Going by latest critical theory
Punjabi literature
by Jaspal Singh

Death of history as a certainty
Telling the Truth about History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob W.W. Norton, London. Pp. 322. £ 19.95.
Reviewed by Shelley Walia

Good, but
could be
better
Stillborn by Rohini Nilekani. Penguin Books, New Delhi. Pp. 268. Rs 200.
Reviewed by Priyanka Singh

Why govts distrust panchayats

Rural Local Government in India and South Asia by B.S. Khanna. Deep & Deep, New Delhi. Pp. 258. Rs 450.

LOCAL government is one area of political studies which is highly researched and widely commented upon. There is hardly an aspect of it ranging from its organisational pattern to its overall impact on the politics and administration of the country, which might not have attracted the attention of the researchers the world over. However, most of the studies are confined either to the country-by-country description of the local government systems or to the inter-system performance analysis and comparison of its various sectoral components.

Viewed in this context, Prof B.S. Khanna’s "rural local government in India and South Asia" is different from the rest. Its first distinguishing feature is that it compresses within it the local government systems of five different countries of South Asia — namely, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Besides giving a detailed account of each system alongwith evolutionary backdrop, it draws a comparative picture of the status, composition, functions and, above all, the functional performance of all of them.

The second merit of the book lies in the selection of the systems. All of them, with the exception of India, constitute a dark area of research. Not many scholars have cared to peep into them, particularly with regard to their local government system. This book thus tries to fill up a major gap in the literature on the subject.

The book comprises three parts. The first part is devoted exclusively to the panchayati raj of India. The second part deals with the four other countries, setting aside one chapter to each. In the last part, these system have been compared to one another, though somewhat briefly.

Adopting a vertical approach, the author has taken pains to explain each system in minute detail, highlighting its evolution through its various stages of development right from the pre-Independence days, its organisational pattern, functions of its tiers, its administrative personnel, committee system and its functioning over the years. The analysis is both exhaustive and penetrative. The horizontal comparison of these systems too is comprehensive.

Even though each and every aspect of the system has been taken care of quite adequately, the treatment is confined mostly to the bare provisions of the statutes. Full justice has has not been done to their day-to-day functioning. In this respect, the author seems to have been handicapped by a paucity of literature. As pointed out above, not much work has been done on these systems, with the exception of India. Further research is therefore called for.

Though constituting the lowest tier of the politico-administrative hierarchy of a country, local government plays a highly crucial role in government and politics. This is for the reason that it handles such affairs of the people as are of direct and immediate concern. How their problems are dealt with by the government at their door step stimulates its interest, to begin with, in the government and politics of their locality and gradually in the larger affairs of the nation.

The vital place that local bodies thus occupy in the overall scheme of governance makes its rulers, especially of the authoritarian brand, apprehensive lest these institutions breed a rebellion. Even leaders of democracies are no exception. Those of them who occupy positions of power in the government do not cherish local government institutions, because the latter tend to erode their share of power and influence. Left to them, they would like to carry on the government without these institutions. But when mounting pressure for their creation leaves them with no choice, they establish them grudgingly and in a halting and faltering manner. It is after a long and sustained battle that powers are devolved to them and their rightful due is accorded.

This is precisely the story of local government institutions of these countries. That is the reason why there has been a long period of their evolution in all countries of South Asia, India being no exception. Till this day, no country can boast of a system which is fully autonomous of the central control. Take India for instance, its panchayati raj is hamstrung by various types of political and bureaucratic procedures. The author has highlighted this fact quite ably and exhaustively. He unfolds the long tale of how these elites have tried, and quite often successfully, to stunt their development.

On the whole, the book makes interesting reading though it needs some editing. The facts and details of the systems as marshalled in it are indeed valuable, especially for students and researchers of local government. It may inspire many a researcher to study these hitherto obscure systems in greater depth.

