I sentence you — Communist as literary critic

Let us take a rhetorical jump: can you imagine Arundhati Roy without communism? Yes, very much. Communism in Kerala was an echo of a distant thunder. Those who lived in it are today history’s garbage collectors. They all are very imaginative people. They once imagined Kerala as an ever-twinkling little red star. They all are very romantic people. They once romanced in a borrowed revolution. Today they are an autonomous community, lording over history’s waste, with nothing at stake except a few yellowed pages of ideology. Rare castaways indeed. Rarer when they double as literary critics. Today they are feasting on Arundhati Roy, and with what ghostly exuberance.

From the critics’ diary: Roy’s novel is no doubt a sharp weapon in the hands of the anti-communist leaders of world (bourgeois) literature; it is written to suit the Western palate; it is an imaginary(!) depiction of Kerala society and politics …. In short, it is the conspiracy of imagination against the realism of society; it is the word of the novelist against the Word of history. Roy’s book has not only been reduced to a Malayalam novel written in English. It has also been reread by social critics as a political novel of “pure and simple spite”. The whole business is pathologically out of context. And it is immensely sad to see EMS Namboodiripad weighing his own historical worth against the blasphemous words of Roy. It looks comic only when we realise that EMS is not Zhivkov and Roy is hardly Barnes.

Still EMS climbs on to the podium of history and talks to humanity: “… Such a description of three communists in Kottayam is nothing but a caricature of the Communist Party, which has been in existence and working for the last 60 years and more. The majority of the tens of thousands of selfless, devoted cadres come from the working people; a small minority (including myself) can be described as the adopted sons and daughters of the working class’. Among these Communists, there have been thousands of martyrs who have laid down their lives in the cause of freedom, democracy, social justice and secular politics ….” A testament of truth, a believe-me confession from the hero of a fiction larger than Roy’s. Why?

There are three communists in the novel, three stereotypes, and one of them happens to be EMS. They are three peripheral characters in Roy’s novel.

For, communism itself is very peripheral to Roy’s scheme of things. Unlike the European who is trapped in history, unlike the novelist who lived what Kafka imagined, the writer of The God of Small Things is telling her story from a space littered with the remains of a joke. She is not subordinated to history. She is walking amidst jesters, familiar jesters, who evoke little laughter. The communist in Kerala is a sub-rural stereotype. True, Roy’s novel could have managed without them. But their accidental intrusion into the narration in no way disturbs the story. Communism, an orphaned jest, lies orphaned outside the text of emotions. Some garish notes on the margin, nothing more. Replace the text with Kerala, it is the same. The lies of Roy are a slice from EMS’ truth.

Then what are you quarrelling about? Why do you want to read the novel as a documentary of verifiable facts? For the social realist has forgotten to laugh, apart from his other mental deficiencies. Hasn’t communism long ago exiled humour? Humour, as defined by a novelist who lived in the idyll of totalitarianism, is “the divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity and man in his profound incompetence to judge others; humour: the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that comes of the certainty that there is no certainty.” Tell the critic of dead certainties this, he will go on another lecture which may begin with an alas’ and end with an exclamation mark, in between jargon of scientific dissection. For him, The God of Small Things is a libellous peep show, choreographed by a decadent Eve. You have got your Dario Fo, the first Groucho Marx of a writer to win the Nobel Prize, the jester who for some looks as poetic as Pablo Neruda. Can’t you now afford to leave Roy to her designs? No, the social critic is the reality manager. He can reduce The Satanic Verses to a novel of Islam, whereas the book is on the ambiguity of faith, transmigrations, death and love. He can read The Moor’s Last Sigh as a secularist’s rejoinder to the politics of Shiv Sainiks. When he reads, the text collapses into a million anagrams of social clauses. The communist lives in lies; the social critic, whose grammar is formed by Marx, lives in empirical truths. Between them, there is no space for a novel.

This is an old arrangement in the history of imagination. Ask Solzhenitsyn, Dinescu of Romania, Wat of Poland, Klima of the Czech republic, or Kundera of the world. Roy of The God of Small Things is not a victim of history, for in Kerala communism is a simulated experience, which requires a novelist of big things. Still, someone continues to read her politically, someone who can never appreciate the magnificence of small things. He tells Roy: I sentence you.