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One would not expect an ordinary university teacher’s life to
have many surprises, but in the span of just a month and a half,
two unrelated upheavals take place, dividing Shiv’s life into
a Before and After. The first occurs when Meena, a ward and
daughter of an old friend whose existence (in a women’s hostel
in another campus of the city) he was but dimly aware of, breaks
her leg and has to be brought into his house in the absence of
his wife. The intrusion of a young, politically conscious woman,
with her entourage of friends and comrades, into his placid
humdrum life opens a whole new world before him. While he is
still adjusting to this invasion of his private space, the
second event is triggered off by a lesson he had written on the
ancient reformer-poet Basava some years ago. Suddenly, and
inexplicably, this lesson arouses the ire of ‘fundoos’ who
clamour for his blood — for he has allegedly misrepresented
the great poet, not given due credit to the glories of the past
heritage, and hurt the religious sentiments of a certain sect of
people. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The two unrelated
events coalesce into one and their full impact hits Shiv. As a
result, what could have been just another love-story on a beaten
track — an affair between an ageing professor and a
20-something research student — now takes a different
direction, moving into the political arena, dealing with issues
that keep surfacing time and again. Communal violence, for
instance, is a recognisable ugliness in the novel: echoes of the
Mandir-Masjid debate reverberate, the demolition of the Babri
Masjid becoming a metaphor for the collapse of values that could
have held a nation together.
The distortions of
history by political parties in power, the ‘Hinduisation’ of
education, and the interference in academics by the ‘knicker
brigade’ — these are related issues that Hariharan explores.
It is not an accidental that Shiv is a professor of history.
Immersed in the past, he would probably never have come out of
the time warp had Meena not intruded into his scheme of things,
forcing him to confront contemporary issues. The story of Basava
and the Vijayanagar kingdom of yore finds a contemporary
parallel in the trials and tribulations of Shiv in New Delhi.
So, a precarious balance is maintained between antiquity and
contemporaneity.
An important
concern of the novel is the re-writing of history. What, after
all is history, and whose history can claim to be the real
truth? As in the film Rashomon, each party has a
different version of the truth and each version has its
validity. The learned academic may cry himself hoarse, insisting
on the objectivity of his account, but the hired, illiterate mob
bent on destruction, would have different ideas. The university
authorities, well aware of the power of the mob, would
ultimately bow down before the rabble and concede to its
irrational demands. (Again, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Such
a scenario is recreated in In Times of Siege. When the
mindless, irrational masses take over, how can the voice of the
intellectual be heard or understood above the din?
Hariharan explores
all these related issues in a slow, ambulatory manner, lingering
over the buzzing of a fly or the humming of a fan or the itch of
human flesh imprisoned in a plaster cast. Often the reader would
like to hasten her pace but, on second thoughts, the narratorial
pace seems to be appropriate for the purpose, quite in tune with
the cerebral numbness experienced by the main protagonist, the
mental paralysis produced by events beyond one’s control. As
the novel draws our attention to censorship and the freedom of
speech, there are references to other instances when the voice
of the intellectual has been ruthlessly silenced by
fundamentalism – Salman Rushdie’s, for instance, or Taslima’s.
The last of Deepa Mehta’s trilogy, Water, the filming
of which was abandoned on similar grounds, is also mentioned.
The issues that In Times of Siege deals with,
thus, are those which have been around for a while even as we
stood by, watching helplessly. Blending fact with fiction,
Hariharan gives us yet another perspective on the unresolved
(and unresolvable?) problems of our times, tacitly asking us
what we are doing about them. Are we doing anything about
them? Or are we complacent accomplices to the malaise of our
times?
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GITHA
Hariharan, who shot into prominence with her Commonwealth
Prize-winning novel, The Thousand Faces of the Night, later
followed by The Ghosts of Vasu Master and When Dreams
Travel, is one of the leading Indian writers who write in
English. Her latest novel, In Times of Siege, takes up a
contemporary situation, focusing on a middle-aged professor in an
open university in New Delhi. Passionately committed to his subject,
Professor Shiv Murthy spends his time researching and writing
history lessons which are then mailed to students enrolled in the
distance education course. His life straddles two different worlds:
that of the subject he specialises in, the glorious past of the
Vijayanagar Empire, and the nondescript present in which he lives a
routine academic life. Other individuals peopling his world are a
wife (at present away to visit their daughter in America), a female
colleague with whom he has an on-off half-hearted affair, a
bickering ‘fundoo’ colleague (i.e., with fundamentalist
leanings), and a few other caricatured characters.
