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NEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE
Postcolonial Modernity
and the Indian Novel
On Catastrophic Realism
Sourit Bhattacharya
New Comparisons in World Literature
Series Editors
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
Department of English
Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
Neil Lazarus
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one
of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world
literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particu-
lar kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing
that registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the his-
torical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that
take up the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the
global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar
new modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result.
Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this
decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect.
Editorial Board
Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA
Dr. Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden
Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland
Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK
Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK
Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada
Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA
Dr. Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Dr. Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada
Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India
Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK
More information about this series at

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Sourit Bhattacharya
Postcolonial
Modernity
On Catastrophic Realism
Sourit Bhattacharya
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
School of Critical Studies
University Gardens
Glasgow, UK
New Comparisons in World Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-37396-2 ISBN 978-3-030-37397-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37397-9
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The book is dedicated to my parents:
Sushil Bhattacharya (Baba) and Chhanda Bhattacharya (Maa)
Thank you for believing in me.

Acknowledgements
This book is based on my Ph.D. thesis. So, let me first acknowledge my

immense gratitude to the Ph.D. supervisors at the University of Warwick,
Neil Lazarus and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee. They did not only guide
the thesis to fruition, but have continued to motivate me with their sug-
gestions and counsel even after the completion of the thesis—especially
during the limbo between the thesis and the book when I was unsure if
I could turn the thesis into a book. Here, I would also acknowledge my
debt to my Ph.D. examiners, Priyamvada Gopal and Graeme Macdonald,
and the anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript who have enriched
the material with their sharp and astute commentary.
My sincere thanks also go to the staff and resources at the Univer-
sity of Warwick Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Ox-
ford, the National Library in Kolkata, to a number of good people who I
have met in and around Warwick and IIT Roorkee, and who have offered
me at times their invaluable academic insights, and at other times the
much-needed food and talk breaks. Alphabetically with their surnames:
Somak Biswas, D. Bharat, Shrikant Botre, Senjuti Chakraborti, Paulo de
Medeiros, Thomas Docherty, Demet Intepe, Nagendra Kumar, Vijay Ku-
mar, Nick Lawrence, Waiyee Loh, Angus Love, Divya Rao, Emanuelle
Santos, Aditya Sarkar, Martin Schauss, Sakshi Semwal, Kamalika Sengupta,
JungJu Shin, Michael Tsang, Rahul V., and Rashmi Varma. Sincere thanks
to colleagues at my current institution, University of Glasgow, especially
to Nigel Leask, Willy Maley, and members of the Postcolonial Studies
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
reading group for the excellent conversations and insights. Special thanks
to Priyanka Basu, who has helped me with documents as well as with
good food and company in London, and to my Leeds friends, Saira Fa-
tima Dogar and Jivitesh Vashisht for their hospitality, affection, and com-
panionship. Special thanks also to Lara Choksey and Joseph Shafer for the
wonderful discussions and for sharing comradely joys of academic failure
during the Ph.D. and post-Ph.D. days.
Finally, a few close people. I would like to thank my extended family,
my grandmother (my late Thakuma), my uncles (Jethu and the late Mejho
Jethu, who loved me so much), aunts and cousins (Boroma, Mejhoma,
Dadan, Fuldi, Chhordi, and my little sister, Payel), my elder brother
(Dada) and his wife. My special thanks also to my parents-in-law (Baba-
Maa) and my brother-in-law (Bhai). Their blessings and love enrich me
every day. A lot of love for my long-time friend and a stellar academic
himself, Arka Chattopadhyay, whose scholarship and solidarity have mo-
tivated me in so many ways; to Anuparna Mukherjee, for her friendship
and faith in my work; and to my childhood friends, especially Rajasree
Das and Chirantan Kar for the much-needed laughter.
This book, let alone my higher studies, would have never been possible
without the support and love that I have received from my parents. I do
not know how they manage to place so much faith in me. I still remember
as I was boarding the taxi for my flight to Britain to start my Ph.D. (which
was also my first flying experience), my parents were unsure as to whether
I would be able to talk to them for over a year. Strange is the nature of
parental love. No thanks are enough here.
For Arunima, whom I have known for more than a decade now, and
who is more a genuine friend than a wife and partner, I have only love
and gratitude. There have been occasions when I have wanted to aban-
don literary studies in order to do something “more” meaningful. She has
managed to convince me every time, through her deep interest in litera-
ture and the arts and through her critical faculties, that a lot can be done
through and with literature.
I would also thank the series editors of New Comparisons of World Lit-
erature for recommending my work and the editorial people at Palgrave,
especially Ms. Vicky Bates and Ms. Rebecca Hinsley, who have been so
kind, patient, and efficient with my work.
Grateful acknowledgements are also due to the publishers who have
allowed me to reuse some of the earlier published works. These works
have been duly revised. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared first in the article
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
“Colonial Governance, Disaster, and the Social in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s

Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine” in Ariel: A Review of International
English Literature, 47.4 (2016), 45–70. © 2016 The Johns Hopkins
University Press and the University of Calgary. Reprinted with permission
by Johns Hopkins University Press; and in the book chapter “The Ques-
tion of Literary Form: Realism in the Poetry and Theatre of the 1943
Bengal Famine.” Reprinted/adapted by permission from [Springer Na-
ture]: [Palgrave Macmillan] [The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger]
by [Anastasia Ulanowicz and Manisha Basu, editors] (2017). Part of
Chapter 4 was adapted to the book chapter “ The Margins of Postcolonial
Urbanity: Reading Critical Irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Fiction”
in © 2016 from (Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian
Literature) by (Umme Al-wazedi and Madhurima Chakraborty, editors ).
Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division
of Informa plc. Many thanks for the permission.
Praise for Postcolonial Modernity
“In this urgent and compelling study, Sourit Bhattacharya makes a

case for reading catastrophe—famine, insurgency, political terror—as the
hermeneutic lever with which to unlock the complexities of aesthetic form
in Indian postcolonial fiction. His admirable historical contextualization
and careful analysis of novels from six decades following Indian indepen-
dence suggest a harsh, unforgiving realist commitment within both mod-
ernist and postmodernist narrative, producing the poetics of ‘catastrophic
realism.’ Bhattacharya’s book should be required reading for students of
postcolonial fiction.”
—Supriya Chaudhuri, Professor Emerita, Jadavpur University, India
“This is an original book that offers a welcome discussion of liter-

ary realism within a postcolonial context. It explores the possibilities of
constructing a new perspective on literary history centred around catas-
trophic events throughout the 20th century. Bhattacharya’s detailed and
engaging readings will undoubtedly make an important contribution to
the postcolonial revision of modernity, and the role of literature within
the dynamics of history.”
—Dr. Eli Park Sorensen, Assistant Professor of English,
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
and author of Postcolonial Studies and the Literary:
Theory, Interpretation and the Novel (2010)
xi
Contents
1 Modernity, Catastrophe, and Realism in the Postcolonial

Indian Novel 1
The Historical Context: The Theory of Modernisation and
Modernity 3
The Dialectic of Crisis and Event 8
The Dynamics of Realism: Understanding Form and Mode 14
Writing the Indian Postcolonial: Framing Catastrophic
Realism 19
History and Temporality: Outline of the Chapters 26
References 36
2 Disaster and Realism: Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine 41

The 1943 Bengal Famine: History and Thought 41
Understanding the Form of Disaster: Interrogating Famine
and Realism 44
Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers!: The Disastrous
Decade and the Analytical-Affective Mode 50
Amalendu Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhāne: Metafictional
Mode of a Post-Famine Postcolonial Society 65
References 90
3 Interrogating the Naxalbari Movement: Mahasweta

Devi’s Quest Novels 97
The Naxalbari Movement: History and Politics 98
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
Representation of the Movement and the Form of Critical

Irrealism 101
Mahasweta Devi’s Naxalite Novels and the Use of Quest Mode 106
Linear Plot and Non-linear Action Time I: Dreams
and Dialogues in Mother of 1084 109
Linear Plot and Non-linear Action Time II: Dialogue and
Memory in Operation? Bashai Tudu 118
The Interventionist Narrator 127
The Non-death of the Insurgent 131
References 150
4 The Aftermath of the Naxalbari Movement: Nabarun

Bhattacharya’s Urban Fantastic Tales 157
The Movement and Its Aftermath 157
Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Fiction: The Lumpenproletariat
and Urban Fantastic Mode 158
The Dialectic of Rational and Irrational I: Spatial
Unevenness in Harbart 163
The Dialectic of Rational and Irrational II: Urban Filth
in Kāngāl Mālshāt 175
References 196
5 Writing the Indian Emergency: Magical and Critical

