. Specifically narcissistic view in
religion gives rise to prejudices in the minds of people about the other
religions and religious faiths. They adhere to their religious beliefs
stringently because it brings hope and consolation to many people.
Nevertheless, people become extremely sentimental about their religion and
religious matters that they fail to respect the other’s religion like their
own. This possibly sparks religious tension and conflict. People become fanatic
to the extent that they resort to violence. It is quite obvious from the 2002
Gujarat Carnage. Although Secularism and Humanitarianism is being talked about
in abundance but sectarian politics on petty titles like religion, caste,
region etc reigns supreme over all concerns.
This complexity and the difficulty of
defining religion and religious belief are illustrated by the still developing
history of the protection of freedom of religion or belief in the context of
international human rights. Hindu-Muslim divisions are already laid down with
the Partition of India -in India & Pakistan in 1947 and further in India
& Bangladesh in 1971. Even politics of the nation-state remains incomplete
without involving Muslim vote-bank or hurting or arousing religious sentiments
of one religion to win the elections. It was best seen in 1991 PM’s Elections
when the issue of Ram Janmbhoomi temple was brought to the fore by Bharatiya
Janta Party. It resulted in 1992 Babari- Masjid demolition and more than that
many human-beings lost their lives from both communities. This snowballed in
yet carnage in Godhara city of Gujarat in 2002 where Hindus coming from
Ayodhaya were burnt alive in the coach of the Sabarmati Express.
Githa Hariharan’s Fugitive Histories is based on 2002 Gujarat Riots and its aftermath
and the apprehension and trauma it left on people’s mind and the normalcy in
life. The 2002 Gujarat pogrom is the biggest Hindu-Muslim communal violence in
the history of post-Independence India responsible for taking lot many human lives.
The torch up of the Godhra train resulted in communal riots between both the
communities. On 27 Feb.2002 at Godhara city in the state of Gujarat, the
Sabarmati Express train was attacked by a large Muslim mob in a conspiracy as
seen by Justice Nanavati and declared by the Court. As a result 58 Hindu
pilgrims, mostly women and children of ladies’ compartment returning from
Ayodhya were killed.
The attack prompted retaliatory massacres
against Muslims and communal riots on a large scale in which 790 Muslims and
254 Hindus were killed and 223 more people were reported missing. A.G. Noorani
in Frontline weekly, (publication of The Hindu) and The Hindu itself in its various editorials ever after, call the
riots a ‘pogrom’, genocide and a massacre when its own reporter reported that
Muslims too were on the offensive, as early as 1st March 2002.
Githa Hariharan was born in Coimbatore and
grew up in Bombay and Manila; she now lives in New Delhi. Hariharan is a
versatile writer; she writes novels, short stories, essays, newspaper articles
and columns. She has written five novels till now. Her first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night (1992) won
the Commomwealth Writer’s Prize in 1993. Her other works include The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1994), When Dreams Travel (1999), In Times of Siege (2003) and Fugitive Histories (2009). Githa
Hariharan has also edited a volume of stories in English translation from four
major South Indian Languages, A Southern
Harvest (1993) and co-edited a collection of stories for children Sorry, Best Friend!(1997). Hariharan’s
fiction has been translated into a number of languages including French,
Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Greek, Urdu and Vietnamese; her essays and
fiction have also been included in anthologies such as Salman Rushdie’s Mirror
work: 50 Years of Indian Writing1947-1997.
Hariharan also writes a column for the major Indian newspaper The Telegraph. She has been Visiting
Professor or Writer-in-Residence in several universities worldwide, including
Dartmouth College, George Washington University and the University of
Canterbury at Kent. She was an NTU-NAC writer in Residence (international) at
Nanyang Technological University in Singapore from January to July 2015.
