SOURCE: Schneller, Beverly. “‘Visible and Visitable’: The Role of History in Gita Mehta's Raj and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance.” Journal of Narrative Theory 31, no. 2 (summer 2001): 233-54.

[In the following essay, Schneller argues that Raj and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance both use historical fact as a tool to further their plots and themes, commenting that the “deliberate and deliberative uses of history employed by Mistry and Mehta reveal these works as unique, problematic, and complex.”]

The title of this essay derives from Henry James' comments in his preface to The Aspern Papers about the qualities of the novel. He liked to read about a past that was both “visible and visitable,” i.e., a past which was alive, relevant, and the creation of its author. Recent post-modern discussion of historiography has also taken a similar approach to the nature of historical narrative and the kinds of meaning historical writing produces. Hayden White, the leader in this debate, argues that there is little difference between historical narrative and the type of prose narrative associated with fictions. As is now well-known, he posits that the historian's point of view towards the material used in historical writing is equivalent to the fiction writer's point of view when creating a plot for a novel. Whether or not White is right in his analysis is beyond the scope of this essay, but what is of interest in his work is the idea that history is an authorial creation: history is a text shaped by its writer's intention and interpretation of what should be “fact.” The implications of White's ideas bear on the name and nature of historical fiction of which Raj and A Fine Balance are two recent South Asian examples.

Gita Mehta and Rohinton Mistry are writers of popular novels; hers in 1989 and his in 1995. Their subject is the sweep of Indian history; hers before independence from Britain in 1947 and his since. As historical fictions, both Mehta and Mistry are willingly engaged with the burden of the past and participate in what David Cowart has defined as the historians' task of advancing “cultural self-knowledge” typically associated with such “humanistic studies” as history (25). Mehta chooses a female central character, Princess Jaya of Balmer, as the lens through which she transmits her versions of late empire; in contrast, Mistry creates a cast of interrelated characters whose lives offer different but complimentary visions of lower caste Indian life in the 1970s. Neither novel has received much critical attention with most of the existing commentary coming from book reviews in popular periodicals. My purpose in this essay is to compare these two novels in their uses of history; to show how they rely on historical information which they shape to fit their plots; and to discuss how these popular novels perform as history for their readers. To broaden the focus of the essay, I briefly compare how Mehta and Mistry use history in their novels to some recent work by Bapsi Sidwha, a Pakistani novelist, and by Hanif Kureshi, an Indian novelist living in Britain. Because Raj and A Fine Balance are historical novels of differing types, they provide a window on the ways novelists can incorporate history into their works to teach as well as to delight. Historical novels, in light of Hayden White, may now be considered as kind of historiography and it is as historical novels that Raj and A Fine Balance need scrutiny.

In the opinion of some book reviewers, Mehta's and Mistry's use of history is problematic. Some have asked the question, “Are we reading history or fiction?” While a few, such as Ian Buruma, identify the challenge facing the South Asian historical novelist. In The New York Review of Books, Buruma wrote, “in few countries is the legacy of history, in spirit and form, so apparent as in India” (9). For Pico Iyer in Time, Mistry has created “the Great Indian novel” (85) while for The New Yorker's anonymous reviewer, A Fine Balance is “a novel that can stand with the best of Dickens” (93).¹

Mehta, praised by Buruma for writing of the Raj “without nostalgia or bitterness” (9) sets Princess Jaya's story across the end of the colonial period including the first elections for the Indian Congress, in which she places her name as a candidate. Mehta's story flirts with the traditions of romance—bad marriage, the loss of a son, the attraction to a British soldier, and the heroine's successful quest for identity in a country where repression of women is culturally enforced. Mistry writes a social commentary illustrating how oppression is not always brought to a country from farther shores. Indians are the villains and the heroes in A Fine Balance and what the people do to each other seems as bad if not worse than what happened during the colonial period. Both novelists complicate the easy distinctions between history and fiction in their depictions and interpretations of India's colonial and post-colonial pasts.

Like Forster, Mistry and Mehta make India a character in their novels, and their two novels compare well in other ways, too.² Both Mistry and Mehta construct plots which focus on family issues and family loyalty as an extension of nationalism; both write with historical accuracy and use history as an operating principle in their narratives; the scope of both novels is broad as a result. Evolution of the individual in the nation and the evolution of India as a free country provide a common, parallel quest in both works, even if the focus of their histories of India diverge conspicuously. Princess Jaya is a member of the ruling class, who eventually becomes the Maharani of her Indian Kingdom and a politically active woman. She is largely sheltered and protected from the common people until she sees the tide has turned with independence. She finds her own voice and her own mission in the new country. The Hindu tailors, Ishvar and Omprakash Darji, whose lives intersect with those of Dina Dalal and Maneck Kohlah, are of the lower castes. They all become victims of the turbulence caused by the State of Emergency and find their lives changed utterly as a result of their vulnerability in this critical period of Indira Gandhi's rule in the 1970s.