Realisms 201
The Emergency: Authoritarianism, Violence,
and Representation 202
Allegorising the Emergency: Salman Rushdie’s Magical
Realism 209
Critical Realism I or Realism from Above in Nayantara
Sahgal 216
Critical Realism II or Realism from Below in Rohinton
Mistry 226
References 255
6 Conclusion 261
References 267
Index 269
CHAPTER 1
Modernity, Catastrophe, and Realism

in the Postcolonial Indian Novel
On 15 August 1947, India gained formal independence from British colo-

nial rule. On the eve of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would soon
be India’s first Prime Minister, stated in a now famous speech: “Long
years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we
shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substan-
tially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India
will awake to life and freedom.”1 However, the country’s awakening from
slumber, from the long histories of colonialism and imperialist subjection
to socio-economic and ideological freedom, was not and could not be a
smooth one.2 The decade of the 1940s saw several enormous moments
of national crisis—the Second World War, the 1943–1944 Bengal famine,
the communal riots in 1946–1947, and the 1946 naval mutiny in Bom-
bay, just to name a few. The year of independence was bloodied with grue-
some violence due to the partition of the colony into two countries, India
and Pakistan. In the decades that followed, India would have wars with
China and Pakistan, would encounter wide internal discontent surround-
ing language and caste issues, and agitations from peasants, students and
the working classes on issues of food shortage, unemployment, inflation,
and poverty. In the 1970s, these crisis conditions would be aggravated
by a corrupt Congress Party stewardship led by Indira Gandhi which, in
order to save its own image and political priorities, would declare a state
of internal emergency in the name of safeguarding democracy from chaos.
© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Bhattacharya, Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel,
New Comparisons in World Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37397-9_1
2 S. BHATTACHARYA
The present book looks at the turbulent period of the first thirty years
of Indian history after independence, between 1947 and 1977. It does
not read these years as isolated from what came before because of the
historical rupture of independence. To the contrary, it seeks to under-
stand how the economic and political crisis in the late-colonial period
shaped the social conditions and cultural values in the postcolonial after-
math. It reads late-colonial as a temporal marker denoting roughly the
second quarter of the twentieth century, shortly before the formal end-
ing of colonialism. Although independence is the nominal break between
the late-colonial and the postcolonial, the book argues through a reading
of a longer framework of historical crisis and catastrophe, of structures of
domination and acts of resistance that there is hardly a notable conceptual
or categorical break there. Rather, this whole period appears as a time of
crisis-in-continuity.3
The main framework of this book is built around literary works of
the three catastrophic events—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–
1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 Indian emergency. Catas-
trophe is understood to be “an event causing great and usually sudden
damage or suffering.”4 While the term has been recurrently used for
environmental issues, I use catastrophe here to mean a historical event
resulting in tremendous violence and damage of human and nonhuman
lives. I argue that the above-mentioned events are “historical catastro-
phes” as they are linked with the long-term agrarian and food crisis in
India which began from mid-nineteenth century onward with the British
colonial changes in agriculture, irrigation, and revenue laws. They have
made tremendous impact on life and living in postcolonial India. My
understanding of modernity in this book arises from its relation with
the colonial-capitalist modernisation programme and its (historical) catas-
trophic repercussions in the postcolonial period. I employ an original
method of reading long-term crisis and its link with catastrophic events
here. Drawing variously from Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, Shahid
Amin, and Veena Das, the book argues that a historical event is as much
a crystallisation of a long-term socio-historical crisis as it is an inter-
active amalgamation of different contemporary spatio-temporal events.
Although these events have emerged from a particular crisis and led to
related events, they are specific in their nature, character, and orientation.
The book further contends that their specificity and relatability can be
best understood by the aesthetic and fictional techniques of memorialisa-
tion and representation that they have given birth to. A close reading of
1 MODERNITY, CATASTROPHE, AND REALISM … 3
these fictional techniques, the book posits, can offer us enabling insights
into the deeply connected yet highly heterogeneous histories of Indian
postcolonial modernity.
The main contention in the book is that novels have represented the
relationship between crisis and events through an innovative use of real-
ism. While realist form has been used to address the immediate socio-
economic crisis and the dynamics of postcolonial optimism and disillusion,
a number of highly experimental and diverse modes have been employed
to reproduce the deep impact and the specific nature and orientation of
the events. I show here that the choice of these modes which range from
melodramatic, metafictional, quest, to urban fantastic, magical realist, crit-
ical realist, and others (many of which are conventionally understood as
anti-realist or non-realist) is deeply historically shaped. Their experimen-
tal condition is marked as much by the form and nature of the events as
by the proximity of the novels to them. Because my focus in this book
is to study through the diversity of realist modes the orientation and
function of catastrophic events and related socio-economic crisis, I group
these modes around the events themselves and argue for different sets of
realisms coming out of them, such as “disaster realism,” “critical irreal-
ism,” and “emergency realism” in the postcolonial context. Together, I
read these realisms as catastrophic realism, which I argue is the aesthetic
fabric of catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden vulnerable condition of life and
living in postcolonial India.
The Historical Context: The Theory

of Modernisation and Modernity
In Modern India (1983), Sumit Sarkar tells us that the process of mod-
ernisation in India began in the nineteenth century, as the British started
to systematically “underdevelop” India through deindustrialisation and
the commercialisation of agriculture in order to turn the flourishing
world market of cotton into a raw material for export to Britain.5 After
Britain’s restriction on export to India in 1843, factory-machines for
cotton production were imported, and agriculture was further commer-
cialised with irrigation, railways, and the telegraph. Bishnupriya Gupta
adds that although there was commercialisation of agriculture, irrigation
was limited to particular sectors. It did not help the development of the
agricultural sector as a whole. The turn to cash-crop production included
priorities given to tea, jute, coal, and other profitable resources over those
4 S. BHATTACHARYA
of the foodgrains.6 And, as economic historians such as Amiya Bagchi

have argued, there was a strong case of racial discrimination in colonial
policy, where the native industrial class’s entry into the production mar-
ket was limited. Bagchi also reasons that the shift away from manufactur-
ing (handicrafts and small-scale industries) to agriculture and cash crops
brought down India’s GDP and curbed its growth.7 The modernisation
of industries and agriculture contributed significantly to an unequal and
uneven system of growth that made India, though a stable economy even
during the mid-twentieth century, into an irredeemably poor one. The
consequences were seen in a number of disasters in the late nineteenth
century. As Sarkar writes, “The colonial structure, as a whole […] consti-
tuted a ‘built-in-depressor’ for India’s agrarian economy. The most obvi-
ous indication of this lay in the series of disastrous famines, in the 1870s
and again in the late 1890s, the latter wave coinciding with the ravages
of plague – while twenty years later even influenza managed to kill off
millions.”8
What these studies indicate is that colonial modernisation always and
by definition occurs in the “catastrophic” mode. The Bengal famine, with
which my chapter readings begin in this book, has direct links with the
changes in agricultural production, modernisation, and industrialisation
in the colony. The Second World War, accompanied by climactic condi-
tions, corruption among traders, and the operation of speculative capital,
aggravated the situation. The post-famine society saw increasing depriva-
tion, oppression, and eviction of the peasants by the landed elite. This
resulted in the Tebhaga Movement (1946) in Bengal, which was part
of a series of social movements in late-colonial India.9 Tebhaga was fol-
lowed by a longer armed struggle by the peasants of Andhra Pradesh
against the Nizam and the Indian armed forces, known as the Telan-
gana Uprising (1947–1952).10 These insurgencies were organised by the
peasants’ and workers’ fronts of the Communist Party, which was also
instrumental in organising food movements in the cities in late 1950s
and early 1960s. The crises in food and agriculture were escalated by
inflation. Jawaharlal Nehru’s death and Indira Gandhi’s rise to power in
the mid-1960s marked a shift in politics, especially in her heavy commer-
cialisation of agriculture through the Green Revolution project which had
the effect of making already rich farmers even richer. Gandhi’s economic
reforms failed to address the wide uneven development in rural India, the
unending peasant oppression, the new nexus between the landed elite,
political heads, and the police, etc. As the old problems of deprivation and
oppression continued, peasants in Naxalbari rose in arms in 1967. The
uprising continued for five years until brutally crushed by the state. Soon,
Gandhi, unable to tackle the crisis in agriculture, employment, inflation,
and economy, and fearful of the rising dissatisfaction with her govern-
ment, declared a state of emergency to coercively “discipline” the post-
colonial public and to pave the way for “neocolonialism” in the name of
development. Indian postcolonial democracy now entered a new phase of
state authoritarianism and regimentation. Ranajit Guha wrote a fiercely
critical essay on the emergency measures. In an argument similar to what
Frantz Fanon wrote in “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in the
late 1950s, Guha contended that true democracy never actually existed
in India because decolonisation did not destroy the old colonial state,
but only transferred interest and power from the British ruling bodies
to the Indian ruling classes. The artificial and state-imposed version of
democracy lost credibility when, five years after the liberation of India
from colonial rule, the Nehruvian government brutally crushed a peas-
ant movement which demanded landholding and better crop share rights
in Telangana. The dead body of democracy was clearly buried in the
state’s autocratic-repressive acts in the Naxalbari tribal-peasant uprising.
The emergency, thus, was not a radical break from a culture of democ-
racy, as the passive opposition would say: “It [wa]s [rather] the realization
by the ruling classes, acting through the government of the day, of the full
potential of the violence of a state which they had themselves conceived
of and set up as hostile to democracy.”11
These aspects of catastrophe, violence, and resistance, produced by
capitalist modernisation and bourgeois political dominance in the post-
colony, are read here as the social condition of modernity in post/colonial
India.12 Here my use of the term “modernity” draws critically on Fredric
Jameson’s use of it. In A Singular Modernity (2005), Jameson writes that
modernity is “the new historical situation, modernization [i]s the process
whereby we get there, and modernism [i]s a reaction to that situation
and that process alike, a reaction that can be aesthetic and philosophical-
ideological.”13 Modernity as a historical situation is “new” because older
feudal and tribal economic modes have been dismantled, because meth-
ods of capitalist accumulation never seen before have arisen, and because
innovations in technology and machinery have emerged (like the observa-
tions in Indian colonial context above). Here, Jameson is careful enough
6 S. BHATTACHARYA
to use the word “situation” in a Sartrean sense to suggest the contin-

gency and limits of a particular situation and the desire to break free
from the dominant frameworks and to achieve social freedom.14 Moder-
nity as a historical situation retains within its framework this dialectic of
dominance and resistance, and is not to be understood in liberal terms,
as “progress.” However, Jameson’s framework of break and continuity
does not allow this dialectic to be understood through a periodisation of
shorter periods, which is key for my theoretical framework.
At an early point in his book, Jameson defines break and continuity
as twofold movements sharing a dialectical relation. Historical continuity
is the “insistent and unwavering focus on the seamless passage from past
to present [which] slowly turns into a consciousness of a radical break;
while at the same time the enforced attention to a break gradually turns
the latter into a period in its own right.”15 The consciousness of conti-
nuity gives birth to the radical consciousness of breaks and consequently
of periodisation. Jameson here has a longer history in mind, in which
he finds two radical breaks, namely the ancients with their pre-modernity
and the European Renaissance with its pre-modernity. What marks this
second break and the consequent periodisation is the capitalist mode of
production, which proceeds to subsume historical differences under a uni-
lateral logic of global accumulation. For Jameson, these two breaks are
not gaps or discontinuities in the Foucauldian epistemic sense. These are
new paradigms that have dissevered most of their connections from pre-
vious ones. He writes:
[F]or if the break is initially characterized as a perturbation of causality as

such, as the severance of the threads, as the moment in which the continu-
ities of an older social and cultural logic come to an incomprehensible end
and find themselves displaced by a logic and form of causality not active in
the older system, then the renewed and mesmerized contemplation of the
moment of such a break, as it begins to detect causalities and conferences
not previously visible to the naked eye is bound to expand that break into
a period in its own right.16
In this longue durée framework, Jameson finds aesthetic modes to be

