allegories of power - a reading of o. v. vijayan's short fiction and political cartoons

8/20/2019 Allegories of Power - A Reading of O. V. Vijayan's Short Fiction and Political Cartoons

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‘ALLEGORIES OF POWER’

A Reading of O.V. Vijayan’s Selected Short Fiction

and Political Cartoons

A Dissertation submitted to the University of Mumbai for M.A. Honours

(Research) Degree in English

Submitted by

SHIVANGI GUPTA

Under the Guidance of

DR. SHOBA VENKATESH GHOSH

Department of English

University of Mumbai

Kalina, Santacruz (East)

Mumbai – 400098


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MARCH 2013

STATEMENT BY THE CANDIDATE

As required by University Ordinance 770, I wish to state that the dissertation titled ‘Allegories of

Power’: A Reading of O.V. Vijayan’s Selected Short Fiction and Political Cartoons, submitted

by me in partial fulfillment for a Master’s Degree in English, is my own work.

This work has not been submitted for the award of any other degree to this or any other

university. Any reference made to previous works of others has been clearly indicated and

included in the Bibliography.

_____________________

Shivangi Gupta

(Candidate)

Certified by

_____________________

Dr. Shoba Venkatesh Ghosh

(Research Guide)


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CERTIFICATE OF THE GUIDE

I certify that the M.A. Honours (Research) dissertation titled ‘Allegories of Power’: A Reading

of O.V. Vijayan’s Selected Short Fiction and Political Cartoons by Shivangi Gupta represents

her original work which was carried out by her at the University of Mumbai, under my guidance

and supervision in the academic year 2012 – 13.

I further certify that the foregoing statements made by her in regard to her dissertation are

correct.

Signature of the Guide

(Dr. Shoba Venkatesh Ghosh)

Place: Mumbai

Date: 14th

March, 2012


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Acknowledgement

I would first and foremost like to thank my father, Vinay Gupta, for having introduced me to this

enthralling collection of O.V. Vijayan’s short fiction, which has captivated my imagination for as

long as I can remember. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my mother, Saloni

Gupta, whose unconditional love and support encouraged me to read Vijayan’s radical texts in

unconventional ways.

My heartiest thanks and greatest appreciation goes to my research guide, Dr Shoba Venkatesh

Ghosh, who has been extremely kind, supportive and patient with my less than perfect drafts andannoying queries. I feel truly honoured to have had the opportunity to conduct my research under

her guidance and to have attended her invaluable lectures for the past two years, which have

been a key influence in shaping my academic as well as personal life. Without her constant

encouragement and belief in my abilities it would have been impossible for me to complete this

dissertation.

Next I would like to thank my professor and friend, Sonali Pattnaik, who took the time to

painstakingly go through my unstructured drafts and point out the inconsistencies. Her timelyinterventions and fruitful discussions regarding the theoretical approaches I have utilized had a

profound influence on my work and in the way I now approach the works of O.V. Vijayan.


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I am also extremely grateful to Dr. Coomi Vevina, for thinking me capable of and giving me an

opportunity to pursue the M.A. Honours (Research) Degree at the University of Mumbai and for

being extremely patient, kind and supportive.

Finally, I would like to thank my dear friends and classmates, especially Gayatri Viswanath, for

her unconditional love and support, and for helping me iron out my theoretical and formatting

issues, which I can never thank her enough for. I would also like to thank my friends Aman

Khan, Harsha Malaney, Jyotsna Morris and Aniruddh Date for constantly motivating me and

reminding me that I have a dissertation to write.

Shivangi Gupta

CONTENTS

Title i

Statement by the Candidate ii

Certificate of the Guide iii

Acknowledgement iv

Chapter 1 Locating O. V. Vijayan 1

Chapter 2 Of Allegories and Dystopias 6


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Chapter 3 Questions of Time, History and the National/Human Subject 21

Chapter 4 The Sexualization of Politics 34

Chapter 5 Conclusion 49

Bibliography 51


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CHAPTER I

Locating O. V. Vijayan

O.V. Vijayan can be seen as a pioneering figure of Malayalam modern literature; however he can

also be viewed as a silenced and marginalized figure within the corpus of modern Indian

literature. It is somewhat ironic that while he was centrally located in the national capital for

most of his career and has been a fairly revered figure of Malayalam literature, his radical

writing and art works earned him a marginal space in the canon, positing questions concerning

the politics of literary canonization and the process of its selection and exclusions. This is ratified

by the fact that O.V. Vijayan won the Sahitya Akademi award for his novel Infinity (1997),

which was more acceptable and less explicit than his masterpiece novel The Legends of Khasak

(1965). His more radical works during the time of the Emergency push democratic ideals to their

limit and expose the state’s silencing mechanism which violently crushes any voices of dissent

before they are able to surface.

The body of Vijayan’s works, and especially his short political fiction, is posited as a multi-

dimensional text characterized by an intricately patterned interlocking of ideology and existential

concerns as C. Gopinathan Pillai rightly observes in his text titled The Political Novels of Milan

Kundera and O. V. Vijayan – A Comparative Study (1996).

O. V. Vijayan can also be viewed as one of the first few post-modernist writers of the

subcontinent. Vijayan, who was also one of the leading English-language cartoonists in India,

exploded into the literary scene with his dark, brooding, profoundly unsettling novel Khasakkinte

Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasak , 1965). His writing was immediately identified as


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“athyadunikam” (ultramodern), as the term “post-modern” had not come into vogue in the

critical vocabulary in Malayalam literature. Vijayan continued to write masterly short stories and

social critiques until the National Emergency in 1975, when his second novel, the masterpiece

Dharmapuranam (The Saga of Dharmapuri) was prevented from publication due to its

controversial content.

When asked about his works churned out during the tumultuous time of the Emergency, O.V.

Vijayan immediately recalls ‘Allegories of Power’ fr om his collection titled After the Hanging

and Other Short Stories (1989). The title under which the first four short stories have been

compiled itself suggests the strong political affiliations of the text. He reveals to Rajeev

Srinivasan in an interview in 1998 that these were amongst the pieces which he had kept in “cold

storage” until the end of the Emergency.1

Like his novel Saga, these short stories were written before, during and after the Emergency,

with a lot of latent anger. He admits in the interview that writing during this period of his life

was a “cleansing and cathartic experience.” Since the emergency was imposed in June, 1975, his

book Saga along with his radical short fiction “went into hiding”, which gave him ample time to

“meddle with the story.”

Like Dharmapuranam, his short stories too seem to have been influenced by the existentialists as

well as by Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. However, his vision and style, in general, spring

out of the classic experience of pre-modern India, relics of which have managed to survive in the

remote villages and tribal cultures of Kerala. The nascent post-modernist sensibility enabled him

to bring out the essence of the pre-modern in a scorching, flaming narrative style, much to the

1 See Rajeev Srinivasan’s interview with O. V. Vijayan. “The Lion in Winter”, 2005.

http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/mar/31intera.htm


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confusion of the modern progressives, who claimed certainty in the matters of life and art. His

dissent from modernism was evident in his early short stories and parodies. By distancing

himself from western existentialist concerns and influences, Vijayan brought into currency a

truly unique postmodern style in Malayalam literature which approaches these questions from a

localized lens.

In his ‘Allegories of Power’ he looks at tyranny, addressing and highlighting its multiple

manifestation and forms, be it as an organic quantity in the case of ‘Oil’, as allegory in ‘The

Foetus’ and ‘The Wart’, or as dark comedy in ‘The Examination’. There is a certain sense of

ambiguity of good triumphing over evil in ‘The Foetus’ and especially in ‘The Wart’. This

makes one wonder whether he conforms to this binary opposition or fractures it. It is therefore a

complex matter to try and fix O.V. Vijayan as he constantly surprises his readers while dealing

with volatile subjects and concepts in his works.

In his interview with Rajeev Srinivasan (op. cit.) O.V.Vijayan, while referring to his novel of

protest Saga in particular and his ideological shift in general says ,

But Saga is definitely a novel of protest — a predetermined offensive about the whole concept

of state, against war, cautiously written about a future where the right of the plant or the

vegetable will be upheld. In some ways, it is anti-civilizational . As in some of the short stories,

especially the ones about dystopias (Emphasis added).

