Nation Topics - Indira Gandhi | The Nation

The former first lady speaks from beyond the grave—and shows how far we’ve come (and haven’t).

A clash between a feminist activist and a former Guantánamo detainee divides the left.

Decades of civil war have all but destroyed once-progressive Sri Lanka. Now that the army is closing in on Tamil rebels, what chance is there for real peace now?

As the world mourns the loss of Benazir Bhutto, it would be myopic to focus only on Islamic-inspired violence and on Pakistan. For all of post-independence history, South Asia has been a region drenched in blood.

The contradictions of parliamentary democracy in India have been a constant source of struggle and rich debate.

If Canadian writer Yann Martel were a preacher, he'd be charismatic,
funny and convert all the nonbelievers. He baits his readers with
serious themes and trawls them through a sea of questions and confusion,
but he makes one laugh so much, and at times feel so awed and chilled,
that even thrashing around in bewilderment or disagreement one can't
help but be captured by his prose.

That's largely why I took such pleasure in Life of Pi, Martel's
wonderful second novel, which playfully reworks the ancient sea voyage,
castaway themes of classics like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's
Gulliver's Travels, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Melville's Moby-Dick and (in some of its more
fantastical aspects) Homer's The Odyssey, to explore the role of
religion in a highly physical world. What's more, it's a religious book
that makes sense to a nonreligious person. Although its themes are
serious and there are moments of awful graphic violence and bleak
despair, it is above all a book about life's absurdities that makes one
laugh out loud on almost every page, with its quirky juxtapositions,
comparisons, metaphors, Borgesian puzzles, postmodern games and a sense
of fun that reflects the hero's sensual enjoyment of the world. Although
Martel pays tribute to the past by using the typical castaway format
(episodic narrative, focus on details of survival, moments of shocking
violence and reflections on God and nature), his voice, and the fact
that his work is more fantastic, more scientifically sound and funnier
than that of his predecessors, infuses the genre with brilliant new
life. If this century produces a classic work of survival literature,
Martel's novel is surely a contender.

Life of Pi is the unlikely story of a 16-year-old Indian boy, Pi
Patel, adrift in a boat with a hungry tiger after the ship carrying his
zookeeper father, mother, brother and many animals sinks in the middle
of their journey from India to Canada. (It's the mid-1970s and Pi's
father decides to emigrate after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi starts
jailing her enemies and suspending civil liberties.) Pi is at once a
Hindu, Christian and Muslim (echoes of the pacific Mahatma Gandhi here)
who believes that all religions are about "love." But having grown up
among animals, he's also practical and grounded. Early in the book, his
three religious teachers meet, and Pi gets his "introduction to
interfaith dialogue," a big argument that ends only when he is asked for
his opinion. He quotes Gandhi, "All religions are true," adding, "I just
want to love God," which floors them all. Then he goes out with his
parents for ice cream. Most of the rest of the book is a challenge to
Pi's simple faith, as this sweet yet unsentimental hero experiences a
situation where, it would seem, survival is everything. Aside from the
detailed descriptions of hands-on survival techniques that almost rival
Ishmael's whaling lore in Moby-Dick, the book poses the
questions: Can faith survive in the face of doubt and suffering? Can the
love of God and one's fellows remain pure in an angry, violent world?

Despair sets in from the beginning. Not only does Pi lose his parents,
but he is facing life on the ocean wave with a tiger (named Richard
Parker), a zebra, an orangutan and a hyena. Pi watches them kill each
other, with Richard Parker finishing off the hyena. The boat is littered
with animal carcasses. As the days go by, Pi, a vegetarian, learns how
to kill with his bare hands, batter turtles to death and eat uncooked
flesh. He weeps. He is "dumb with pain and horror." But he survives,
marking his territory with his urine, as animals do, to keep Richard
Parker at bay, feeding him and finally teaching the tiger (by using a
whistle) that he, Pi, is master here.

It's true that his three faiths recede to a whisper on the boat. He
confesses that it is Richard Parker, and the practical matter of
avoiding being eaten by him, that gives him "purpose," even "peace" and
perhaps "wholeness," and thus keeps him alive. "If he died, I would be
left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger.... He
pushed me to go on living." Pi keeps up with his religious rituals, but
he finds his faith wavering. In one funny scene, he yells out his
beliefs to make them more real. "I would touch the turban I had made
with the remnants of my shirt and I would say aloud, 'THIS IS GOD'S
HAT!'" Then he points at Richard Parker and says, "THIS IS GOD'S CAT!"
The boat is "GOD'S ARK!" The sea, "GOD'S WIDE ACRES!" The sky, "GOD'S
EAR!" But, he says, "God's hat was always unravelling," and "God's ear
didn't seem to be listening."

