Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
18 - “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
“Lashings of the Ultraviolent”
Consider two explosive moments in two Indian novels from opposite ends of the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the first, frenzied denizens of one of Delhi's gated communities – or “colonies” – surround a truck driver:
The man with the rod is now poking the driver in the throat with it. The other man is speaking. “And who was going to drive the truck? Your daughter-fucking father? … What will my children drink tomorrow, you fucking pimp? What do we pay your owner so much for?” He lands another slap. Flecks of blood from the driver's bleeding mouth fall on his overalls. A line of red trickles down, impossibly straight, through the middle of the ‘M’ of the Mehrotras Water Supply printed across his chest.(R. Joshi 278)
At this point, the novel's central character and narrator Paresh, accompanied by some of his friends, intervenes, and all are quickly embroiled in a fracas during which the tables are turned. Now, it is the Sikh driver who is standing with the two scions of Delhi's nouveau riche at his feet:
The driver has the rod now and he is a strong man. He swings the rod into Green Jacket's neck, just once, but it is enough. Then he turns to Shibu and hisses, “Hat jaao!” Shibu tries to fling himself back but he is still close enough when the rod smashes into the back of the second man's skull and the man's forehead catches him on the nose. He reels back, holding his nose, blood pouring out from under his hand.(280)
The analogous moment from the second novel comes as the narrator, a chauffeur, asks his employer, another elite Delhi businessman, to step out of the car and help him with an imaginary problem with the wheels. As the unsuspecting man bends down to inspect them, Balram engages in what A Clockwork Orange calls “lashings of the old ultraviolent”:
I rammed the bottle down. The glass ate his bone. I rammed it three times into the crown of his skull, smashing through to his brains. It's a good, strong bottle, Johnnie Walker Black – well worth its resale value. The stunned body fell into the mud.
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- A History of the Indian Novel in English , pp. 282 - 295Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
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