To invoke the Derridian notion of the “supplement”, philosophy and politics merged in his

cartoons, just as revolution and spirituality coalesce in his writings, the one “folding into” the

other, each the other ’s “supplement”. Vijayan’s concern about the future of humankind, the bold

mix of sexuality and politics in his stories and novels, his use of the scatological imagery to

question the banality of politics, and his deep anxiety about the cosmic order, are all unique


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characteristics of a writer whose oeuvre was much more than the sum of its parts. Sex, satire and

a deep sorrow mark much of his writing.

Being proficient in both Malayalam and English has enabled the bilingual Vijayan to exploit

both languages and push their boundaries to their limits, via his literary fiction as well as his

political cartoon. Much like After the Hanging and Other Stories, the author has translated most

of his own works from the original Malayalam. It is interesting, as Rajeev Srinivasan too

suggests in his interview with Vijayan, that his translations of the short stories are perceived as

being more evocative and popular than in the original Malayalam. However, Vijayan’s humble

response to this statement suggests that the readers of the English version may lose out on many

nuanced cultural references embedded in his texts.

O.V. Vijayan’s contribution to the art of political cartooning in India has been phenomenal. The

very style he adopted, with his jagged black and white sketches punctuated by negative spaces in

the form of black lines, and his creative and satirical base lines, all are key factors in establishing

O.V. Vijayan as one of the leading English language political cartoonists of his time. Any

analysis of his ‘Allegories of Power’ taken from his book titled After the Hanging and Other

Stories (1989), would be incomplete without his excellent artistic rendition and critique of the

political nexus and exercise of power during the years of the Emergency. Vijayan ingeniously

makes use of evocative visual imagery in his fiction, making his writing comparable to the pieces

of art he churned out for leading English dailies.

One of the central arguments of this dissertation is that not only does Vijayan push language to

its seams, his radical works of fiction also extend the boundaries of the modes and techniques he

deploys in his texts. The second chapter titled ‘Of Allegories and Dystopias’ focuses on the


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politics that Vijayan consciously engages in by using a minor form like the short story along with

the allegorical mode. Other questions taken up concern his ideological shift from the left to a

transcendental, bhakti-oriented philosophy, along with other techniques that he utilizes to make

optimum use of the allegorical mode in his short stories, especially ‘The Wart’ and ‘The Foetus’.

The third chapter titled ‘Questions of Time, History and the National/Human Subject’ looks at

Vijayan’s short fiction and political cartoons through a different lens, interrogating the nature

and importance of memory with regards to the formation of identity, of truth and histories in the

selected texts of Vijayan. I also draw upon the seminal work of Deleuze and Guattari while

addressing questions of the ‘nomadic’ subject and the constant process of ‘becoming other’ when

dealing with questions of the human subject.

In the fourth and final chapter, Vijayan’s ‘Allegories of Power’ will be subjec ted to a feminist

analysis. It sets out to interrogate the figure of the female political leader located in the third

world scenario by looking more closely at the politics of the popular iconography and

representation of Indira Gandhi. The chapter also touches upon key issues like caste/class

oppression which add to the woes of third world women as well as questions regarding the

gender sensitivity of the author, Vijayan, and how he manages to subvert stereotypical

representations of women with the voluptuous vocabulary he utilizes in his texts.

In sum, this dissertation is an enquiry into the short fiction of a writer who has and continues to

hold a crucial position in the literary annals of modern Malayalam literature, but who is, in a

fundamental sense, excessive of all categories that seek to define and contain him.


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CHAPTER TWO

Of Allegories and Dystopias

In his seminal and contentious essay, ‘Third-world Literatures in the Era of Multinational

Capitalism’ (1986), Fredric Jameson argues that in the literatures of the “third world”,2 there is

now “an obsessive return to the national question” (65) and that typically this takes the form of

Allegory – “All third world texts are…necessarily allegorical, and in a very specific way: they

are to be read as what I will call national allegories” (69). Given that “[a] certain nationalism is

fundamental in the third world [literatures]”, what, asks Jameson, is the best suited replacement

for this trend in third world literatures? O. V. Vijayan’s work is certain ly concerned with the

“national question” and, particularly in his short stories, his explorations are cast in the

allegorical mode. Vijayan’s significance, however, lies in that he avoids any nationalist jingoism

and rearticulates the nation by situating himself in a regional and vernacular space. And, most

importantly, he formulates a non-western postmodernist style of writing which has become a key

characteristic of postmodern Malayalam fiction.

By rejecting Western postmodernism and existentialism Vijayan refrains from merely imitating

an American (or first-world) brand of postmodernism, instead developing a unique style of

writing which focuses on specific localized issues and a particular historical trajectory. Vijayan

uses the allegorical mode of writing towards various ends. Not only does the allegorical mode

present Vijayan with an opportunity to escape directly naming those concerned, it also broadens

2 Contrary to charges leveled against Jameson for his homogenizing tendencies, Jameson clarifies that he uses the

term “third world” in an essentially “descriptive sense” and he that he has no intention of obliterating “profound

differences between a whole range of non-western countries and situations” (1986: 65).


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the scope of the text itself so that there is a wider possibility of associations which can be linked

to its content. Through his texts Vijayan broadens the scope of the allegorical mode as well, by

subverting the conventional elements of the mode as utilized by the west and using it as a tool for

a scorching and scrupulously located socio-political critique.

Vijayan’s choosing of the ‘minor’ genre of the short story to address national issues is, it can be

argued, a fundamentally radical move. Vijayan himself speaks of the scope of his short stories in

an interview with Rajeev Srinivasan.3 The interviewer inquires whether 'The Foetus’ is a thinly

veiled story of the excesses of Sanjay Gandhi and his cronies”, probing the author to make clear

his objections to the Nehru Dynasty. However, Vijayan resists this cooption, instead insisting

that “The story should not be reduced to the level of personal animosity towards anybody. It is

only a take-off point to indicate human evil, evil in the state and (to some extent) evil in negating

nature.”

Having said that, his short story ‘The Foetus’ included under the selection titled ‘Allegories of

Power’ is a sweltering account of Sanjay Gandhi’s aggressive leadership of the Youth Congress,

the youth wing of the party, which during the Emergency gained more powers and importance

than the parent organization it stemmed from.

Mrs. Gandhi proclaimed a state of Internal Emergency under Article 352 of the constitution on

the morning of 26 June, suspending the normal political processes, but promising to return to

normalcy as soon as conditions warranted it. The proclaimations suspended the federal

provisions of the constitution and Fundamental Rights and civil liberties. The governmentimposed strict censorship on the Press and stifled all protest and opposition to the government.

(Chandra 2008: 321).

3See Rajeev Srinivasan’s interview with O. V. Vijayan. “The Lion in Winter”, 2005.



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All of these features of the Emergency of 1975 and the draconian laws put in place by Indira

Gandhi find allegorical equivalents in the texts of O. V. Vijayan. Of particular importance is his

short story ‘The Foetus’ as discussed earlier, which represents the Sovereign mother-son duo

who effectively suspended democratic processes during the period of the Emergency. Indira

Gandhi is referred to as “the Lady, widowed Sovereign of the village” (‘The Foetus’, 30) who

the people seldom saw while the unborn yet mobile Foetus is an allegorical representation of her

son Sanjay Gandhi. Immediately after the widowed Sovereign is introduced we are informed of

her scandalous pregnancy which is accompanied by the manifestation of fearsome omens.“The

perennial spring of the temple tank dried up, even as the Lady's womb ceased its bleeding” (30).

This could also be viewed as a reference to the two consecutive droughts of 1972-73 which

added to the woes of Indira Gandhi’s government, causing massive failure of crops and the

subsequent inflation of food grains and other basic essentials like cooking oil.

