Fiction Unlimited? Rethinking Violence in Shashi Tharoor’s Riot

In this essay I would like to offer a brief reconsideration of the role of the imagination in literary texts and literary criticism in the context of depictions of violence. My discussion will focus on Shashi Tharoor’s 2001 novel Riot, which is remarkable for its metatextual questioning of the internal as well as the external boundaries of the fictional mode.

Paradoxical though it may sound, Tharoor’s novel ‘analyses’ rather than depicts some of the ways in which politics and religion are intertwined in India.¹ Revolving around the death of a twenty-four year old US American field worker in a communal riot, the novel uses her parents’ outsider perspective to deliver a fragmented multiperspective insight into the causes of sectarian violence in India, as well as into cultural differences between Indian and American world views.

Dealing with and representing violence, trauma, terrorism and fundamentalism has become one of the most challenging tasks literature and literary studies need to address. Literature cannot fully ignore the topical relevance of events such as 9/11, the Mumbai attacks and other recent negative landmark events associating place names with acts of terrorism and violence world-wide, which have become points of reference. In this sense, every novel published after 9/11 is a post-9/11 text, and its reflection of the fact differs from other reflections only in the degree of directness with which these issues are addressed. Literary studies needs to address such issues because the discipline is in a somewhat defensive position in relation to the global financial crisis, the so-called crisis of the humanities and other developments challenging the raison d’être of allegedly outdated and unproductive disciplines as literary theory on account of their diminishing relevance to society at large.

I would argue that texts written by authors from a formerly colonised country such as India,² play a particularly important role in this context, because terror and violence and the artistic impossibility of giving voice to unspeakable experiences, dehumanising events, a loss of rational control, and the phenomenon of (in Shashi Tharoor’s words) a ‘crowd tuning into a mob’ have occupied Indian writers in English from early on. Long-term traumatic experiences of invasions, the Partition riots, several wars, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime, ongoing border conflicts with Pakistan and other nations, and last but not least, different forms of internal violence and conflict, communal and otherwise, constitute a chain of influences which indicate that the cultural consciousness of the unspeakable that the western world associates with post-9/11 attempts at rationalisation, are old news to writers from the Indian subcontinent.³

In this context it is important to observe that fictional writings play a more significant and more ambivalent role than the one usually ascribed to them. All too often imaginative writing is regarded only as a tool for writing back to history, digesting or reviewing events. However, the interchange between historical events and fictional imagination is neither a one-way-street nor a hen-and-egg situation. Events, even those leading to mindless violence start with an idea. The imagination is the single most important starting point not only for fictional events but for real ones.

What is needed is a thorough revision of the concept of the imagination and its cognates. In a global cultural climate where virtual communities, imagined ones by any standard, proliferate at the speed of thought, it is necessary to acknowledge the imagination as a real, reality-shaping and reality-creating force, and to investigate where its power lies and how it works. Literature never just writes back to historical events, it can just as well – and has – imagine(d) realities into being.⁴ Texts are no longer fixed on pages, they are enacted and transformed by heterogeneous and elusive reader communities. As a result, there is no such thing as ‘mere fiction’, as imaginary literature provides tools for seeing all texts as subjective and necessarily limited constructions. 

It is in the context of debating the limits of the fictional imagination that Tharoor’s novel constitutes an interesting experiment on the borderlines between fiction, essay, documentary and criticism. The novel is set in September-October 1989. The young idealistic doctoral student Priscilla Hart, who has spent a year working as a volunteer for a humanitarian organisation in a provincial town east of New Delhi, is found stabbed to death shortly before the end of her stay; to all appearances, she has fallen victim to the violent conflict between local Hindus and Muslims arising on the occasion of a mass procession transporting consecrated bricks for the erection of a Hindu temple. Priscilla’s divorced parents travel to the scene of her death, Zalilgarh in Uttar Pradesh, accompanied by the New York Times correspondent Randy Diggs in order to investigate the circumstances of her death and obtain a sense of closure. From an assemblage of fictional newspaper articles, diary or scrapbook entries, letters and interview transcripts readers gain insight into a complex web of events which interconnect Priscilla’s family history, her disputed initiative for women's education and birth control, her affair with the District Magistrate V. Lakshman, known as Lucky, and the historical, religious and political causes of communal unrest. 