“transitional” in character. Speaking mainly of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction, he writes that a new economic mode results in a new historical
consciousness and a new temporality. But very much like the paradigmatic
nature of economic modes, where the existence of other modes either lies
hidden or is at their nascent stage, aesthetic modes also contain many tem-
poralities. Taking after Étienne Balibar, Jameson posits that in periods of
great economic and social transition, these different temporalities reveal
their coexistence in the form of differential aesthetic techniques, which
constitute the axis of modernism.17
While I agree with these formulations, my point is that, moments or
events of extreme historical crisis that shape the experience of moder-
nity—such as famines, social movements, brief dictatorial regimes, or
coups—do not necessarily suggest a constitutive break or result in a his-
torical consciousness formative of a new period. However, these events
do give birth to new aesthetic modes in order to adequately represent the
specificities of the historical catastrophes, crises, conjunctures, and con-
texts. Indeed, as I will show, sometimes multiple modes—even ones that
seem contradictory on the surface, such as the gothic and the social real-
ist—are juxtaposed in a literary work which is based on a catastrophic
crisis and is predominantly realist in form. I will argue that the general
modern condition of catastrophe and crisis, produced by historical/global
factors or by neocolonialism in India, calls for a broad realist framework,
while the specific/local conjuncture of a crisis like famine or political
uprising inspires the use of specific modes.
This reading of post/colonial modernity, shaped by historical crisis and
catastrophic events, is important for the context of my book for two main
reasons. First, unlike Jameson’s longue durée framework, I am focusing
on a shorter time frame, namely the late-colonial and postcolonial period.
While the crisis in Indian agriculture, as I have argued above, had a long
history of British commercialisation, events like the famine or the political
uprising were conditioned and shaped significantly by the immediate and
escalating crises in politics and history, such as the Second World War (for
the Bengal famine), militant Leftism (for the Naxalbari movement), and
the rise of an opposition coalition party (for the emergency). Even if we
view this period of forty-odd years of post/colonial modernity (1930s–
1970s) in terms of the long twentieth century, the historical conditions
of imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism, and the practices of political
resistance to both the British and the bourgeois native, are so overpower-
ing that the entire post/colonial time frame can together be called a break
and one long period in Jamesonian terms.18 On the other hand, we will
need an elaborate theorisation to understand the historical specificities
and crisis conjunctures of the post/colonial period. Second, although all
these catastrophic events share a common link with food and agricultural
8 S. BHATTACHARYA
crises, they are also different from each other in type, nature, and char-
acter. A famine or starvation may have led to a peasant uprising, which
may then have been followed by repressive state action, but these are all
constitutively different kinds of events. A famine and an agrarian-based
political uprising may include wide scenes of violence, but the immediacy
and immensity of a famine are not comparable to the long deprivation,
dispossession, and violence against peasants by the landed elite, or to the
violence produced by guerrilla warfare waged by tribal-peasants. These
different catastrophic events constituting Indian postcolonial modernity
ask for different modes of expression, which in turn shape the form of
realist representations. I will argue in this book that these historically and
culturally specific modes, in their late-colonial South Asian/Indian con-
text at least, are able to capture the tensions between the global and the
local, between the European-colonialist shaping of uneven modernity and
the national/specific responses to it, and between domination and resis-
tance. In order to understand this aesthetic-historical matrix of modernity,
we will need a theorisation of crisis and event in the Indian post/colonial
conjuncture.
The Dialectic of Crisis and Event

In her book Critical Events (1995), Veena Das defines events as those
that share relations with several institutions “moving across family, com-
munity, bureaucracy, courts of law, the medical profession, the state
and multinational corporations,” and bring about new modes of action
redefining traditional categories of knowledge production.19 She takes
from Francois˛ Furet’s notion that the French Revolution was the event
par excellence as it “instituted a new modality of historical action which
was not inscribed into the inventory of that situation,”20 and proceeds to
critically read the events of the Partition, the Sikh militancy, the Bhopal
gas disaster and others focusing on the violence perpetrated on socio-
economically, sexually, and religiously marginal bodies and communities.
She finds that over time, victim communities have emerged as powerful
political actors, both in terms of declaring their representative authority
over their voices and bodies through an antagonistic politics against the
state, and consolidating the communities’ power through the memori-
alisation of the pains and sufferings of the members.21 Das’ main inter-
est here lies in recovering the individual voices, which have been either
maligned by the state or glorified by the communities in the acts of declar-

ing legitimacy over the pain shared by the subjects of those communities.
In both cases, she says, there is a misreading of pain and suffering and
an eliding of individual, dissenting, contingent voices by viewing them
as irresponsible, accidental, or immoral. An anthropologist herself, Das
attempts to read the nature of irresponsibility with responsibility and to
give voice to the unheard and the subaltern: “The anthropologist must
appear not in the role of an observer but that of a hearer, and the subject
must correspondingly appear in the role of a speaker” and recover the dis-
embodied voice.22 These ideas prompt me to understand the events and
their aesthetic reception from the grounded perspective of victim com-
munities and motivate me to identify and complicate literature’s task of
giving voice to the unheard and the routinely silenced.
But a problem arises with Das’ conception of totalities and resistant
practices. She writes,
To recover such embodied narrations [voice] seems to me the only way

in which one can resist the totalizing discourses that become evident not
only in narratives of the state and narratives embedded in the professional
organization, but also in the discourses of resistance that use the vey logic
of the state which they seek to resist.23
By totalising discourses, as her chapters show, she means the way the state
often tries to abstract or reify the contingent and individual cases of pain
and suffering through legal and judicial practices and through a recourse
to universal humanism. “Discourses of resistance” stand for the practices,
strategies, and rhetoric used by the victim communities to appropriate
the contingent cases and challenge the state. “A critique of the state,”
as she writes, “which reproduces the very logic it seeks to contest and
which exists in the same arena of historicity can do little more than mir-
ror the state’s structures.”24 These observations are problematic on two
grounds. There is an a priori understanding that all resistant practices
and elements in a given community will support the community’s statist
counter-practices, and resistance structures are considered a monolithic
ideal type. To take one example from our readings, the emergency pro-
duced two distinct narratives: one official, one-sided, statist propaganda,
and the other oppositional (political and legal narratives and social com-
mentaries published just after the lifting of the emergency). The latter
was also using statist discourses of meaning appropriation by declaring
10 S. BHATTACHARYA
legitimacy on the sufferers’ bodies (reifying their individual experiences),

asking for punishment of the culprits, and asserting justice. But in the lat-
ter group, there were also competing narratives such as the underground
newsletters, pamphlets, or journalistic criticisms. They were opposed to
the emergency since the beginning in languages that were either extrem-
ist or moderate, but in both cases highly self-reflexive. There were literary
and artistic cases of resistance that challenged the authoritarian regime
and questioned the validity of statist and counter-statist discourses in
rendering the constructed nature of truth. Das’ theorisation is unable
to address this layered and complex case of (literary) resistance—which
points at literature’s complex task of and differential logic from the soci-
ological in giving voice to victim communities. Secondly, totalities, as
Hegel, Marx, or Lukács understood it, do not mean an appropriation
of competing voices for a statist discourse (which sounds closer to the
term totalitarian), but rather are ensembles where competing, disruptive,
dominant, and residual elements constitute history and society. As we will
shortly see through Georg Lukács, a practice of totality, for a writer, is an
understanding of the paradoxical fusion of social dissonances through a
dialectic of the everyday and the historical.25 Interestingly, Das seems to
do a similar thing as she theorises pain and suffering from the Wittgen-
steinian concept of communicability (that pain is social) and inalienability
(that pain is physical-conceptual), and adds that “there is no individual
ownership of pain.”26 It is through retaining the specificity of the individ-
ual and trying to establish a community of suffering via the historicisation
or collectivisation of pain, that an anthropologist, and for that matter a
writer or literary critic, it seems to me, can break open the totalities of
social relationships.
Historian Shahid Amin’s understanding of “event” in his book, Event,
Metaphor, and Memory (1994) enriches Das’ use for my context. Amin
reads the history of a peasant riot in the Chauri Chaura village of the
northern state of Uttar Pradesh in 1922, which caused Mahatma Gandhi
to suspend the Civil Disobedience movement. The event was born both
of the long history of fear and hatred for the colonial masters and their
symbolic-repressive machineries (the police, the guns, and uniform, etc.)
and of the immediate violent skirmishes between the armed police and an
unarmed demonstrating satyagrahi-volunteers (Gandhi’s political follow-
ers who sought truth through nonviolence). Considered a serious flaw in
the nationalist/Gandhian anti-colonial campaign, the event was initially
obliterated from the official nationalist narratives and the public processes
of memorialisation, and repurposed later as an instance of “politics by