The “scions of the gentry” represent the Youth Congress members and a selective panel of

politicians and bureaucrats, who coerce the Astrologer to divine the Sovereign’s pregnancy as an

“Immaculate conception” insisting that the people “need” such a reading. Bipan Chandra’s

commentary on the Emergency tells us that “[t]he Emergency concentrated unlimited state and

party power in the hands of the prime minister to be exercised through a small coterie of

politicians and bureaucrats around her” (Chandra 2008: 322). Indira Gandhi managed to do so by

amending The Defence of India Act which was to the detriment of citizens’ liberties.

The proclamation made by the leader of the gentry never reaches the village and as in the classic

case of shooting the messenger, the village drummer is found lying dead in a palm grove. Here

the village drummer represents the arrest and silencing of the media representatives under the

amendment of MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) in July 1975, which effectively


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curbed the rights of the media machinery to freely report and broadcast any material which

would potentially endanger the interests of the congress party, specifically the speeches of the

Opposition leaders. Another instance of this undemocratic curbing of the Press’s freedom is

presented in the story. Initially when the Foetus is at the peak of its power, the Astrologer and the

Priest are unable of tell the future of the village and the menacing foetus due to the “foetal

eclipse” (42), the passing of which is rejoiced upon when the Foetus is redeemed with love and

coaxed to re-enter his mother, the Sovereign’s womb.

After discovering that the trail from the drummer’s dead body leads to the Fortress wherein the

Lady and her foetus reside, the villagers decide to remain silent and turn a blind eye towards the

death, which they describe as an “inexplicable aberration” (31). This passivity and compliance

can be linked to the popular public reaction to the proclamation of the Emergency. Bipan

Chandra elaborates this point further:

While a section of the intelligentsia reacted to the Emergency with marked hostility, the larger

majority of the people initially responded to it with passivity, acquiescence, acceptance or

even, support. It was only from the beginning of 1976 that the Emergency started becoming

unpopular (Chandra 2008: 323).

In his opinion, there were a number of reasons for this kind of a reaction from the masses. For

one, the people had no experience in recent memory of an authoritarian rule, which led to a sense

of bewilderment and fear of the unknown. The main reason for this popular reception of the

Emergency was that a large number of people were impressed by the positive outcome of some

of the “well- publicized Emergency measures” (Chandra 2008: 323) most of which could have

been achieved despite the Emergency. The village drummer’s brother, however, decides to

investigate, the consequence of which is that he is almost killed by the murderous, blood-sucking

Foetus. Therefore we see in allegorical terms how the fear of arrest and coercive action of the


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government effectively silenced most voices of dissent.

The corruption which riddled the entire political system and the unearthing of which led to the

strengthening of the JP Movement,4 is also one of the major themes of Vijayan’s ‘Allegories of

Power ’. We see representations of this in ‘The Foetus’ after the Foetus is declared as the new

Sovereign by the gentry, followed by “carnivals of youth to celebrate the advent of the Foetus”.

At the end of these carnivals, we are told, “the youth would march to the fortress with offerings

of goat and roosters and bunches of bananas for the Foetus”. And once they left the offerings at

the gate, it would “open at night when the Foetus woke, and the hounds would tug the offerings

inside” (33). It must be remembered that the court case which threatened to keep Indira Gandhi

out of parliament was based on petty charges of which political corruption was one.

Another instance of corruption has been allegorized in Vijayan’s short story ‘Oil’, the title of

which can be viewed as a sardonic allegorical commentary on the inflated prices of basic

household commodities like food grains and cooking oil in particular. Ayyan Chettiyar, the

money lender and owner of the sole shop in the village, and his wife Chalachi Chettichiyar dilute

their cooking oil with castor oil in order to maximize their profits. Once the people, especially

the youth of the village, begin to fall prey to a mysterious epidemic of paralysis and the threat of

discovery and consequent arrest stares them both in the face, they resort to extending favours to

the officers sent to investigate them. They first wine and dine the investigating officers, and then

seal the deal by extending sexual favours to them. Thus we see how corruption is the driving

force of Vijayan’s short story ‘Oil’.

4 Taking its name from its moving force, Jayaprakash Narayan, the JP Movement presented one of the fiercest

oppositions to the Emergency that saw months of draconian laws, extinguished freedom, Gestapo-style arrests,

severe Press censorship, forced sterilization and abject surrender by the minions of the Indira Gandhi/Sanjay Gandhi

regime that made India a fascist-style police state.


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Suspension of the Fundamental Rights and civil liberties of the people, which was one of the

most undemocratic features of the Internal Emergency of 1975, also finds ample allegorical

reverberation in the texts of O.V. Vijayan. In ‘The Foetus’ the new sovereign lays down a

number of autocratic laws which curb all the liberties and freedom of the villagers. The foetus

outlaws formal schooling after disrupting classes at the village school, raping the young teacher

and brainwashing the head master into silence and compliance. Formal schooling is replaced by

the pro-Foetus slogans that are to be taught by the gentry. We also see how public spaces are

encroached upon by the Foetus and his cronies when they invade the temple tank during the

festival bath where hundreds of bare-breasted women are bathing. The foetus and his young

cronies molest them, blind to identity, and search them for signs of pregnancy in order to harvest

all unborn foetuses. When on witnessing this horrid scene a grandmother exclaims to the leader

of the youth, “Desist, my children!” he responds in the negative, informing her that, “This is the

Sovereign’s search. There are no private pregnancies anymore” (35). Another instance of this

encroachment of public space presents itself in a ritualistic, repetitive fashion,

Every morning now the Foetus came to the marketplace riding in the red palanquin. Behind it

in a greasy phalanx marched the little foetuses, and behind them, chanting slogans, the violent

young men of the gentry. Often, the oldest citizen of the village, its only surviving centenarian,

bought up the rear of this village. Its only surviving centenarian, brought up the rear of this

weird revue (‘The Foetus’, 38).

When the village elder falls terminally ill due to this excessive exercise and the Priest asks him

for his reason for following the Foetus he replies, “Aged disciples have always walked behind

young messiahs” (38), a rhetoric which became popular during the leadership of Sanjay Gandhi.

The most intrusive and abominable law laid down by the Foetus comes to light after the shocked

Priest returns from his daughter’s school and speaks with her friend. She informs him of the


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latest decree – “The Foetus has outlawed childbirth. Henceforth the village will have only

foetuses” (38). Later in the narrative we see how a couple that tries to flee with its “illegally”

born child is intercepted and punished by death for trying to escape the confines of the village

and for not adhering to the law of the land. This can also be seen as Vijayan’s razor -sharp

comment on the forced vasectomies, the cause of birth control and population control being

championed by the Youth Congress under the leadership of Sanjay Gandhi. Vijayan’s short story

therefore draws our attention to the gendered politics of the undertaking and execution of such an

action by the government and its resulting consequences. In fact, the death of children and the

degeneration and maiming of the youth are the two constants in all four stories included under

O. V. Vijayan’s ‘Allegories of Power ’.

‘The Foetus’ ends with the symbolic death of the widowed Sovereign as well as the Foetus .

Their demise spells the end of the “foetal eclipse” and also results in the end of their entire

machinery of support.

[b]lack clouds gathered over the fortress and bolts of lightning crashed on the bronze domes.

The arching banyans, primordial spiders, caught fire with an agonized whistling. The dogs

howled to their deaths and great bats winged out of the fortress into the raging fire. A solitary

chamber-maid, beating her breast and wailing, emerged from the fortress wading through its

doom with a message for the village.

‘The news is grim’, the Priest spoke to the Astrologer in the temple, ‘The Lady delivered. The

child was still-born and the mother too passed away.'

They walked to the village. In the lanes and on the common and beside the stiles sat the scions

of the gentry, despairing, wailing, freed into insanity. The little foetuses lay scattered, dead and

rotting (41).

By refusing to use “predominantly western machineries of representation such as the novel”

(Jameson, 69), Vijayan problematizes Jameson’s argument formally in his texts, by choosing


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instead to allegorize the short story form. Thus Vijayan makes a conscious political choice to use

the short story form. He fractures the very category of the “national allegory” by locating his

dystopic short stories in villages and small townships. By refusing to locate them in metropolitan

centres he highlights the deplorable condition and the plight of rural India, especially during and

prior to the declaration of the Internal Emergency in 1975.