The novelists' styles differ as Mistry follows more in the footsteps of Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980), with its use of the grotesque, the shocking, and the ironic. Mehta's style is more straight forward, using the allegory of the birth of India and the new woman in a recognizable manner. Neither novelist wants to break new ground in literary style, but both seem to want to take the South Asian novel in a direction which differs from those of such contemporaries as Bapsi Sidwha and Hanif Kureishi, as I will discuss a little later in this essay. What we find when we compare Raj with A Fine Balance are approaches to writing historical fiction in two strains: the first is to use the history as a driving force to develop a character over a span of time and draw out the character from the country of origin as in Raj; the other is to adhere to stricter use of history and make the events the dominate character, to merge function with form and content, to take to heart, as Mistry does, the confluence of “spirit and form” in his fiction.

Because the subject of this piece is the use of history as fiction, I focus on work concerned with the historical elements in both novels. As I describe the novelists' uses of history, then, I consider how reviewers reacted to the use of such material. From their comments, a sort of preference theory of taste emerges, especially concerning Raj, which drew more female than male reviewers, who clearly were disturbed at the intrusion of fact into what they wanted to read—a neat romance. Yasmin Alibhai says, for example, “Jaya's story is obviously meant to symbolize the history of India itself as it moved turbulently from the end of the 19th century to independence in 1949 and the liberation of Indian women as these historical convulsions rocked the social structures of society. It doesn't work well and the problem may well be … too much meaningless detail, fascination with the exotic” (34). In Alibhai's mind, history and fiction cannot rest peacefully together in a novel, and it seems she faults Mehta for researching the history of the period she creates in Raj.

In what follows, I will address such complaints, and in presenting summaries of the novels, I will concentrate on those characters whose lives create the main lines of the plots. Given the scope of the novels, covering decades of Indian life and history, it is necessary to limit summaries to only major characters, though minor characters and sub-plots are also well-developed and integrated into main storylines by Mehta and Mistry. I contend that both novelists have written novels which create the “visitable past” so admired by Henry James through which they created “fictional histories” which give to fiction the power of history's language to describe the past. As Hayden White notes, in historical metafiction, “[e]verything is presented as if it were of the same ontological order …” (68); the history is submerged into the fiction and the fiction determines the nature of the history the novelists present. We start with the Raj according to Jaya and Gita Mehta; move on to the new India of Mistry; compare their novels with two of their contemporaries and return to James, via J. Hillis Miller, for a concluding theoretical analysis of the use of history in recent South Asian fiction.

Raj is divided into four parts. “Book One: Balmer” is Jaya's early life; “Book Two: Sirpur” covers her marriage to Prince Pratap; “Book Three: Maharani” portrays her life as the leading woman in the royalty of her kingdom; and “Book Four: Regent” describes her widowhood and her role in leading Sirpur into India and away from its position as an independent kingdom. The last book is also the story of Jaya's activism and her realization that she can continue to serve her country as an elected member of the Indian National Congress. The novel begins in 1897 and ends in 1949. Princess Jaya finds herself in three interlocking situations in the novel: her parents' home, where she is steeped in Indian culture; in her own home, where she must carry out roles prescribed for her by the British and by the Indians; and in emerging India, the country which has always been her “Home” of homes, through which Jaya Devi experiences personal and cultural freedoms.

Mehta presents detailed descriptions of the cultural and personal transformations which her character experiences and witnesses. As she writes in the preface to the novel, she researched the periods she covers in “exhaustive archives” and a “wide and eccentric span of books” (ix). These are the details it appears that bothered Alibhai, but pleased Buruma, who is careful to praise Mehta for recreating the poshness of the Raj and its various extravagances, including the dog wedding organized by the Nawab of Jungadh. One need only compare Jaya's courtly life with the descriptions of the end of the Raj found in Lawrence James' Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (1997) to see just how well Mehta shows the wealthy Indians' desire to imitate the British, to play their games, to dress and talk like them, and to spend huge amounts of money keeping up the appearances associated with the “Jewel in the Crown” status India possessed as part of the Empire.

Jaya has been criticized as a flat character by reviewers Rachel Billington and Yasmin Alibhai. Billington, herself a novelist, writes Jaya “must, it seems, unlearn the lessons of thousands of years of Indian history and culture.” Further, she complains, “In general, Jaya is a kind of sleep-walker, making her way through remarkable events” (18). Billington and other reviewers miss the point about Jaya, though, and about Mehta's use of history in the novel. As a Maharani, Indian autonomy, even in a diminished state, is better than no native rule at all. Jaya is a presence in the world of colonial India. She is a transcultural woman like many Indian émigrés today, a part of India and a part of another culture, too. As a colonized subject, Jaya's flexibility and quick assumption of a new possibility point to the resilience and the strength of character which was latent in the Indian people. Certain things which happen to Jaya are obvious concessions to Western readers: the attempted suicide by Jaya's widowed mother and Jaya's lessons in how to be a Western woman at the hands of Mrs. Roy, who was hired by Prince Pratap to make Jaya less Indian. For Alibhai, it is Jaya's “mental lassitude” which makes her a poor person; she believes she should “seethe and plot, and joust, at least within the safe confines of her brain” (34). Yet, wanting Jaya to be Gandhi is inappropriate here. Her experiences are limited by history because of her class and her gender; her knowledge of the outside world is minimal and she is a prisoner of the patriarchy of the Raj. When she has the chance, though, she moves ahead and she learns that her real power is as a symbol for change in a free India. Jaya is not a modern woman or a revolutionary; she is a widow in her early fifties, who is not afraid to try something new for her country. Mehta has, in fact, created a character which is consistent throughout the novel. Jaya has always been in the service of India; the larger historical events simply require she shift her methods but not her focus.