other means.” Amin seeks to reconstruct this erased and maligned event
through memories and cultural acts of remembrance by the current rela-
tives of the “rioters.” He traces through oral narratives, as well as through
various bureaucratic and newspaper documents and political pamphlets,
how this event was related to both local peasant practices and the imagin-
ings of Gandhi as a messiah, and how through such acts official nationalist
narratives appropriated, displaced, and co-opted local resistant practices.
An event achieves a double meaning here, as one “fixed in time and also
as a metaphor gathering significances outside this time-frame.”27 This is
a powerful reading, as it tries to balance the actual (official) course of
the event with the way the event was received and used in official as well
as unofficial speech and writing. It makes the event into both a singular
historical marker and a symbolic construct. At the same time, in order
to emphasise the element of public memory and the localisation of the
discourse, Amin’s work, which follows a method of microhistory, is not
able to tell us how this event was connected to the current political cri-
sis in nationalism, especially with the wide rise of native armed struggles
and “terroristic” activities, and the contemporary nationwide instances
of peasant resistance (the wider historical-metaphorical dimension of the
event, so to say).
Althusser’s reading of the historical event appears useful in addressing
this gap in Das’ and Amin’s theorisation. Althusser writes in the appendix
of the essay, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1969):
What makes such and such event historical is not the fact that it is an event,
but precisely its insertion into forms which are themselves historical, into
forms which have nothing to do with the bad infinity which Engels retains
even when he has left the vicinity of the original model, forms which, on
the contrary, are perfectly definable and knowable (knowable, Marx insisted,
and Lenin after him, through empirical that is non-philosophical scientific
disciplines). An event falling within one of these forms, which has the
wherewithal to fall within one of these forms, which is a possible content for
one of these forms, which affects them, concerns them, reinforces or disturbs
them, which provokes them or which they provoke, or even choose or
select, that is a historical event.28
The context of this formulation arises from Althusser’s understanding of

overdetermination, which he says is present in Marx’s and Engels’ works,
but which the dogmatic “disciples” have ruled out in their economism,
12 S. BHATTACHARYA
empiricism, and determinism. Althusser here explains the content of a let-

ter Engels wrote to J. Bloch in 1890, where Engels clarified that the mode
of production was determinant only “in the last instance”; “the various
elements of the superstructure”—political, religious, juridical, legal, and
literary—“also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical
struggle, and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.”29 In
the Russian Revolution, which is his object of study, Althusser finds a prin-
cipal contradiction between forces and relations of production (a socially
backward country and the presence of an advanced imperialist/capitalist
condition); but there are also different conditions of existence, different
circumstances, national and international in context, “with their own con-
sistency and effectivity” which “merge into a real unity” in a time of crisis
and give birth to this revolutionary rupture. These “radically heteroge-
neous” elements range from political and ideological structures to spe-
cific regional customs, habits, national traditions, international political
contexts, etc.30 They accumulate over time and exacerbate the principal
contradiction. Althusser does not see a particular historical-catastrophic
event, such as the French Revolution, as a radical break in the way Furet
or Das does, as an exception giving birth to new modes of relations and
actions. For him, an event is rather the consolidation of a crisis in var-
ious forms, their “overdetermined contradiction.” Unlike in Hegel—at
least as Althusser reads him31 —where the organic totality of structures
is shaped by “an internal principle” or “abstract ideology,”32 in Marx
totality becomes a dialectic between the economic and the associated
set of structures which accumulate over time, crystallise and transform
into an overdetermined, historical event. Overdetermination becomes the
“accumulation of effective determinations (deriving from the superstruc-
tures and from special national and international circumstances) on the
determination in the last instance by the economic.”33 So, the historical
(catastrophic) event that he refers to in the quote is an event because all
forms of its condition of being (base and superstructure, so to say) are
overdetermined as historical and knowable. In this, Althusser offers us a
more historically grounded definition where the catastrophic event is a
culmination of a series of events (crisis-forms) that are heterogeneous and
possibly antagonistic between themselves, but which also fuse together to
produce the revolutionary rupture. These various forms of effects con-
cern, reinforce, and provoke one another to shape the meta-narrative
of the historical event and struggle. Althusser uses the Gramscian word
“conjuncture” to remind us that these events are specific in their context,

and global in their world-historical relations and meanings.
To come back to our context of late-colonial India, the disaster condi-
tion of the famine was affected by other events such as the War, climactic
conditions, hoarding of grain by corrupt traders, etc. An analysis of the
event must be conducted through an investigation into how the various
dimensions of the crisis of a historical conjuncture produced mini-events,
in which the possibility of the rise of a greater historical-catastrophic event
of rupture lay hidden. The crystallisation of a period’s historical crisis into
a catastrophic event has to be understood through the event’s accumu-
lated, layered nature. At the same time, the form, orientation, and char-
acter of the event also need to be considered. The Bengal famine is an
example of an environmental catastrophic event. But famine as an envi-
ronmental catastrophe is different from other kinds of catastrophes such
as cholera, earthquake, and landslide. In fact, no two famines have the
same historical orientation and form. If we compare the 1943 famine with
another famine, such as the Bombay famine of 1875–1876, we can find
many similarities in the causes-and-effects due to similar historical forces
responsible for them, but there are also important differences because of
the different forces and relations of production and the different evolu-
tion and adaption of historical-cultural factors. This is why this historical
investigation into the event will also need a critical reading such as Das’
or Amin’s, where an event’s particular nature and the formation of vic-
tim communities through resistant acts and discursive strategies as well as
through recovery of erased and marginalised documents are given sem-
inal attention, where the writer’s, or potentially a literary critic’s, role is
understood as revisiting the catastrophic events, listening to the complex
nature of pain and suffering, to the silences and gaps in the speech prac-
tices of the victimised and underprivileged, and transforming these beings
into active speakers, giving voice to their suffering.
This discursive, historical materialist method is further useful for my
context, as I will be reading literary form of novels registering catastrophic
events. My argument here is that novels, for their specific generic con-
ventions and historical-cultural link with capitalist modernity, are able to
address the subtle relation between historical crisis and catastrophic event
through an ingenious use of form and mode. While form represents the
long-term social crisis, it is through mode that authors portray the speci-
ficity of an event and allow the possibility (or sometimes the failure) of
giving voice to a community. I will further argue that socially committed
14 S. BHATTACHARYA
writers have used the realist form to represent the crisis moments. But
because of the interactive and experimental use of form and mode, this
realism has appeared to be deeply layered and diverse. In the following
sections, thus, I will engage with the dynamics of realism through a close
study of form and mode to understand how literary-aesthetic elements
can offer us crucial insights into the relation between crisis, catastrophe,
and representation.
The Dynamics of Realism:

Understanding Form and Mode
A long-debated issue in academic circles, realism is understood as the
manner through which a work of art imitates and registers the workings of
the world. It is both a philosophical/epistemological category and an aes-
thetic form. Epistemologically, it means there is a world “out there” and
that it is in principle possible to register the world through the medium
of language, paint, camera, or others. The method or the set of formal
techniques through which the world is represented is what composes the
aesthetic part. Novelistic realism, as Ian Watt tells us, arose with the rise
of industrial capitalism and Enlightenment values in the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century European world. Watt considers realism as a set of
techniques that were meant to represent an older society’s transition to
capitalist modernity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.34
Raymond Williams notes that because of the term’s historical link with
philosophical schools such as nominalism, conceptualism, and others,
there was a long debate within novelists as to what constituted real in
realism.35 A representation was considered “realistic” which could repro-
duce objects, characters, actions, and situations in a lifelike manner. But
such a representation, writers were acutely aware, focused on the super-
ficial appearance of reality. There is first the barrier of language through
which the realist is mediated, and then the elements of individual emo-
tions, feelings, social and historical forces operating behind the appear-
ance of reality in a particular way.36 For Williams, realism was not a
static form but “a conscious commitment to understanding and describ-
ing these forces.”37 Georg Lukács, who is often credited with the critical
popularity of the term, states that realism is achieved when an author
situates a social “type” in a protagonist, in whom all the socially and his-
torically determining elements are active. Realism captures a “problem-
atic” individual’s negotiations with the pressures of capitalist society and
reveals in the act the totality of structures unavailable to the fragmenting

perspective of the individual.38 For Lukács, unlike Watt, realism is not
a set of formal techniques or a method of producing verisimilitude, but
rather a historical process which is forged through a writer’s deep histori-
cal consciousness and his/her commitment to uncovering the economic,
political, and social forces influencing an individual’s feelings, decisions,
and actions.39
In their understanding, realism is thus mainly a formal element. Liter-
ary form, as Raymond Williams notes, is “a visible or outward shape, and
an inherent shaping impulse.”40 It relates both to the external/superficial
and to the essential/determining. It is through form and its mediational
nature that a work registers the world in all its complex dimensions, gives
these dimensions a social meaning, and reflects on the process of regis-
tration. Realism is this shape which is historically mediated. Indeed, both
Williams and Lukács point us towards the processual/compositional char-
acter of realism and the essentially unstable, heterogeneous, and para-
doxical nature of the real and the realistic (despite it being superficially
understood as lifelike/photographic, etc.) within realism. However, nei-
ther of them offers any specific thought on the use of mode here. For
Williams, modes are mainly genres, such as romance, epic, tragedy, and so
on, which are literary expressions of an older, heterogeneous society. The
shifting mode of economy, the birth of industrial capitalism and the bour-
geois class, and the increasing urbanisation of the rural and new coercive
methods of labour practices have made novels into the dominant “mode
of consciousness” for the current times.41 This reading of mode reminds
me of Northrop Frye’s longue durée understanding of the word as histor-
ical or periodical genres.42
On the other hand, I will argue that irony, satire, pastoral, and so on,
which are presupposed as a novel’s form-giving element, are actually the
modes through which realism’s formal shape is achieved, and through
which form appears to be such a dynamic aesthetic category. A realist
work does not simply imitate the “world” (in an uncritical mimetic sense);
but “registers” it. The word “register” includes the dual meaning of his-
torical/bureaucratic registration (“to record; to set down [facts, names,
etc.] in writing, especially accurately or officially”) and of mediated repro-
duction (“to record in one’s mind, heart, or memory; to become aware
of, to notice properly”).43 Modes are chosen to respond to the historical
specificity of a period or a crisis-based event and to represent these speci-
ficities adequately. As I will show in this book, the difference between a
16 S. BHATTACHARYA
famine-based novel and a contemporary starvation-based one does not lie