Hariharan has also been visiting professor or writer-in-residence in several
countries over the years. She is not only a feminist writer but also truly a great chronicler of her times as she
covers a variety of themes and ancient myths in her novels. Though she doesn’t
like to be named as a Woman writer because she believes that is pigeonholing a
writer, yet she calls herself a feminist, along with several other things. As
Khushwant Singh puts across, ‘Hariharan writes with anguish, pain and anger
about what is happening to our country’. (The Hindustan Times 26 July 2022 )
When people on religious terms come to
conflict mostly as a result of power politics played with them, their
sentiments are aroused on the name of religion. This gives rise to disruptions
in the national life or character of a nation and hinder the smooth progress of
the nation. Aptly the 2002 Gujarat pogrom well exemplifies it and the sufferer
in Githa Hariharan’s Fugitive Histories
is Mala’s family. Mala’s home in
Delhi is empty, save for a lifetime of sketches left behind by her late husband
Asad and the memories these evoke. Shifting through them on restless afternoons
and sleepless nights, Mala, one of the main female protagonists in the novel,
summons ghosts from her childhood, relives the heady days of love and optimism
when Asad and she jointly defied social conventions robustly to build a life
together- and struggles to understand how events far removed could so easily
snatch away the certainties they had always taken for granted.
As their story unfolds others emerge: of
Sara, Mala and Asad’s daughter, who is unable to commit to a cause that will
renew her faith on her parent’s ideals and her own, embarks on a search for
purpose that brings her from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, the venue of recent Carnage.
Of Yasmin, whom Sara meets across a lately created ‘border’, a survivor of
mayhem secretly dreaming of college and the miraculous return of her missing
brother, Akbar, as she navigates menacing by lanes to reach her school safely
every day. Of innumerable other lives trapped in limbo-some caught in a mesh of
memory, anguish and hate; others speaking release in private dreams and valiant
hopes.
The story moves in past and present with
stream of consciousness. Mala comes to Mumbai from her higher studies; she
visits Dilkush Mansion (her friend Nasreen’s house) and meets Asad, an artist.
Asad believes in the equality of religion and marries Mala a Hindu. Mala’s
parents oppose their marriage so Mala elopes with Asad. Her parents cry-‘you’re
killing us! You’ll marry this man, this foreigner, and you’ll be lost to us,
you’ll kill us!’ (Hariharan 69)
After some years, Mala’s parents accept her
marriage and call her home with a sort of reluctance.
One of Mala’s great grandaunt comes to meet Mala, which further
irritates her mother –“I hope you’re happy; Mala’s mother said bitterly as she
prepares for the visit. She throws a new silk sari at Mala. I hope you’re
satisfied everyone is talking about us. Now this horrible woman is coming to
look at us like we’re animals in the zoo”. (Hariharan 73)
To have a last meeting at her departing
grandmother, Mala, with Asad, visits her village where they are welcomed in an
altered way because she married a Muslim. Against her parents’ wishes, Mala has
become almost famous…for having eloped with a Muslim. (Hariharan 72)
When Mala meets Bala, she seems happy – ‘you and I beat them’ she
gloats. ‘You married him. I couldn’t escape this place but I’ve lived longer
than that old bastard boss. We’ve won.’(Hariharan76)
Going through Asad’s sketchbooks, Mala find
one of the Year 2002 “There’s a caption below the drawing and, again; a date. Broken Home, February 2002. There’s no
doubt what the date refers to. It’s the year Gujarat burnt, the month it burnt
into flames.” (Hariharn 198) Mala remembers the evening they listened the news
about the Gujarat Pogrom, everybody was frightened and deeply hurt, and so was
Mala. But Mala is not a Muslim thus Asad and his relatives may have thought
that she can’t feel the way, all of them are feeling.
Mala’s daughter, Sara and son, Samar also
face many problems from their childhood because of mix parentage i.e. Hindu
mother and Muslim father. They suffer the identity crisis. Their friend’s
always make fun of them in the school. Samar’s friend, Prakash scorns his
tiffin because he is a Muslims- ‘He said Samar’s tiffin box smells.’(Hariharan
20) Samar gets frustrated because of such incidents. Though he has a tomato
sandwich in his lunch box, but Prakash is prejudiced and smells of meat.
Sara moves to Ahmedabad from Mumbai. There
during their tour of the city they wanted to know the firsthand evidence. They
enter a building. There is a thin girl Yasmin, who is the third female.
