The relationship between history and fiction is riddled with charming and impossible paradoxes. That impulsive distinction — that history is real while fiction is fabricated — serves no real purpose.
Much of history, we’ve come to know, is fiction of convenience, for dominant forces such as empires, and dominant forms of knowledge-production, such as writing and printing. No less important than history itself is the writing of history.
Fiction, on the other hand, can be as rooted in reality as what we ‘expect’ history to be, sometimes more so when it appears without the claim of truth. “All fiction is largely autobiographical,” P.D. James said, adding a more incendiary afterthought, “and much autobiography is of course, fiction.”
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An autobiography entails a framing by the writer-subject and hence invites posturing and fabrication, but what about a biography? Of public figures? Of a nation? The story of a nation being dismembered into two is indeed the reshaping of a living body and its inevitable blood spillage. But metaphors are fatally bungled in history and politics, as well as in the stunted, unsympathetic imagination of the imperial administrators, such as their talk of “surgery” that will heal, as described in Amit Majmudar’s new novel The Map and the Scissors.
Rivers of blood
Indeed, the title invokes yet another version of this metaphoric bungling of history that still sucks its toll in blood. You do not perform surgery on paper, not unless you think it’s a paper nation and paper lives you’re dealing with. But these were paper lives that led to rivers of blood, and the terms of that surgery — religion — continue to bleed dry India, a nation which had once dreamt of being secular.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah with Mahatma Gandhi in 1946 | Photo Credit: Universal History Archive / Getty Images
The real crux of difference between history and fiction might just be the fact that the former is primarily a narrative of the public sphere while the latter has an abiding commitment to the private. Not that they are mutually exclusive: fiction knows that private lives exist against the backdrop of public history; and when history evinces an interest in the private, the eventual pay-off is usually an understanding of a larger social formation. The result is that historical interest in private life usually entails the lives of public figures — lives which can never fully be the subject of private representation.
To live fully, therefore, a historical character must not only reveal its private capacity, but also appear as rounded and idiosyncratic, spilling beyond our standard historical conception of it. This is where this novel falters. The key characters, Jinnah and Gandhi, are shown in their private capacities, through their personal and intimate relationships, and yet these are private conceptions wholly determined by dominant narratives of public history. Such is their initial conception: “The groom at this wedding could be either boy, the young Gandhi or the young Jinnah. If there’s a Brahmin in saffron nearby, then the boy is the thirteen-year old Gandhi, and the girl is Kasturba. If there’s an imam in a beard nearby, then the boy is sixteen-year old Jinnah, and the girl is Emibai.”
Truth or dare?
This may very well be historically true — Majmudar’s research seems both ambitious and meticulous. While I cannot claim adequate historical knowledge to speak for the biographical accuracy of this characterisation, this historically predetermined method does not feel like a particularly effective way to shape characters in a novel. This either/or approach scatters the ground for readerly empathy. We are left to wonder — are these flesh-and-blood characters, or historical concepts that have been personified?
The Map and the Scissors
₹499
Truth in life and truth in art have a curious, angular relation with each other, like reflections on a mirror. They reflect each other and yet they are not quite identical. Fiction must create life on its own terms, and it should be an act of genuine birthing, not a passive following of historical knowledge. Majmudar’s characterisation of these historically renowned characters, unfortunately, remains abstract and theoretical till the end, when they face Mountbatten on the eve of an inevitable partition of India: “They rest aslant on opposite armrests on opposite sides of the room, mutually repelled, like magnets of identical polarity.”
Such a sentence sounds clever and beautiful. Human form, alas, is usually neither — it is messier and more jagged, far more uneven than the scientific precision a well-balanced simile can conjure up, as it has done here. Majmudar’s research feels elaborate and impeccable. He has indeed built a great house of history in this novel. And yet, as Woolf had said — just because Mr. Bennett has made a house, he assumes that people must live there — are the people living in Majmudar’s elaborate house of history flesh-and-blood characters, or the human formulae we already know from our history books?
The reviewer’s novels include The Firebird, The Scent of God, and The Middle Finger.