in their realism, if we read realism as the commitment to describing and
demystifying social-historical forces. They lie in the use of modes. Irony
and caustic humour in the registration of a catastrophic event is a mode
of expression; metafiction is another mode. They do not exist exclusively
in a narrative; there can be different modes used within a predominant
ironic mode. In fact, in many catastrophe-based realist works, modes shift
somewhat quickly in order to register the nature of violence adequately:
from documentary to gothic, fantastic to social realist, etc. It is this char-
acter of uncertainty and malleability that is definitive of modes. As Chris
Baldick writes in his Dictionary of Literary Terms, mode is “[a]n unspe-
cific critical term usually designating a broad but identifiable kind of liter-
ary method, mood, or manner that is not tied exclusively to a particular
form or genre.” 44 I will contend throughout the book that these unsta-
ble, heterogeneous, yet historically specific modes transform the realism
of the event-based novels into an experimental and “modernistic” form.
Of course, terms such as “metafictional” or “modernistic” are not gen-
erally understood to be realism’s properties. Indeed, the divide between
what stands as realism and as modernism has seen a long debate. In
the famous Brecht-Lukács debate in the 1930s,45 the writers highlighted
the possibilities realism held both in order to conceptualise the current
changes in society and to be used as a medium or force for resisting
the contemporary rise of fascism. While Lukács spoke of the dimension
of totality within realist art through which it uncovers the major forces
shaping social relations and conflicts in the transitional phase of capital-
ism, Brecht also shared a similar sentiment while being more sympathetic
to the experimental aspects within modern art, which he understood as
a form of “combative realism”: a realism that is contemporary, aesthet-
ically aligned to resistance to capitalist hegemonic dominance, and rep-
resentative of the people, making them historically and politically aware
and consolidated for the fight against fascism. This aspect of the com-
bative or modernistic element within realism has long been argued by
George Levine, Fredrick Jameson, and others. In a volume, Adventures
in Realism, which pays close attention to the self-conscious, experimen-
tal, and modernist character of realism,46 Fredric Jameson tells us that
since realism is used to represent immediate social crises and greater his-
torical shifts, the established realist modes gradually come to seem less
vital (“limited and ossified” in his words).47 They are then understood as
unable to register deeper structural changes, “the ongoing revolution” or
“some transitory moment in history,” and turn into “targets for the defa-
miliarizations of the various emergent modernisms, which stigmatize their
conventions in the form of satire or absorb and sublimate their narratives
into generalized allusions.”48 This is also the point that Joe Cleary makes
in his introduction to a journal special issue on “peripheral realisms.”49
Realism and modernism are not oppositional literary forms, but expan-
sions of, and reworking on, the same form produced and qualified by
historical shifts in the capitalist world-system: “nineteenth-century real-
ism already contained latent modernisms that broke strongly to the fore
only in conditions of systemic crisis and that twentieth- century mod-
ernisms may equally have retained latent realisms that may yet find novel
articulations in new media or new generic modalities in further moments
of crisis.”50 Jameson adds in the same issue that Third-World writers,
the majority of whom sympathise with the Left, predominantly use a
realist style, while the constantly modernising impulse of their countries
also constitutes and shapes this style. A genuine realism, Jameson fol-
lows Lukács in suggesting, is thus “a discovery process, which, with its
emphasis on the new and the hitherto unreported, unrepresented, and
unseen, and its notorious subversion of inherited ideas and genres […]
is in fact itself a kind of modernism, if not the latter’s first form.”51 He
terms this realism a “modernistic realism,” which uses realism’s conven-
tions and then undermines them.
Interestingly enough, Jameson recognises the blurred distinctions
between realism and modernism in an earlier work we discussed before, A
Singular Modernity. For Jameson, every modernism tries to address the
social world in idioms and techniques that have not been used before,
and this is exactly what every new realism does:
Each realism is also by definition new: and aims at conquering a whole new
area of content for its representation. Each wishes to annex what has not
yet been represented, what has not yet ever been named or found its voice
(and this is why throughout and beyond the age of modernism, there are
still new and vibrant realisms to be heard and to be recognized, in parts
of the world and areas of social totality into which representation has not
yet penetrated). This is to say not only that each new realism arises out
of dissatisfaction with the limits of the realisms that preceded it, but also
and more fundamentally that realism itself in general shares precisely that
dynamic of innovation we ascribed to modernism as its uniquely distin-
guishing feature.52
18 S. BHATTACHARYA
However, he does not discuss the complexities and innovations within

realism(s). Modernism appears to be the philosophical-aesthetic response
to the conditions of modernity. Since realism is primarily an epistemolog-
ical category and modernism primarily an aesthetic category, these two
are incommensurable and “the attempt to combine the two into a single
master narrative must therefore necessarily fail.”53
What I will seek to do in this book is not to combine these categories,
but to point out the experimental modes of realism that are “recog-
nisably” modernist, meaning that realist narratives are able to capture
the complex dialectical relations of the “situation (modernity) and [the]
process” (modernisation) of post/colonial life. I will contend that real-
ism achieves this “modernistic” end predominantly through the use of
modes. The “modernizing impulse” in a colonised territory or for a
recently decolonised Third-World country, dependent on the First-World
for economic reasons, often results in catastrophes: famines, insurgen-
cies, counter-insurgencies, civil war, etc. These postcolonial catastrophes
are, thus, world-historical in their formation. But they are also specific
in orientation and local in their impact. Novels capture this relation
through the use of modes. A Bengal famine, for instance, may have
global-historical (colonial) factors responsible for it, but the specificity
of Bengali history and culture in the late-colonial period will also have
vital influence in the literary registration of the disaster. While there may
be stylistic and formal convergences in the late-colonial-based novels on
famines across the world, the cultural and historical contingencies, as I
will show in the next chapter, will also be notable in their shaping of the
literary form. My contention in this book is that: if form is a commitment
to understanding how historical processes and historical crisis take place
and how the world can be registered in a work, it is mode that offers the
framework to do so, retaining the heterogeneity of perspectives and the
element of self-reflexivity in fictional writing. It is through the dialectic
of form and mode that the dialectic of historical crises and catastrophic
events is registered, that epistemology and aesthetics become combined
and enabling. I call this framework of realism, produced by a national-
specific historical conjuncture of postcolonial modernity and a culturally
contingent use of modes, as “catastrophic realism.”
I will quickly note here that this use is different from Michael Roth-
berg’s close terminology, “traumatic realism.” Rothberg discusses the
twentieth-century cultural representation of the Holocaust from the
analytical categories of trauma and memorialisation. Although for him,
traumatic realism “mediates between the realist and anti-realist positions

in Holocaust studies and marks the necessity of considering how the
ordinary and extraordinary aspects of genocide intersect and coexist,”54
realist and anti-realist positions are separate registers. He posits that
realism operates, mainly, in the documentary/memoir practices, while
modernism is a self-reflexive attempt to render history transparent, and
the postmodern moment responds to the questions of emergence and
circulation of memory. On the other hand, what I have been arguing in
the book is that realism based on catastrophes, or “catastrophic realism”
in my use, inheres in it the coexistence of these different registers; here,
realism is capacious and expansive, manufactured by the demands of his-
tory and society, of catastrophic modernity and modality. Since the book
deals not with one event (the Holocaust) but with a set of events and
their specific modalities, “catastrophic realism” as an aesthetic framework
of postcolonial modernity appears richer, and more dynamic and diverse.
I will substantiate this use through a brief critical reading of realism
in late-colonial and postcolonial Indian literature, and through Sa’adat
Hasan Manto’s choice of modes in his pre- and post-Partition fiction.
Writing the Indian Postcolonial:

