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

intensity of the experience. Tara is abducted and raped by a Muslim goonda but, in Yashpal’s ordering of events, this is but moments after she has walked out on her no less brutal and abusive Hindu husband on her wedding night. There is irony in the fact that it is a Muslim young man she had loved and wanted to marry and she is now raped by a Muslim. After carrying her home and dumping her on the floor, her abductor Nubbu goes out and lies down and slowly smokes one cigarette and then another and only then saunters in to rape her, with the kind of impersonal cold-bloodedness that we find in Manto’s short stories such as ‘Open Up’ or ‘Cold Meat’—except that this scene has none of the charged theatricality of Manto.
    As Nubbu rapes Tara, his wife sits outside the door cursing him to hell. The sub-human Nubbu is not dignified by the author with a formal proper name; in fact, he is during the act of rape pointedly and repeatedly called just the ‘
mard
’, and his motive for the act is not only to violate a Hindu womanbut also to make money, first by stripping her of all her jewellery and then by selling her off for twenty-five rupees. After the rape, Tara is surrounded by sympathetic Muslim women, and then taken home and looked after by another Muslim, Hafiz-ji, who is a
hafiz
or custodian not only of the Koran (which one must have by heart to earn the title) but equally piously of this woman of another faith; she in turn observes with him and his family the daily fast for ramazan. Hafiz-ji does later suggest to her that she should convert to Islam, and she seems half willing, for she does not care much for either faith. When thrown together with those other raped women, she recalls Hafiz-ji’s offer and wonders what good remaining a Hindu has done her and whether she might not have been better off turning a Muslim.
    Too many subtle ironies attend upon this climactic scene and enrich its meaning for it simply to have ‘happened’ without consummate artistic mediation. Another similarly layered and nuanced aspect of this novel is the apparently plain enough language used by the narrator as well as by the characters. Language is, of course, not only a medium here but also a major plank of the agenda of communal division, as is openly enacted and debated time and again in the novel. All the characters in Lahore whether Hindu or Muslim or Sikh speak Punjabi and several words in their speech and even in the author’s own narrative are translated within brackets into Hindi by the author himself. The language of formal discourse and literature is Urdu; Puri is an Urdu journalist, and it is only a few women who are proficient in Hindi. Language in this novel is thus not a cause of division but an emblem of shared community, and most characters can speak any of the three languages named above, as well as English, according to the demands of the social situation while the highly anglicized senior bureaucrat Rawat can even quote Kalidasa in Sanskrit. A nicely discriminated deployment of such multilingual polyvocality becomes a means of characterization in the hands of the novelist.
Narrating the Nation
    In two interrelated postcolonial formulations, the nation is theorized to be an ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson), and the novel is acclaimed as the literary genre peculiarly suited to ‘narrate the nation’ (Homi Bhabha).Even without the benefit of these recent assertions, and in fact ever since Gandhi in 1918 declared Hindi to be the national language, a number of major Hindi novelists have shown a keenness to take up the burden of narrating the nationalist movement and the liberation of the nation, including Premchand (
Rangabhumi
,
Karmabhumi
,
Godan
), Bhagwati Charan Varma (
Terhe-Merhe Raste
,
Bhoole-Bisre Chitra
) and Satchidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ (
Shekhar: Ek Jivani
), to name only the foremost.
    It is Yashpal’s particular distinction that he has in this epic novel narrated not one