Throughout the novel Tharoor’s various narrators complain that tea in India is served with too much sugar. Many of Tharoor’s critics have echoed this opinion with regard to the novel in its entirety. The murdered protagonist is said to be both overdrawn and contradictory, in fact, most of the novel’s characters are supposedly clichéd, and the love plot is judged to be template-like, inauthentic and unoriginal, repeating as it does an extramarital affair Priscilla’s father once had with an Indian woman.⁵ This impression is strengthened by the fact that Lucky’s initial attractiveness diminishes rapidly as the story develops, leaving him to appear as a cowardly and corrupt opportunist.⁶ Other critics take issue with Tharoor’s intellectual, often ironic and also his more than often rhetorical distance from the narrated events.⁷ 

However, the most problematic aspect of the novel is that it takes up the serious and explosive topic of sectarian unrest only to degrade it to an atmospheric backdrop for a romanticised whodunit plot. Thus the riots in the run-up to Ayodhya degenerate into a mere cover-up for Priscilla’s murder, even though hers is only one of several deaths. Seven Indians are killed in the riot, of whom only two are even named. The novel’s selective view is explained by the fact that it implicitly traces the perspective of the American visitors, but this is obviously grist to the mill of a frequent criticism aimed at expatriate writers, to privilege the already privileged and pander to a western audience. On the other hand, there is just as much reason to say that Riot is not so much a romance as a textbook introduction to communal strife in India, using a love plot as an anchor. Whatever the reading, it is clear that the novel strains against the limits of the various genres it more or less ironically recruits.

Besides his being a novelist and poet, until recently Shashi Tharoor had a distinguished career as a high-ranking UN executive and in his non-fictional writing has proved a knowledgeable journalist and clear-sighted analyst of ongoing political developments. He has done thorough research, consulting among other things the normally inaccessible reports of an IAS officer for Riot. Considering these achievements, I am treating this slightly flawed text as symptomatic of problems I see in recent depictions of fictional violence, of the texts themselves disputing their own efficiency as a tool for dealing with violence.

One of the metatextual comments in the novel revolves around the closet writer Lakshman’s secret ambition to write a novel that does not read as a novel at all:

“I'd like to write a novel,” I tell her, “that doesn't read like a novel. Novels are too easy – they tell a story, in a linear narrative, from start to finish. […] No, what I mean is, why can't I write a novel that reads like ... like an encyclopedia? […] What I mean is, something in which you can turn to any page and read. You pick up chapter 23, and you get one thread of the plot. Then you go forward to chapter 37, or backwards to 16, and you get another thread. And they’re all interconnected, but you see the interconnections differently depending on the order in which you read them. It’s like each bit of reading adds to the sum total of the reader’s knowledge, just like an encyclopedia. […] Down with the omniscient narrator! It’s time for the omniscient reader!” (Riot 135-136)

The often-quoted passage bears repeating here, not only because it quite literally marks a pivotal point, being located in the exact middle of the book, but also because I would like to go beyond a reading of this as one of many remarks à clef which Tharoor likes to scatter across his pages.⁸

The novel is designed to read like materials collected in the process of a journalist’s research, with the reader acting as compiler. What is interesting is the way in which Tharoor utilises the imaginary or fictional mode on the one hand and the mode of journalism as another form of writing, blending them into each other, but in the process revealing the flaws of each. Priscilla Hart’s parents are in search of ‘the truth’ about their daughter; Randy Diggs is in search of a story to sell, and in their parallel investigation, the third detective, the reader, is put in possession of the combined facts, those uncovered and those withheld from the visitors. ‘The truth’ about Priscilla Hart’s last days remains fragmentary and in part silenced, making the point that there needs to be a gap between an event and its narrated double. Thus even Priscilla’s mother, the single most insightful and determined truth-seeker, becomes an accomplice in a self-conscious plot to use a narrative as a means of silencing the truth: “I had to see Lakshman. It was him, of course. He confirmed it out of his own mouth. That phrase from Priscilla’s letter – ‘in his own words, he’s overworked, overweight, and married’. He couldn't resist using it again. […] I'll never know what happened to my poor baby. […] Maybe it was God’s will, and all one can do is accept it.” (Riot 260) 

One of the functions served by these demonstrations of thinking outside the box, as for instance in the self-mirroring use of intertextuality, a tool useful in obscuring an essentially repetitive transaction, is to highlight the function of the book as a borderzone between different kinds of realities, the textual and the extra-textual. By self-reflexively referring to extra-literary context, Tharoor creates an ironic complicity which invites the reader to wink back into the mirror that is the page, relishing her recognition of the masterful re-construction of historical material into a cohesive tale.