Framing Catastrophic Realism
Realism’s use has been dominantly experimental and modernistic in the
colonies. As Roberto Schwarz has shown, realism was imported and used
with irony and parodic elements in the slave-holding economy of Brazil.55
In the context of India, as Meenakshi Mukherjee (1985) writes, the colo-
nial novel was influenced by modern European values of individualism,
rationality, historical consciousness, and so on; but those did not turn the
colonial novel into a case of simple derivation.56 As India was predom-
inantly an agricultural country, the main cultural products were oral in
form—e.g. jatra (folk theatre) and kathakata (oral recital of the purana
stories)——which frequently exploited the topics and narrative elements
of the mythological and the supernatural.57 Many of the novelists appear
to deploy a mythological temporal framework and make heavy uses of
allegory, symbol, and fable in their works, where rational-linear progress
and cyclical narration converge in the novel of development (Bildungsro-
man).58 Ulka Anjaria (2012) revisits some of these contexts for a work on
realism’s aesthetic capacities in the late-colonial period.59 Anjaria observes
20 S. BHATTACHARYA
that writers who used the realist form were agonisingly conscious of Indi-
a’s problematic entrance into historical modernity, where anticipation of
a redemptive future and the disillusionment of the present were inter-
connected. Realism held this paradoxical condition of the impossibility of
knowing what was coming next and a faith in a better, more accommo-
dating postcolonial future:
At one level this paradox appears simply in aesthetic gaps: works that are
unrealistic, characterization that is unconvincing, plots that are episodic,
writing that is overdramatic, and so on. Seen from the perspective of
desire, however, these so-called failings can be reinterpreted as represent-
ing the coincidence of richness and simultaneous impossibility, of mimesis
and metafictionality, that constitute the complex coordinates of realism in
the colony.60
Through the use of allegory, symbol, or metafictionality, Anjaria adds,

writers have engaged politically with the pressing issues of the period and
broken open the nationalistic hegemonies of meaning and discourse that
clouded critical judgement.
Priyamvada Gopal’s use of “critical realism” appears fitting for my
context. In Literary Radicalism in India (2005),61 Gopal writes that
the publication of “Angarey” (1932)—a collection of stories that chal-
lenged orthodox notions of community, religion, and gender—and the
formation of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association were pivotal
for the building of a critical spirit for decolonisation, as opposed to the
bourgeois-nationalist discourses of harmony and inclusion. This critical
spirit was the product of the country’s particular late-colonial historical
conjuncture. Borrowing from Gramsci’s notion of the “terrain of the
conjunctural,” “where incurable structural contradictions have revealed
themselves (reached maturity),”62 she argues that, in the context of
India’s transition from colony to nationhood, the oppositional political
force should not be understood only as a passive revolution of Gandhian
nationalism, which followed a politics of manoeuvre, neutralising politi-
cal heterogeneities and promoting a discourse of consensus. Instead, this
oppositional force encompasses numerous acts of peasant militancy and
labour activism during the period:
The conjunctural terrain of Indian nation formation in the decades just

prior to independence in 1947 is marked by the gathering of various forces
of opposition. Their activities ranged from trade union activism to peasant

agitation, and from the secularisation of state institutions to the prolifer-
ation of diverse women’s organisations. Though inflected by the struggle
between British imperialism and Indian nationalism, the activities under-
taken by these various forces suggest that a multiplicity of projects were to
be undertaken as the transition from colony to nation took place. Gram-
sci’s contention that oppositional forces on the terrain of the conjunctural
‘seek to demonstrate that the necessary and sufficient conditions already
exist to make possible, and hence imperative, the accomplishment of cer-
tain historical tasks’ is borne out at this historical conjuncture.63
This offers a clear picture of the sociopolitically tempestuous nature of the

times. According to Gopal, writers and filmmakers such as M. R. Anand,
Premchand, Ismat Chughtai, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, K. A. Abbas, and
others were aware of the plural and heterogeneous character of the con-
juncture, as well as the tremendous political energies of the period. They
argued to retain political and literary heterogeneity in the programmatic
(Party-line) use of politics and literature. Their range of experiments in
writing and artistic production was meant to preserve literature’s critical
exploration of the socio-historical dimensions and its “ironic commitment
to truth.” From this, Gopal contends that realism of the age should be
understood as “less a specific aesthetic technique than a philosophy that
brings together an affective sense of justice, fairness and harmony with an
understanding of all that violates that sense.”64 This definition is powerful
as it grasps both the political dimensions of fairness, rights, and entitle-
ment in the practice of realism and in the awareness of their violation in
everyday life. Critical realism in such a form appears to express a con-
sciousness of critical solidarity.
My readings of the catastrophic event-based novels also find a simi-
lar critical awareness and vision of solidarity. At the same time, during
periods of catastrophe and social violence, such as those of the Parti-
tion or the famine, socially committed writers have to also address the
questions of documentation, analysis, puzzle of incomprehension, and
above all, reflection on the act of representation itself. In such a for-
mation, critical realism, I think, does not remain a choice or a question
of balance between philosophy and aesthetic techniques. The techniques
shape the mode and constitute the philosophy of fractured times. As Sisir
Kumar Das and Meenakshi Mukherjee have shown, the social conditions
of modernity, the political and economic crisis in the 1930s and 1940s,
resulted in the rise of realist novel in India. Kalindi Charan Panigrahi’s
22 S. BHATTACHARYA
Oriya Matira Manisa (Man of the Soil, 1931), Tarashankar Bandyopad-

hyay’s Bangla Chaitali Ghurni (The Whirlwind, 1932), Nanak Singh’s
Punjabi Chitta Lahu (White Blood, 1932), A. Bapiraju’s Telugu Narayana
Rao (Narayana Rao, 1934), Gajanan T. Madkholkar’s Marathi Muk-
tatma (Free Soul, 1936), Premchand’s Hindi Godaan (The Gift of a Cow,
1936), and Raja Rao’s English Kanthapura (1938) have variously nar-
rated the rapid rise of the manufacturing and steel industries in rural
areas, the destruction of the handicraft industry and the debilitating agri-
cultural relations, the large migration of rural workers to the city, the
native bourgeois elite’s exploitation of the peasants, the resistance of the
peasants and the subaltern populations, the tension of a looming World
War, the general social crisis and the nationalist agitations under Mohan-
das Karamchand Gandhi, and so on.65 These conditions, they have fur-
ther argued, have also influenced the formal and structural elements of
the realist narratives: there are uses of archaic cultural forms, such as the
jatra or the kathakata alongside modern and contemporary ones in terms
of plot development and characterisation, uses of parallel temporal scales,
problematic spatial locations of the narrators, aspects of popular faith in
the supernatural and the mythological alongside emerging features of a
rationalised subject, and so on.66
However, in novels that register catastrophic events such as a famine or
a communal riots, there are further developments in form and style. For
instance, novels about the 1943 Bengal famine, by Bhabani Bhattacharya,
Manik Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, or Bibhutibhushan
Bandyopadhyay, have demonstrated wide improvisation in narrative form
in order to represent the immensity of horror in a society already in deep
turmoil as a result of the Second World War and the anti-colonial agita-
tions. In these novels, there are scenes of emaciated hungry people wailing
for rice, dying carelessly on the streets, seizing food from their offspring
and from animals; scenes of rape and prostitution, of corruption among
traders, and of deep entrenchment in class; and scenes of exhibitionism
of wealth by the bourgeoisie. The question of how to represent this ter-
rible period of crisis and suffering affected the contemporary writer. The
novels, especially those written by socially committed writers (proletar-
ian, working-class, and activist writers, as well as writers critical about
the socio-economic exploitation of the poor and the vulnerable), exper-
iment with specific modes, through which they attempt to balance the
requirements of the age: to document the current social condition, to
analyse the factors responsible for the disaster, and to use literature as a
social therapy or to reflect on how to represent the pain and suffering

of the people. Indeed in novels written much thereafter and that revisit
catastrophic events, there are further experimental uses of mode. As I
will demonstrate in the next chapter, while the immediate repercussion
of the Bengal famine resulted in an analytical-affective mode in Bhabani
Bhattacharya, Amlendu Chakraborty writing almost forty years later used
a metafictional mode through which he attempted to understand how
the famine transitioned into chronic starvation and malnutrition prob-
lems—constitutive of postcolonial modernity. The choice of these modes
around the same event is then shaped by the immediate and long-term
impact of the event. This is why despite studying a historical period of
thirty years or so (1943–1977), my research goes beyond the 1970s and
finds out how these events have made longer impact in the late 1990s
and early 2000s. Through studying these novels with their temporal and
spatial proximity with the events, I believe, it will be possible to under-
stand a catastrophe’s transition into long-term crisis and its shaping the
birth of another catastrophe and so on (i.e. the trajectory of postcolonial
modernity or rather modernity-as-catastrophe in postcolonial India). It
will also be possible to see how modal choices and experiments are orig-
inated by these socio-historical changes and influences, and how writers
have attempted to formulate and give voice to the victim communities of
these events.
Let me quickly corroborate this point on modal innovation in
catastrophe-oriented writing through a reading of Manto’s Partition sto-
ries. Gopal, who also analyses in her book Manto’s writings for an under-
standing of critical realism, tells us of the difference in critical commentary
as well as in the framing of narration in Manto’s pre- and post-Partition
stories.67 In reading one of the post-Partition stories, “Sau Kaindal Power
ka Bulb” (“A 100 Candle-Power Bulb”), she notes that Manto, instead of
critiquing exploitation of, or speaking fondly about, prostitutes (which he
did in his pre-Partition fiction), presents a nameless and stubborn female
prostitute who does not want to be understood or sympathised. As the
protagonist, sympathetic to her situation, decides to kill the pimp, he dis-
covers in a “nightmarish” scene that she has already killed him and that
he is not needed as her fantasied protector. Gopal offers a historical mate-
rialist reading of the ending:
It would seem reasonable then to read the story as the critique to end all
critiques: a farewell to literary arms and the writerly aspirations to a realism
24 S. BHATTACHARYA
that would let the light of day upon the filth and grime that the rest of
society refuses to see. That was obviously not to be the case, certainly
in terms of Manto’s career and continued output. But the argument can
certainly be made that the experience of Partition and the devastation that
followed chastened the writer and made him aware of the relative modesty
of his own and other literary endeavours. It appears, in this instance, to
have occasioned an acknowledgement of the limits of what he could, in
fact, explain and effect in relation to social transformation.68
As I have been arguing, an event of catastrophic nature creates a new con-