— S. Bhatnagar

Going by latest critical theory
Punjabi literature
by Jaspal Singh

LITERARY criticism in Punjabi has been nourished by critics like Sant Singh Sekhon, Kishan Singh, Attar Singh and Haribhajan Singh. Three of these leading ones are dead and the fourth is not physically fit enough to engage in literary controversies. Nevertheless, these masters have produced a whole generation of active literary critics like Tejwant Gill, Gurbhagat Singh, Raghbir Sirjana, Sutinder Noor, Jasbir, Gurcharan Arshi, Joginder Rahi, Tarlok Kanwer, Ravinder Ravi, Kesar Singh and T.R. Vinod, to name only a few.

Even a third generation of literary critics has appeared on the horizon — Jaswinder, Harbhajan Bhatia, Sukhdev Khehra, Dhanwant Kaur, Sukhdev Sirsa, Satish Verma, Manjit Singh and Vanita (the last two from Delhi). The contribution of the younger lot has been no less important in recent years.

Another critic, Harchand Singh Bedi, can also be included in this group. His recently released "Path te Parsang — Parvasi Punjabi Kahani" (Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar) is a significant contribution to critical thought in Punjabi. This compilation of research papers deconstructs 12 short stories by Punjabi writers settled abroad. Two of the stories "Vapasi" (by Jagjit Brar) and "Panghura" (by Rani Nagender) are from the USA. Two others are by Canadian citizens of Punjabi origin. They are "Margrita"(Amarpal Sara) and "Hamchhin" (Ravinder Ravi).

Rest of the eight stories are by Punjabi writers settled in Britain. They include "Rape" (K.C. Mohan), "Bedakhal" (Shivcharan Gill), "Free society"(Swarn Chandan), "Khatti lassi da glass"(Darshan Dhir), "Do kanare"(Tarsem Neelgiri), "Roommate" (Veena Verma), "Gungi rutt de panchhi" (Harjit Atwal) and "Us paar" (Raghbir Dhand).

All these stories are based on different themes relevant to the immigrant situation in an uncaring alien world. They have one thing in common — the consciousness of being different, that too in an ethnically, culturally and economically hostile environment.

Racism, covert and overt, keeps troubling the protagonists both at the conscious and subconscious level. The ethnic problem is aggravated by inhuman capitalist relations of the western world where human concerns are a low priority area. Even the dynamic Punjabi community develops a ghetto psychology in the western environment that provides them a sense of security but in an apparently antagonistic surrounding.

Jagjit Brar’s story "Vapasi" focuses on religion, the judiciary and political system, and how all three do injustice to the immigrants in a society like that of the USA.

Rani Nagender’s "Panghura" brings out the deep racial prejudices in the mental make-up of white America that force a white American woman to decline an offer to become a surrogate mother of a baby of an Indian couple though she is in the market to sell her womb to the highest bidder.

Amarpal Sara’s story "Margrita" is about the coarsening of human relations in the capitalist system. A daughter bound for a barbecue party learns about the death of her father in a hospital. She casually informs her mother about it and herself prefers to attend the party instead of taking care of the dead body.

Ravinder Ravi dwells on man-woman relationship from the existential point of view. In K.C. Mohan’s story "Rape" a whiteman is imprisoned for raping his own wife. A Punjabi woman Nasib Kaur is shocked at the complaint of the wife against her husband for such an usual thing.

In Shivcharan Gill’s story "Bedakhal" an Indian married to a white woman is called a dog by his in-laws and thrown out of the house by the entire family. Antagonistic race relations precipitate the situation in this story as well. The whites and the brown do not meet even in conjugal bondage.

Swaran Chandan’s "Free society" portrays the predicament of Punjabi parents who claim to be most forward-looking in a fully developed free society. But when it comes to teenage morality that this system encourages, they become medieval and feudal in their outlook.

Darshan Dhir compares the different ways of exploitation in the Indian and British systems in "Khatti lassi da glass". The money lending commission agent offers a glass of buttermilk to his clients — the peasant — whom he exploits and the British factory owner gives a little hike in wages and breaks a workers strike.

