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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2016
This article explores the various ways in which Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy privileges the affective (and aesthetic) quality of reticence. I begin by addressing the broader political significance of such moderation—relating it, more specifically, to the placatory content of the speeches made by Jawaharlal Nehru during the late forties and early fifties. I then trace the process by which Nehru’s “meandering pleas for mutual tolerance” eventually find their way into the very structure of A Suitable Boy, directly influencing its formal qualities and creating a general discursive “climate” of order and stability. In other words, I would like to suggest that the narrative not only privileges this Nehruvian virtue at the level of content—by explicitly advocating the renunciation of strong feeling—but also practices it at the formal or structural level. And by doing so, I shall argue, it ultimately obliges the reader to adopt a similar affective stance.
1 Barthes, Roland, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 19Google Scholar.
2 Ibid., 75.
3 Ibid., 75.
4 Seth, Vikram, A Suitable Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 3Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., 1335.
6 Ibid., 1241.
7 In a 1961 essay on the subject, Nehru offered a particularly clear definition of the Indian secular state: “It is not very easy,” he wrote, “to find a good word in Hindi for ‘secular.’ Some people think that it means something opposed to religion. That obviously is not correct. What it means is that it is a state which honours all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities; that, as a state, it does not allow itself to be attached to one faith or religion, which then becomes the state religion” (Jawaharlal Nehru: An Anthology, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980], 330).
8 Kamlaben Patel quoted in Menon, Ritu and Bhasin, Kamla, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), 76Google Scholar.
9 Talib, Gurbachan Singh, ed., Muslim League Attack on Sikhs and Hindus in Punjab, 1947 (Amritsar: Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, 1950), 287Google Scholar; Basu, Aparna, Mridula Sarabhai: Rebel with a Cause (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 123Google Scholar.
10 Nehru, , Anthology, 73–74Google Scholar.
11 Nehru, Jawaharlal, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, Volume Two (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1954), 135–136Google Scholar.
12 Ibid., 23.
13 Reddy, William M., The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the development of this particular emotional regime, see Good, Mary-Jo Delvecchio and Good, Byron J., “Ritual, the State, and the Transformation of Emotional Discourse in Iranian Society,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 12 (1988): 43–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. By contrast, the medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman has described the way in which the Chinese Communist Party sought to anathematize affective states such as depression and anxiety after it came to power in 1949—claiming that these feelings were bourgeois pathologies that a program of “socially productive labour” would quickly eradicate (Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981], 128).
14 Nehru, , Speeches, 135Google Scholar.
15 Ibid., 146.
16 Ibid., 147; my italics. Here, Nehru is clearly acknowledging the performative nature, the illocutionary force, of such utterances—however remote they may appear to be from the lived reality of communal violence.
17 Seth, A Suitable Boy, 1241.
18 Ibid., 955.
19 Ibid., 1241. Neelam Srivastava has pointed out that A Suitable Boy’s endorsement of Nehruvian secularism carried a broader social and political significance at the time of its publication in the early nineties, “when Nehru’s idea of the Indian secular state was subject to severe erosion in the political sphere, with the rise of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP].” As Srivastava observes, “The cultural and social mores of 1950s India [were] still easily recognizable in the India of the 1990s. But the political present of 1993 had witnessed a radical shift in the hegemonic ideology of the Indian public sphere: Nehruvian secularism was out, Hindutva ideology was in. . . . The novel can [thus] be read as a way of addressing the ‘present needs’ of the Indian polity by proposing a return to Nehruvianism, by recreating a national narrative set in the heart of the Nehru era, the heyday of secular nationalism in the aftermath of Partition” (Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel [London: Routledge, 2008], 11).
20 There was, however, a significant disparity between the act’s proclaimed objectives and its practical implementation. In Bihar, for instance, “[t]he state government did not have the administrative competence to implement it fully. Former zamindars [landlords] were well advised and knew in advance the provisions of the forthcoming abolition legislation, and they were in many cases able to circumvent the intentions of the measure and retain for themselves significant landholdings” (Brown, Judith M., Nehru: A Political Life [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003], 234Google Scholar).
21 Seth, A Suitable Boy, 261.
22 Ibid., 3.
23 Needless to say, I am not alone in having noticed this thematic emphasis in A Suitable Boy. In her review of the novel, for example, Anita Desai argues that it implicitly endorses “Aristotle’s golden mean—the avoidance of excess, the advisability of moderation, the wisdom of restraint, temperance, and control” (“Sitting Pretty,” New York Review of Books [May 27, 1993]: 24); and Myers, David makes a similar claim in “Vikram Seth’s Epic Renunciation of the Passions: Deconstructing Moral Codes in A Suitable Boy,” Indian Literature Today, Vol. I: Drama and Fiction, ed. R. K. Dhawan (Delhi: Prestige, 1994), 79–102Google Scholar. Where my analysis differs, however, is in its focus on the formal and structural consequences of these Aristotelian (and Nehruvian) virtues.
24 Seth, A Suitable Boy, 385.
25 Ibid., 1138.
26 Ibid., 14.
27 Ibid., 1291.
28 Ibid., 1296. In this passage Lata is referring to one of the novel’s other major plotlines, which involves the relationship between Maan Kapoor, her brother-in-law, and Saeeda Bai, a Muslim courtesan. As the narrative progresses, Maan becomes increasingly infatuated with Saeeda Bai—until finally, in Chapter 17.12, this excess of feeling erupts into violence. Discovering his friend Firoz in her bedroom, he flies into a jealous rage and stabs him with a fruit knife. Once he realizes what he has done, however, Maan finally “comes to his senses”—repudiating the courtesan (“He had been eager to visit Saeeda Bai when he was in jail, but now that he was out of jail, he found that he had inexplicably lost his eagerness to do so” [ibid., 1299]) and reentering the family fold. By the end of the novel, then, he too has been exposed to the disruptive consequences of desire and learned to appreciate the “conservative” virtues of moderation and stability.