“A Citizen’s got to have both, dad –fundamental rights and excise duties.”5

As Bipan Chandra rightly points out, the JP Movement, which was in opposition to the Congress,

with its slogan of “Total Revolution” and call for civil disobedience, had failed to attract and

include the urban as well as rural poor, causing it to slowly fizzle out, as has evidently been the

problem with Anna Hazare’s Anti-Corruption movement. Its supporters were largely students,

the middle class that was suffering because of inflation and corruption, traders and the

intelligentsia. The dissident JP Movement also got backing from nearly all non-left political

parties since there was a general sense of disillusionment with socialism.

5 Source: http://www.hindu.com/mag/2006/06/04/stories/2006060400360500.htm


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JP often accused Indira Gandhi of trying to destroy all democratic institutions and establish a

Soviet-backed dictatorship in her hunger for power. Her continuation in office, he said, was

‘incompatible with the survival of democracy in India’ (Chandra 2008: 316).

However, the adoption of extra-legal and extra-constitutional, often violent methods by the

popular JP Movement and its reliance on the rhetoric of revolution, were for all purposes

incompatible with the functioning of a democratic political system. The main goal of the

movement, as Bipan Chandra rightly points out, was the hasty removal of Indira Gandhi. We

find resonances of this popular attitude in the selection of short stories in question, each one

having the underlying theme of a ‘contagion’, an ‘epidemic’ or a ‘murderous spore’ which is

feared, and which the characters struggle to cure and rid themselves of.

“He can live without electricity…”6

6 Source: http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/lr/2002/12/01/stories/2002120100250300.htm


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Ideologically, the anti-Congress political parties that were part of this movement in a coalition

were incompatible with one another, with no coherent leadership, message or promise for change

in government policies. We find resonances of these failures of the oppositional movement in

Vijayan’s short story titled ‘The Examination’.

The emperors of old, and the police inspectors who succeeded them, all had taken tributes from

the people, and had taken their women as well. But Ananthan Pillai did neither, and for these

reasons the citizens treasured his benevolent terror (66).

Therefore the Plague Control Officer, Ananthan Pillai, is described fondly by the people of

Palghat as the “New Emperor of the Hooked Sceptre, the dispeller of rats” in juxtaposition to the

ancient times of “a head a day” during the rule of the Sultan (66). The violence Ananthan Pillai

exhibits and sanctions is seen as comparably humane and therefore the people choose to turn a

blind eye to it, choosing the lesser of the two evils. It is rather ironic that both the Indira Gandhi

led Congress as well as the Jayaprakash Narayan led opposition legitimized their political actions

as being necessary to safeguard democracy in India. But in fact both were interested only in

swaying public support and votes in their respective favour in order to win political power. In

their efforts to do so they adopted anti-democratic methods and the consequence of it was the

suffering of the common man. This corrupt political manipulation of the masses and the sordid

betrayal of Indian democracy is aptly portrayed by a one of O. V. Vijayan’s famous political

cartoons reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945).


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“THE CREATURES OUTSIDE LOOKED FROM PIG TO MAN, AND FROM MAN TO PIG, AND

FROM PIG TO MAN AGAIN; BUT ALREADY IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY WHICH WAS

WHICH.”7

Thus we see how Vijayan uses both the art of cartooning and the literary allegorical form as tools

to unmask the ugly, in this case “ piggish” face of Indian politics which was riddled with

corruption, manipulation and an unrelenting thirst for power. It becomes evident that the

ideological climate during this period in Indian politics was rapidly changing and unclear. We

see resonances of this lack of ideological clarity in the works of Vijayan as well, a fact that he

concedes in the interview with Rajeev Srinivasan (1998):

There are elements that I am not able to understand fully -- in the search and in the

transcendence there are elements of bhakti that cover and overcome the element of ideology in

fiction. It is not necessary that I have become a religious person, but I have experienced in my

own life things that must be termed magical, for want of a better word.

7 Source: http://choukkar.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/a-cartoonist-remembers-ov-vijayan/


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When asked by the interviewer about the reasons behind his ideological shift to the

transcendental mode of thought and his break away from the left, Vijayan responds by saying:

It’s a long story; it began with the experiences in Hungary and Imre Nagy. I had always been a

little uneasy about Stalin. And Czechoslovakia completed my disillusionment. That also made

it difficult for me, as a writer, because my very words were associated with my left wing self-

image. A brief period of stasis and then it was a simple act to walk into the realm of the spirit:

it happened naturally and I have stuck to it ever since.

Vijayan’s ideological shift must theref ore be viewed in the light of these failed socialist

experiments, both at home and abroad, which brought into question the possible failures of

implementing a socialist political system in both developing as well as developed nations.

In this manner, the wart said. It gave me the knowledge of willing servitude. Brotherhood was a

word of freedom, but from now on, words would change, and so would everything that came

from the sacred grottos of the mind ('The Wart', 27).


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Above we see a cartoon equivalent of how Vijayan, through his allegory titled ‘The Wart’,

makes a sharp commentary on the re-articulation of words utilized as political slogans and the

recasting of the concept of brotherhood. These words and concepts like ‘Total Revolution’,

‘Democracy’ and ‘Progress’ were being manipulated repeatedly in the on-going quest for

political power, by the party in power as well as the Opposition.

Vijayan’s interrogation of the concept of Brotherhood has strong resonances with George

Orwell’s 1984, wherein the ‘Big Brother’ is the embodiment of an all-seeing, controlling figure

of totalitarianism in a dystopic world of the future. Thus we see how contemporary political

allegories like those of Vijayan’s borrow extensively from classic Orwellian critiques in

articulating their disillusionment with Indira Gandhi’s brand of socialism.

In his ‘ Allegories of Power ’, Vijayan represents a society which struggles to accommodate and

come to terms with modernity, particularly in his short story titled ‘The Wart’ wherein the

protagonist struggles to hold on to traditional medicine and the old ways of life to the point of

self-annihilation. He is unable to submit himself to modern medicine which, represented by the

young doctor Aechchu Menon, ultimately betrays him. The protagonist says,

I sat uneasily in a chair in front of him. The young doctor made me conscious of my crumbling

manor and my ignorance; he was the son of a family of parvenus, the first men in our part of

the country to have mastered the medicine of the English (‘The Wart’, 16).

Here we must also stress upon the clear link made between modernity and the British, which

highlights the anxiety of the post-colonial subject. Thus, Vijayan’s text has traces of a colonial

legacy and therefore incorporates postcolonial trends, putting the author in the league of other

postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh to name a few.


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At one level the dystopic allegories of O. V. Vijayan can be seen as reactions to the failures of

the socialist utopia in post-independence India. Dystopias are in themselves allegorical because

they are essentially a critique of a current trend, societal norm, or political system in their

depiction of a futuristic dystopic scenario. As Bipan Chandra rightly points out in India Since

Independence, the deteriorating economic, social and political situation in pre-Emergency India

signalled a bleak dystopic future indeed:

By the beginning of 1973 Indira Gandhi’s popularity began to decline. People’s ex pectations

were unfulfilled. Little dent was being made in rural or urban poverty or economic inequality,

nor was there any lessening of caste and class oppression in the countryside.

The immediate provocation for the rising discontent was the marked deterioration in the

economic situation. A combination of recession, growing unemployment, rampant inflation and

scarcity of foodstuffs created a serious crisis (Chandra 2008: 311).