The protagonist in Tarsem Neelgiri’s "Do kanare" tormented by racial terrorism does not want to go back to the West. But forced by his father and wife for different reasons, he agrees. Veena Verma in "Roommate" brings out the tragedy of an educated girl married to a semi-educated British Punjabi husband. This girl has to suppress her longing for having an intellectual dialogue with him, which the husband considers totally irrelevant. Harjit Atwal writes about the religious and political exploitation and the natural human drives in "Gungi rutt de panchhi".

Raghbir Dhand’s "Us paar" portrays race relations in historical and ideological perspectives.

Critic Harchand Singh Bedi concentrates on each one of these stories in order to understand their structure, both at the manifest and immanent levels. The dialectic of construction and deconstruction of the literary discourse is brought into focus by decoding the "grammar" of its texture. The literary critique here does not move from context to text or from author and his worldview to his specific work, but moves from the text to its discourse, then to the field of pragmatics (society, history, culture and so on) so that the process of signification can be shown in motion from one unit to the other, unfolding the semantic layers (meanings, shades, nuances of the text).

This critical project falls back on two seminal influences — one of Ferdinand de Saussure and the other of Vladimir Propp — which were later on utilised in a magnificent manner by Claude Levi-Strauss in his monumental "Mythologiques" and "Structural Anthropology". Levi-Strauss appears to be the best practitioner of the structuralism method in the field of mythology.

In fact, the well-known French culture scientist, Griemas has been able to produce such scintillating models of semantic studies only because Propp and Levi-Strauss had preceded him. Roland Barthes, one of the most perceptive semiologists (one who studies signs and symbols in different sociological contexts), of the 20th century combines Saussure, Propp and Levi-Strauss for the study of literary productions and cultural phenomena like fashions.

Roland Barthes holds that a text is liberated from its author since it is held not by him but by signs and symbols that comprise the textual discourse, and the "life" of the signs and symbols becomes independent once it has been encoded by the author. The process of decoding the text is that of the reader who breathes life into the dormant words confined to the text by the author. In fact the text is "liberated" and "recreated" by the reader. Its semantic load is carried by the words and sentences, and the author is left with no role to play whatsoever. That is why Roland Barthes announces the "death" of the author.

Language and culture are the ultimate arbiters of a work of literature that takes birth through the medium of the author. The aesthetic realisation of the text is a three-layered project that is at the level of syntactics (linear sequence of events and situations), semantics (conceptual oppositions within the textual context) and pragmatics (the socio-cultural context).

For such an interpretation, the concept of "paradigm" is very important. It is a set of related words and ideas that constitute the total semantic field of each word (signs, symbols) used in the text. While making sentences only one from the group at each stage is chosen at a time, all the others remain in the background — that is, they are absent from the text. But the meaning of those that are present is largely shared by those that are absent. Then the entire paradigm is culturally situated in the linguistic community.

Therefore, the relation of words chosen by the author in a particular text provides only a limited peep into the dialectic of the meaning. In fact the relation of the present words to those related words that are absent (paradigmatic relations) lays bare the entire gamut of meaning carried by the texts in concrete socio-cultural and historical situations.

The field of pragmatics highlights the ideological paradigm of literary discourse where it intercepts the stream of intellection while being semantically realised.

Harchand Singh Bedi has utilised these new mediations to concrete literary creations by synthesising them in his own way. However, the diagrams presented for showing the interaction of forces in certain stories create confusion. They could have been easily avoided.

Nevertheless, the attempt is a significant contribution to textual criticism. The author has employed a lot of intellectual sources in the production of this work, which augurs well for critical thought in Punjabi.

Death of history as a certainty

Telling the Truth about History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob W.W. Norton, London. Pp. 322. £ 19.95.

FACTS do not speak for themselves. The epistemological notions of the positivists are now being challenged on the ground that history is a literary artifact and that all historical sources are intertextual. The intrusion of politics and theory into the discipline, therefore, has lead to historians becoming more and more defensive. Their approach to language and to the narrative conventions that they have always followed has a vividly untheorised position which has turned the post-modern critic into an antagonist who strongly disagrees with the empirical bases of historical inquiry.

