Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

I was working on the last part of the book in 1984 when the riots broke out. After the violence it was a struggle to bring the manuscript to a conclusion: my attention had turned away from it. Unlike Shyam Selvadurai, unlike the Sikhs of New Delhi, I was not in the position of a victim during the riots of 1984. But the violence had the effect of bringing to the surface of my memory events from my own childhood when I had indeed been in a similar situation.

Somehow I did manage to finish The Circle of Reason, and soon afterward I started the novel that would eventually be published as The Shadow Lines. When I began to work on the manuscript, I found that the book was following a pattern of growth that was exactly the opposite of its predecessor's. The Circle of Reason had grown upward, like a sapling rising from the soil of my immediate experience; The Shadow Lines had its opening planted in the present, but it grew downward, into the soil, like a root system straining to find a source of nourishment.

It was in this process that I came to examine the ways in which my own life had been affected by civil violence. I remembered stories my mother had told me about the great Calcutta killing of 1946; I remembered my uncles' stories of anti-Indian riots in Rangoon in 1930 and 1938. At the heart of the book, however, was an event that had occurred in Dhaka in 1964, the year before my family moved to Colombo; in the unlit depths of my memory there stirred a recollection of a night when our house, flooded with refugees, was besieged by an angry mob. I had not thought of this event in decades, but after 1984 it began to haunt me: I was astonished by how vivid my memories were and how fully I could access them once I had given myself permission to do so. But my memories had no context; I had no way of knowing what had happened, whether it was an isolated incident, particular to the neighborhood we were living in, or whether it had implications beyond. I decided to find out what had happened. I went to libraries and sifted through hundreds of newspapers, and in the end, through perseverance, luck, and guesswork, I did find out what had happened. The riots of my memory were not a local affair: they had engulfed much of the subcontinent. The violence had been set in motion by the reported theft of a holy relic from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar. Although Kashmir was unaffected, other parts of the subcontinent had gone up in flames. The rioting had continued for the better part of a week, in India as well as the two wings of Pakistan.

The process by which I came to learn of this was itself to become a pivotal part of the narrative of The Shadow Lines. While searching for evidence of the riots, I came across dozens of books about the Indo-Chinese war of 1962. This was an event that had evidently created a torrent of public discourse. Yet the bare fact is that this war was fought in a remote patch of terrain, far removed from major population centers, and it had few repercussions outside the immediate area. The riots of 1964, in contrast, had affected many major cities and had caused extensive civilian casualties. Yet there was not a single book devoted to this event. A cursory glance at a library's bookshelves was enough to establish that in historical memory, a small war counts for much more than a major outbreak of civil violence. While the riots were under way, they had received extensive and detailed coverage. Yet once contained, they had vanished instantly, both from public memory and from the discourse of history. Why was this so? Why is it that civil violence seems to occur in parallel time, as though it were outside history? Why is it that we can look back on these events in sorrow and outrage and yet be incapable of divining any lasting solutions or any portents for the future?

Inasmuch as I addressed these conundrums in The Shadow Lines, it was in these words:

Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence. It is a struggle that I am destined to lose — have already lost — for even after all these years I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of a ruthless state — nothing like that: no barbed wire, no checkpoints to tell me where its boundaries lie. I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words — that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are not words.

The enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there can be no words without meanings — so it follows inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world… where there is no meaning, there is banality, and that is what this silence consists in, that is why it cannot be defeated — because it is the silence of an absolute, impenetrable banality.

I can still feel the sorrow and outrage that provoked these words — emotions that owed much more to the events of 1984 than to my memories of 1964. Just as terrible as the violence itself was the thought that so many lives had been expended for nothing, that this terrible weight of suffering had created no discernibly new trajectory in the history or politics of the region. When we grieve for the appalling loss of life in World War II, our sorrow is not compounded by the thought that the war has changed nothing: we know that it has changed the world in very significant ways, has created a new epoch. But in the violence of 1984—to take just one example — it was impossible to see any such portents. It was hard to see how a further partitioning of the subcontinent could provide a solution; on the contrary, it would create only a new set of minorities and new oppressions. In effect, it would amount only to a recasting of the problem itself, in a different form. In the absence of such meanings, there seemed to be no means of representing these events except in outrage and in sorrow.

It follows then that the reason that I — and many others who have written of such events — are compelled to look back in sorrow is that we cannot look ahead. It is as though the events of the immediate past have made the future even more obscure than it is usually acknowledged to be. Now, close on two decades later, I find myself asking, Why is this so? Why was it that in the 1980s, history itself seemed to stumble and come to a standstill?

The past, as Faulkner famously said, is not over; in fact, the past is not even the past. One of the paradoxes of history is that it is impossible to draw a chart of the past without imagining a map of the present and the future. History, in other words, is never innocent of teleologies, implicit or otherwise. Ranajit Guha, in a recent lecture on Hegel and the writing of history in South Asia, says, "It is the state which first supplies a content, which not only lends itself to the prose of history but actually helps to produce it." In other words, the actions of the state provide that essential element of continuity that makes time, as a collective experience, thinkable, by linking the past, the present, and the future. The state as thus conceived is not merely an apparatus of rule but "a conscious, ethical institution," an instrument designed to conquer the "unhistorical power of time." That is, since the nineteenth century, and perhaps even earlier, it is the state that has provided the grid on which history is mapped.

It was perhaps this politically insignificant but epistemologically indispensable aspect of time's continuity that was most vitally damaged by the conflagrations of the 1980s. Even before then, it had often been suspected that elements of the state's machinery had been colluding in the production of communal violence; after the violence of the eighties, this became established as a fact. It became evident that certain parts of the state had been absorbed by — had indeed become sponsors of — criminal violence. No longer could the state be seen as a protagonist in its own right. It is for this reason that I have used the self-contradictory phrase "civil violence" here, in preference to other, more commonly used terms: because these events signaled the collapse of the familiar categories of "state" and "civil society."