Book: The Solitude of Emperors
Author: David Davidar
Publisher: Penguin
Price: 495 | Pages: 244
The Solitude of Emperors, David Davidar’s second novel, is an ambitious essay at delineating the daemons of communalism that stalk the essentially secular soul of India in many seductive disguises. Madness and hysteria of communal violence that blighted India’s brightest and most cosmopolitan metropolis in 1993-1994 following the demolition of a Muslim mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya, which Hindus claim as the birthplace of the divine king Ram, shadows this narrative of uses and abuses of religion. History is an insatiable tyrant, as the author tells us in the opening paragraph of the novel.
The plot of the novel follows a predictable curve, with not many page-turning surprises on the way. The narrator Vijay, a 20-something earnest young man, leaves the stifling provincialism of a small town in South India to work for a niche magazine called The Indian Secularist run by a benign Parsi businessman in Bombay – the city of promise and desire that lures many a weary soul thirsting for escape and opportunity. A few months into his new job, Hindu-Muslim riots break out in the city, triggering a nervous breakdown in the young man who has come to treasure this city as a refuge from the banalities of small-town India.
Bearing witness to this orgy of violence and bloodbath, evoked in most chilling details – 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’ – marks him for life. As he recovers from the trauma, he inwardly vows to guard the besieged fortress called Secular India. And his wish is answered when the octogenarian Parsi editor Rustum Sorabjee sends his young protégé on a working holiday to a small town in the Nilgiris, the picturesque hill station in south India.
But it’s not going to be just pleasure; to ensure that the young man’s mind is never free of the burden of secularism his editor gives him a draft of a book he has written for young adults but has not published – The Solitude of Emperors. This book within the book, which gives the novel its title, conjures up portraits of three flame-bearers of religious tolerance (which we now call secularism): Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi; this trinity of immortals could be held as exemplars as they were simultaneously men of faith and secular to the core, the author argues.
The Parsi editor also asks Vijay to find out about a local dispute over the Tower of God, a Christian shrine which is claimed by Hindus to be the site of a Shiva temple: a microcosm of the Ayodhya-like situation when Hindu mobs demolished a centuries-old Muslim mosque, a defining event that irrevocably altered the political landscape of the country.
The symmetry is complete: even in a beautiful and laidback place, known for some of the most rare and beautiful flowers and connoisseurs who intrigue to win the trophy for the best fuchsia garden, the virus of communal violence can never be far away. In the interconnected world we live in, one can’t pretend to exult in a pastoral idyll and claim immunity from history. Not for nothing is this holiday town called Meham. “The wars inspired by the gods will be with us for a long time to come,” muses the narrator and these wars can strike anytime anywhere, the novel seems to be saying.
The novel hurtles towards its denouement as the narrator succumbs to the temptation all journalists face: to become part of the story they are covering as he gets sucked into local intrigues surrounding the holy shrine, and, in the process, goading an eccentric bohemian to pay for his life by saving the shrine from some Hindu zealots. This guilt of inadvertently causing the death of a loved person will haunt the narrator all his life.
For a novel that has such a serious and weighty political theme – the crisis of secularism in the 21st century India – it ends on a somber and tentative note, giving us a peep into the soul of the guilt-ridden narrator, his existential confusions and metaphysical uncertainties as he goes about his rather boring job as a bank teller in Canada.
The private anguished individual, alone with his solitude, who was earlier consumed by activist ardour to save India from its god-lovers, emerges in the foreground as the novel ends. “It’s a condition of our life that our beloved dead will never be forgotten,” the narrator says in the closing sentence of the book.
An unflinching critique of religious and sectarian violence, The Solitude of Emperors is one of the few Indian novels that grapples with recent horrors of communal carnage even at the risk of being baited by critics for masquerading polemics as fiction. It’s perhaps a private act of exorcism and redemption the author has performed to get this daemon out of the way that has privately obsessed him all these years.
Some would say the novel suffers from what may be called didactic excess – a preachiness and politically correct high seriousness that is more the province of the essay rather than the exploratory modern novel. For all the novel’s passionate concern about endangered secularism, there is no scathing insight into the roots of the god–hunger in this country where religion is omnipresent, no great asides on beauties of faith, no attempt to locate discontents of modernity that drives some to identity politics. But even if one were to disagree with the hidden politics of the novel, the novel has its redeeming moments.
The author has lovingly conjured up the tragic romantic figure of Noah – the keeper of a derelict cemetery, the compulsive loser, the lovable autodidact who reads Rimbaud, Pessoa and Rilke out of a deep inner need, a lover of women and a man with a deep-down feeling for seeing beauty in the most mundane things.
Above all, he is one of those rare haunted and hunted spirits, “ignored and discarded by the world,” who lives intensely, completely in the moment that gives him “the lightness of unburdened faith.” Yet, he is the one, by a curious quirk of circumstance, who redeems his wayward life by saving the beleagured shrine in the end. In the novel’s transfiguring vision, this much despised creature, “this useless piece of shit,” as the narrator says in a moment of fury, becomes a true emperor of solitude, “an Emperor of the Everyday,” an unaccomodated man who refuses to be ensnared by tyrannies of history with his overflowing love of life.
Author Profile
- Manish Chand is Founder-CEO and Editor-in-Chief of India Writes Network (www.indiawrites.org) and India and World, a pioneering magazine focused on international affairs. He is CEO/Director of TGII Media Private Limited, an India-based media, publishing, research and consultancy company.
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