I saw this at the Centre of Indian Studies in St Antony’s College, Oxford, when I presented this view in a lecture on the problem of writing history and cultural formations. A searching debate did take place but what many historians present there failed to see was that such destabilising of univocal and monologic historical accounts is an enabling factor introducing politics as well as an opportunity for other histories to be written and those existing to be brought under a stiff scrutiny.

Like them, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, the three writers of "Telling the Truth about History" do try to favour critical enquiry and not consensus-building, but they remain adamant in viewing diversity and pluralism as distinct from relativism. If history has to contribute to a public debate and political consciousness, it must move away from its authoritarianism and excessive allegiance to established philosophical categories. One would agree with Hayden White that history is the product of "the fictive capabilities of the historian". The story about the past as history is more than just an account of empirical facts.

Questions concerning pluralism and relativism or singularity and plurality, which lie at the very heart of contemporary philosophical investigation are as ancient as the philosophies of classical Greece. These controversies concerning relativity or universality of truth abound in post-Orientalist historiography which treats areas of knowledge, culture and traditions as sites for conflict, with the main purpose of getting rid of essentialisms reached by colonial western historians. Apparently, it is a reaction to Western anthropologists and ethnographists who have traditionally gone by the conservative assumptions that culture is a sphere of a privileged social expression. It is this history and the writing of it that has given rise to recent exchanges between the foundationalists and the post-foundationalists, the modernists and the post-modernists. And behind these debates I see the struggle to reformulate shifting identities and precarious polities.

The enlightenment concept of man’s unchanging nature or the humanist idea of an ahistorical essence of man has been rejected by Sartre and by Marxist-humanists like Georg Lukacs who see violence behind such a homogenising discourse. Man is seen by them as "a product of himself and his own activity in history". Humanism was a strategy for legitamising the ideological control of the colonised or, in Sartre’s words, "a practice of exclusion". I would say it is also a practice of assimilation and inclusion of the human itself with the values of Europe.

Sartre’s "Critique of Dialectical Reason" rejected European humanism seeing human subjects as "products of a conflictual psyche and political economy". The project of decentering of the subject by the structuralists was in many ways itself derived from, in the words of Robert Young, a "suspicion that the ontological category of ‘the human’ and ‘human nature’ had been inextricably associated with the violence of western history. The centrality and unity of the "I" as regarded by humanism stands demolished. It is this view of the alterity within the self which is made up of innumerable other selves that coheres with the Foucoultian redefinition of the self that continuously gets displaced as well as decentred as systems alter and institutions as well as hierarchies of power undergo a change.

In recent years it has become imperative to question the external nature of objectivity, realism and truth which traditional historians take as essentials on which to proceed. The philosophical foundations of history endeavour to reformulate the link between reality and theory, but as is seen in this book, there is an inherent constraint in this relationship. For the sake of historical objectivity, the historian tries to reconstruct and reinterpret the past out of the evidence available to him but "evidence imposes definite limits to the factual assertions that can be made" and this limits the range of interpretations. Thus the question that is posed in the book is: To what degree are historical studies objective?

Often, interpretation takes hold over the thinking process which cannot transcend its own discursive practices to get at truth. As is postulated by pos-modernism, there is no autonomous procedure of bringing reality to bear on interpretations. Since all judgements are based on interpretation that cannot be infallible. It can, therefore, be concluded that there cannot be certainty about the foundations of knowledge. Though it is a difficult task to satisfy the sceptic, and this is what the writers also feel, they finally do succumb to Foucault’s claim that though all that he produces is fiction, he does not mean to "go so far as to say that fictions are beyond truth". He is of the view that it is possible to make fiction work inside of truth.

This approach to history provoked the post-modern historian to deny the purity and reality of the past and thus of any objective truth about the past. The frailty and fallibility of the historical enterprise is always kept in mind. In its opposition to the "canon of evidence" and the authenticity of documents, the post-modern historian endeavours to expose the pretence of "facts" which in other words is the working of an ideology behind the historical texts of the modernists, an ideology of the hegemonic and privileged patriarchal interests.