Alibhai contends Mehta is writing an exploitation novel, and though the novel is based on factual events, which yield local color and give depth to the plot, the “nostaligie de l'Empire” remains too strong for the novel to be taken seriously and as a good work of fiction. In particular Alibhai writes: “But this is supposed to be a novel and not a boil-in-bag history/social anthropology lesson and the imaginative leap that is needed to transform historical realities into fictional realities is rarely made” (34). How the “leap” is to be made is left unstated, but one must assume that it involves something more in Alibhai's mind than a well-crafted, accurate portrayal of a character in a specific moment in recorded history. I suspect Alibhai would be equally willing to dismiss Ruth Prawer Jhabvla's 1975 Heat and Dust, which is set again the Sepoy Rebellion (1857-8), and gives a similar blend of history and romance. Alibhai seems to believe that history is itself a kind of fiction and one reality fits both nonfiction and fiction. The premise of her critique, which is central to my argument, concerns the kind of history fiction is thought to present. Buruma believes, as do I, that “[Mehta] is at her best when describing the twisted human relations in colonial society” (9).

Princess Jaya's version of India shares some of the same characteristics as Miss Quested's in A Passage to India (1924). At first, Jaya and Adele Quested find themselves trying to reconcile India's physical beauty and stunningly rich cultural heritage with its politics, but, in the end the two cannot be reconciled any more than a cross-cultural romance between Princess Jaya and Colonel Osborne or Miss Quested and Dr. Azziz would be possible, probable or desirable for either pair. Both women are looking outside for an India they possess within themselves. Forster, Rushdie, and Mehta blend “dream and reality, revelation and imagination, history and fiction, past and present … British culture and Indian culture … to [undermine] and continuously [question] the authority of the monologic voice in religion and culture” (Dönnerstag 458-59). Alibhai and Billington want a feminist political novel from Mehta. They are critical, disappointed, and dismissive (though not as dismissive as the Publisher's Weekly writer who could not let pass that Mehta, is the “wife of Knopf's Sonny Mehta” (217)). In fact, Mehta uses the popular formula of the romance to enliven, through the eyes of a thoughtful woman whose whole life has been a cautionary tale, the end of the Raj. We experience through Jaya's eyes what it is like to see the old world slip away and the curtain rise on the new.

Jaya is a woman who can assume new roles and transform herself without losing her identity because she is loyal to India and remains so her whole life. There is in Raj a female history and a feminist theme after all, as Maharani, then citizen Jaya, never loses her place despite large scale political upheaval and raw violence. Jaya Devi travels around India in the closing pages of the novel, spreading the nationalist message. She wants to insure a peaceful transition from kingdom to part of India for Sirpur. When she registers as an independent candidate for Congress from Sirpur, the election official, hearing her name smiles and says: “The name means victory, madam. May I wish you good luck in your endeavours?” (466). As Osborne and her activist friend, Arun Roy, argue over what the British Empire knew about democracy, Jaya Devi laughs out loud at the absurdity of worrying about the past when the future is so promising (467).

Jaya's optimism is lost on the four characters whose lives are the focus of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. In this novel, the widow, Dina Dalal, refuses her brother's efforts to arrange another marriage for her, and she ekes out a living as a piecemeal seamstress for a woman who operates an export clothing business. Once a woman with close friends and a husband, Dina is alone in Bombay. When her friends from school ask her to let their son rent a room from her while he is in college in Bombay, she is only too glad for the company, though their relationship gets off to an awkward start. She has not had an unrelated man in her home before and Manek Kohlah has never shared a home with anyone other than his parents. Manek is caught by having to live out his parents' dreams for him as a student of engineering, which he eventually abandons.³ He found the college dorm where he first stayed unnerving in its filth, and he was happy to move in with Dina Aunty.

In a parallel narrative, the reader is introduced to two struggling Hindu leather-workers turned tailors, uncle and nephew, Ishvar and Omprakash (Om) Darji. The two apply for jobs which Dinah has advertised when she finds the work is too much for her alone, and soon they are sewing for her in her apartment and living on an acquaintance's roof. Dina is uneasy about the men as she fears they will try to cut her out of the garment business, so she goes to great pains to see that they do not know where she takes the finished dresses, keeping them as virtual prisoners in her home when she is away delivering and picking up more material and patterns. A third story involves the Beggerman, who operates a large network of street beggars, and who eventually offers Dina and the tailors protection services when she has trouble with her landlord. All in all there are at least five levels or strands of Indian society brought together in A Fine Balance: the Himalayan family of Manek, whose father made his fortune in business; Dina and her brother, who are of the middle class; Om and Ishvar, representing the Hindu caste; Manek's school friend, Avinash, who becomes a campus activist and is killed by the police; and the underworld of Beggerman, the hair collector, Rajaram, and the displaced villagers who wander the streets of Bombay helplessly reduced to crime and begging.

