‘We are under the rule which murdered Gandhi’

Artists and writers are required to chronicle history. Without art and literature, we would never know the truth, says Nayantara Sahgal in her new novella, When the Moon Shines by Day. In this satirical dystopian novella, Sahgal looks at wombs under the control of men, history repeating itself, caste politics and ghettoisation of muslims. But, this isn’t new for her. She has been a writer who was always influenced by the politics around her. In Sahgal’s autobiographical Prison and Chocolate cake, she describes the years when Gandhi was leading the independence movement. Her Rich Like Us was set against the Emergency and it had won her the Sahitya Akademi award, which she returned in 2015 to protest the killings of rationalists and writers. This novella, which took her four months to write, is about the unmaking of India, and she is already working on another one.

In an interview with National Herald, Nayantara Sahgal talks about the politics around us, her book and how we have grown as a nation. Edited excerpts from the interview:

Writers and artists are under attack; your book also mentions it. But it is not a new phenomenon. Taslima Nasreen, MF Hussain and Salman Rushdie were all persecuted during the previous regime. So, what is the difference between then and now?

Above all, we saw a huge slice of dictatorship during the emergency – the height of intolerance up till that time was then. So, the Opposition was jailed and no way to speak freely. The Constitution was amended; we didn’t even have the right to life and liberty. We knew then we were in a dictatorship, but now it is much worse. Now, all those things are happening under the guise of democracy. It is much worse now. The situation we are facing in India is new – it hasn’t happened before. Earlier we could call it intolerance, now we are looking at murder. Murder is not intolerance.

You had returned the award in 2015. Has anything changed since then?

The situation has grown much worse from before. We have seen killings, one after the other, by the vigilantes; mob lynching on a public highway with the police present. Not only that, we have seen criminals go scot-free. There hasn’t been a single conviction. In fact, in a terrible travesty of justice, there has been a reverse. The families of the victim are called the guilty party. We are in a dangerous situation.

We are living in a seemingly polarised society. What are the reasons for it?

The reason is that after Independence we declared ourselves to be a secular, democratic republic. This isn’t acceptable to the ideology known as Hindutva. BJP is the new name for its ancestor, known as Hindu Maha Sabha, which began in 1915. They had been waiting for almost 100 years to come to power. This country had rejected that ideology for 70 years. Vajpayee did come to power, but again it is different, because he functioned within the framework of the Constitution. Now, it is a different situation. Crimes are committed by the so-called fringe groups. But, they are no longer the fringe. They know they have the support of the government.

We are under the rule which murdered Gandhi. It is a very, very new situation.

In your novella, you made the book on Medieval history disappear. Why didn’t you choose modern or ancient history? How does this reflect in our society?

I chose it because that is the Muslim period – just before the Mughal period. The Hindutva ideologists believe that Muslims are outsiders; enemies. They are not Indians, though they may have been here for 1,000 years. They are here on sufferance and they don’t need rights. The others like Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists are outsiders, but they will be tolerated. The medieval period is one of Muslim invasions, finally ending in the Mughal empire. They feel that Hindu history was interrupted thousand years ago by these invasions and now they want it to resume, so that they can declare it a Hindu Rashtra.

What was on your mind when you chose the characters in your novella? To me, it seems like a mini India.

I don’t know what other writers do, but I never plan these things. They flow out by themselves. When you’ve got an idea stirring in your head, when you begin to work it out on paper, you too aren’t sure of it. You put it on the page and the character lives its own life and does its own thing. The American writer William Faulkner once said, “I have a hard time running after my characters, putting up with them.” All my novels have had political backgrounds; again, it was not planned that way. It just happened because politics was my natural material. Each novel represented a stage in our lives since Independence. I think of the whole chronology of novels as the making of India. Since, that is what I write about, the book and characters came from the same political awareness and it turned out to be the unmaking of modern India.

The current dispensation believes that the foundation of the country, which is based on Nehruvian ideas is failed/flawed. Do you think there is merit to their criticisms? Do you agree with the alternative proposed?

It’s not because secularism has failed, but because it has been successful, they are determined to oust it. It is in our psyche and in our DNA. In the Gujarat riots, where there was the state-sponsored massacre of Muslims and we know it was state-sponsored. They made a statement through it – this is what we think of your secularism. They created, with this massacre, a constituency of Hindutva followers. So, they don’t need the Muslim vote anymore. They don’t need the Dalit vote anymore. Although, the majority of Indians, which includes Hindus, voted against Modi, they threw down their gauntlet saying this is who we are and what we are. These people have brought out the worst instincts in Indians because here are people amongst us who are obsessed with the hate of Muslims, caste and who think as the RSS ideologues do.

The foundation we have now had been laid in the Nehruvian era – IITs, Space programme, agricultural institutes, big industries. He led three consecutive governments and everything got going from a scratch. There was tremendous growth and it was growth from zilch. Modi doesn’t realise there is always a ladder to be climbed and he rose to where he is climbing that ladder. He is at this stage, up here, because so much had been done before. Every generation inherits what the past has built. For him to say nothing has been built, shows how ignorant he is. This is a silly political statement. It has no basis in facts, but we are living in a post-truth era.

There are objections that the foundation of our secular modern state is an extension of western ideology and philosophy. So, now they want to exert their Indian-ness...

That is a false analogy that they are making. Secularism, in our terms, came about as a result of the freedom struggle. Until that time there was no such thing called modern India. There were different regions under princely rule. What Gandhi did was not done before – he started a movement, which cut across regions, religion, language, caste, class and gender. It was also the first time, where class and mass came together under one banner. When India became independent, all though we are a deeply religious country and for that reason we decided to be secular nation, so as to not have a religious identity. This is the meaning of Indian secularism and it has nothing to do with the West. Nowhere else have such contradictions held together and made the country strong so that we move forward as one people.

We have been divided by the first partition, now we are going through another partition. Hindutva has divided the country into Hindus and others. This is the second partition.