Yasmin’s story is as follows written by Sara:
Yasmin, seventeen years old. Yasmin’s father
had a shop downstairs in the house where they used to live. Yasmin’s mother
used to be a housewife, now an NGO helps her and other women in the area sell
the skirts they stitch and embroider. Yasmin’s brother was in college when the
trouble started, he did not come back home. He’s still missing. Her father was
forced to sell their house for whatever he could get and move to a safe area.
He’s trying to set up a small business, but is often sick. Yasmin is in the
last year of school. She wants to go to college, but she failed her boards last
year. (Hariharan 114)
The little girl Yasmin has very traumatic effect of the post 2002
carnage. “Across the city, across the border, Yasmin lies in bed, waiting for
sleep to find her.” (Hariharan 114) Yasmin’s brother Akbar is still missing.
The missing lives in all kinds of places. (Hariaharan 144)
Yasmin also reminisces her past and not able to come out of that
‘Memories are what she remembers now and
then, what makes her sad only for a while when she remembers. But Akbar, the
house, the shop, their lives, these can’t be memories because they are there
with her, with them, all the time. They are part of them, they have become
Ammi’s tight Heart and Abbas’s coughing lungs. And the long curving scar on
Yasmin’s thigh that none can see though she knows it’s there. (Hariharan 144)
There are other eyewitnesses of the post 2002 havoc and massacres in
Gujarat. The another incident goes in this way-
The pregnant girl from upstairs Zakia
suddenly speaks up in a wheezy voice that lets her speak only a few words at a
time. “I saw it with my own eyes. The little boy next-door. They poured petrol
in his mouth. They put a lit matchstick into his mouth as if it was a lollipop.
He just burst.” (Hariaharn 159)
The violence eschewed post riots tears down public there in Gujarat.
“It’s strange being hated. Yasmin wants to cover her ears but she doesn’t. It’s
so strange, seeing a little boy being hated.” [Hariharan 159]. A nation has all
dimensions attached to it such as linguistic, ethnic, cultural, religious,
geographic, spiritual and political. The violent acts on national scenario are
absolutely contrary to literary theorist Ernest Renan definition of nation:
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.
Two things which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual
principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in
common of a rich legacy of memories, the other is present day consent, the
desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that
one has received in an undivided form. Man does not improvise. The nation, like
the individuals, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice and
devotion. (19)
It seems from reading of this literary piece that the Muslim man Asad
also perceives the same about nation. But he becomes a victim of communally
hyper active powers.
Asad had a very clear vision about religion
before the pogrom of Gujarat. The word ‘Secular’ resonates in his mind and he
feels proud of it and considers all religion to be equal. But 2002 Gujarat
pogrom shattered his Secularism because he will always be a Muslim until others
are prejudiced and biased. He can be part of every other religion but others
simply consider him a Muslim i.e. an outsider. There are a few who do not
believe that Muslims are also Indians because of formation of Pakistan for
Muslims, though they are provided with equal rights in the country. Gujarat
pogrom is the result of these biases. Muslims were burnt, slaughtered, raped,
and thrown out of their houses and properties just because they were Muslims
and incident of Godhara train burning for which a hatred for the community
emanates. Otherwise there was no mistake they had done for which they were
penalized. Asad deeply feels the pain and his faith in equality of religion is
broken completely after the carnage in Gujarat.
He strives hard to draw the sketches to
describe the pogrom of Gujarat in his sketchbook. After February 2002, he is
changed, now he talks less. His heart is weakened with each passing day. He
stops interacting with Mala as well, instead he whiles most of his time in his
studio, focusing over his drawings. He expresses this pain to Mala-“We’ve
marched all our lives and nothing has changed. Or it’s changed for the worse.”
(Hariharan 215)
He is depressed, his chest can’t bear the
pain of cruelties, and in a state of depression, and he stops listening to the
news and going outside of his house. Although Mala tries her best to console
Asad’s broken heart; but fails. He develops heart disease and eventually one
morning, he is found dead in his bed because of heart failure. His life ends
here with a broken Mala behind.