What this form of intervention does, however, is to express a certain distrust in the medium of the novel as such. I would argue that the specific form of Tharoor’s novel is not merely an experiment of a post-modern kind which utilises fragmentation as an invitation to the reader to become a self-conscious hermeneutic agent in reconstructing the plot, but a journalist-detective in her own right. It goes beyond such a heavy-handed trope, or gesture. Throughout his almost aphoristic narrative, Tharoor proposes the possibility of a not-novel, a text which does not so much construct a fiction but utilises fictionality as a mode of writing which becomes some kind of heterotopia.⁹ It denies novel-status to the resulting text because the contents are self-consciously not ‘new’ (or novel).

It is not surprising, in view of the increasing awareness of violence and random terror from the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, that trauma research has developed into one of the most dynamic new interdisciplinary subjects of life writing and literary research.¹⁰ Connections between memory, fiction, fragmentation, history and the uncontrollable element of trauma as mental and/or physical injury are being explored in a great number of present-day writings, and a revision of the role of literature as a tool of exploration, re-presentation and even potentially healing, is under way not only within the discipline of psychological research. It is necessary to reconsider the imagination and the potential of fiction in this light, so that novels can go beyond such solutions as portraying how the journalist supersedes the novelist. After all, the Horatian double goal of literature as aiming to delight and instruct is in itself often a conflictual one, requiring a fine balance of nuances of expression and a keen consciousness of the power of words as triggers.


WORKS CITED

Alexander, Vera (2006). “Shashi Tharoor.” Kritisches Lexikon zur fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. KLfG 3/06. Rpt. in: Indische Literatur der Gegenwart. Ed. Martin Kämpchen. München: edition text + kritik, 380-390. 
––. (forthcoming). “Sounds of Otherness: The Representation of Music in Ann Patchett's Bel Canto.” 
Carruth, Cathy (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
Da Silva, Stephen (2005). “The Importance of being Onomastically Wilde in Shashi Tharoor’s Riot.” Onoma: Journal of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences 40, 145-166. 
Fernandes, Edna (2006). Holy Warriors. A Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism. New Delhi: Penguin Viking.
Fliethmann, Axel (2006). “The Violence of Representation.” Violent Depictions: Representing Violence Across Cultures. Ed. Susanna Scarparo and Sarah McDonald. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 1-16.
Foucault, Michel (1986). “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, 22-27.
Ghosh, Amitav (1988). The Shadow Lines. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Hetherington, Kevin (1997). Badlands of Modernity. Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge.
Jain, Jasbir (2004). “History as Counter Discourse: Fictional Interventions in the Process of Remembering.” South Asian Review 25.2, 51-64. 
Khair, Tabish (7 Dec. 2007). “Silver Linings.” The Hindu.
http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2008/12/07/stories/2008120750210500.htm. Accessed 2 February 2009.
Pinsky, Robert (2008). “Afterword: Imagination and Monstrosity.” Literature after 9/11. Ed. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. New York and London: Routledge, 285-291.
Riemenschneider, Dieter (2005). “Glocality and its (Dis)Contents: The Future of English Language Literatures Studies.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture 53.4, 385-396. 
Tharoor, Shashi (2005). Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers. New York, NY: Arcade. 
––. (1997). India from Midnight to the Millennium. New York: Harper Perennial. 
––. (2001). Riot. New Delhi: Viking.
Winslow, Rosemary (2004). “Troping Trauma: Conceiving / of/ Experiences of Speechless Terror.” The Journal of Advanced Composition 24.3, 607-633.