Mistry presents the details of the intersecting lives with a microscopic precision that never seems boring or heavy handed. Like Mehta, he offers little personal touches which lend beauty to the narrative, especially in the quilt that Manek, Dina, Om and Ishvar collaborate on as a testimonial of their lives together. When Om and Ishvar find the government housing they were so pleased to have acquired is bulldozed during the State of Emergency, Dina takes them into her house as boarders; they live on her porch. Om and Manek have a predictable attraction to each other. They are both young men with a fire for life moving them; Dina and Ishvar are compelled by a class-consciousness particular to their ages and experiences to try to discourage the two young men from becoming too friendly. Other happy times in the apartment include Ishvar taking over the cooking and Manek's persuading Dina to take care of some stray kittens he found who live outside the kitchen window. In time, the four of them discover a common humanity. They are people who work hard, respect each other, and worry a great about their futures in uncertain times. Ishvar and Dina share the joy of Om's prospective marriage; Dina even feels she has a right to involve herself in the negotiations (540-7). They agree the trip home to the tailors' rural village will yield the promised results.

Chapter Fifteen “Family Planning” is the turning point in the novel. Om and Ishvar have returned home successfully and they are out shopping for Om's wedding and courting clothes when an old friend, Ashraf Chacha, tells them that a family planning clinic has just opened up in the village. Naturally, they all feel uncomfortable with the sterilizations they know go on there. The sinister background the clinic's tents provide is offset by the raucous welcome Om and Ivshar receive when they are recognized in the village (610), but the celebration is seemingly short-lived as the police move in wielding nightsticks and herd Om, Ishvar and others onto the waiting trucks. Ashraf is murdered on the street, Om and Ishvar are sterilized, against their will, and held in the camp for four months until they make their return to Bombay. Because Om spoke out against the family planning initiative and challenged the doctor performing the operations, the young mans testicles were removed, leaving him a eunuch (614-30). When they return, Dina nearly fails to recognize them. Reduced eventually to begging, Om supports the maimed Ishvar, who lost a leg due to blood poisoning. Dina's life also changes as the State-of-Emergency has ruined Mrs. Gupta's dress trade. She moves in with her brother and becomes a servant to her sister-in-law, Ruby. Manek, who encounters his old friends on the streets pretends not to recognize them when he returns to Bombay for a visit after his military tour has ended, but he does and they know he has, too. The pain is all too much for him: first he loses Avinash, and then his replacement in Om. Manek commits suicide on the train tracks (710). In the end, Om, Ishvar and Dina still find a way to be together: she surreptitiously feeds them from her brother's table and they do a little mending for her. Most of all they keep each others spirits up as their lives go on in a fine balance between life and death, sorrow and happiness, freedom and restraint. While there is pathos in Mistry's novel, the history wards off sentimentality.

A Fine Balance spans eleven years, from 1975 to 1984.⁴ The novel, which won four international prizes and was short-listed for four more, is described by reviewers as “ambitious in scope” (Rubin), as a “monumental new novel,” of “an heroic canvas” and as “a domestic novel that refuses to remain within its walls” (Mojtabai). None of Mistry's reviewers seem disturbed that he has chosen to write a contemporary historical novel, though A. G. Mojtabai finds herself “loosing touch with Ishvar and Dina” as the novel progress and “interior journies” are not presented (29). In the main, reviewers appear satisfied with Mistry's ability to capture “the real sorrow and inexplicable strength of India” (Iyer) as he treats “India both kindly and harshly” (Ross 239).

Robert L. Ross's essay, “Seeking and Maintaining Balance,” is the first U.S.-published critical essay on Mistry's fiction. Ross ponders how much interest Western audiences can be expected to have in Indian politics as he writes in World Literature Today:

Another question arises when considering these two novels (A Fine Balance and Such a Long Journey; Jowney [1991]): does the exposé of political corruption and tyrrany during Indira Gandhi's tenure still hold that much interest? She is long dead … The tempest that is Indian politics before, during, and since Mrs. Gandhi's years in power probably fails to intrigue most readers of Mistry's work. It is not the history of the actuality that attracts in Mistry's fiction, but the way he uses these elements … he transforms historical situations and the reality of Indian life into a metaphor that shows how the individual reacts to widespread corruption when tangled in its grasp … and how people respond to the endless forms of tyranny that government and society inflict.

(240)

While I agree that Mistry integrates the history of India in a way that is relevant to and enhances the theme of A Fine Balance, I disagree with Ross's assumption that the incorporation of accurate historical information fails to attract readers. Ross appears to suggest that in Mistry's latest novel, history can be separated from the fiction, which I contend it cannot. The use of history is not limited to images and metaphor as the State-of-Emergency is a violent character in the novel, and as such, needs to be explored.