It is quite obvious that religious
animosities among two communities lead to victimization of one by the other and
vice-versa which is insensitive to their needs and aspirations. A community may be even subjected to
dehumanizing experiences because of being degraded and humiliated and made to
feel powerless. They are the victims of violence because of their low rung
power status, Minority institutions such as places of worship , housing
localities , schools and cemeteries, have been the target of destruction,
burning and violence.
The 2002 Gujarat riots remain the pivot of Fugitive Histories, it goes much further
into the past and tries to trace the root cause of the divide between these two
communities, the point at which people move from accepting the other to
abhorring the other. It suggests that it is easy enough to create a situation
where people lose their bearings, hunt down those who are perceived as alien;
and work to deepen existing conflicts. Unable to bear the trauma of his
father’s death, Sara’s brother Samar gives up everything that his parents, Mala
and Asad, had tried to inculcate in him, grows a beard and finds a surface
bonding with Islamic fundamentalism.
Noor Zaheer in her review of the Fugitive Histories states that –
Fugitive Histories is about people picking up
threads from the point where man- made upheavals have left them. It is a
journey back in time. It is the story of Mala, …
After the attacks, Mala goes through Asad’s
sketches and comes to see the reasons why he gave way to the inner turmoil that
had shaken all that he believed in, loved, stood for and thought was
indestructible. She suddenly comprehends the reasons why his inner colours had
faded and his sketchbook had gone blank.
Her daughter Sara moves to Mumbai to pursue
her career in film industry. Later on she comes to Ahmedabad, Gujarat to shoot
for her film. There in the rehabilitation camp, women-the only survivors of the
carnage-are giving a group interview for Sara’s film, words recreate the
horrors that people have gone through in 2002 Godhara riots. These are the
horrors that have bruised their bodies and souls.
The book is about three cities, Delhi, Mumbai
and Ahmedabad. Remarkably, a woman embodies each city. Hariharan uses a number
of vehicles in creating this canvas to navigate through time. (source)
Air, water, wind and even the shade of the
tree- where Sara, Asad and Mala’s daughter, along with Yasmin, a survivor of
the riots, sit and talk- are all employed to transcend time and space, recreate
settings and provide links to the present.
People are usually prejudiced about the faith
of others which sometimes lead to riots. A research scholar has written about
prejudice that those who are possessed with a prejudice are possessed with a
devil and one of the worst kinds of devils, for it shuts out the truth, and
often leads to devastating error. As John Mac duff writes in Christians Pathway-
“Prejudice is the conjuror of imaginary
wrongs, strangling truth, over-powering reason, making strong people weak, and
weak people weaker. God gave us the large-hearted charity which bearth all
things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, which
thinketh no evil!”
The same is with religious prejudices when
one takes one’s religion as supreme one can go to any extent to kill humanity.
The pitiable and plighted situation of Mala is quite obvious from the Fugitive Histories where Muslim
community passes through a traumatic experience. Her dismantled family world is quite
noticeable from the following excerpt:
Her ears fill with fan’s monotonous whispers.
There is more than one past. There are many pasts that lay claim to her
stirring up the air with incessant murmurs. There is for instance, another
family she is part of, a family as different as possible from the old one.
(Hariharan 19)
The lines resonate with aftermath life of Mala due to carnage. In review
of Fugitive Histories, M. Ronak Soni writes:
Marked by an astonishing clarity of
observation and deep compassion, Fugitive
Histories exposes the legacy of prejudice that, sometimes insidiously,
sometimes perceptibly, continues to affect disparate lives in present day
India. In prose that is at once elegant, playful and startlingly inventive,
Githa Hariharan portrays with remarkable precision the web of human connections
that binds as much as it divides.
The communal division and followed human killings touche Sara, Mala and
Asad’s daughter, who lives in Mumbai and works in an NGO. She is working there
on a film script named City skyline,
a film produced by her friend Nina. The script of the movie is also based on
the recent happening in Gujarat. It reads like this:
On 27th
February 2002 the Sabarmati express was attacked in Godhara station in Gujarat
and two of its carriages set on fire. The train was carrying Hindu activists on
their way back from Ayodhya. Godhara is a ‘Muslim locality’. In the days and
weeks that followed, the Muslims of Gujarat became the target of brutal
violence. The statements of survivors, eyewitnesses and relief workers suggest
that state officials and the police connived with the attackers. (Hariharan 42)
The riots resonate in the text with twice occurring effect. Nina skips,
goes down to the section she has already got Sara to smarten up for earlier
applications.