You might say he's trying to persuade himself. But it's clear that he
continues to appreciate the beauty of the sea and sky, and the sparse
life around him, in which, as a Hindu, he sees his connection to God.
There are wonderful poetic descriptions of the fish around the boat as a
little city, of Richard Parker's beauty and of a dorado fish that, as it
dies, begins to "flash all kinds of colours in rapid succession. Blue,
green, red, gold and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its
surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death." Even
when his journey is "nothing but grief, ache and endurance," it is
"natural," he says, that he "should turn to God."

But religion is only one element of the book's exploration of faith.
Martel is also interested in the faith of his readers. He wants them to
believe his story. He has his narrator pose a larger, Keatsian "beauty
is truth" argument against the glorification of reason, "that fool's
gold for the bright." It's as if he were suggesting that storytelling is
a kind of religious experience because it helps us understand the world
in a more profound way than a just-the-facts approach (or by
implication, dogma, fundamentalism and literalism). Two passages that
some reviewers have picked out as the least convincing (for their lack
of literal accuracy!), I find illustrate Martel's attempt to show the
power of storytelling at its best. Fantastic, yes, but utterly
convincing. The first is Pi's encounter with a blind, cannibalistic
Frenchman whom Pi runs into at the exact moment he too has gone blind
for lack of nourishment. Their obsessive conversation about food is one
of the funniest and most farcical moments in the book. The second is
Pi's sojourn on a flesh-eating island, which is one of the most chilling
symbolic illustrations of evil I have read. (If the pious Swiss Family
Robinson finds utopia, the religious Pi finds dystopia!)

Good postmodernist that he is, Martel wants to use the very telling of
the tale--multiple narrators, a playful fairytale quality ("once upon a
time" and "happy ending" are mentioned in passing), realistically
presented events that may be hallucinations or simply made up--to push
at the limits of what's believable, yet still convince the reader of his
literary, not literal, veracity. He wants to prove that it's possible to
remain curious about and connected to the world, yet to accept that
there are always going to be aspects of life (and literature) that
remain mysterious.

Pi's doubts about his faith are mirrored by the seeds of doubt Martel
sows in the mind of the reader throughout the narrative. Every moment of
certainty is undercut by the potential for disbelief, and that's when
Martel seems to ask: Am I convincing you now? He sifts the story through
various narrators, beginning with an author-narrator that at first one
thinks is Martel himself but is only Martel-like, introducing the story
as if it were true. Martel has said in interviews that some of this
information is factually accurate. Like his narrator, he was trying to
write a novel about Portugal that wouldn't come alive when he got the
idea for Life of Pi on a trip to India. Martel also briefly
acknowledges his special debt to Brazilian Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar,
whose novella Max and the Cats also has a hero who survives the
sinking of a ship filled with zoo animals and spends days at sea in a
boat with a large cat, in this case a jaguar. Scliar's is the
mini-version that Martel fleshes out with more lyrical language and the
fruits of zoological research.

But there reality stops. There's the whiff of an old-fashioned quest or
allegorical tale in the introduction, for the Martel-like narrator first
learns the story from Francis Adirubasamy, a family friend of Pi's, who
tells him that Pi's story will make him "believe in God." And he plays
with the reader's sense of reality when he has Adirubasamy talk about Pi
as "the main character" whom the narrator proceeds to track down in
Canada. And just how believable is Pi? Now in his 40s, Pi apologizes for
his memory and tells the story as a series of out-of-sequence
events--jumping back and forth between his early childhood, his teenage
years and his time at sea. He can barely remember what his mother looks
like, but he appears able to recall whole conversations from his
childhood. He even asks the narrator to "tell my jumbled story in
exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less." (He does.)
One begins to wonder if Pi made up Richard Parker. Despite his knowledge
that people anthropomorphize animals because of their "obsession" with
putting themselves "at the centre of everything," Pi seems
disproportionately haunted by the fact that when the boat hits Mexico,
Richard Parker takes off without a backward glance. Perhaps the loss of
the tiger symbolizes the greater loss of his family, or of his own
innocence. Perhaps Pi invented the tiger to keep himself sane. The
reader is left to decide.

