A Land Beyond Imagining

Gautam Patel

It was a typically squalid town in the heart of India’s cowbelt: the usual cats’ cradle of messed-up wiring, open sewers, cracked pavements, blaring horns, loudspeakers on every corner blaring something indecipherable, the air so thick with dust and grime and exhaust that even the sunlight seemed to have surrendered. I was here, against all better judgement, on a work trip and regretting every minute of it. Along the way, an unexpected possible refuge; inside, the bookshop was small and tired, pulp fiction potboilers and outdated magazines with curled covers, the paunchy proprietor, soaked in boredom, alternately picking his teeth with a matchstick and shouting at an assistant. On one shelf, facing out, was a thick book, its kitsch cover a challenge: buy me if you dare.

Ian McDonald’s River of Gods was, I believe, largely ignored in India; in England, it won the British Science Fiction Association best novel award in 2004 and was nominated for the Hugo and the Arthur C. Clarke best novel awards.

India, 2047; one hundred years after Independence. India as we know it today no longer exists. It has fractured into a number of independent states: Awadh, Bharat, the United States of Bangla. There is no water. The monsoon has failed for the third year in a row. Most of the Himalayan glaciers have turned to gravel; the Ganga is reduced to a trickle. One nation starts damming it, threatening the life-source of the other. Governments propose melting the few glaciers that remain and diverting natural systems.

The land, like the two cities central to the narrative, Delhi and Varanasi, is like nothing we know and are everything we know. There is still the extreme poverty and backwardness, people scratching a living out of dirt. But this is also the world of cutting-edge technology, the land of high-end computers and artificial intelligence (in the language of the book aeai) and robots supplied to the rest of the world. There are the “Krishna Cops”, a sort of moral police for aeais, charged with destroying artificial intelligences which pass the Turing Test and are indistinguishable from humans. There is a wildly popular soap (‘soapi’), Town & Country, on television (‘tivi’), entirely created and run by aeais, complete with artificial computer graphic actors who believe they are distinct from the soapi character they portray. There are distributed entities that can go ‘live’ on different tivi channels at the same time (that should sound very familiar). A Hindu fundamentalist leader, N.K. Jeevanji, undertakes a yatra on a fabulous rath. There are communal riots; a ‘nute’, a neutral-gendered entity, not a eunuch, not a transvestite, of compelling beauty; an American scientist hiding in a village on a South Indian coast; a foreign reporter (embedded, of course), robot armies, a mysterious clairvoyant girl, an asteroid, climate change, an iceberg being towed into the Bay of Bengal, a private secretary to the Prime Minister and — this is delicious — ‘datarajas’, kings of digital information.

The huge cast of characters, and the innumerable Mahabharata-like sub-plots and side-stories running together make for a book that, while not easy, is irresistible, partly because so much seems so familiar. There is that unbridgeable divide between the ancient and the modern, old and new, inhuman poverty and obscene wealth, the many irreconcilable differences that are India even today. Time is meaningless, history is an illusion: old mythologies are warped by technology, traditions and customs run up police diktat. There is an overwhelming feeling of noise, babble, chaos, and a complete unconcern for the inevitable doom, a fatalism that is precisely India.

The book has an unnerving prescience. How and when was India Balkanized: river-water disputes or something more sinister — religion, language or caste perhaps? A possible answer is in two stunning passages from Vishnu at the Cat Circus, one of the long short stories in McDonald’s later collection Cyberabad Days (two other stories, An Eligible Boy and A Little Goddess are spectacular):

 

 