¹ A thought-provoking analysis of this subject is provided in Edna Fernandes's Holy Warriors (New Delhi: Viking, 2006).
² Along with many other critics resident in the West, I do not make a strict distinction between Indian writers resident on the subcontinent and Indian writers living in the diaspora. This seems to me to be one of the most striking differences in the way literary critics within India and outside India differentiate and classify groups of writers, no doubt also due to marketing and distribution aspects.
³ My observations about violence do not only apply to literature. Obviously, representations of violence occur in other media and are being addressed in neighbouring disciplines, esp. Film Studies. See for instance, Violent Depictions. Representing Violence Across Cultures, ed. Susanna Scarparo and Sarah McDonald (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), and Josephine G. Hendin’s Heartbreakers: Women and Violence in Contemporary Culture and Literatture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), the latter also analysing the power of violence in the media as having “broken the wall between spin and reality” (3) and having become a matter of “infotainment” (5). More interactive media such as the internet or computer games are even more designed to obscure the boundaries between what is real, imagined, or virtual.
⁴ The most striking example of such a sequence is of course Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
⁵ Labelled by the use of English as well as their more or less telling names: the American reporter who serves as a narrative focus is called Randy Diggs, the romanticised dead heroine is called Priscilla Hart, which both echoes ‘heart’ and marks her as the female equivalent of an Everyman of the John Doe variety, carrying echoes of the Jane Doe gap filler used in judicial processes in cases where the person’s real name is not known. Similar labelling processes are at work with the Indian names employed, some of which even register with Western readers, for instance when the name of Gurinder is shortened to Guru.
⁶ Detailed lists of reviews and available criticism can be found on Shashi Tharoor’s own website (www.shashitharoor.com) and in my entry on “Shashi Tharoor” in Kritisches Lexikon zur fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. KLfG 3/06.
⁷ The depersonalisation of a central character which can be observed in this book can be encountered in other texts dealing with violence, riots and dehumanising processes of mob synergy. Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadowlines is another fictional text which deals with the killing of a central character in a rioting incident. Reconstructed by the character’s nephew, the achronological story thematises the importance of the imagination as a mode of living a life, making sense of experience and filling one’s life with meaning, depth and cohesion. The narrator is trained to think about foreign locations and to search for meaning and specificity by his uncle Tridib from an early age. Retracing his uncle’s life, the narrator finally arrives in London and learns to face the actual details of Tridib’s death in a violent attack. While many of Ghosh’s characters are beautifully crafted and set into an artful balance, the narrator himself remains nameless and literally lifeless as he does not seem to have much of a life of his own, having defined himself solely in relation to others, notably Tridib, his cousin Ila or Nick Price, a British boy whom he constructs into his more successful Alter Ego.
⁸ For instance, he likes to include quotations from his previous works, including a humorous allusion to his earlier book, The Great Indian Novel, and several of his characters are employed as mouthpieces for diverse political opinions, caricaturing different factions. Lakshman’s endless supply of Oscar Wilde quotations would be a related example of an intertextual set of key observations critiquing the decadence of the leaders portrayed, and their opportunistic aspirations.
⁹ Heterotopia, a term coined by Michel Foucault, introduced in The Order of Things (1966, English trsl. 1970) and explored further in a 1967 paper that appeared posthumously under the title “Of Other Spaces”. In this paper, Foucault outlines how ideas about space have changed in the course of western history, leading up to the present. Foucault’s theory on heterotopia, though fragmented and not fully elaborated – after all, the paper he gave on this in 1967 was published posthumously and as an oral presentation, leaves something to be desired in terms of its internal consistencies – can cast some light on processes of mirroring as representation which is useful here: the mirror image, as it displaces the one who sees herself reflected, is identified as fiction. If we try out the idea that books can be read as heterotopias, we can do that by recalling that they can indeed transport readers into realms other then the one in which they find themselves. Like in a mirror, readers discover in books a reflection of the world they live in, though displaced. The fact that unlike roads or cemeteries, they are not fixed geographical sites seems less important to me than the idea of mirroring and representation and the overlapping of utopian and heterotopian functions.
¹⁰ It is no accident that both with reference to thinking and to trauma, the vocabulary at our disposal echoes the language of bomb defusal. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient examines this phenomenon in quite some detail, especially focusing on the Indian sapper Kirpal Singh who defuses numerous bombs for his colonial masters until the explosions of the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally trigger a realisation of his own dependence and complicity.