In a final test of the reader's faith in the narrative, Martel has Pi
tell an alternate, allegedly more believable version of the story at the
end--lacking not only Richard Parker but also the humor, poetry and
detail of the tiger story--to please a couple of doubting Japanese
shipping officials. He asks them which they think is the "better" story.
Of course, the tiger story is the finer, more thoughtful literary
creation and therefore (Martel suggests) has a truth more lasting than
the second, more journalistic version, with its "dry, yeastless
factuality."

Even if one accepts the twists and turns of the narrative, one faces the
further challenge of tracking down clues hidden in a warren of allusions
for more definitive answers to questions about Pi's religious faith, and
whether the narrator (and the reader) will be persuaded of the story's
original premise that it will make one believe in God. That symbolism is
important in this book is made clear at first by the most obvious symbol
of Pi's name, self-chosen because it's the short version of his real
name Piscine (after a family friend's favorite Parisian swimming pool),
and he is inevitably called "Pissing" by classmates. Nothing could be
grittier. In contrast, Pi is like ¼, what mathematicians call an
"irrational number," that is, 3.14 if rounded off, but with endlessly
unfolding decimal places if carried out. Martel couples this mysterious
abstraction with a concrete image--"And so, in that Greek letter that
looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive,
irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe,
I found refuge"--to show that, as a boy, Pi is in harmony with things as
they are as well as with his sense of the unknowable.

That Pi's attitude to religion may have changed after his ordeal is
buried in the hidden symbolism hinted at by Pi's college studies in
religion and zoology, described on the opening page as if to emphasize
their importance as a key to the story. (This is after the lifeboat
comes to shore in Mexico, and Pi goes to Canada to start a new life.)
His specialties are the sixteenth-century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria and
the sluggish three-toed sloth (symbol of the Trinity?) whose miraculous
capacity to stay alive, he says, "reminded me of God." (An echo of his
own survival, perhaps? A hint that God seems more elusive these days?)
More important, Luria's cabalistic ideas may hold the key to Pi's
experience at sea. His philosophy (Luria thought the secrets of the
universe lay in numbers) echoes the symbolism of ¼, and the formula
for figuring out the dimension of a circle and its radius (connecting
perimeter and center). Luria believed that God's light contracted from
the center of the universe, purging itself of evil elements, leaving an
empty space (a circle) in which human life developed. But God also sent
down a ray of light (like a radius) so that the few remaining divine
sparks could reconnect with Him. To achieve this fusion with God, and by
implication eliminate evil from the world, Luria believed, people must
live an ethical life. The original divine contraction is called
variously tzimtzum, zimzum or simsum. It's no
coincidence that Martel called the sinking ship Tsimtsum. Thus Pi at sea
was experiencing his own void (or withdrawal of God), in which elements
of evil fight with the instinct to do good. Richard Parker saved his
sanity, and Pi's goodness kept Richard Parker (and perhaps his own
faith) alive. By introducing this strain of mystical Jewish thought,
Martel not only further illustrates Pi's contention that all religions
are essentially the same in that they stem from love but he also uses
mysticism to underscore the profound ways in which literature can
present life's truths. Skeptics, however, might see Pi's study of Luria
as a move away from his earlier, purer faith toward a more structured
mysticism. That would explain his comment at the end of the book, when
he confesses his need for "the harmony of order."

Though one can read Life of Pi just for fun, trying to figure out
Pi's relationship to God makes one feel a bit like the castaway hero
wrestling slippery fish into his lifeboat for dinner. An idea twists and
turns, glittering and gleaming, slaps you in the face with its tail and
slips away. Did the story really happen? Does it make one believe in
God? What kind of God? Early on the narrator says, "This story has a
happy ending." But Pi also tells his interviewer, "I have nothing to say
of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it
is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful," which suggests
a man with at least some conflict on his mind. On the other hand, Martel
may also be suggesting that work is less important to Pi than God and
family--the narrator gives us glimpses of Pi's shrine-filled house and
his loving relationship with his wife, son and daughter. However, when
Pi is showing him family pictures, the narrator notes, "A smile every
time, but his eyes tell another story." I believe Martel's point is that
doubt inevitably accompanies faith. But the opposite explanation, that
after Pi's life-threatening experiences his faith is a mere prop for his
anxiety, might work just as well.