“War took us all by surprise. One day we were the Great Asian Success Story — the Indian Tiger (I call it the Law of Aphoristic Rebound — the Tiger of Economic Success travels all around the globe before returning to us) — and unlike those Chinese, we had English, cricket and democracy; the next we were bombing each other’s malls and occupying television stations. State against state, region against region, family against family. That is the only way I can under the War of Schism; that India was like one of those big, noisy, rambunctious families into which the venerable grandmother drops for her six-month sojourn and within two days sons are at their father’s throats. And the mother at her daughter’s, and the sisters feud and the brothers fight and the cousins uncles aunts all take sides and the family shatters like a diamond along the faults and flaws that gave it its beauty.
…
My parents fell in love in one country, India, and married in another, Awadh, the ghost of ancient Oudh, itself a ghost of the almost-forgotten British Raj. Delhi was no longer the capital of a great nation but of a geographical fudge. One India was now many, our mother goddess descended into a dozen avatars from re-united Bengal to Rajasthan, from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu. How had we let this happen, almost carelessly, as if we had momentarily stumbled on our march toward superpowerdom, then picked ourselves up and carried on. It was almost embarrassing, like a favourite uncle discovered with porn on his computer. You look away, you shun it, you never talk about it. Like we have never talked about the seisms of violence that tear through our dense, stratified society; the mass bloodletting of our independence that came with an excruciating partition, the constant threat of religious war, the innate, brooding violence in the heart of our caste system. It was all so very un-Indian. What are a few hundred thousand deaths next to those millions? If not forgotten, they will be ignored in a few years. And it certainly has made cricket more interesting.”

To fiction, it doesn’t matter how this came about. It should matter to us; and each cause is a possibility today for the India of 2012 has all the signs of achieving McDonald’s vision of a splintered nation because of water disputes, religion, caste, language, custom, culture, united only by trashy television soaps, gossip and celebrity watching. (In Vishnu, there’s a full-blown Delhi wedding at Lodi Gardens, complete with elephants and a performance by the full — and entirely aeai — cast of Town & Country dancing to music composed by ‘legendary screen composer A. H. Husayin’).

In a recent article, Pratap Bhanu Mehta demonstrated the distancing of the Congress Party from its origins; a party now defined only by casteism, corruption, communalism and cynicism. Talking about telecom, Rahul Gandhi mentions Sam Pitroda, and inexplicably refers to his origins and caste. How is this of the remotest relevance to what Pitroda achieved for the nation? His contribution was not limited to a community or even an area. It changed the face of an entire country. More divisiveness: with a critical election ahead, a Congress Minister promises increased reservations for Muslims.

The approach is infectious — think Parthenium hysterophorous L: highly toxic, known to cause severe allergies in humans, this fast-proliferating weed invades the land. It is commonly known as Congress Grass or safed topi and its spread is unstoppable. And so political parties of every hue and strip find new ways to hit communal, parochial and casteist nerves. We’ve already got Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chattisgarh ripped out of Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh. Now we must tear up other states too (Mayawati wants to cleave UP in four), and the list keeps getting longer: Bodoland and Dimaraji (out of Assam); Gorkhaland (from West Bengal); Harit Pradesh (out of UP); Kosal (bits of Odisha and that appendix excised from MP, Chhattisgarh); Mithila (Bihar and Jharkhand); Purvanchal (Uttar Pradesh again); Tulu Nadu (between Karnataka and Kerala); Vindhya Pradesh (from MP). And let’s not forget Vidharbha from Maharashtra and Telangana from Andhra. Three new states; another eleven to come. So far. Delhi, too, but that was always separate from the rest of India. And Mumbai has its own share of dimwits, blessed with much money and little brain, demanding independence. We should go the whole hog: let’s have the independent nations of Chunabhatti, Saki Naka and Pydhonie.

To create a smaller administrative unit is one thing; to divide a nation on considerations of language, faith and culture raises the question of how and why we, with our pluralistic and secular Constitutional mandate, have allowed ourselves to come to a pass when our identity as Indians is thought inadequate, and when who we are is defined by who we are not. This regionalism makes us declare ourselves to be first Maharashtrian, Gujarati or Punjabi before we are Indian, and the trickery of such pseudo-definitions will shape what we will become: a nation dismembered. Our nationhood was too hard won at too high a cost to be allowed to be divided like this.

Meanwhile, as we go about carving up ourselves, life continues to prove stranger than the strangest fiction: no writer, however gifted, could ever have imagined the pink plastic-wrapped pachyderms that line the streets of the independent states of Lucknow and Noida.