Narrativity itself is singular and a primary culprit which through its dependence on chronology and causality imposes a fixed history of a real and truthful past. Salman Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, Mukul Keshvan, and many other contemporary writers and critics realise this anathema in post-modernist terms. History for them is no more than a fictional truth — a rhetorical, literary, aesthetic and imaginative creation — that goes beyond documentary evidence and authenticity or the absolute certitude of historical fact.

I must stress the connection between the erosion of the implicit and explicit universalist claims of western epistemology and the increasing impact of other cultures on European thinking. The relativisation of native epistemologies is sustained by labels such as "post-modern", "post-colonial" or "post-structural" that are applied hegemonically to cultures and texts outside Europe as a "survival strategy against the reinscription of non-European realities into a dominant European system. Although such "neo-universalisms" constitute liberating practices from the discourse of the coloniser or the master-narrative, they have also been interpreted as a shrewd means of controlling the "other".

The appropriation of native literature of such hegemonic control — a control that revives and invigorates the dialectic of self and other — brings about the crisis of one’s indigenous generic forms that become "peripheral when implicated in unquestioning compliance with the western centre". At the same time "it is a valid contention that European models too undergo ontological fracture when the ‘other’ begins to formulate its own perspective and a vision of an independent identity brought about by exposing the politics of labels and metaphors, is refusing to accept the hegemonic forms of impenetrability."

But there is no denying that pluralism and fragmentation are here to stay. And the historian may just as well adapt himself to dealing with incoherence and disunity. But this does not mean that there are any interpretational flaws in the study of history. The profession of history goes on flourishing and its future is secure, whatever the sceptic might argue. Why then should the keepers of the discipline fear that the social historian has "dug the grave of historical studies". Reformulation and recreating are an ongoing process in history writing. The past appears as a protean entity that has a direct bearing on our present and on version of ourselves. To stop writing about the past is to stop being human.

The multiple point of view has enriched the study of the past. Cultural difference, pluralism and relativism emphasised by the social historian have certainly broadened the vision of the discipline. In spite of highlighting these new currents in telling the truth about history, the writers of this book seem to ignore the problematical concept of truth. They stand by the Descartean concept that objective knowledge is possible because external reality has the power to impose itself on the mind. They would like to prefer the non-absolutist view but contrary to it, language for them does not present any complexities as it embodies theoretical presuppositions. They refuse to see the inherent complex relationship between language and fact and do not allow post-modern approaches to "undercut the ability to say meaningfully true things about the world. Regardless of language and human linguistic conventions, nature, whether in the form of plants or microbes, would still be real, out there behaving in predictable ways, even if there were no way of saying so."

Such standpoints have brought us to a juncture when the discipline of history is surrounded by confusion as the traditional, analytical and conceptual structures of historical knowledge stand eroded. It is not possible to ever reconstruct the past in all its actuality as all reconstructions are provisional and interpretative. The recent death of Thomas Kuhn takes us literally into a post-Kuhnian age where traditional notions of transcendental historical value have become suspect.

— Shelley Walia

Flirting with Revolution for 70 years

Stalin by Edvard Radzinsky. Anchor/ Doubleday, New York. Pp. 607. $15.95.

"ALL our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but whenever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared…We brought you the truth, and in our mouth it sounded like a lie. We brought you freedom and it looks in our hands like a whip…we brought you the future, but our tongue stammered and barked," thus mused Rubashov, the Bukharin-like central character awaiting a certain death in a GPU prison in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel "Darkness at Noon". Rubashov’s prosecutor Gletkin says as he pronounces the sentence on him, "You were wrong, and you will pay, Comrade Rubashov. The Party promises only one thing: after the victory, one day when it can do no more harm, the material of the secret archives will be published."

The archives today have been opened, though not after the promised victory of the Party. In the book under review, rather pompously subtitled as the "first in-depth biography based on explosive new documents from Russia’s secret archives", Stalin, the dead dictator, comes back to life.