Through ‘The Wart’ Vijayan also presents a critique of the feudal system, hierarchies of which

can be easily fitted into and are comfortable and even compatible with a capitalist economy. The

protagonist represents the rich peasantry class which relied heavily on convention for its

sustenance. This was also a class which turned against Indira Gandhi and the Congress which

threatened to bring about sweeping land reforms, redistribution of land to the landless and the

abolition of bonded labour among other social reforms announced in the Twenty-Point

Programme.8 Vijayan gives us an indication of the protagonist’s social standing in the following

lines:

Ours was a country mansion, a granary fortress a hundred years old. Our estate had dwindled,

but there was enough to ensure a life of leisure and contemplation. I did not know the extent of

8 As Bipan Chandra points out in the section titled 'Public Response to the Emergency', “Serious efforts were to

implement the Twenty-Point Programme; and some quick results were produced in terms of reduction of prices, free

availability of essential commodities, and check on hoarding, smuggling and tax evasion” (324). But the heart of

Progr amme’s agenda was the upliftment of the rural poor, which it failed to implement effectively.


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the lands nor how much grain they yielded, but Chaaththan, the head serf, kept count of things

for me as had his father for mine. Suma disapproved of this, complaining often of my

ineptitude, but I would tell her that Chaaththan knew better (‘The Wart’, 14).

Thus we see how Vijayan’s ‘Allegories of Power ’ in some senses redeems the “long discredited”

form of allegory by politicizing it; where the personal, the political and the fictional are brought

together in order to fully understand and digest the experience of something as momentous and

as haunting as the Emergency which lasted from 1975 right up to 1977. O.V. Vijayan can be

viewed as the third world intellectual who is perforce, due to his location, always-already a

“cultural intellectual who is also a political militant, the intellectual who produce s both poetry

and praxis” (Jameson 1986: 75).

References

Jameson, Fredric. 1986. ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’. Social

Text , No. 15 (Autumn,), Duke University Press, pp. 65-88.

Chandra, Bipan. 2008. India Since Independence. New Delhi: Penguin.

Vijayan, O.V. 1989. After the Hanging and Other Stories. Translated from Malayalam to

English by the author. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

Web Sources

See Rajeev Srinivasan’s interview with O. V. Vijayan. “The Lion in Winter”, 2005.



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CHAPTER 3

Questions of Time, History and the National/Human Subject

O.V. Vijayan’s collection of short stories titled After the Hanging and Other Stories (1989),

unleashes a full-scale attack on the state and brings into question various metanarratives which

are generally left unquestioned, accepted as the absolute truth without further interrogation. This

constant questioning of metanarratives and boundaries displays a strong postmodernist streak,

which resonates with other well-known works by the author. In this sense he does a great service

to his readers by problematizing these notions through his self-reflexive texts, positing a harsh

allegorical commentary on the post-Nehruvian abuse of political power in India. The words of

the narrator in the powerfully evocative and chillingly grotesque short story ‘The Wart’ capture

the generalized spirit of this crucial era in Indian political and social life:

Generations of my people had mediated on this seer with trust, and I could see no other path for

me either. This was my sin, and this now my moment of unburdening… (Vijayan, ‘The Wart’,

13).

It is interesting to note how, for the unnamed narrator/protagonist of the story, the “unburdening”

is in the telling, the narration of his fragmented yet powerful, almost overwhelming experiences.

It is ironically the unconventional memoir of an individual who is clearly unable to break away

from conventions, unable to transition from, to invoke Antonio Gramsci, “common sense” into

“good sense”9

. The fear that prevents the protagonist of the story from making this transition has

been symbolized by the wart, the fear of social unacceptability and exclusion, the need to belong

9 Gramsci describes commonsense as “the diffuse, unco-ordinated features of a general form of thought common to

a particular period and a particular popular envir onment” (1971: 330). Good sense on the other hand is “a

conception of reality that has gone beyond common sense and become, if only within narrow limits, a critical

conception (333; emphasis added).


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to a community by blindly following the codes and dictums laid down by it. The Sage and the

forefathers are viewed as revered and distinguished figures. But the protagonist is unable to cope

with change; he relies on the methods which suited his father and ancestors but does not evolve

with the times. This can also be linked to the political stance of Indira Gandhi and her reliance on

the Gandhi family tag which was her biggest asset as far as consolidation and imposition of

power was concerned.

‘The Wart’ is the first story to feature in the section titled, ‘ Allegories of Power ’. The story has a

circular form, almost mimicking the karmic circle. It begins with the protagonist feeling dwarfed

in the garden he had once tended to, which he had ownership of. He feels dislocated and

alienated; his home has been rendered un-homely, thrown into what Freud would term “das

unheimlich” and which Bhabha explains as “an estranging sense of the relocation of home and

the world” (Bhabha 1994: 13).

Imperceptibly a change came over my relations with people. It was a curious idler first, a man I

encountered at the village library, who stared hard at me; then another and another and another,

until I found myself driven gently but relentlessly into a prison of their awareness of me. Still I

could have carried the wart, now as big as a tomato, in the hammock of my lip, and trudged to

the hospital in the town, but in my way was all that my forbears and I had lived by (The Wart,

18).

The final step of his alienation and isolation is when the protagonist hears his wife Suma tell

their son Unni that the wart is a contagious disease:

I chose not to hear my son’s reply, the strength for that knowing had gone from me and slowly

I climbed up to the paneled attic, which would henceforth be my home… (18).

What is evident here is how this acute feeling of alienation is imposed not only by the state

machinery but in fact through human contact and societal recognition practices. The


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narrator/protagonist is isolated out of society’s fear of the abnormal. The fear of “contagion”

keeps everyone at bay. Here it is also possible to raise questions about how an instance of

resistance to the norm is considered contagious. Further, that which is socially unacceptable and

threatening is deemed as ‘unnatural’ so as to justify its elimination by those in power. In doing so

the threat of imitation of this act of resistance to power by other individuals is also eliminated.

Once his wife and child leave him, the narrator/protagonist lives in complete isolation except for

his brief contact with the head serf’s sister -in-law, who cleans up, prepares his meals and departs

for the day. He becomes sexually involved with her but the wart takes over this act of pleasure as

well when it turns into a huge black phallus and repeatedly violates the poor woman even after

she is dead:

Now the last spaces of my freedom vanished, the spaces I had conjured with my desperate lust.

The prison closed around me, and I was left alone with the wart, my prison warden (26).

Thus, the protagonist once again loses all hope of human contact and in the process turns into a

less-than-human entity while the wart becomes transformed into a huge black elephant fated to

be worshipped as the sacred elephant of the temple.

The protagonist says, “I have sinned the sin of the gentle and the pious, and so must make

amends. I must communicate … I go back to the wart, drawn to revisit my sin. My sense of time

fails me, I cannot recall with any measure of certainty when it all began” (13).

Here we see how both the protagonist of ‘The Wart’ and Vijayan himself question and dismantle

the very notion of linear Time. Even the sequence of the protagonist’s memory is punctuated

with periods of delirium and total memory lapse, which illustrates how memory is shot through

with gaps and fissures and unaccounted for lapses. He becomes a marginal figure, reduced to a


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speck, spatially located in the garden, which becomes symbolic of the liminal space which lies

both outside and yet inside the home. Geography therefore becomes important and this liminal

space becomes the site of radical possibility due to its peripheral nature, which fractures the

legitimizing basis of the power exercised by the state. Homi Bhabha, for instance, refers to the

liminal as a potentially disruptive in-between – “This interstitial passage between fixed

identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without

an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha 1994: 5).

But, to revert to the treatment of the experience of time in Vijayan’s story, it is useful to recall

Jurgen Habermas’ thesis in his essay “Modernity versus Postmodernity” that Post-

Enlightenment Modernity signaled, above all, a radically “changed consciousness of time”

(Habermas 1981: 4). This echoes Henri Bergson’s influential ideas about two different

conceptions of time – “les temp”, that is, time as the intellect divides it and marks out in

specialized units such as seconds, minutes, hours and so on; and “la duree”, or time as duration

that is indivisible, continuous and subjective. Most significantly, the idea of duration underlines

the fact that time is characterized by interpenetration, which is the overlapping of current

experience and memory (see Bergson 1968). And Michel Foucault’s primary goal in his

conception of the ‘History of the present’ is not to understand the past but to understand the

present; or, to put the point with more nuance, to use an engagement with the past to understand

something that is intolerable in the present. We see this trend in the works of Vijayan as well, as

the protagonist of ‘The Wart’ takes us from the present to the fragmented past and back to the

present.

