This Is Not That Dawn: Jhootha Sach Read Free Page A

women have themselves chosen to love. Their valiant actions in the public sphere are fully matched by their hard-won autonomy in that inner domain which is equally the arena of sexual politics.Correspondingly, it is the men in Yashpal’s scheme of things here who behave abominably (Somraj, Mohan Lal), or give in and resign themselves with a forced cheerfulness to the circumstances (Pandit Girdharilal), or betray weaknesses of character which subject them to moral degeneration, as in the case of the hero Puri and his political patron Sood. There are, of course, a few good men like Ratan and Gill and above all Dr Pran Nath who play positive roles in private and public life and also help and support the women in various ways—and that is how they prove themselves worthy of the women who choose them.
    The novel depicts the gradual fall of the hero, Puri, from his high ideals and principles to devious self-serving practices. In contrast, in what proves to be the central strand of the novel, it also shows the rise of his sister Tara from the depths of the misery and degradation inflicted on her by men to becoming perhaps the most impressively successful of all the fractured and dislocated humans who have been washed upon a strange land and left stranded by the hurricane of history. In her quiet but resolute way, she embodies best the unbreakable spirit of the Punjabi refugee of whom we glimpse numerous other nameless examples inhabiting and indeed swarming the streets and public spaces of Delhi in this populous novel. They are not ‘
sharanarthis’
(refugees) but, as Yashpal calls them, ‘
purusharthi
s’, a term that connotes determined pursuit of a high goal worthy of a true man. In this sense, Tara, with all her innate grace and courtesy, proves herself to be as much of a purusharthi as any man in the novel.
    This is the more remarkable because she has suffered as no other character has in what is virtually a sea of suffering. Her abduction and rape seem to constitute perhaps the nadir of all the cruel and dastardly acts committed in the whole novel—except that she is a little later herded together with a number of other women who, we discover, have suffered a similar or even worse fate as they now sit half-naked and starving in the enclosure where they have been locked up and tell their grievous tales to each other.
Artless Art
    This whole episode, with its multiple narratives of several raped women whom their ill fortune has momentarily brought together, is presented byYashpal in his usual plain prose and seemingly flat style (
sapaatbayani
), with his unblinking narratorial eye not failing to register some little jealousy and class envy among the women even in this extreme situation. But this is because Yashpal tells the whole and unadorned truth with an apparently artless art which is deceptive in its cumulative effect. He appears to follow closely the curve and trajectory of events and to imitate the tenor and sweep of life itself, though this is of course a careful artistic construction. Shortly after the novel was published, Kunwar Narain, a Jnanpith-award winning poet, had acutely enough observed that it lacks any element of poetry and the critic Ram Svarup Chaturvedi has pointed out that in this whole vast narrative, there are few moments when a character stops and reflects on what she or he has experienced. But then, they all seem so constantly buffeted and tossed by the workings of circumstances that they are busy enough just keeping themselves afloat, and as for poetry—as Wilfred Owen said of his poems of World War I—‘the poetry is in the pity’. It is not the pity of the author for the characters or the pity of the hapless characters for themselves, which are hardly ever in evidence, but the pity that events have turned out in as they have.
    Nevertheless, even in this unremittingly realistic and at places naturalistic flow of the narrative, one may discern a design or pattern that heightens the