Radzinsky is the most popular playwright in Russia after Anton Chekov. He trained as a historian and this is his second book on history, the first one having been published in 1991 as "The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II". The present one makes for gripping reading, the author’s penchant for dramatisation rising over and above the life of its protagonist, often however to fall as with a damp squib.

Questions are posed with a theatrical flourish like, "The official date of his birth is indeed fictitious. But when was it invented? And why?" Others: did Stalin murder his wife Nadzezhda Alliluyeva? Did Stalin poison Lenin? Was Stalin himself a victim of his proteges when he died in 1953?

These are questions that have lingered on more in gossip rather than as questions of serious historical inquiry. To each of these questions, the author falls back on routine answers, more often than not basing himself on conversations and hearsays rather than on any "explosive" archives material. One is often left wondering why he raised the question in the first place and then devoted tens of pages to finally greet the reader with the fallacy of the question itself.

In terms of tone and intent, the present work follows the pattern set earlier by Dmitri Volkogonov’s "Stalin" (1988). Its purpose seems to be to wreck vengeance on his subject rather than seek to understand him in a wider historical context. The study is at either a descriptive level or a psychological level, often creating the impression that the author is keen to read Stalin’s life selectively. For a much more serious study, one would without any hesitation still turn to Isaac Deutscher’s "Stalin" published in the 70th year of Stalin’s birth —1948 (a newer edition was published after his death with an additional chapter).

And yet the book makes for compulsive reading. For one, it brings out some very interesting archive material on people like Trotsky and notably Bukharin. For another, it forces one to grapple with and look again into the life of Stalin — and how a revolution can be taken over by sheer mediocrity and how history gives rich space to political shrewdness and chicanery at the expense of brilliance and eloquence.

Radzinsky points to the early influence of anarchist Nechaev on both Lenin and Stalin as well as that of N. Chenesvesky, who urged: "Summon Russia to the Axe". Nechaev had also said "poison, the knife and the noose are sanctified by the revolution".

Early on in the party, Stalin realised that being close to Lenin, a la Sancho Panza (though Lenin was no Don Quixote) was essential for a successful career. Radzinsky points to a number of incidents when Stalin hid or protected Lenin from arrest or physical danger. That was the reason Lenin preferred to keep the pock-marked Georgian around him. In the dazzling company of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin, Stalin was undoubtedly an anachronistic dwarf. This must have given him a bruised ego, as the author rightly suggests.

The author also conjectures rather provocatively that Stalin could have been a double agent for the Tsarist police. One of Lenin’s proteges Malinovsky had indeed turned out to be a double agent and despite Lenin’s soft corner for him, he was executed after the Revolution when his treacherous role had been clearly proved by the police records seized by the Bolsheviks. After Stalin’s death, when it was suggested that Stalin too might have been a double agent, Khrushchev is said to have thrown up his hands and declared: "It’s impossible. It would mean that our country was ruled for 30 years by an agent of the Tsarist police." Indeed, in the face of any incriminating evidence, it seems to be yet another speculation, a rather amusing one.

As one reads the gory account of the terror that Stalin launched after his trusted lieutenant and heir apparent Kirov’s murder under suspicious circumstances in 1934, one gets transported to the most tragic period of the revolution. It was Stalin the paranoid in action as he systematically went about physically eliminating the Bolshevik old guard. Among them was Lenin’s "son", the "darling of the party", as Lenin had once termed the young Nikolai Bukharin.

As this century draws to a close, the Russian Revolution for all practical purposes has passed into history as yet another "could have been" long prophesied socialist revolution. One may finally conclude and recognise what it truly was. A product of the late 19th century secret revolutionary groups that happened to be intellectually well prepared and organisationally well oiled to fill the power vacuum that marked the collapse of the absolutist Tsarist ancien regime, the Bolsheviks just happened to be in the right place. Trotsky was to correctly remark later: "Revolution was lying in the streets of St. Petersburg for us to pick it up."

