Of late, images of conflict dominate digital and print media — injured children, rubble, weeping people, vehicles blown apart, graphic photographs from war zones. We live in a culture of war. What is frightening is our daily engagement with this violence, to make it a backdrop and a “normal” part of our lives. The threshold of our receptivity to it is lowering; the “appetite” for violence seems to be increasing.
Take the Partition of the sub-continent in 1947. Vishwajyoti Ghosh, curator of This Side, That Side , the brilliant anthology of graphic stories with contributions from three countries, remarks, “Partition is so much a part of the lives of South Asians.” It exists in living memory. Generations have been brought up on family lore, detailing experiences about Partition, the consequences and the struggle to make a new life. For many years, there was silence. Then, in India, the communal riots of 1984 following Indira Gandhi’s assassination opened a Pandora’s Box of memories, especially for many of the older generation who had experienced the break-up of British India. With the pioneers of Partition studies — Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin and Urvashi Butalia — this tumultuous time in history began to make its mark in literature.
Contemporary sub-continental literature comprises storytellers who probably grew up listening to stories about conflict in their regions. It is evident in the variety, vibrancy and strength discernible in South Asian writing with distinct styles emerging from the nations. There is something in the flavour of writing; maybe linked to the socio-political evolution of the countries post-conflict —Partition or civil unrest. In India, there is the emergence of fiction and non-fiction writers who offer a sharp perspective, informed by their personal experiences, who are recording a historical (and painful) moment. Recent examples are Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots , Amandeep Sandhu’s Roll of Honour , Chitrita Banerji’s Mirror City , Sujata Massey’s The City of Palaces , Sudipto Das’s The Ekkos Clan , Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother and Samanth Subramanian’s The Divided Land , a travelogue about post-war Sri Lanka.
In Sri Lankan literature, conflict is a constant backdrop, places and names are not necessarily always revealed or easily identified, but the stories are written with care and sensitivity. Shyam Selvadurai, in his introduction to Many Roads to Paradise , writes, “In a post-war situation, this anthology provides an opportunity to build bridges across the divided communities by allowing Sri Lankans access to the thoughts, experiences, history and cultural mores of their fellow countrymen, of which they have remained largely ignorant due to linguistic divides.” Contributors include Shehan Karunatilaka ( The Chinaman ), Nayomi Munaweera ( Island of a Thousand Mirrors ) and Ashok Ferrey ( The Colpetty People and The Professional ). Bangladeshi writers writing in a similar vein are Shaheen Akhtar’s The Search , Mahmudul Haque’s Black Ice (translated by Mahmud Rahman), Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim and Neamat Imam’s The Black Coat . Pakistani Nadeem Aslam’s last novel Blind Man’s Garden is a searing account of the war in Afghanistan and its devastating effect on the lives of ordinary people. In his interview with Claire Chambers for British Muslim Fictions, Nadeem Aslam said his “alphabet doesn’t only have 26 letters, but also the 32 of the Urdu alphabet, so I have a total of 58 letters at my disposal”. Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone uses fiction (the story is set during the World Wars) to comment upon contemporary socio-political events (Peshawar). Earlier this year, while discussing his latest novel, Noontide Toll, Romesh Gunaseekera told me , “All over the world, including in India, people are trying to grapple with the memory of conflicts, and trying to find a way in which language can help us understand history without being trapped in it.”
From Homer’s The Odyssey , recording war through stories has been an important literary tradition. Today, with conflict news coming in from every corner of the world and 2014 being the centenary year of World War I, publishers are focusing upon war-related literature, even for children. For instance, Duckbill Books has launched a new imprint, NOW, about children in conflict.
The first book is the haunting Waiting for Mor , set in Kabul and inspired by a true story.
Paro Anand’s No Guns at my Son’s Funeral was one of the first stories that dealt with war, children and Kashmir written in India for young adults; it is soon to be made into a feature film. Although 90 years after the first book was published, Richmal Crompton’s Just William series — about a mischievous 11-year-old boy set during WWI — continues to be a bestseller! The culture of war has been inextricably linked to literature and media.
As the protagonist, Adolf Hitler says in Timur Vermes’ must-read debut novel Look Who’s Back, “after only a handful of days in this modern epoch, I had gained access to the broadcast media, a vehicle for propaganda”.