sciousness within writers which is not entirely dissevered from the con-
sciousness of the past, but which may require improvisation of existing
techniques as well as importation of new modes of expression, and new
strategies of narration for adequate representation. Gopal’s reading here
draws mainly upon sexuality and gender. In many of his post-Partition
stories, Manto also focuses on the aspect of madness and of losing sense
and speech acts (which can certainly be read through the lens of mas-
culinity and sexuality). In two of the stories, “In the Name of God” and
“Open It!” Manto shows how the main characters, respectively, a mother
and a father who have lost their children due to the violence, are com-
pletely at odds as much with themselves as with the institutions that try
to assuage them and create an aura of normality in these times of abso-
lute madness: police station, prison, and medical centre. Indeed, one of
Manto’s iconic stories, “Toba Tek Singh,” is about lunatics in the asy-
lums of Hindustan and Pakistan who, after an order from the govern-
ments of these newly formed countries, are about to be exchanged to
their family-countries. One lunatic, Bishan Singh, who had some landed
property in a town called Toba Tek Singh, comes to know that his land
now belongs to Pakistan, while his Sikh family has shifted to Hindus-
tan. On the day of exchange, Bishan Singh, who has been in the asylum
for the last fifteen years and been himself named Toba Tek Singh after
his endless questions about this place, resists his hand-over and takes a
spot in the middle of the borders of the two countries, resolute on his
decision. The next day he dies there. The final lines are striking here:
“Over there, behind the barbed wires was Hindustan. Over here, behind
the identical wires lay Pakistan. In between on a bit of land that had no
name, lay Toba Tek Singh.”69 Consider the restraint in emotion in the
language: Manto uses caustic humour throughout the narration to sug-
gest the farcical and meaningless nature of the situation. The case of a
brief moment of pathos only aggravates the caustic nature: that human
bodies have become expendable now, violable and can be killed with
impunity, and human community, belonging, and ancestral place have also
acquired a contingent meaning. In dying on a land that does not belong
to anyone, Toba Tek Singh and his eponymous place appear to declare
their resistance against violent disciplining and mapping by the state and
against coercive accommodation of their identity. This style of narration
also appears in another post-Partition story, “The Dog of Tetwal,” in
which a stray dog is given national identities by the armies of Pakistan and
Hindustan, by stringing cardboard pieces that hold their nations’ names
around its neck. The dog is killed in the end by both armies for not being
loyal enough to either nation. Manto’s juxtaposition of the merciless act
of dog-killing with the soldiers’ sentimental nostalgia for their homes and
families and the beautiful spring in the surrounding mountains serves to
show that the dog is just a victim of sport, that patriotism can itself bee a
murderous act.70
The many scenes of violence that characterise the Partition, the
madness of killing, and the proliferating case of men and women (and
nonhuman animals), whose bodies are now suspended in the middle
of chartered territories both geographically and socially, who have lost
speech and communicability, or who are puzzled as to why they commit-
ted those gruesome acts of violence, compel Manto to take up a narrative
mode that is caustic, bitter, reflexive, and deeply satiric, where emotions
and analysis merge, although not without restraint. As Gopal correctly
notes, there is a “fusion between reason and emotion” in Manto’s post-
Partition stories in contrast to the pre-Partition ones, which “tended to
dichotomise emotion and intellect, or metonymy and metaphor.”71 This
curious shift in the mode of representation of catastrophic crisis is what I
have been arguing about in this chapter. Whereas the general social and
economic crisis in the late-colonial period resulted in the rise of social
and critical realisms, albeit with heterogeneity in formal use, fiction based
on catastrophic events gave birth to an innovative use of modal repre-
sentation within realist writing. There is a tendency to combine analysis
with affect in narrating catastrophic events when narration is done from
a close distance with them; the mode changes when narration is done
from a long distance, such as a fictional work revisiting an event after a
long time. While in the case of Partition fiction, Manto’s mode of rep-
resentation changed, there would be, as we will see in the next chapters,
uses of a number of modes to attempt to render the catastrophic events
26 S. BHATTACHARYA
of famine, peasant insurgency, and emergency in the postcolonial Indian

scenario. Like Manto’s modal change in pre- and post-Partition fiction,
these modes will change according to both the nature of the event and
the historical timeframe within which they are represented or addressed
to. It is through these complex representational modes that the writers
will be understood to have given critical voice to the victim communities.
Here a caution regarding representation needs to be maintained. Giv-
ing voice in the literary domain is a far more complex task as it has,
among others, two degrees of representation involved. These are, as Gay-
atri Chakravorty Spivak noted in her widely cited essay on the subaltern,
political representation (to speak for) and symbolic representation (to rep-
resent in art and philosophy), in which the subaltern’s voice is often “un-
consciously” elided.72 The writers writing about crisis-subjectivity here
seem to be aware of this complex interactive duality as they represent the
victimised conditions. But what literature or literary realism does further
is that it creates its own dualities of aesthetic representation. That the
catastrophic events ask for different modes and often a mixture of appar-
ently antithetical modes anticipates how literary realism both derives from
and cleaves sociological and historical factors—in course becoming a sin-
gular literary event itself. In other words, the writerly representation (of
speaking for) allows the artistic-tropological representation to carve out
another kind of representation (socio-literary) within the conventions of
the literary-aesthetic. As we will see, in Bhabani, Nabarun, Devi, Sahgal,
Mistry, and others, this socio-literary representation, constituted by the
questions and procedures of giving voice to the victim community (and
more often by the failure to do so), will become productive for pointing
out literature’s act of meaning-making of the catastrophic events or of its
differential logic from the sociological.
History and Temporality: Outline of the Chapters

In the end, a quick note on history and scales of temporality in the book
will be useful. While my historical readings range across a period of thirty-
four-odd years from 1943 to 1977, my literary readings begin from 1947
and end in 2003. This is a longer period of around six decades which
is not studied chronologically—in terms of the events and their literary
outputs—but rather in a way that rallies back and forth in time. Here,
a novel written immediately from an event will be read with one writ-
ten long after. This long-after novel may be found to have surpassed
literary-temporal registers of the future event. For instance, Amalendu