Does it matter that the answer to all questions in this novel is both
yes and no? One answer comes in the form of Pi's question moments after
the ship has sunk and he's sitting in the lifeboat, bewailing the loss
of his family and God's silence on the topic: "Why can't reason give
greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in
an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?" And
that, of course, is the nature of faith. One can't argue it through, one
just believes. Faith in God (as the younger Pi sees it) "is an opening
up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love." It's also "hard to
love," Pi adds, when faced with adversity. The same might be true of a
good novel, as readers are taken to the edge of their understanding by
something new. If the reader lets go of preconceptions, the experience
can be liberating and exciting. Martel may be sowing seeds of
uncertainty about God, but there's no doubt that he restores one's faith
in literature.

Minutes after the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center, my friend watched in horror as a man shot at two women in head scarves near Canal Street in downtown Manhattan.

You may find reading Akhil Sharma's debut novel akin to having your head held underwater. Attendant with feelings of a relentless, choking panic, though, will be an almost preternatural awareness of the details suffusing the experience.

In Sharma's An Obedient Father, a stunning work that is both personal and political, you hear a man say, "Misery often makes me want to look away from the present and leads me to nostalgia." The misery of the present is born out of the political trials of India in the early eighties. The escape that the narrator wishes for is driven by yearning for a rural past: "As I swallowed my heart medicine in the blue dark of the common room, I imagined walking through Beri's sugarcane fields and sitting beneath a mango tree. I wanted to be a child again, with the future a wide, still river in the afternoon." What makes this nostalgia for an unsullied past both poignant and problematic is that it is the desire of a man who cannot escape the memory of the newspapers soaking up the blood beneath his daughter's thighs each night after he has raped her.

The protagonist, Ram Karan, is a corrupt official in the Education Department in Delhi. He is a widower living with his newly widowed daughter, Anita, and his young granddaughter. Anita is the child he raped repeatedly twenty years earlier. Most of the book is in Karan's voice.

The experience of an intimacy so often violent, of being a witness to what is routinely hidden but is here plainly visible, is a result of the quality of the narrator's voice. Lucid and perverse, like the solipsistic narrator of Nabokov's Lolita, the confessions of Sharma's antihero are sharp, even empathetic, and loathsome. (Recall Nabokov's H.H.: "I had possessed her--and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.")

The social backdrop of the novel is also enriched by the tussle for the Delhi seat between a dying Congress Party and an emergent, right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. Karan is the money man, the bribe-collector, for one of the candidates in the parliamentary election. The petty political intrigues and their murderous fallouts provide a distraction from the less public drama that is played out inside the three-member Karan home.

It is to Sharma's great credit as a novelist that I was as often horrified by Karan's abuses and compulsive degradations as I was held captive by his pellucid dissection of shame that exposes a geography of self-delusion and national wrongdoing. There can be no doubt that Ram Karan is evil, but because he almost always is given voice, he also remains in some measure human.

This is the book's most disturbing feature but also its most powerful triumph. As a result, An Obedient Father poses a serious challenge to a reviewer who is tempted to take refuge in the easiest, moralizing dismissal of this unusual novel. There is reason to be dismayed by its brutality, and not everyone can savor its black humor; but it cannot be denied that the maddening narrative voice is as darkly hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky.

Sharma also pulls off the trick of showing that a collective political degradation is intertwined seamlessly with personal turpitude. Indira Gandhi's dictatorial "emergency," imposed twenty-five years ago, suspended civil rights and gave a free hand to an inner circle of politicos in Delhi. The emergency didn't tamper only with democratic institutions; its depredations made more base our responses to those weaker than we are. Sharma's novel bears the scars of that trauma and its aftermath on Karan, but also on his daughter: "Money would make everything negotiable.... The more years Indira Gandhi spent in office, the more my income grew, for more and more things fell under the government's aegis and we civil servants were the gatekeepers. I bought a toaster, a blender, a refrigerator, and a television. Anita went through higher secondary and into college. She grew up shy and easily panicked, but there was nothing that marked her as damaged."

If Kafka's K. located power in the distant castle, Sharma shows us mercilessly that such castles are our homes, so to speak, in our bedrooms. In fact, when you overhear Ram Karan's confessions about his political sins to his daughter each evening after the English news, you also realize that the political is a deflection from the interrogation of the personal. Karan understands this well: "I thought that providing her with something to rage about openly would be a way to keep us from the topic of what I had done to her."

Incest has enjoyed a popular run in Indian fiction recently. An Obedient Father is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote The God of Small Things. It is certainly the novel that Raj Kamal Jha came close to writing when in The Blue Bedspread he plumbed the dark ambiguities of abuse and incest. Sharma's novel is part of a brilliant coming of age in Indian fiction.