To this day the dispossessed of Gujarat live
in ‘safe areas’- Muslims ghettos – without civic amenities. In Ahmedabad; for
instance, people who used to be part of the city’s life- bakers, auto drivers,
shopkeepers, engineers, school teachers – are now refugees in their own city.
(Hariharan 42)
People’s lives there were completely at chaos and disturbance. Both the
friends try to channelize the grief.
In their
own country, adds Nina, hits the enter key sharply, then scrolls down the
page to OBJECTIVE.
The documentary will tell the stories of some
of these people in their own voice. What happened to them in 2002, what the
state government did (or didn’t do) to rehabilitate them, and how these people
are now trying to rebuild their lives. (Hariharan 42)
Through the script of the movie by Sara the visuals of 2002 Pogrom occur
to one’s mind and touch the psyche.
In a nation like, India which has deep-rooted
spiritual and moral values, people feel for their fellow countrymen and share
their sufferings, horrifying and goose bump arousing incidents like Gujarat
pogrom shattered humanity deeply where International Human Rights Commission
has to look into the matter and respond to sufferers. People of Muslim
community were homeless, someone fatherless like Samar and Sara of Fugitive Histories, someone missing,
women’s dignity destroyed like Yasmin. Laila, Sara’s childhood friend, is burnt
to death with her husband when Mumbai erupted. Sara wants to research on the
causes of killings based on religious prejudices. Sara is both –Muslim as well
as Hindu. Laila was a very beautiful girl and everyman saw in her was beauty,
but during Mumbai eruption “all she had in their eyes, was religion”. [Hariharan53]
Laila was killed because she was a Muslim. Sara sometimes gets depressed to
think about her identity. She is totally confused what to adopt as her
religion.
“If she ever, wanted to change her last name,
drop the Zaidi; she could be Vaidyanathan like her mother or Shaw like her
boyfriend. Sara Zaidi could become Sara Vaidyanathan, take a break from one
half of herself and try out the other. Or she could leave herself behind
entirely turn into Sara Shaw. But that sounds terrible, like steam escaping
from a pressure cooker. She could, of course array much baggage as possible.
Call herself SaraVaidyanathan Zaidi Shaw”. (Hariharan 39-40)
Asad may have told us we’re not Muslim or
Hindu, but the rest of the world only has to hear our last name. Anyway I’m
happy to be seen as a Muslim, I want to be one. (Hariharan 99)
After the 2002 riots in Gujarat, Ahmedabad is
divided by a new border: it is assumed that within this border Muslims are
safe, but if they traverse the border they should be heedful of their refuge.
The writer Githa Hariharan explains the border in her language, “ They call
this border,” Nina tells Sara as they cross a highway, reach an area that is a
bizarre mix of bungalows, short and tall building many hovels; too many hovels.
‘And some call this area mini Pakistan.” (Hariharan 110)
The police instead of helping them, made fun
of their misery and enjoy their grief. When Yasmin’s father was searching his
son the policemen instead of co-operating with them to find their son rather
make fun of them and hurt their feelings. Hariharn throws light on the
cruelties of people when Yasmin’s father searches his son Akbar among the dead
bodies-
“Abba spent all his time visiting the places
where the corpses were piling up. He had never seen anything like it before,
the parade of body after body that bore so little resemblance to a real body.
To a human being, even a dead one. It’s the first time Abba saw that being dead
meant being out. It meant missing a body part-an arm, leg, even a head. It’s
the first time Abba saw that being dead could also mean a new body part had
grown overnight to stick out of the old body: an iron rod or a hammer or a
wooden stump or a screwdriver. There was one body with its belly torn open; a
spear stuck out of it like a sharp edged hand calling for help. Another body
was just burnt coal. If you touched it, it would fall apart, crumble into a
small heap of gritty black power. Abba don’t know how the others managed to
recognize fathers , mothers , sisters and brothers; people, in these monstrous discolored lumps of flesh bloated; burnt
or cut to pieces. Sometimes it was only
bits of clothes they had to identify.” (137)
Yasmin is terror stricken after the incident
but still not broken inside. She decides to continue her study, become
independent and leave that place. She hated that place. She dreams to be free
one day and live happily as an independent citizen of her country but always
having a fear because of herself being a Muslim.
