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Abstract
Several recent novels in English by Indian and South African authors explore the theme of violent political resistance to the entrenched injustices of the hierarchical Indian social order and South Africa’s institutionalised system of racial and economic domination, respectively. This article will investigate and compare the ways in which this theme is treated in four novels: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Lowland (2013), Neel Mukherjee’s Lives of Others (2015), Mandla Langa’s The Texture of Shadows (2014) and Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats a Man (2015). The first two chart the consequences for their protagonists of their participation in the Naxalite insurrection in the late 1960s. While Langa’s The Texture of Shadows does not question the decision to engage in armed struggle against the apartheid regime, it refuses to evade the bitter consequences of this decision both for individuals and for the country more generally. Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats a Man situates the theme of resistance in relation to the extreme poverty and inequality of the contemporary South African countryside. The comparative approach followed in this article reveals continuities in the representation of resistant violence in the Indian and South African texts in terms of its consequences both for individuals and for post-revolutionary society. At the same time, the comparison exposes significant disjunctions relating to national and generational histories, political ideologies and the ways in which race, class, caste and gender intersect with political resistance in the two countries, as these concerns are imagined in fiction.
Acknowledgements
A version this article was first delivered at the Journal of Southern African Studies ‘Southern Africa Beyond the West’ conference, held in Livingstone, Zambia in August 2015. I was part of a panel tasked with comparing literary texts from two BRICS countries. I should like to thank the organisers of that conference for the invitation to attend, and the anonymous reviewers of this article whose criticisms resulted in significant changes to it. The research that has made this article possible has also been supported by funding from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa.
Notes
1 The terms ‘counter-violence’, ‘resistant violence’ and ‘revolutionary violence’ are used interchangeably in this article. ‘Counter-violence’ is commonly used in the literature on violence to provide a rationale for violent resistance to the violence inherent in the dominant social and economic order. ‘Resistant violence’ carries the same signification. ‘Revolutionary violence’ describes the organised form of counter-violence that both the Naxal insurrection and the armed wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe, adopted.
2 N. Martyris, ‘The Naxal Novel’, Dissent, 61, 4 (2014), pp. 38–44.
3 See D. Menon, ‘A Prehistory of Violence? Revolution and Martyrs in the Making of a Political Tradition in Kerala’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, pp. 662–77.
4 P. Malreddy, ‘Solidarity, Suffering and “Divine Violence”: Fictions of the Naxalite Insurgency’, in A. Tickell (ed.), South-Asian Fiction in English (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2016), p. 221.
5 Malreddy adapts the idea of enchanted solidarity from an essay by Frank Schulze-Engler, in which he argues that some decolonial and postcolonial critics exhibit an uncritical nostalgia for the workers’ and anti-colonial struggles of an earlier era. See F. Schulze-Engler, ‘Once Were Internationalists? Postcolonialism, Disenchanted Solidarity and the Right to Belong in a World of Globalized Modernity’, in P. Kumar Malreddy, B. Heidemann O.B. Laursen and J. Wilson (eds), Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2015), pp. 19–35.
6 S. Žižek, Violence (New York, Picador, 2008), pp. 1–2.
7 Žižek derives this term from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Towards the Critique of Violence’ (1921); see M. Bullock and M. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1927 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 236–52.
8 Žižek, Violence, p. 8.
9 See R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2011).
10 Žižek, Violence, p. 10.
11 Ibid., p. 11.
12 É. Balibar, ‘Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Anthropology’, Differences, 20, 2/3 (2009), p. 11.
13 H. van der Linden, ‘On the Violence of Systemic Violence: A Critique of Slavoj Žižek’, Radical Philosophy Review 15, 1 (2012), p. 17.
14 Malreddy, ‘Solidarity, Suffering’, p. 218.
15 Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (London, Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 115.
16 Ibid., p. 336.
17 Ibid., p. 335.
18 Ibid., p. 322.
19 Ibid., p. 339.
20 Ibid., p. 338.
21 Ibid., p. 334.
22 Ibid., p. 337.
23 Ibid., p. 338.
24 Balibar, ‘Violence and Civility, p. 10.
25 Lahiri, The Lowland, p. 320.
26 Ibid., p. 338.
27 Malreddy, ‘Solidarity, Suffering’, p. 226.
28 Balibar, ‘Violence and Civility’, p. 19.
29 R. Frenkel, ‘The Politics of Loss: Post-Colonial Pathos and Current Booker Prize-Nominated Texts from India and South Africa’, Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 13, 2 (2008), p. 87.
30 Lahiri, The Lowland, p. 224.
31 Ibid., p. 275.
32 Ibid., p. 246.
33 Ibid., p. 496.
34 Malreddy, ‘Solidarity, Suffering’, p. 218.
35 Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others (London, Vintage, 2015), p. 246
36 Ibid., p. 338.
37 Ibid., p. 420.
38 Ibid., p. 426.
39 Ibid., p. 495.
40 Ibid., p. 343.
41 M. Gandhi, Selected Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, selected and introduced by Ronald Duncan (London, Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 249.
42 Martyris, ‘The Naxal Novel’, p. 39.
43 Ibid., p. 43.
44 Mukherjee, ‘Lives of Others’, p. 503.
45 Ibid.
46 Malreddy, ‘Solidarity, Suffering’, p. 232.
47 Ibid., p. 228.
48 A short list would have to include Gordimer’s The Late Bourgeois World and Burger’s Daughter, Coetzee’s Age of Iron, Serote’s To Every Birth its Blood and La Guma’s The Butcher Bird.
49 Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2001).
50 J. Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (Johannesburg, Jacana Media, 2014).
51 Balibar, ‘Violence and Civility’, p. 17.
52 Mandla Langa, The Texture of Shadows (Johannesburg, Picador Africa, 2014), p. 220.
53 Ibid., p. 183.
54 Balibar, ‘Violence and Civility’, p. 29
55 Langa, Texture of Shadows, pp. 365–7.
56 Ibid., p. 230.
57 Ibid., p. 32.
58 Ibid., p. 33.
59 Ibid., p. 20.
60 Ibid., p. 308.
61 Ibid., p. 157.
62 Ibid., p. 158.
63 Ibid., p. 159.
64 Ibid., p. 189.
65 Ibid., p. 197.
66 Ibid., p. 208.
67 Ibid., p. 217.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., p. 224.
70 Ibid., p. 107.
71 Ibid., p. 243.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., p. 262.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., p. 318.
77 Ibid., p. 76.
78 Ibid., p. 361.
79 Ibid., p. 369.
80 Ibid.
81 Nkosinathi Sithole, Hunger Eats a Man (Johannesburg, Penguin, 2015).
82 Ibid., pp. 82–5.
83 Ibid., p. 105.
84 Ibid., pp. 152–7.
85 Ibid., p. 161.
86 See É. Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (Columbia, Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 22. In this book, Balibar rejects non-violence, arguing instead for anti-violence or civility, a politics that seeks to ward off cruelty even as it recognises the inherent violence of politics itself.
87 Ibid., p. 25.