Indira Gandhi (1917-1984), who was active in the independence movement in the 1930s and 1940s, became a member of the Indian Congress in 1950; party President 1959; Minister of Information in 1964; and Prime Minister in 1964. The State-of-Emergency was declared in June 1975 after she was found guilty of electoral corruption. She enforced censorship, limited civil liberties, and carried out social engineering among the poor. Removed in 1977 when the Congress Party lost the elections, she returned to politics as head of the Indian National Congress in 1978 and as Prime Minister in 1980. In 1984, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, which led to the retaliatory deaths of 3,000 Sikhs. This assassination is the subject of recent Indian literature, and A Fine Balance spans the whole of Gandhi's first term as Prime Minister. Om, Ishvar and the community in which they live mirrors reality and historical situations. Mistry relies on the reader to recognize the validity of his portrayal of the effects of the State-of-Emergency on the Indian poor. As Naomi Jacobs says, when writers use historical or pop-culture figures there is “a concentrated code reference to an elaborate set of associations in the reader's and/or writer's mind” (110). These associations are revealed now.

For Om, Ishvar and the other lower caste characters, the State-of-Emergency leads to arrests, beatings and the destruction of shanty homes in an atmosphere of widespread confusion. The declaration served as a means for Mrs. Gandhi to lash out at her whole country and to punish the easily abused poor. One must read the State-of-Emergency as a Hyrdralike occurrence, in which the tentacles of government reached across the entire subcontinent, destroying lives in its wake. Dina's apartment serves as a safe-haven for Om and Ishvar, who are otherwise homeless at the wrong time. Their caste prohibits them from climbing out of poverty, though they are incredibly diligent and talented tailors. They are judged by their appearances and the outward signs of their caste's poverty, even though they are literate, are saving money from their wages for Om's wedding, paying their bills on time, and generally minding their own business. They are criminalized for being who they are, which is ironic when one recalls that Dina is actually breaking the law by having them work and live in her apartment and the sinister, but oddly likeable hair collector, Rajaram, is a murderer.

Reading the 1999 Human Rights Watch report, Broken People: Caste Violence against India's ‘Untouchables’, underscores the extent of the hardship and the violence the poor of India face and with which Mistry seems well-acquainted. The report's major finding, in the context of its relevance to A Fine Balance, is how through “a series of inefficient and corrupt state governments since the early 1970s … government officials … have acted as agents and turned a blind eye to the killings,” displacements, and police-led attacks on rural villagers, called Dalits (Untouchables) (43). Women and those who would dare engage in social activism are routinely singled-out for beatings and other acts of violence, which are termed attacks on modesty. The report describes “the criminalization of social activism” (153-165) and details cases similar to Om's one-man resistance to the vasectomy. Mistry's ability to grasp and portray the lives of the poor, especially how they “languish in makeshift homes on government property” (99) is particularly realistic as Om and Ishvar find themselves mingling with displaced members of Indian society during the State-of-Emergency. Broken People elucidates and A Fine Balance enlivens the patterns and types of violence and state-sponsored oppression. Started in the 1970s they are still much in evidence, lending credibility to “the fine balance,” the thin, delicate balance which is daily life in India.

The State-of-Emergency is Manek Kohlah's nemesis. As a young man who descends into the underworld of Bombay, he fails to survive. A victim of repression in a way that differs from the experience of Om and Ishvar, Manek will not be a hypocrite. His wealth and education would enable him to rise or, to at least do well, but this is irreconcilable with the mass suffering of the Indian people as experienced by his extended family in Bombay. Out of loyalty and in response to their dignity, Manek jumps to his death; his last memory is that of his murdered friend from college, whose parents he had lately met. From the start, Manek is ill-suited to urban Bombay; he is always uncomfortable with what seemed normal to those who had become acculturated to certain levels of squalor and poverty in order to survive. Lacking survival skills, with his head literally in the clouds, Manek is lost in a world without beauty.⁵

Mistry's decision to tell a story of personal courage, resilience, hope and dignity in a destructive world redefines the family by crossing classes and economic barriers. Pamela Dunbar addresses the importance of family in the postcolonial novel when she writes; “The use of [the family] implies a skepticism about the healthy survival of the wider community during a period of historical uncertainty” (103). Readers who know Indian history realize that what Dina, Om and Ishvar have will once again be tested in 1984, the year of the novel's Epilogue, and Mrs. Gandhi's assassination. The balance is once more upset. Gandhi's period as Prime Minister repeatedly tested the character of India and Indians' ability to balance hope and despair.

Both Gita Mehta and Rohinton Mistry illustrate Henry James' concept that a novelist “should regard himself as an historian and his narrative as history” (qtd. in Miller, “History, Narrative” 193). James maintained “fictional histories” bear the same weight of truth as history itself, writing in the Preface to the Aspern Papers: “I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past … We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar; the difficulty is, for intensity, to catch it at the moment when the scales of the balance hang with the right evenness” (197-8).⁶ That is, when the fine balance between history and literature is achieved, a lively, realistic history in and as fiction emerges from the story. In the post-modern, and post-colonial novels of Mehta and Mistry, history gives power to the language of fiction. It relies on literary narrative to mix the real with the imaginary. Writers of “fictional histories” bear the “responsibility” of telling the “truth” about the past. It is upon this responsibility that their ethos as novelists and those of their characters rest.