29 Ibid., 1299. In its entirety, the stanza Lata is quoting here reads as follows: “There are two different kinds, I believe, of human attraction: / One which simply disturbs, unsettles, and makes you uneasy, / And another that poises, retains, and fixes and holds you. / I have no doubt, for myself, in giving my voice for the latter. / I do not wish to be moved, but growing where I was growing, / There more truly to grow, to live where as yet I had languished. / I do not like being moved: for the will is excited; and action / Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious, / Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process; / We are so prone to these things, with our terrible notions of duty” (Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage [1903], Project Gutenberg, August 2008, www.gutenberg.org/files/1393/1393-h/1393-h.htm, accessed February 27, 2015).
30 Clough quoted in Seth, A Suitable Boy, 1299. As can be seen from the preceding footnote, however, Lata has slightly misremembered this phrase.
31 Interestingly, we find the same renunciation of strong feeling in The Golden Gate, Seth’s 1986 novel in verse. “Passion’s a prelude to disaster,” one character declares, while proposing to our heroine, Liz. “It’s something else that makes us sure / Our bond can last five decades more.” In the end, Liz acquiesces to this logic, deciding that instead of marrying a man she passionately loves, “she’d far rather / Marry a man who’s a good father” (The Golden Gate [New York: Vintage, 1991], 244–45).
32 Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 47Google Scholar.
33 Ibid., 38.
34 Ibid., 140.
35 Ibid., 38.
36 Barthes, S/Z, 75.
37 Brooks, Reading, 19.
38 Ibid., 107.
39 Seth, A Suitable Boy, 1295.
40 Ibid., 1299.
41 In his analysis of Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” Barthes describes a similar moment of discursive intrusion. One evening, as he is leaving the Teatro Argentina, the eponymous hero of the story is cautioned against pursuing his infatuation with the singer La Zambinella. “Be on your guard, Frenchman,” a stranger whispers in his ear. “This is a matter of life and death . . .” (Balzac quoted in Barthes, S/Z, 241). At this point, Sarrasine would seem to have a choice—he could either heed the stranger’s warning or ignore it. But of course this “choice” (and the agency it implies) is ultimately illusory. As Barthes observes, “Sarrasine is not free to reject the Italian’s warning; if he were to heed it and to refrain from pursuing his adventure, there would be no story. In other words, Sarrasine is forced by the discourse to keep his rendezvous with La Zambinella”—the character’s “freedom” being dominated, at this particular juncture, “by the discourse’s instinct for preservation” (135).
42 Culler, Jonathan, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 2001), 191Google Scholar. The point Culler is making here emerges out of the classic narratological distinction between story (what is told) and discourse (the way it is told). For more on this “double logic,” see 188–208.
43 Barthes, Roland, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” A Roland Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Vintage, 2000), 265Google Scholar. For a function to qualify as a nucleus, Barthes argues, “it is enough that the action to which it refers open (or continue, or close) an alternative that is of direct consequence for the subsequent development of the story, in short that it inaugurate or conclude an uncertainty. . . . Between two [nuclei] however, it is always possible to set out subsidiary notations which cluster around one or other nucleus without modifying its alternative nature. . . . These catalyzers are still functional, insofar as they enter into correlation with a nucleus, but their functionality is attenuated, unilateral, parasitic” (ibid., 265–66).
44 Ibid., 265.
45 Seth, , A Suitable Boy, 45–46Google Scholar.
46 Voltaire quoted in ibid., “Epigraph.”
47 Ibid., 559.
48 Barthes, , “Introduction,” 261Google Scholar.
49 Seth, , A Suitable Boy, 558Google Scholar.
50 Cleary, Joe, Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 221CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Turning to the referential (or cultural) code, one could even focus on the intertextual significance of Lata’s train journey—invoking, as it does, any number of literary and cinematic precursors, from Anna Karenina to Pather Panchali.
51 Moretti, Franco, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013), 72Google Scholar.
52 Ibid., 79.
53 Ibid., 81–82.
54 Seth, , A Suitable Boy, 235Google Scholar.
55 Ibid., 237–38.
56 “From a critical point of view,” he writes, “it is as wrong to suppress the character as it is to take him off the page in order to turn him into a psychological character (endowed with possible motives): the character and the discourse are each other’s accomplices: the discourse creates in the character its own accomplice: a form of theurgical detachment by which, mythically, God has given himself a subject, man a helpmate, etc., whose relative independence, once they have been created, allows for playing. Such is discourse: if it creates characters, it is not to make them play among themselves before us but to play with them, to obtain from them a complicity which assures the uninterrupted exchange of codes: the characters are types of discourse and, conversely, the discourse is a character like the others” (S/Z, 178–79).
57 Seth, , A Suitable Boy, 1315–1316Google Scholar.
58 Twenty-four pages later, during Lata’s wedding, we learn in passing of “that fellow Rasheed’s suicide” (ibid., 1340).
59 It is, however, worth acknowledging the fact that the novel’s secular principles—like those of Nehru himself—are largely confined to the public sphere. As Nehru wrote in 1961, secularism does not mean the “absence of religion, but putting religion on a different plane from that of normal political and social life” (Anthology, 331). And this is a distinction that is also emphasized in A Suitable Boy, where the anti-sectarianism advocated in the public sphere doesn’t quite extend to the “private” issue of intercommunal marriage.
60 Seth, , A Suitable Boy, 1349Google Scholar.
61 I am paraphrasing David Herman here (“Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 13).