Writing through a keyhole

By : Sumana Roy

The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar Penguin/Viking, 2007

David Davidar’s new novel takes its epigraph from Kabir, the secular saint:

The one who stays within the limits
assigned to him is a man
The one who roams beyond these
limits is a saint.

To reject both limits and their
absence:
That’s a thought with immeasurable
depths.

‘Man’ and ‘saint’, ‘both limits’, staying and roaming – this is the beginning of the play of binaries that provides the tapestry of Davidar’s The Solitude of Emperors. Two of the main characters in the book are writers, working in two different genres – Rustom Sorabjee, writing a book on the secular ‘emperors’, Akbar, Ashoka and Mohandas Gandhi; and Vijay, a journalist writing the book that we have in our hands, both cunningly titled “The Solitude of Emperors”. The work is set, primarily, in two places, Bombay and Meham; the idea of the ‘secularist’ is posited against the reality of the convinced communalist. The demolition of the Babri Masjid, a historical event, and the destruction of the Tower of God, a fictional conjecture, in both senses of the phrase, likewise bear out the novel’s image-object binary.

Davidar’s book is ultimately about the craft of writing, as well as the nature of aesthetic experience. We are made aware of this at the very outset: the solitude of the title, with its Wordsworthian ring, is emphasised by Bena Sareen’s cover design of a man with his back to a crowded world. Indeed, at places the author seems merely to be writing about writing. At the beginning of the book, Vijay performs a ceremony to his dead friend, Noah, with a “manuscript” in a cemetery. “Reading aloud the last chapter”, Vijay rues his lack of “effrontery or imagination”, though a little later is grateful for his “years as a journalist”, which have “equipped [him] with enough tools to thread together a coherent, sturdy narrative”. Then, he goes on to discuss his “slow” progress on the “version” of the work that we have in our hands, which has “gone through five drafts”. The Solitude of Emperors ends after we have seen Vijay “working on the penultimate draft of this book” – but only after he has learned from the other writer, Sorabjee, that in a “story there should be no loose ends” and that “there will inevitably be questions that remain unanswered.”

This book is indeed about writing, but more specifically about becoming, particularly becoming a writer. This is no easy journey, Davidar takes pains to emphasise, and the physical injuries sustained by Vijay, the journalist-becoming-a-writer, are stigmata representing the difficulties he faces on his journey to becoming an artist.

Creative destruction
It struck this reviewer that Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, published almost a decade ago, also utilised the demolition of the Babri Masjid as a wall on which the fresh graffiti of secular and non-secular signs could be left to dry. And, like Davidar’s, Chaudhuri’s work also centred on a creative activity, the act of composing and then performing a play. This street-play, rendered as a beautiful absence in that book, almost erased the divide between the writer and the spectator in a deliberate play on Marxist aesthetics. Its multiple writers, adlibbing and extrapolating the everydayness of their lives into the narrative, were bound by a common agenda – the Bengali Marxist’s protest against Hindu fundamentalism.

But “The Solitude of Emperors” – not Davidar’s book but the secular Sorabjee’s – is different from the absent play in Freedom Song, and not only by virtue of its genre. It is written by just one man; is reproduced in Vijay’s narrative as both text and, importantly, commentary; and is in the form of an essay. This last marks a significant change in aesthetic, and not just between Davidar and Chaudhuri. Rather, this is the gradual privileging of the essayistic mode, the interpolation of the tone and content of the popular academic essay into the discourse of the contemporary Indian English novel. As such, sentences often begin thus: “The Western interpretation of secularism is…”, or “The fundamentalists have always…” Here, for instance, are the two writers writing about hospitals. The first is from Freedom Song, the second from Solitude:

‘Ma Sharada Devi nursing home,’ … The words were enough to please Mini. She was something of a devotee of Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda; had long been one; not a formal one, but one who’d read their books, life stories, and sayings.