Thus, Mehta and Mistry are in the middle of the debate about historical “truth.” In 1946, R. G. Collingwood stated the inevitable dilemma of the historian who was writing about events which he/she did not witness first hand, when he said that if the historian is not present for the event, then “[he] must re-enact the past in his own mind.” To write the historical account, he must employ “certain documents or relics of the past” to achieve appropriate levels of “historical thinking,” i.e., the mindset which allows “[him] to re-enact in his own mind the experiences about which he wishes to write” (282-3). It seems the same could be said of the historical novelist.

Hayden White, as recently as 1999 in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, claims “historical discourse” is an “interpretation of the past” which literary critics are as capable of assessing as historians (3). Because history writing relies on the same type of narrative linear storytelling, the perceived “opposition between fact and fiction is abolished;” or “the contract” between the real and the imaginary is “dissolved” (66-68). Again, the lines between historical and fictional narrative appear blurry. For literary critics including Cowart in History and the Contemporary Novel (1989), historical writing “… like imaginative writing, involves the selection of detail, the determination of emphasis, [and] a narrational shaping” (17). These are all properties of fiction writing which in the end affect the validity of the “truth” the reader finds in history. Cowart also maintains that “… history makes its greatest contribution when it supplies the creative artist with raw material” (25).

Following from Collingwood to White to Cowart, the reader is left to consider whether the form of the historical novel in any way invalidates the history which one finds in the fiction. As I have already shown, Mehta, through primary research creates her own interpretation of the Raj from the perspective of her female central character. Mistry's use of history is focused more on the situations of the characters he creates which are emblematic of the Indian people. In his work, I find parallels with memoirs and other primary accounts, though unlike Mehta, he does not indicate if he conducted research to develop his story. What the postmodernist view of history as a sibling of fiction suggests is that Mehta's and Mistry's histories of India are as valid as Lawrence James', Siddhartha Dube's or the Human Rights Watch report's authors.

To see more of these “fictional histories” and to highlight how Mistry's and Mehta's use of history differs from their contemporaries, it is helpful to consider, if briefly, two novels by Bapsi Sidwha and one by Hanif Kureishi. Sidwha's The Crow Eaters (1981) and Cracking India (1988) predate Mistry and Mehta while Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia was published in 1990 between Raj and A Fine Balance. Anglo-Indian relations are a common theme in both The Crow Eaters and Raj; while Cracking India has more in common with the brutal realism of A Fine Balance.

In The Crow Eaters and The Buddha of Suburbia, political history is a part of the furniture of setting. Racism is given a slightly larger role by Kureishi; though in the Sidwah novel, the marriage of the youngest son is an allegory for Anglo-Indian relations. When Billy Junglewalla marries Tanya Easymoney, he allows himself to be as westernized as she already is. Tanya, a beautiful spend thrift, with her “swing of black, bobbed-hair” (201) prefers to dress in British style. Billy is more traditionally raised, and has grown up in the shadow of his handsome, loved brothers. He is eager to gain his father's approval, and after his older brother dies and another becomes a mendicant, Billy assumes his father's store and becomes rich. The tension between Tanya and Billy symbolizes her greedy colonialist mindset; while he represents the wealth of India to her as ready to be plundered.⁷

Another subplot involves Yazdi, the family's second son, and Rosy Watson, an unfortunate Anglo-Indian. Yazdi falls in love with her, and promises to marry her though they are both still school children. He is moved by her accounts of domestic violence perpetrated by her father and stepmother. To get her out of the way in the house, her stepmother arranges for Rosy to be raped in her own home: “They tied her to the bed and brought men into the room …” (127), Yazdi tells his father, Freddy. Yazdi, Freddy realizes, does not grasp what Rosy's stepmother has done to her, but as Sidwha knows in creating this situation “Once a girl is raped, she becomes unmarriageable” (Human Rights Watch 31). For this reason, Freddy sends Yazdi away from Lahore for schooling, and succeeds in keeping Rosy out of the family.

In breaking up his own Romeo and Juliet, Freddy loses Yazdi anyway. By accident, Freddy finds Rosy working in a brothel he and some friends have gone to visit, and to make his point clear and the solidify in his rightness mind of his actions, he has sex with Rosy himself. Perhaps in this way he can make his decision more clear to Yazdi, but it is nevertheless cruel.

The aspects of The Crow Eaters that are clearly verisimilar include a rural family moving to the city to prosper; generational conflict; the steadying influence of women in the family; and class-based decision making. Indian history/Pakistani history does not play an essential role in this novel. The characters are affected by internal domestic politics, more so than by the separation of Pakistan from India or by Indian independence. Similarly, the racism of The Buddha of Suburbia and the experiences of this novel's main character are part of a fictional situation more than a fictional history.

Karim Amir introduces himself as “an Englishman born and bred” (3) in the first sentence of Kureishi's novel. Karim is the son of an Indian father, Haroon Amir, and an English mother, Margaret. The family lives in South London and tensions between the native British population and the Indian and Pakistani immigrants are always in evidence. Karim's foil is his cousin, Jamilla, a feminist, who sees Karim as selfish and a racetraitor. Although the novel, like The Crow Eaters is comic, Karim's inability to see himself as exploited because he is Anglo-Indian and The National Front's attack on people in his circle as well as Jamilla's arranged marriage, adds seriousness and depth to the text.