At that the woodpecker’s cackle spoke, not in my ear but within my mind,

You transgress the law.


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Wherein do I transgress? I asked.

Memory, the wart said. Memory is a crime against history (26).

The state’s erected dominant version of History, Truth and the Human/National Subject engages

in the exclusion of those which do not ‘fit in’ to this category. Just as the protagonist of ‘The

Wart’ ultimately shrinks to the size of a microbe, those who pose a threat to the existing norm

are doomed to the same fate. This resonates with question of why, in the grand scheme of things,

he is unable to fit himself, locate himself, within the linear framework of time and normative

subject-hood through the course of his narrative. The truth must be backed by factual evidence,

therefore the dominant version of the truth must, by definition, exclude the memoirs of memory.

Memory is by nature fragmented and discontinuous, thereby its inclusion into the field of truth

threatens the prevailing structure, which relies heavily on an imposed sense of continuity and

coherence. Thus we see how Vijayan consciously ruptures the state’s dominant versions of

history, truth, linear time and the human subject by presenting alternatives to them all –

alternatives which refuse to be categorized and escape definition. Memory becomes Vijayan’s

tool to dismantle the “machine of repression”, namely the state, which “produces antiproduction”

– signifiers which are there to close off and forbid the emergence of every subjective group

process, as Roland Bogue enumerates in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari.

In my worm’s voice, thin like a pupal thread, I cried out: pious Brahmins, this is no elephant,

this is a microbe. I shall tell you its tale. But the Brahmins were gone. The wind rose and the

dead leaves rustled (‘The Wart’, 29).

The voice of the now marginalized protagonist is no longer audible to the human ear and his

words are drowned out by the mere rustling of dead leaves. It is due to this silencing by the

representatives of religion, the priests, that the protagonist feels the need to narrate his story. His


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voice has no place in the official history of religion, which is also managed by the state.

Therefore the unnatural origins of the wart-turned-elephant must be muted in order for it to be

legitimized as an object of worship. The official narrative cannot accommodate such an

unnatural event and process of becoming and must therefore marginalize those voices which

present such accounts of “aberrations”. We can also find textual evidence for this forced

repression and elimination of uncomfortable histories and events from the official version in his

other short story titled ‘The Foetus’:

The Priest gasped, and said after an agonized silence, ‘This is unnatural, nothing like this has

happened in this village before.’

‘Far from it, it was happening all the while. For many generations the lords of the fortress had

willed their power over us, and this manifests itself in this blob of slime' (‘The Foetus’, 33).

Here we see how repressed memory of the ‘unnatural’ erupts when the astrologer confirms that it

is in fact the widowed Sovereign’s foetus that has unleashed terror in the village. Thus we see

how O. V. Vijayan is making a pointed comment regarding how official histories are at odds

with collective memory, thereby suggesting that this falsely coherent and naturalized version of

history can be ruptured through the tool of memory.

The knife blazed now, and I remembered my great uncle. We are a gentle and pious people, but

our genealogy is punctuated by proud and regal ancestor s as well…it cleansed the scalp round

his tuft and the base of his phallus, so that he was shorn anew into nakedness and could romp

down the hillside to seek out wedded matrons and sow in them the seeds of bastard

sovereignty — and the children, in the incestuous unknowing of their ancestry would chase and

mate with one another (‘The Wart’, 19).

Here while narrativizing an alternative history accessible only through memory in ‘The Wart’,

which implodes and brings into question the protagonist’s seemingly gentle and pious ancestry,


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Vijayan also highlights that memory can become a tool for empowering and mobilizing the

fearing/docile subject into action:

[P]erhaps the knife and its power compelled me. The suicidal violence of my great uncle

welled up within me along with the futile resistance of the gentle and the pious, and in a great

mingling I held the wart with my left hand and with the right drew the knife along its stem (20).

Set in the town of Palghat during the plague epidemic of 1946, Vijayan’s short story titled ‘The

Examination’ interrogates the intersections of history and specific geographical locations. We are

told about a street in the town that, “[t]his dingy street was redolent with history, it was called

Sultanpet, to commemorate Tipu Sultan’s invasion” (61).

The reluctance of the town’s newspaper and media machinery to aptly portray the seriousness of

the epidemic suggests how the media can be manipulated by the state to serve its larger interests.

Instead of focusing on the plague itself, the newspaper account ironically capitalizes on the

historical value of the town.

The town’s newspaper, a reluctant commentator, wrote, ‘Palghat is a famous town, and it gives

us great pride to recall that in the good days of old its twenty square miles were an empire of

four kingdoms. It is a pity that this fell disease has attacked such a historic town. People thus

afflicted will have their daily observances, like spinning, disrupted. They will experience great

inconveniences and possible death…’ (‘The Examination’, 61).

Thus Vijayan, though his text, tries to highlight how history is manipulated, used and abused,

glorified and marginalized, by those in power to suit their needs. After the epidemic has been

effectively managed by the officer in charge, Ananthan Pillai, the following commentary

appears:

The events about to be narrated here will probably seem unconnected with those narrated in the

preceding pages. This is a correct assumption; here is no sequence, as in all history… (66).


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Years after the epidemic Ananthan Pillai is revered and remembered as “The New Emperor of

the Hooked Sceptre, the dispeller of rats” (66), and is commemorated for his heroism by all the

town folk. They give long speeches in praise of the man who captained the war of man against

“ bacillus” but Vijayan adds that none who spoke in praise of the officer had clear memory of the

traumatic epidemic. Here we see how memory has been manipulated and recast in order to deify

and justify the misdeeds and excesses of the tyrannical officer.

O. V. Vijayan forces us to interrogate concepts like that of the Human Subject, which is in itself

a production of the state. Vijayan’s short stories have a tendency to be anti-rationalist, signalling

an epistemological shift in the way one approaches concepts of History, Time and The

Human/National subject, all of which are being constantly managed, codified and concretized by

state machinery, but which also manage to escape and evade it. One can draw an analogy here

with Gilles Deleuze’s radical engagement with the officially circulated History of philosophy

that has marginalized the transgressive philosophy of Nietzsche. Deleuze, however, sees

Nietzsche’s philosophy as an escape route, a “line of flight”, from dominant Hegelian thought.

Stemming from the argument put forth by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia (1977) that “all desire is social rather than familial”, I would like to propose that

even though the protagonist seems to be caught within a quintessential Oedipal family scenario,

he fashions an escape into nomadic life through his ‘metamorphosis’10

aided by the wart. When

the protagonist’s son Unni becomes upset at the prospect of the wart being surgically removed, it

immediately throws up questions regarding the incestuous oedipal desire of the son for his

10 This reading draws upon Ronald Bogue’s essay ‘One exemplary reading, Kafka’s rhizomic writing machine’

which presents a ‘Deleuzoguattarian’ reading of Kafka’s story ‘Metamorphosis’ . See Brogue 2008:110 - 111.


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mother. But instead we see how the protagonist himself uses this reluctance and fear of his

young son as an alibi for his refusal to undergo surgery, which he regrets deeply in retrospect.

Today I recall my words in sorrow, and know, my son, wherein I failed you. You were pure

and young, ignorant of the ways of the microbe; I ought to have armed you with that

knowledge… (‘The Wart’, 17).

It is vital to view the oedipal identity as a construction of the state, a model best suited to

curbing, taming and managing of desire, which in Deleuzian terms is multiple, erratic and

polyphonous. By denying the elevation of family relationships and the unified self to positions of

pre-eminence Vijayan resists and deforms the structures of Oedipalization, and therefore the

onus of the ultimate choices of not having the wart surgically removed rests entirely on the

protagonist/narrator.

The wart was now a slab of meat. I felt the burden within as well; in vain I sought a place in my

mind where I could rest it awhile (22).