If the temple was the epicentre of the arts, spirituality and romance, The Balaji Medical Centre represented the height of modernity. The gleaming new hospital complex on the north-eastern edge of the town had been completed in 1975, seven years after I was born, by a native son who had made good in
Austin, Texas.

While Chaudhuri’s focus is on the words and their mental associations (the books, life stories, sayings – in other words, the aesthetic), Davidar’s is on the “insatiable tyranny of history”, time, date, place. This refocusing is emblematic of the historical turn that has taken place in the Indian English novel, a tectonic shift from the ‘aesthetic’ to investigations into the social life of things – as literary theorists would say, from the word to the world.

As note previously, the street-play was a notable absence in Chaudhuri’s book, its life sketched in the reader’s mind in broad ellipses and footnotes of the characters’ sighs and gestures. On the other hand, Sorabjee’s book-within-a-book, so significant that it gives Davidar’s work its title, is a collection of essays, amateurish in style, written for schoolchildren and, hence, in the pedagogic mode. He is the editor of a journal, Indian Secularist, but his manuscript has the texture of being unedited, almost like notes from a favourite teacher’s class lectures that have been turned, hurriedly, into an examination essay.

This is a deliberate ploy on Davidar’s part, to work with two different kinds of narratives. The first flows ahead like an energetic picaresque novel, following the central protagonist, Vijay. The second moves backwards in time, to popular history, or at least to what has been received as history in the schoolchild’s imagination. The foremost effect of these parallel narratives is that it impedes the flow of Vijay’s storyline. In addition, however, the space for narrative silence is also elided in favour of verbosity, the book’s major flaw.

Towering gods
Would, then, The Solitude of Emperors have worked perfectly without “The Solitude of Emperors”? Yes and no. The novel would perhaps have read better had Sorabjee’s “The Solitude of Emperors” been more subtly embedded in Davidar’s book – like contact lenses, palpable but invisible, tiny yet allowing for greater visibility of distant frames. At the same time, the schoolteacher tone of Sorabjee’s text – instructing and imploring, cajoling and celebrating – is perfect in many ways. Most importantly, the detached narrative of loss (of the secular), which reads like a children’s history book, acts as a foil to Vijay’s feverish narrative of encounters with the secular and its many discontent antonyms – the Tower of God and the “surfeit of Gods” that act as banisters in our everyday encounters with belief.

The Tower of God – which Davidar likens to Akbar’s “Ibadat Khana”, where the emperor would “confound the Gods themselves with his thinking about faith” – is described as “a curious mixture of non-denominational Christianity, Hinduism and mystical Islam”. For Davidar, therefore, the secular is not the taxi driver’s dashboard, “struck by the absence of religious objects”. Instead, it is “the Indian Army”; it is Noah; it is ammunor, the Toda land of the dead; it is cemetery and garden; Maya, Noah’s Indian lover and Iva, his Croatian girlfriend. It is the religion of man, not the religion of men.
The quest for god, the immaterial “blank white emptiness”, operates as a subliminal bookmark throughout The Solitude of Emperors. Here god is not the human deceptions of wood and stone, in all their quarrelsome geometries. Instead, his “mystery” takes form most significantly in the character of Noah, in the various myths surrounding his origin and his “death”, or rather his “loss” from the “human” world. With a name like his, with its biblical undertones as the carrier of the world, Noah is Davidar’s idealisation of the hypothetical secular Indian.

It is significant that Davidar uses science to discuss the violence of institutionalised religion (“as … urology lab demonstration”; “like a flaccid rubber tube”; “like … a total solar eclipse”), while using poetry to talk about divinity. Importantly, he takes only the title of Sorabjee’s book, “The Solitude of Emperors: Why Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi matter to us today” while leaving out its subtitle for his own work. In these ambiguities of elision and erasure between Sorabjee’s text and Davidar’s lie the torque between two versions of the ‘literature of power’, with their unequal denominations of attention and attraction, the difference between key and keyhole.