Karim experiences personal discomfort with his race when he is cast as Mogwli in The Jungle Bunny Book, not the dramatic adaptation Kipling wrote, but a play written and directed by a friend of his father's lover. Karim is enjoying the part until he is asked in rehearsal to use a stage-Indian accent, something which his father, who came to England for college in the 1950's, worked hard to eliminate, but Karim does it anyway.

Later in this acting career, Karim is included in a select company in a send up of method acting. He is asked to prepare a real-self sort of part, so the playwright, after seeing what the ensemble creates as characters, can write a play to accommodate them. First, Karim imitates what he sees as hysterical in his uncle, Anwar, whose fasting nearly kills him until Jamilla relents and accepts his choice of husband for her, Changez, a crippled man who loves reading and has no apparent business sense. When challenged by another member of the company, Tracey, with “Why do you hate yourself, and all black people so much Karim?” (180), Karim is at first confused, then sets out to create Changez for the stage. Like the National Front thugs who cannot tell the difference between Pakistanis and Indians, Karim cannot see the difference between himself as Anglo-Indian and as British; after all, he defined himself as an “Englishman” at the start. As he says, “… if I wanted the additional personality bonus of an Indian past, I would have to create it” (213) which he does by siphoning Indian-ness off of Changez.

Karim's closeness to Jamilla is damaged when he fails to appear at a protest march against the National Front which was organized after Changez was mistaken for a Pakistani and beaten up. Jamilla tells Karim the National Front is planning other acts of violence and the protest march will at least let them know they are not welcome. Karim decides “We could not stop it; we could only make our voices heard” (225); but he does not believe in “we” and “our.” He is, in fact, so successful in acting the part of Changez as a bumbling woman chaser that he becomes the star of the play, goes on tour to New York and gains a future as an actor on a TV soap opera. For Karim, activism is futile and the road to nowhere. In giving the audience a racist stereotype of an Indian man, he has achieved success. As a man in his twenties, Karim is selfish and more interested in sex than politics. At no point does Kureish break Karim's character with false political sentiments. Karim is shallow and selfish and suffers from the intellectual lassitude Alibhai claimed Jaya Devi possessed. Literary critics, however, have found much to politicize in The Buddha of Suburbia, though it makes no effort to be a political novel per se.⁸

Cracking India, Sidwha's 1988 novel, compares more favorably to A Fine Balance. The narrator is an eight year-old girl, Lenny, who is crippled with polio (like Billy, Changez, Bunny and Om, who are other maimed characters.).⁹ She acts as an observer-narrator in keeping with her role as a child. Through her ayah, Lenny crosses paths with a variety of men who wish to be the ayah's suitors, including the “Ice-Candy Man,” a vendor of ice treats. In a period of partisan violence, surrounding the Independence movement, the ice-candy man persuades Lenny to betray the hiding place of her Hindu ayah. The ayah is then raped and abducted, appearing in public as the much decorated, rechristened Mumtaz, “wife” of the Ice-Candy Man. Fortunately for the ayah, Lenny's grandmother is a sort of force of nature who arranges for the girl, though damaged, to return to her family.

Lenny's encounters with politics and sectarian violence are suited to her childhood. She listens to dinner conversations about politics, heated debates in the park, and picks up news she does not really understand in the park with her ayah. Sidwha incorporates the independence movement into the setting, first, then connects it to the most vulnerable member of Lenny's household to give it meaning. The chapters on politics, 15 and 16, in which the ayah is abducted, have the characters saying enough of their views to carry the main ideas of the plot through. How they live their political lives is kept remote from Lenny, who, like Yazdi is witness to something she does not really understand.

Lenny is unaware of the causes of the sectarian violence, the fate of her ayah, or of the cruelty surrounding the marriage of her sometime playmate, a household servant's daughter. The girl's mother really hates the child, and heaps verbal insults and beatings on her. The daughter is unable to physically fight back, but she is willing to provoke her mother and to insult her. At ten years old, she is married to a middle-aged man. For the ceremony, the girl is drugged (Lenny notices she does not seem her usual lively self) presumably by her mother, so she will offer no resistance. Thus, amid all the beauty of the traditional ceremony, a socially sanctioned act of inhumanity occurs. Sidhwa, again, shows her cultural awareness of Indian's women's complicity in acts that are against other women's freedom. While it is true child marriage is a way for parents to protect their daughters from rape by upper class men, the act of the mother in this novel is just vengeful.

Sidwha and Kureishi use historical circumstance as lesser vehicles in creating the settings of their novels. For Sidwha, Cracking India moves towards a greater, more direct use of history and contemporary politics, and both Sidwha and Kureishi present an unvarnished view of South Asian culture.

Henry James, R. G. Collingwood, and Hayden White are not far apart on the issue of history and fiction and history as fiction. For James, to be a novelist was to be cultural historian whose duty was to capture the details of the past. For Collingwood and White, the historian is in the same situation, needing to write about the past, which as a human, one is bound to interpret and shape in ways that do or do not conform with taste and cultural preoccupations. Both Mehta and Mistry transform key moments in Indian history into readable fiction and popular history. They are not “Indian historians” but they are invoking the “historical thinking” which Collingwood held was necessary for historical writing. Because history is the operating principle behind both novels, changing the settings of Raj and A Fine Balance to another time and place, would simply not work. Far from causing readers to move away from the fictions because of the historical thinking, as Ross suggests, the deliberate and deliberative uses of history employed by Mistry and Mehta reveal these works as unique, problematic, and complex. Raj and A Fine Balance make history visitable and visible and as historical novels they are worthy of appreciation having earned a place in the ongoing postmodern debates about truth, meaning and interpretation of the past.