Although whatever may happen i.e. riot, massacre,
bloodshed but national consciousness always remains in a person’s psyche when
he/ she starts thinking in the broader context. ‘My grandmother was,’ says
Sara. ‘I have Muslim relatives and Hindu relatives. I’m neither. Sometimes I
think I’m Indian. But most of the time I’m just Sara.’(Hariharan 167). This is
making of nation. A person can never bereft himself of his national identity.
National consciousness occurs and reaches to humanity at large.
Sara after returning to Mumbai reads some of
her jottings from the sufferer’s mouth in Ahmedabad. These go like this-
What do you call what happened here in 2002? Just communal violence, the
bland, zipped up phrase the government prefers? Or danga, riots? But it is all
too obvious these were not riots. Then there are those slightly desperate
phrases journalists cooked up. Dance of
death, Season of Hate, Inferno of hate and horror. But we have
to call it what it was, we have to use hard words even if they are frightening.
Pogrom. State – sponsored terror. Carnage. The Gujarat Carnage. (Hariharan 234)
Sara gets shattered by the frightening and
howling dance of death post 2002 carnage.
As usual there are too many voices pulling
this way and that. Sara thinks she understands what is being said, but she
doesn’t know what she is supposed to do, she can only feel, and what is the use
of feeling, what good did ever do? She still has no idea how to turn what she
saw and heard- and what she feels – into a script, or any other piece of
writing. And she has no idea how to let all these stories, other people’s
stories that are becoming hers, teach her who she is, what she is. It’s simpler
to get her mind round Yasmin; what Yasmin will do now, what Yasmin will do now,
what Yasmin will do next. Only, she has to promise herself she will not let
Yasmin down. For Yasmin’s sake, but also for her own sake, and Asad’s sake.
Laila’s sake. Samar’s and Mala’s sake. ( Hariharan 234)
The novel does not have happy resonances to
provide some relief to the unrelieved darkness of the Gujarat Carnage.
There is a 2008 Hindu Political thriller film
Firaaq set one month after the 2002
violence in Gujarat, India and looks at the aftermath in its effects on the
lives of everyday people. Firaaq means both separation and quest in Arabic. It
claims to be based on “a thousand true stories”. Firaaq follows the life
of several ordinary people, some who were victims, some silent observers, and
some perpetrators one month after the 2002 violence in Gujarat. It focuses on
how their lives are affected and changed. The story is set over a twenty-four
hour period one month after carnage that took place in Gujarat, India in 2002.
This religious violence killed more than 900
Muslims and 300+ Hindus, hundreds of thousands were made homeless and the
number of women raped is still unknown as per the recorded data.
Post – colonial theorist Bhabha’s
interpretation can aptly be applied to communal splits and divisions in the
society. Bhabha says that question is “not simply the ‘selfhood of nation as
opposed to the otherness of other nations’. We are confronted with the nation
split within it, articulating the heterogeneity of its people.”(Bhabha 98) It
can be on the basis of margins, minorities or diasporic communities and these
polyphonics/ multiple narratives jostle for space in the arena of national
representation. These voices contest contradict and complement each other and
what results is no cacophony (discordant voices) but the essential composite
nature of the collectivity called nation.
Works Cited
Primary Source
Hariharan,
Githa. Fugitive Histories. New Delhi:
Viking/Penguin Press, 2009. Print.
Secondary Sources
Bhabha, Homi K. Ed. Nation and Narration. Routledge: London, 1990. Rpt. 1999. Print.
Hariharan, Githa. In Times of Siege. New Delhi: Penguin, 2004.
Print.
Tharoor, Shashi. India Shashtra:
Reflections on the Nation in Our Time. Aleph Book Company: New Delhi, 2005. Print.
Internet Sources
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south_asia/4543177.stm>. BBC News. 2005-05-13. Web.
Firraq<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1263679>
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