The Solitude of Emperors, by David Davidar
Reviewed by Soumya Bhattacharya
,Sects and the city of dreams
In December 1992, in the small north Indian town of Ayodhya, Hindu nationalists destroyed a 16th-century mosque they claimed was built by the Mughal emperor, Babur, over the birthplace of the Hindu god, Rama. This demolition, achieved as a helpless government mutely watched in New Delhi, constituted the one act that altered the social and political landscape of modern India. Its ripples spread across the country and, in the financial nerve centre of Mumbai, turned into a wave of sectarian violence and bloody killings that seemed to drown the city's spirit of cosmopolitanism.
Weeks after the incident in Ayodhya, disaffected Muslims carried out stray attacks on Hindus in Mumbai. The retaliation was swift and unprecedentedly brutal: 900 people were killed in the ensuing riots, choreographed and executed by right-wing Hindu nationalists. Within a month, in February 1993, Muslim gang lords supervised their own reprisal attack: serial blasts across Mumbai killed 257 people. The city (in those days still called by its old – and, to many, more enduring – name, Bombay) was scarred for ever.
It may, as is its wont, have got back on its feet quickly and gone about its business at the forefront of the economic boom in India. But the ghosts of those riots and blasts still haunt the city. They convulsed Mumbai – always frenetic, always on the move – into a sense of self-awareness and introspection, and forced it to confront the fact that the secular and inclusive credentials on which it prided itself were merely a veneer for malevolence and intolerance. After the demolition of the mosque and the violence in Mumbai, these are questions that India, more diverse and various a country than any other, has been grappling with.
They also lie at the heart of David Davidar's ambitious, disturbing new novel. Vijay, a young man who longs to escape his claustrophobic home in south India, comes to Mumbai to work as a journalist for a small but respected magazine called "The Indian Secularist". He is caught in the middle of the riots, and sees the chilling violence. Davidar is unflinching in his portrayal of the brutality; as he watches a killing, Vijay sees how a man's left eyeball "had been gouged out of its socket, and the right eyeball had been slashed by a knife, and was cloudy and occluded by blood".
He suffers an emotional breakdown. His kindly employer, Mr Sorabjee, sends him to recuperate in the Nilgiris, the "Blue Mountains" of south India. But it is, he warns Vijay, a working holiday: he is to report on a religious disturbance at a famous shrine in a small town nestled in the mountains; and to read the manuscript of a history textbook that Sorabjee has written for young adults. It focuses on three great Indians who epitomised the virtues of religious tolerance and empathy.
This manuscript is a clever authorial sleight of hand. Vijay reads it, and this allows Davidar to get in all his polemical bits without seeming, well, polemical. During his trip, Vijay finds that the disturbances in the hills are a microcosmic version of the momentous events in Ayodhya. He becomes involved in them, with consequences he spends the rest of his life regretting – and escaping.
As the book hurtles towards its dramatic denouement, it offers us quite a white-knuckle ride. Davidar, now boss of Penguin Canada, is also the publisher who started Penguin's India operation from a small Delhi room many years ago and has done a great deal for the English-language publishing boom in India. He has a keen eye for detail, and an elegant turn of phrase. This is a daring novel that engages with Indian realities: it looks sectarian violence and intolerance in the eye, and does not turn away.
Soumya Bhattacharya's memoir, 'You Must Like Cricket?', is published by Yellow Jersey
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £12.99 (264pp) £11.50 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897