Notes

1. See also Annalisa Oboe, “South African Historical Fiction and Nationalism,” and Kavita Mathai, “National Identity in Recent Indian Novels in English.”

2. Yoko Fujimoto labels Mistry and other immigrant novelists as “postcolonial transcultural writers” (33).

3. Ragini Ramachandra's essay, “Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey: Some First Impressions” enables the reader to quickly compare the plots of his first and second novels. Both share the themes of a younger man disappointing his male elders and of personal loss. Ramachandra glosses over Mistry's use of history in Such a Long Journey as “lending a political coloring to the novel apart from investing it with topical interest” (29). Topical interest is not the point in Mistry's treatment of historical events.

4. These years are also addressed in Siddharth Dube's family memoir, In Land of Poverty: Memoirs of an Indian Family, especially chapter 7: “The Messiah of the Poor: Indira Gandhi,” pp. 99-112. He writes “The campaign of forced sterilization and slum clearance begun by Sanjay Gandhi … left her reputation tarnished almost beyond repair, it was inconceivable they were pursued without her concurrence. The campaigns … also betrayed Mrs. Gandhi's retrograde attitude to the poor: they were a valuable vote block, they were also the root cause of India's troubles” (106). One and a half million people, mostly in northern Hindu states, were victims of sterilization (107). By the end of the 1970s, the poor felt they would never be able to rise above “the deprivation that [they] had long suffered” (112).

5. Here it is interesting to compare Upamanyu Chatterjee's short story, “The Assassination of Indira Gandhi” with its main character, Bunny Karion, to Mistry's Manek Kohlah. Bunny is a Sikh college student, who against his parents wishes does not follow his religion or wear the beard and turban of his people. He has a drinking problem, and is leading a dissipated life at school in Bombay, when he decides, mostly out of boredom, to just go home. In fact, Bunny is ill with rheumatoid arthritis. As he is recovering from jaundice, Bunny and his family hear of the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi. Bunny feels “in a delirious state, … that the world's chaos merely mirrored his own” (207). Less subtle than Mistry or Mehta, Chatterjee drives home the parallels between history and literature. Both Bunny and Manek believe “nothing could claim him” (209), because “(a)mbition was an absurdity, so-much-to-do-and-so-little-time-to-do-it, how pointless an outlook” (210) in a world full of “mad events” (210). Bunny and Manek give into the State-of-Emergency which is at once a part of their private and public lives.

6. Here, as I will explain later, I draw on J. Hillis Miller's interpretation of Henry James on the relationship of history and fiction.

7. Mrinalini Sinha explains in Colonial Masculinity in a succinct way the importance of India to the English economy which makes Tanya's and Billy's marriage a symbolic parallel, see pp. 1-10.

8. See for example, the essays on The Buddha of Suburbia in the special section of Commonwealth Essays and Studies, ed. with an introduction by James Oubechou. Topics including colonialism, otherness and cultural criticism are addressed by the several authors. Though Kureishi is only 44, he is the subject of a biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta, Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller.

9. The defective body of the most native or natural of Indians is overtly suggestive of diseases and injustice in the larger polis; of colonialism and the State-of-Emergency. Rushdie's Salem Sinai is also disfigured with his huge nose and face in the shape of India. The injured bodies here are not open to such parody.

Works Cited

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Bayer, Jogamaya. “The Presentation of History in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Novel Heat and Dust.” Zach and Goodwin 443-447.

Billington, Rachel. “Out of the Purdan into Politics.” Rev. of Raj, by G. Mehta. New York Times Book Review 9 April 1989: 18.

“Briefly Noted—A Fine Balance.” The New Yorker 3 June 1998: 93.

Buruma, Ian. “Good Night Sweet Princes.” Rev. of Raj, by G. Mehta. New York Review of Books 18 May 1989: 9-12.

Chaterjee, Upumany. “The Assassination of Indira Gandhi.” Mirrorwork. Ed. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West. New York: Owl Books, 1997: 198-210.

Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1946.

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Dönnerstag, Jurgen. “Hybrid Forms of Multiculturalism in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie.” Zach and Goodwin 455-460.

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“Fiction Reprints—A Fine Balance.” Publisher's Weekly, 22 February 1991: 217.

Fujimoto, Yoko. “Multi-Culturalism and Ethnic Writing in English Canada: A New Development in the National Literary Discourse.” Zach and Goodwin 325-330.

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———. “Narrative and History.” ELH 41 (1974): 455-473.

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Rubin, Merle. “Novels of Love and Adversity for Summertime Reading.” Rev. of A Fine Balance, by R. Mistry. Christian Science Monitor 27 June 1996: B1.

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———. The Crow Eaters. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981.

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