The Bolsheviks did just that and under Lenin and Stalin went about turning Dostoyevsky’s grim prophecies in the novel "The Possessed" into reality.

— Bhupinder Singh

Good, but could be better

Stillborn by Rohini Nilekani. Penguin Books, New Delhi. Pp. 268. Rs 200.

"THE foetus was suspended in a wide-mouthed, dusty glass bottle with an aluminium seal... neglected, vulnerable, ashamed. A dead human being. A human non-being. In the surreal setting, I felt more alienated than shocked..... It was not obviously human. Not ‘us’. It could have been any life form. I became clinical in my observation. Disproportionate. Even for a four-month (old) foetus. Very long neck. Only one arm formation. Two leg stubs, almost enjoined. Translucent head, veins criss-crossing, dots for eyes. Stillborn". These are lines which constitute the maximum impact in a book which, though extensively researched, appears to lose intensity down the line.

Medical thriller is a genre not very many Indian writers are enthusiastic about. Journalist Rohini Nilekani makes a foray into it with her first novel, "Stillborn", the idea of which seems influenced by Robin Cook’s medical thrillers.

"Stillborn" questions the validity of science in crossing the borders of ethics. It is the story of 28-year-old Poorva Pandit, a journalist with a leading publication, who, while recovering in a hospital from a road accident, overhears the bizarre story about a contraceptive vaccine research being carried on secretly in M.R. Hills (inhabited by the Baniga tribe) near Bangalore, which has resulted in unwanted pregnancies, a missing malformed foetus and much trauma. Sensing a scoop, she is determined to break the story. Those involved in the research, however, are hell bent on suppressing the facts, not wanting to draw attention and hamper the chances of the vaccine.

Poorva begins to investigate mysterious occurrences and uncovers uncredible links in an international game where scientists and researchers are playing for high stakes to produce the ultimate contraceptive.

The story moves through Bangalore, the epicentre of action with its booming pharmaceutical industry, to the tribal settlements in M.R. Hills and, finally, to the rarefied and awesome world of medical research in New York. The novel draws on the latest developments in the field of immuno-contraception and changing patent laws.

The point which Rohini Nilekani raises is relevant in a scenario where the cloning of animals has become a reality and the cloning of humans a near possibility. Should science tamper with nature? Should it play God and with what consequences? What can it do for Ketamma, a poor tribal woman who, totally unsuspecting of the risks, agrees to take the trial vaccine, only to be told weeks later that the calculations had gone awfully wrong and the foetus, if at all delivered, would be deformed a grotesque picture of human miscalculations and scientific fallout.

How does science hope to redeem itself before silent sufferers like Ketamma and her malformed baby whose fate was sealed in the womb itself, depriving it of any fair chance to a normal life?

There is a glimmer of hope when Anshul Hiremath, a returned NRI doctor, leading the ambitious research at Bangalore, owns responsibility for causing trauma among the tribal women and praising the altruism of volunteers, makes a generous financial contribution to the Banigas .

Poorva typifies a go-getter journalist who would use influence, skip morals, manipulate and, if necessary, intimidate sources, sometimes irritatingly so, to get to the bottom of the story. She has a gentle side to her as well. Seeing the malformed foetus preserved in formaldehyde, she wonders if it was not better than a deformed life and because of Shweta, her younger sister, suffering from a progressive neuromuscular disorder, she finds herself saying no. Life in all its form is precious, deformed or not.

The other characters, with perhaps the minor exception of Anshul, are relegated to the background. They seem incidental to the plot, pushing it forward with their presence at strategic points.

Printing errors in a publication by Penguins is rather surprising. The name of a character goes as Praful Shah on one page and as Pravin Shah on the very next. Also, it is "neck to neck" at one place and "neck and neck" at another.

"Stillborn" keeps a brisk pace. The events are juxtaposed in a way that connects them well and adds to the fluidity of the plot. It is a book you wouldn’t want to put down before you’ve reached the end. However, the intensity which this subject is capable of generating, remains limited and oddly elusive.

— Priyanka Singh