Here we see Vijayan blurring the lines between the psychological and the physiological self

wherein the protagonist attempts to seek, in spatial terms, a concrete place within the

psychological to rest that which is overbearingly physical. The ancestral knife can be viewed as a

tool for subverting convention, which the wart orders thrown into the well. The wart can

therefore be viewed as a totalitarian force, which invades the protagonist’s body as well as his

mind.

Fear gave me the energy to rise and move; I went up to the mirror to take a look at the wart. It

hung from my lower lip like a sea turtle. The red patch I had seen and which I had mistaken for

inflammation and possible decay, now opened up into a mouth, vampire lips drooling spit and

pus and the black dots into a pair of eyes, little eyes winking lewdly at me from the mirror. The

lips moved now and once again I heard the spectral cackle of the woodpecker. As I listened

intently the cackle defined itself into words of frenzied and obscene abuse (‘The Wart’, 25).


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The image of the self and the other are fused together and viewed in the same mirror, therefore

the boundary between the normal and the abnormal has been breached and rendered useless. The

horror of no longer recognizing the self manifests as the wart in the image reflected back by the

mirror. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the problem in an oedipalizing world is to find, what

they call, “a line of flight” which is not necessarily a search for a bsolute liberty or escape but

simply a means of movement, a way of transforming a situation – in this case by becoming non-

human and de-subjectifying the self in order to deterritorialize the human subject. The

relationship between the protagonist and the wart can be viewed as, in the words of Remy

Chauvin, “a parallel evolution of two beings which have absolutely nothing to do with one

another” (Bogue 1989: 111). It is a “becoming” which is mutual deterritorialization. When this

mutual transformation is achieved and the protagonist’s body shrivels off the large body of the

wart-turned-elephant, the protagonist exclaims: “But I had my freedom, the freedom of the

castaway” (29).

This can be read as signalling the absolute deterritorialization of the human subject represented

by the narrator/protagonist. This mutual transformation is ratified by the various instances

presented in the text which suggest a shared experience between the wart and the protagonist, be

it while walking towards the well to dispose of the knife or in the necrophiliac encounter with

Naani, the head serf’s sister -in-law, wherein the pleasure of the wart-turned-phallus is that of the

protagonist as well. The narrator manages to escape the oedipalized familial trap in the process

of “becoming-other”, thus escaping into a nomadic, less-than-human existence:

All nutrients were withheld from my blood stream. Within me grew a hunger like an unseen

fire that licks through mountain crevices. I began to dwindle, even as the wart grew by leaps

and bounds; I became a mere appendage (28).


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If the narrator/protagonis of ‘The Wart’ finds an escape route from subject-hood, familial and

societal constraints through his transformation into a less-than-human entity, ‘The Foetus’

presents us with a reversal of the very same process, wherein the murderous foetus must be

coaxed with love into re-entering the womb of his “Sovereign” mother and thus become human.

The cycle is reversed and the less-than-human, yet all powerful foetus finds his “line of flight”

thr ough becoming human just as the Ape in Kafka’s short story, ‘A Report to an Academy’.

In ‘The Foetus’, Vijayan presents a stark picture of how power operates and consolidates itself

by instilling fear in its subjects.

Rushing to the grove, they found the village drummer lying dead. There were marks of

strangulation round his neck, and a gash near his heart; all the blood had been drained away

from his body and from where he lay a broad trail of slime stretched towards the village,

punctuated with bloody drip. The peasants followed the trail and discovered that it led to the

massive gates of the fortress. They stood hesitant; just then a conch sounded inside the fortress,

and the fierce hounds tethered in the kennels howled in spectral relay (31).

The “trail of slime” which leads to the dark fortress of the Sovereign can be viewed as traces

which evidently mark the source of the killings and connect them to the source of power,

residing in the fortress. The fierce hounds can be equated with the Repressive State Apparatus

(Althusser 1971) which coerces the villagers into complacence and silence. Gradually the trails

of slime and the marks of the hounds’ feet become a common sight in the village, pointing us in

the direction of Michel Foucault who says that power is never monolithic, never concentrated

within one entity or institution, but is in fact diffused and invisible. These markers of power help

to keep the villagers in constant fear and therefore in check, thereby effectively discouraging any

action against the wielder of power.


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We are told that “[t]he village accepted the death (of the village drummer) as an inexplicable

aberration, and chose to forget it” (31). These aberrations are to be left un -recorded in official

histories, just as the scandalous news of the widowed Sovereign’s pregnancy must be confirmed

as an “immaculate conception” in order for it to be legitimate. This is achieved by the young

scions’ threats to the Priest and the Astrologer of the village, both of whom represent the old

patriarchal order, juxtaposed by the new matriarchal one represented by the widowed Sovereign

and her foetus.

The village council is “overrun and occupied” by the youth of the village and the old order

crumbles under the tyrannical rule of the new sovereign, the Foetus. New laws are put in place

whereby formal education is denied to the youth and schooling is replaced by slogans which are

to be taught by the gentry. And, that is not all: “The Foetus has outlawed childbirth. Henceforth

the village will have only foetuses” (38).

In this fashion Vijayan presents us with various instances wherein the language of legality is

misused and modified in order to suit the needs of those in power, just as was the scenario during

the National Emergency of 1975. The forced brainwashing and submission of the old

Insurrectionist of the village in ‘The Foetus’ presents an instance of how revolutionary ambition

is nipped in the bud by the repressive elements of the state machinery. Even the feeblest threat

like that posed by the aged Insurrectionist must be dealt with immediacy. The foetus must

“vampirize” the revolution as well as historical memory in order to eliminate any threat to the

new order.

A strong postmodernist streak is evident in O.V. Vijayan’s short stories, which repeat edly bring

into question the notions of linear time, history and representation by recasting the natural as the


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unnatural and the grotesque. Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to Kafka “a postmodern attitude

towards language, an avant-garde politics aimed at the creative subversion of social

representations, and an impersonal Nietzschean laughter that transforms grotesque absurdity into

affirmation through the productive activity of writing” (Brogue, 1989, 122). The same qualities

can be ascribed to this selection of short stories by O.V. Vijayan, who engages simultaneously in

formal experimentation and political activism in art which aims at deforming and denaturalized

ideological codes of representation. This artistic strategy is nothing short of revolutionary, as

Vijayan coaxes his readers to read between the lines, and delve deeper into many important

existential and political questions.

References

Althusser, Louis. 1970. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’. Lenin and Philosophy and

Other Essays. Translated Ben Brewster. Monthly Review Press.

Bergson, Henri. 1968. The Creative Mind . Translated Mabelle L. Andison. New York:Greenwood Press.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture London: Routledge.

Bogue, Roland. 1989. Deleuze and Guattari: London and New York: Routledge.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London

and New York: Viking Penguin.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci . Edited and

translated Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishhart.

Habermas, Jurgen. 1981. ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’. New German Critique, No. 22.

Vijayan, O.V. 1989. After the Hanging and Other Stories. Translated from Malayalam to

English by the author. New Delhi: Penguin Books.


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CHAPTER 4

The Sexualization of Power

As Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan aptly puts it in her book titled Real and Imagined Women: Gender,

Culture and Postcolonialism (1993), “Indira Gandhi’s historical importance as a woman leader

of a postcolonial democratic nation and as an influential third-world political figure has not yet

been subjected to extended feminist enquiry” (Sunder Rajan 1993: 99). This is because for the

most part feminists themselves have been deeply divided on the relation of women to questions

of political power and authority. Women in leadership roles, especially when located in the third

world scenario, cannot however be regarded as being representative of the general status of

women in these countries. How must we then locate someone like Indira Gandhi, daughter of ex-

prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who herself held the prestigious post of prime minister

from 1966 to 1977, within questions of women’s issues and more importantly within the Indian

male-dominated political arena? It can be argued that even though women in India have held

prominent positions in government, their overall status in Indian society has undergone very little

change. These are questions with no easy answers, and feminists are divided over whether truly

revolutionary change in the status and condition of women can be brought about by securing

parliamentary positions for women or through mass movements and external activism.