The dust jacket of the book informs us that its author is an investment banker who lives in Manhattan. He was born in India but grew up in Edison, New Jersey, studied at Princeton and later Stanford. He has won two O. Henry awards for his short fiction and worked as a scriptwriter for Steven Spielberg.What is most remarkable about this profile is not the youth (he's 29) or even the impressive array of accomplishments; rather, it is the fact that a writer who has lived most of his life outside India is able to write about life in Delhi with such sensitivity and flair. The brothels of Delhi's GB Road, the roads and shops of Kamla Nagar, the alleys of Old Delhi, in the changing light and temperature of the seasons, all come alive in this book's pages. Even the evocation of Karan's childhood in a village before India's independence is exact and intriguing:

I remembered that when my mother and I waited by the side of the road for a bus, I would tell my mother to move back, not because I was worried about her safety, but because this was one of the few ways I had to show my love.... Violence was common. Grown men used to rub kerosene on a bitch's nipples and watch it bite itself to death.

Does this sharpness of outline in the book, its confidence in its own voice and descriptions, put an end to the debate about the authenticity of Indian expatriate writers? An Obedient Father demonstrates that magical realism à la Salman Rushdie is not the indispensable tool of the Indian writer living abroad and, second, that unmagical realism à la Rohinton Mistry is insignificant if it does not scratch away at wounds that are covered over by the scabs of silence.

Unlike Rushdie and Mistry, both of whom have written about Indira Gandhi's emergency, Sharma produces nothing that could have been culled from the pages of a newspaper. Neither magical nor dull, his writing transgresses the borders of earlier, celebrated fictions, and he makes connections that are both vivid and dislocating: "Every night I had dreams of humiliation, of people catching me with Anita. When I saw a rooster picking at a pile of dung, I wondered what he was eating. Around this time I also began imagining sucking the penises of powerful men."

We learn early about Karan's death, but there is little consolation in this. The ironies of the victimizer becoming a victim, at the novel's end, are plainly discernible. Yet such ironies are overshadowed by the more gloomy evidence of damaged lives and their unsettled grief. And after Karan's death, I missed his eye for detail. I could not let go of the thought that of all the people in the room when Anita informs her extended family of what happened in her past, Karan is the only one who notices that everyone, in their desire to help, had ignored Anita's own desires. (Nabokov's H.H. was similarly cognizant of deeper absences: "I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.")

I tried to think again about one of Karan's earlier statements: "All the things that might mark me as unusual and explain what I did to Anita were present in other people." Did I not see the signs in my own life?

I was returning to college one summer from my hometown in Bihar, India. The train stopped at Aligarh. We were running late and it was hot outside. I looked up from my reading when an old man appeared and began to claim in a loud voice that he was Jawaharlal Nehru. The train began to move. There were many new passengers, daily commuters with their bags and their loads of merchandise. Some of them began joking with the old man. The Aligarh passengers, all men, settled down to a game of cards. They asked the old man a question or two and then teased him. Like many others in the compartment, I was amused by this teasing.

The old man, sensing that he was being mocked, shouted louder; one of the men slapped him from the upper berth and told him to be quiet. The old man was wearing a white cotton cap, as Nehru did in photographs. The cap had been knocked down. The old man picked it up and turned on the others with filthy abuses.

This was all the provocation the men needed. All down the narrow pathway between the berths, violent blows rained on the old man, who swore and spat viciously. His head began to bleed. One man gave his rubber slipper to the old man and asked him to use it to sweep the floor. "Do that, Jawaharlal," he said. When the old man tried to use the slipper to hit back, the man pulled his dhoti, leaving the old man naked from the waist down.

My fellow passengers, many of whom had been sitting till then, crowded around the old man and tore off his shirt. They kicked his genitals. Someone on a nearby berth asked that this be stopped, but this appeal had no effect.

There was a stink coming from the corner in which the old man had been pushed. As I said, it was very hot outside, and it was hot in the compartment too. I did not want to move. I thought of the old man when I got to my hostel and was preparing to sleep, but I don't think I've thought of him for any length of time ever again till I was reading An Obedient Father. That memory of derangement and violence was evoked by the book, no doubt, but also evoked was the claustrophobia of our closed lives, our bitterness and the collective nakedness ringing with abuse.

Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo, threatening fire from heaven if Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic does no