In Ghosh’s essay “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi”, the author dwells on the terrible anti-Sikh riots, raising questions of national identity as well as violence and human morality. The author describes in detail his own participation in the events, starting with the assassination of Indira Gandhi and up to the events following the violent and bloody riots. Apart from that, Ghosh advances several ideas regarding writing about violence and loss of national identity, which can be evidenced in different works of historical fiction such as "Return to Haifa" by Khassan Kanafani and "Toba Tek Singh" by Saadat Hassan Manto.
The most prominent idea of Ghosh’s essay has been inspired by the internal conflict that occurred to the writer after having participated in the events of 1984. As a writer but also as a witness of the tragic events of the 1984 riots, Ghosh has reservations about implementing his experience of fighting against violence into his writing. From Ghosh’s accounts, it is evident that for the majority of events that occurred during and after the riots the writer took an active part in the resistance and was far from an unwilling hostage of the circumstances. Instead, as he himself points out, it was the resistance to violence that left an unforgettable impression on him rather than the violence itself. At that time, and for a very long time afterward, Ghosh could not bring himself to picture the events as an irreversible damage or a devastating tragedy. He believed that it was wrong to pursue the typical goal of many writers which is to create a piece of writing that will impress the reader with its dramatic nature. “Writer don’t join crowds,” asserts Ghosh, yet he does just that, joining the resistance and becoming more than an impassive observer.
Becoming a witness to violence and destruction leaves a permanent mark on a person. When Ghosh describes how he slowly came to terms with everything that had happened to him throughout the whole period of violent anti-Sikh riots, he dwells on the fact that it took a long time for him to figure out how to put his experience in words. As he points out in the essay, he was forced to face a dilemma of being a writer and a citizen: “How was I to write about what I had seen without reducing it to a mere spectacle?” (Ghosh). Having lived through the events after Ms. Gandhi's death, it did not seem correct to the writer to turn his experience, as well as the actual history of his country into a literary device, with violence as the hook for the reader’s attention. Apart from that, the writer’s memory of what had happened was still fresh, and it seemed to him at the moment that, instead of dramatizing the events, there were more important and urgent things to document such as dates, names, and further developments concerning the attempts to restore balance within the society and help the victims of the attacks.
It is reasonable to state that Ghosh’s division between a subjective witness who experiences the events and a distant unemotional author who uses those same events within a literary plain is proof of the fact that violence in dramatic fiction is nothing like the real-time violence. It has a deep psychological impact on the person. From this point of view, Ghosh’s reluctance to view and reinterpret his experiences with violence from a literary perspective can be recognized in different fiction about war. In Kanafani’s short story “Return to Haifa”, the author describes the feelings that the main character experiences a certain amount of time after having lived through war: “Said S. had the sensation that something was binding his tongue, compelling him to keep silent, and he felt grief well up inside of him” (Kanafani 149). Returning home to Haifa, the man talks with his wife about everything, including the events of the war, yet the very essence of what they had to experience is something that weighs down upon them, too heavy and complicated to transform into words. Kanafani identifies the feeling as grief, and the situation bears a strong resemblance to Ghosh’s accounts, proving his idea that writing about violence experienced firsthand is a task that takes time and immense bravery.
Ghosh describes the situation following the murder of Indira Gandhi as one marked with confusion and disbelief. The Sikhs who lived in the writer’s neighborhood could not believe that living as respected members of the Hindi society, they were now under a threat of being assaulted by the radically-oriented people. In this respect, Ghosh puts forward the idea that violence is often unexpected and to many people, not involved in the political or religious matters, it is a sudden blow that turns their lives upside down. This idea can be supported with the evidence from Manto’s work “Toba Tek Singh”. Describing different events – the confusion following the Partition – the author presents a similar picture: “Since the start of this India – Pakistan caboodle, he had got into the habit of asking fellow inmates where exactly Toba Tek Singh was, without receiving a satisfactory answer, because nobody knew” (Manto 14). Here, lunatics in the asylum represent the disoriented citizens of India after it was split into India and Pakistan, and the tragedy is in the fact that while the ‘bigger’ history was being made by the Partition, there were vast numbers of people that in one night were left without a definition of home and identity.
Citing Karahasan, Ghosh puts forward the idea that violence is an easy subject for a writer to turn into a literary device: “it is all too easy to present violence as an apocalyptic spectacle, while the resistance to it can as easily figure as mere sentimentality, or worse, as pathetic or absurd” (Ghosh). This, it seems, is one of the biggest faults of the modern world as well as the kind of attitude toward violence that Ghosh wishes to avoid most of all. Citing the ideas of a fellow writer, Karahasan, Ghosh concludes that such thinking is equal to indifference. Authors often portray violence in an overly dramatic fashion in order to evoke a certain range of feelings and emotions from their readers. It is possible to state that in that fashion they take away the meaning of the events, as well as an impact that this violence had on its victims. As a result, people become desensitized in their perception of violence, failing to realize its real impact on people’s lives. In “Toba Tek Singh”, Manto uses masterful allegory to describe the wartime experiences when he writes the attempts of lunatics in the asylum to resist relocation to India or Pakistan. As can be expected, these attempts can only be seen as pathetic and deserving of pity or compassion, painting the violence as an unstoppable force. In view of Ghosh’s ideas, it is possible to state that the author dramatizes the force of violence to the point where resistance against it seems completely pointless.
It is important to mention that Manto’s writing has been characterized as open-ended and episodically formal, offering “an excellent interface between history and fabulation” (Parui). Alternatively, Kanafani’s “Return to Haifa” has been recognized as a piece of writing which aims to dramatize the events of the national history in order to raise the national and international support (Hadar). As such, there is a clear correlation between Kanafani’s and Manto’s short stories: the accounts of both authors seem to touch upon the topics of remembrance and national identity: just like "Toba Tek Singh" is a representation of many people whose fate is to be stripped of their belonging to a specific nation and location because of the divide between India and Pakistan, the man and his wife in "Return to Haifa" represent the same fate for people who lost their national identity in the conflict that divided the land into Palestine and Israel. The authors take a similar approach, dramatizing the events and evoking feelings of compassion in the readers, which only goes to prove Ghosh’s idea.
In his essay, Ghosh asserts that “words cost lives, and it is only appropriate that those who deal in words should pay scrupulous attention to what they say”. By describing war experiences, the writer takes immense responsibility upon his shoulders, as he explores the subject that has touched many lives outside the realm of fiction. Just like he was unwilling to sacrifice the value and meaning that each damaged or lost life in the anti-Sikh riots had, Ghosh believes that writers should not omit the active resistance against violence from the narrative or make it insignificant or pointless for the sake of dramatic impact.
Works Cited
Ghosh, Amitav. "The Ghosts Of Mrs Gandhi". The New Yorker, 1995, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/07/17/the-ghosts-of-mrs-gandhi. Accessed 30 Sept 2018.
Hadar, Leon. "Return To Haifa : Whose Narrative Is It Anyway?". Huffpost, 2011, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/return-to-haifa-whose-nar_b_811179.html. Accessed 6 Oct 2018.
Manṭo, Saʻādat Ḥasan. Toba Tek Singh.
Parui, Avishek. "Memory, Nation And The Crisis Of Location In Saadat Hasan Manto’S ‘Toba Tek Singh’". Short Fiction In Theory & Practice, vol 5, no. 1, 2015, pp. 57-67. Intellect, doi:10.1386/fict.5.1-2.57_1. Accessed 30 Sept 2018.