Mary Fainsod Katzenstein’s opening commentary in her paper titled “Towards Equality? Cause

and Consequence of the Political Prominence of Women in India” makes these discrepancies

visible:


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Mrs. Gandhi's Prime Ministership symbolizes the anomaly of women's position in Indian

politics. On the one hand, women appear to be prominent at an elite level of politics. On the

other hand, there persist gross inequalities between male and female in Indian society as a

whole-testified to by an imbalanced sex ratio, severe differentials in wages and work

participation, and a host of other factors (Katzenstein 1978: 473).

Katzenstein further interrogates the role of women who hold important political office and asks

questions concerning how these women are able to negotiate within a male-dominated political

system deeply shot through with patriarchal prejudice and masculine anxiety. She suggests that

women leaders must then have honorary “male-dom” conferred upon them as a gesture of

tokenism in exchange for their internalization of male norms. This, she suggests, is a strategy

they may use in order for them to be taken seriously as capable political leaders. This explains

the rapid change in the popular representation of Indira Gandhi which transitioned from the

‘dumb doll’ image to that of the only man in the parliament:

A cartoon appeared in one of India's English dailies picturing Mrs. Gandhi seated at a table

with a number of other politicians. Referring to Mrs. Gandhi's strong-handed leader-ship, a

leadership which belied the earlier expectations of some party bosses that she would rule in

name only, the cartoon's caption read, "the only man in a cabinet of old women” (Katzenstein

1978: 473).

Reading Vijayan’s ‘Allegories of Power’ from a third-world gendered perspective throws up just

as many questions: questions of the author’s gender sensitivity, the fictional representation of

women in positions of power, and the function and representation of these women as historical

icons. Although it could be argued that women have held important positions in Indian political

and social life right from the freedom struggle, we must question as to how they have been

represented to the Indian public by way of the media and the political machinery, what is the

agenda behind these kinds of representations, and whether these representations correspond with


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the ground reality as far as Indian society is concerned. While discussing the fiction of O.V.

Vijayan it is also imperative to interrogate the relationship between women and authoritative

political power, which are traditionally at odds with one another.

The impression that Indian women occupy an important place in Indian politics has been

created, then, more by the visibility of a Few women, Mrs. Gandhi and a number of historical

figures, than by the presence of substantial numbers of women leaders (Katzenstein 1978: 478).

Here one may also find the intervention presented by Trina Nileena Banerjee, in her piece

“Political Iconography and the Female Political Leader: The Case of Indira Gandhi, Some Initial

Questions”, useful to answer questions concerning the postulation of women leaders in terms of

the art, literature and history of the subcontinent. She begins her paper with a quote from the then

General Secretary of National Affairs, Virendra Khanna, whose words deify Indira Gandhi and

present her as the ultimate political icon for the generations to come. His comment, however,

has a strong underlying current of religiosity:

The coming generation will feel extremely proud of the name of Indira Gandhi. They will

worship her as the personification of Sita, Laxmi and Durga. Long live Indiraji (cited in

Banerjee 2012).

It must be argued that since the time of the national struggle for independence right up to the

contemporary politics of India, the influence of Hindu religious iconographies has been fairly

strong in bestowing power upon and garnering popularity for political figures. The above

comment must also be viewed in light of Brinda Bose’s observations in her introduction to

Translating Desire (2003) which sheds light on the right wing’s manipulation of the image of


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Hindu goddesses like Durga in order to mobilize its female faction during the tumultuous time of

the Hindu Muslim riots (Bose 2003: Introduction xv).

“Religious Hatred…”11

It is interesting to see how similar strategies were being implemented by a pseudo-secular

political party like the Congress in order to put their leader on a pedestal. A similar scenario is

enacted in Vijayan’s short story titled ‘The Foetus’ which can be viewed as a thin ly veiled

allegorical text, elaborating the excesses of Sanjay Gandhi during his leadership of the Youth

Congress. The powers of the “widowed Sovereign” and her uncontainable Foetus are defeated by

the litany of the Devi. Here Rajeshwari Suder Rajan argues that the widowed Sovereign, the

fictional representative of Indira Gandhi, allegorically stands for “despotism”, “metaphysical

evil” and political dynastic power, while the power of the Devi, who is the antagonistic force to

the Sovereign, “can only stand for the divine powers of grace” (Sunder Rajan 1993: 106). Since

the Emergency was overthrown by the historical collective will of the people in 1977,

Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan rightly points out in her analysis of ‘The Foetus’ that, “the prayer that

invokes the goddess must represent the law, or the Constitution, through which means the

Emergency was revoked” (Sunder Rajan 1993: 107). Both the forces of power which operate

11 Source: http://indulekha.com/colours/2006/07/blog-post.html


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within the force field of Vijayan’s text are embodied by allegorically represented female

characters.

The figure of the widow is traditionally associated with the a-sexual, docile and tabooed female

subject in Indian society. Vijayan’s scandalous and overt sexualization of the despotic Sovereign

thus makes the reader uncomfortable, as her sultry “honeyed” voice chimes through the gates of

the fortress to address the “scions of the gentry” on behalf of her strengthening Foetus. It must be

remembered that at the outset of her political career, there were fervent objections made to Indira

Gandhi’s even shaking hands with male members of foreign delegations on account of her social

status as a widow. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan points out that although the widowed Sovereign is

presented as a highly sexualized figure, “[s]he remains invisible in the text, as in the narrative –

only her portrait is seen and worshipped (represented in ‘the carnal fullness of middle age,

pregnant, naked’)” (Sunder Rajan 1993: 106). Although Sunder Rajan goes on to argue that

despite her sexualized representation the widowed Sovereign is not gendered in any other way,

one could draw upon Trina Nileena Banerjee’s argument that s pecifically looks at the image

created for Indira Gandhi in the national imaginary. By overly sexualizing the sinister figure of

the Sovereign, Vijayan consciously and effectively desecrates the god-like status accorded to

Indira Gandhi during her reign as prime minister. Therefore, this technique deployed by

Vijayan’s text can be seen as a radical move towards countering the age old political tradition of

drawing parallels between Hindu-centric religious figures and Indian political and historical

leaders.

The sexual imagery in O.V. Vijayan is almost always presented as scandalous and bordering on

the grotesque. While Vijayan indulges in excessive eroticism in order to extricate the divine from

the political and the historical, we must take into consideration observations made by Harold


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Bloom in his text titled ‘The Grotesque’ wherein he elaborates that “[t]he problem remains that

grotesque is essentially something we distrust, the hidden demonic fantasy that still torments and

attracts us, the shadow we repress because we don’t want to confront this central problem in our

society” (Bloom 2009: 21). This general attitude towards the grotesque signals another trend in

the writing of Vijayan, which by incorporating the grotesque, the abnormal and the unnatural

tries to draw much needed attention towards the unacknowledged absurdities and wrong doings

in our corruption-infested male-dominated political system as well as patriarchal Indian society.

Via the grotesque he compels his readers to unearth, almost in an archeological fashion, the

hidden agendas of political parties in the contemporary India political scenario.

In his story, ‘The Foetus’, there is a presence of incestuous strains wherein the mother figure is

sexualized to a great degree. This incestuous strain is further strengthened by Vijayan’s

description of the mob of youth, the “scions of the gentry”, who molest the women of the village

having their ritual festive bath at the temple tank, under the pretext of searching them for “signs

of pregnancy” which has been outlawed and must therefore be reported to the Sovereign. They

commune with the Foetus in “carnivals of youth” (33) and stand guard when the Foetus rapes the

school teacher and other women of the village. These instances in the narrative all point towards

state-sanctioned atrocities, which are legitimized through the letter of the law, and have far-

reaching consequences. A contemporary example of the same presented itself during the war

with Bangladesh under the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi, during which the armed forces

were given a free hand to rape, loot and brutalize at their discretion. Women are therefore

threatened and become more vulnerable during times of war, religious unrest or autocratic rule as

was the case during the Emergency. We find echoes of this age-old threat to women in Vijayan’s

‘The Examination’ as well:


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The emperors of old, and the police inspectors

allegories of power - a reading of o. v. vijayan's short fiction and political cartoons

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