18 - “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel

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.