Chakraborty’s Ākāler Sandhāne is written historically after the Naxalite
insurgency and is shaped by rural starvation conditions that sparked the
Naxalbari peasant unrest. This novel uses a literary mode and style—
metafiction and cinematic techniques—which appear dominantly in global
writings of the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Mahasweta Devi’s Naxalite
writings (as will be discussed in this book). However, Chakraborty’s and
Devi’s novels will use two different realist modes because they respond to
two divergent yet related historical events and are written from separate
temporal locations. This zigzag movement of time, going back and forth,
arises from the methodological thrust in the book which argues that while
the catastrophic events are unique in their form and character, they are
produced by a long-term crisis. These events and their literary modalities
of representation need to be read together to understand the modern and
catastrophic conditions of life and living in postcolonial India.
Thus, in Chapter 2, I engage with the 1943 Bengal famine, where Bha-
bani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers! (1947) is read alongside Amal-
endu Chakraborty’s 1982 novel revisiting the famine, Ākāler Sandhāne
(In Search of Famine). Here I explore why and how Bhattacharya has used
an “analytical-affective” mode and Chakraborty has employed a “metafic-
tional” mode and what impact they have had on their disaster realism.
The Naxalbari peasant insurgency, which rose in the late 1960s and early
1970s, is the subject matter of the Third Chapter. A deeply neglected
matter in Indian literary-critical studies, this insurgency resulted in a rich
set of literary-artistic texts ranging from novels, poetry, theatre, films,
songs, painting, etc. I devote two chapters to this event to both restore
the event and its literature and to show how the postcolonial famine-like
conditions have led to several social movements culminating in the catas-
trophic event. These chapters closely read two novels each by Mahasweta
Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya to understand how these writers have
represented student-peasant experience in the 1970s and the social con-
ditions of the urban poor in the aftermath of the event, i.e. in the late
1990s and early 2000s. While I find a dominant use of the “quest” mode
in Devi’s short novels Hazār Churashir Mā (Mother of 1084, 1974) and
Operation? Bashai Tudu (1978), Nabarun’s novels (Harbart, 1994; and
Kāngāl Mālshāt [Warcry of the Beggars], 2003), in situating the histor-
ical link between the Naxalite guerrilla insurgency and the irreal guer-
rilla warfare by Calcutta’s urban poor, use an “urban fantastic mode.” I
28 S. BHATTACHARYA
contend here that together the quest and the urban fantastic modes com-
prise the framework of critical irrealism. Finally, in the Fifth Chapter, I
write about the continuity of socio-economic crisis and state violence in
the late 1960s and the implementation of a nationwide emergency under
Indira Gandhi in 1975. I show here that while novelists such as Salman
Rushdie (Midnight’s Children) have used a “magical realist” mode, nov-
els written from a distance and revisiting the event have used critique and
analysis more strongly, especially in the works of Nayantara Sahgal (Rich
Like Us ) and Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance). These “critical realist”
modes however complicate class-, gender- and caste-based perspectives.
These magical realist and critical realist modes have constituted for me an
emergency realism. Together these realisms compose the aesthetic fabric
of “catastrophic realism” in postcolonial India.
Before turning to the chapters themselves, I would like to make three
final notes. First, this book is in no way an exhaustive reading of novels
of catastrophe and crisis in postcolonial India. Neither does it claim that
these events together form an exclusive lens through which the nature of
Indian postcolonial life and society is to be perceived. One can choose
a number of events, such as the Partition, the Indo-Pakistan War, the
Bhopal Gas Disaster, and so on. By selecting these events what I have tried
to understand is the relation between (colonial) structures of domination,
the conditions of life and living for the oppressed and the marginalised in
postcolonial times, and the practices and discourses of resistance from
below. Here, I have set myself to inquire into what literary form can say
about these catastrophic conditions and their traumatising futures, the
“continuous” nature of historical crisis. Why is a mode chosen? What
does this choice suggest about the reception and registration of an event,
of critical solidarity, or of an author’s social values? What can a reading of
catastrophic realism tell us about Indian postcolonial society in general?
Second, while authors such as Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry
have enjoyed a commanding reputation in the field of postcolonial liter-
ary studies, Nayantara Sahgal and Bhabani Bhattacharya have been rel-
atively neglected. Mahasweta Devi, despite being adequately translated
into English, has limited national and international visibility; and texts by
Nabarun Bhattacharya, Amalendu Chakraborty, OV Vijayan and others
are hardly known to a wide Indian audience, let alone a global one. It has
been a challenging task to read them and to bring them together for a
study of historical crisis, catastrophe, and modernity in postcolonial India.
This task has also been motivated by the desire to retrieve a body of writ-
ers who have been either unjustly neglected or violently displaced and
relegated to the margins for a certain institutionalised politics of the field
of postcolonialism. Through this selection of reading, the book thus aims
to offer a counter-genealogy for the postcolonial Indian novel, one that
is able to address the questions of historical conditionality of the texts, as
well as their nuanced and interrogative uses of literary realism.
Finally, as I proof-check the manuscript and write these words in April
2020, the world witnesses a Coronavirus pandemic. Millions of people are
infected, hundreds of thousands have already died, and a global lockdown
has been underway for almost two months now. The world and its capital-
ist speed have come to a standstill. What has been deeply challenging for
many of us is to adequately comprehend the strangeness of our realities,
where one notices semblances of the normal, in the everyday activities
of the humans and the nonhuman animals outside or in vegetation (with
the beautiful spring all around and virtual, social media images of a heal-
ing, restorative nature), and then juxtaposes them with the cruel bit of
information that hundreds and thousands of people are dying everyday
of the virus in and around the same place (mostly unseen). These real-
ities have been deeply disturbing on a personal level and yet strangely
enriching to this professional work, so much so that I feel more confident
about the conjectures, insights, and analyses mobilised in this book. As
we attempt to make sense of “our” catastrophic realities and their global
yet geo-historically specific impact, it will be useful to note how writers
and artists of an era not so long ago have encountered and represented
“their” catastrophes and "their" crises through art.
Notes
1. Jawaharlal Nehru, “A Tryst with Destiny,” in Nehru: The First Sixty Years
Vol II, ed. Dorothy Norman (New York: John Day, 1965), 336.
2. Although it is only from a particular (class-, caste-, and gender-inflected)
position that the country can be said to be slumbering at all.
3. However, the important discontinuities, such as Ambedkar’s drafting of
the constitution, need to be acknowledged as well.
4. “Catastrophe,” OED, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/
catastrophe [accessed 17 June 2018].
5. Sarkar writes, “By the second half of the nineteenth century, British busi-
ness houses were in virtual control of the overseas trade, shipping and
insurance of the country. So the bulk of the profits from the export boom
30 S. BHATTACHARYA
was appropriated by foreign forms and went out of the country as foreign
leakage.” Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (London: Macmillan,
1989), 31.
6. Bishnupriya Gupta, “The Rise of Modern Industry in Colonial India,” in
A New Economic History of Colonial India, ed. Latika Chaudhary, Bish-
nupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V. Swamy (London: Rout-
ledge, 2016): 75–81.
7. Amiya Bagchi, “De-industrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century:
Some Theoretical Implications,” Journal of Development Studies 12, no. 3
(1976): 135–64; see also Immanuel Wallerstein, “Incorporation of Indian
Subcontinent into Capitalist World-Economy,” Economic and Political
Weekly 21, no. 4 (1986): PE28–PE39. Bagchi’s theory supports Dadabhai
Naoroji’s book of the “drain of wealth” from India. Naoroji has shown
through a reading of John Stuart Mill how British merchants systematised
an urban-based economy in which the wealth (i.e. revenues) from the
rural parts of India was supplied to the metropolitan centres of Britain.
See Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London:
Swan Sonnenschein, 1901).
8. Sarkar, Modern India, 36.
9. As Sarkar has noted, there were a number of social movements “from
below” by tribals, peasants, artisans, fishermen, etc., in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries in response to the “disastrous” social con-
ditions in the rural world. The Tebhaga was the result of these various
resistance movements produced by the specific colonial-historical conjunc-
tures. Ibid., 43–62.
10. The continual nature of these movements and the fact that the Telangana
Uprising started in the same year as India’s independence only serve to
show that there was no rupture or break, or no awakening from slumber
for those on the lowest tier in the socio-economic ladder.
11. Ranajit Guha, “Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Now Buried,” Journal of
Contemporary Asia 6, no. 1 (1976): 44; for Fanon, see The Wretched of
the Earth, 1961, trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin, 2001):
119–65.
12. While I use the term “postcolonial” in the book in the dual sense of
the historical (after colonial) and the sociological-aesthetic (catastrophic
conditions), the term “post/colonial” refers to the period encompassing
the (late) colonial and the postcolonial.
13. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2005), 99.
14. Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness that one does not choose not to
have freedom. Man is “condemned to be free” (449). There are no limits
to this freedom. But the outer world can never produce an action by
itself. Man has to envision an alternative and to act upon the desire for
change. Sartre calls freedom in the outer world as “being-in-itself,” and
the desire to fix a limit and to overcome it as a “situation” or a “being-

for-itself.” He writes: “There can be a free for-itself only as engaged in
a resisting world. Outside of this engagement the notions of freedom,
of determinism, of necessity lose all meaning” (483). He also points out
that this desire “to be free” should not be confused with one’s subjective
wishes. Only in extreme circumstances (Sartre was writing this work as
France was occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War)
can people make significant moral choices and do a fuller use of freedom.
I think this applies reasonably to the anti-colonial context, especially to
the acts of wrestling social freedom both from the imposing elements of
colonial-capitalist modernity and from the native bourgeois dominance of
class and culture. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on
the Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen,
1969).
15. Ibid., 24.
16. Ibid., 27.
17. “[O]ne of the great themes which has conventionally been identified as
a dominant in literary modernism – namely temporality itself […] is very
precisely a mode in which this transitional economic structure of incom-
plete capitalism can be registered and identified as such.” Ibid., 142.
18. Indian history has long been periodised in terms of the breaks manufac-
tured by different dominant Indian and foreign empires.
19. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contempo-
rary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6.
20. Ibid., 5. Emphasis in original.
21. Ibid., 12–13.
22. Das, Events, 18.
23. Ibid., 23.
24. Ibid., 16–17.
25. Dialectic, as Jameson defines the term, is “a conceptual coordination of
incommensurabilities […] a kind of new language strategy, in which both
identity and difference are given their due in advance and systematically
played off against each other (in ways that for non- or pre-dialectical
thought will seem to break the law of non-contradiction).” Jameson, Sin-
gular, 64–65.
26. Das, Events, 194–95.
27. Shahid Amin Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3.
28. Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in For Marx,
trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1990), 126; emphasis in original.
29. Ibid., 112.
30. Ibid., 114.
32 S. BHATTACHARYA
31. Of course, several dialectical philosophers (from Gillian Rose to Timo-

thy Brennan) have argued that Althusser completely misreads Hegel on
this. Indeed, Adorno gave a lecture on “Universal and Particular” around
the same time as Althusser’s first publication of this essay in a Commu-
nist Party journal. Adorno argued that the idea of a particular historical
event, understood as a nodal point of crisis in the historical process, was
trendy and factual, and instead asked us to look at the Hegelian notion
of a universal history, where the particular is stored in as a negative or a
“bad” element. This lecture, later published as an essay, seems to challenge
Althusser in that what Althusser labours to produce is already available to
him in the dialectical tradition. But I also think that it is in Althusser’s
expression that the relations between historical events and crisis, for my
context at least, appear sharp and enabling. For the Adorno essay, see
“Universal and Particular,” in History and Freedom: Lectures, 1964–1965,
trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 10–18.
32. Althusser, “Contradiction,” 102.
33. Ibid., 113.
34. Watt considers formal realism as a set of techniques that were meant
to represent an older society’s transition to capitalist modernity in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. See Watt, The Rise of the
Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1957), 31.
35. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 258–59.
36. In order to understand the complexities involved in the act of literary
mimesis, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature, trans. William R. Trask, intr. Edward Said (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003 [orig. pub: 1953]).
37. Williams, Keywords, 261.
38. Totality, for Lukács, is a “paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete
components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over
again.” Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on
the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin
Press, 1971), 84. The realist novel achieves totality through repeatedly
bringing and cancelling the organicity of these paradoxical and disparate
elements in its use of the devices of irony and narrative perspective, as
well as the other features of reflection, mood, chorus/minor characters,
etc. (92). Despite the more doctrinaire and strident temper of his writing
in later years, Lukács’ belief in the roundedness of life, in the possibility
through art and aesthetics to uncover the historical conditions of soci-
ety, and in the essentially historical impulse of realism, never lost track.
That is why his celebration of Tolstoy’s realism would also emphasise the
“indissoluble” character in the writer, where disparate elements would not
always harmoniously converge. This is also why a more polemical and nar-
rower take on realism in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism would
include the “realistic potential” in Franz Kafka, where the nightmarish
and improbable statements would be read not as a “straightforward anti-
realism, but a dialectical process in which realism of detail negates the
reality described”. See Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism,
trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1962). For his
uneasy engagement with ETA Hoffmann, see the essay “Marx and Engels
on Aesthetics,” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur D.
Kahn (New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1971), 61–88 (especially 75–80).
On Kafka, see “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann” in The Meaning, 47–92.
For his somewhat harsh and seemingly uninformed criticism of Chinese
theatrical realism or the realism of Rabindranath Tagore, see Studies in
European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stend-
hal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others, trans. Edith Bone (London: Merlin
Press, 1972), 132, and the review essay of Tagore’s Ghare Baire (The
Home and the World), 8–11. On Tolstoy, see the long essay “Tolstoy and
the Development of Russian Realism,” in Studies, 126–206.
39. Lukács writes in The Historical Novel: “[The] historical sense, [which is]
already present in practice, of the possibility of generalizing the historical
peculiarity of the immediate present, which had been correctly observed
by instinct, characterizes the position which the great social novel of Eng-
land occupies in the development of our problem. It drew the attention
of writers to the concrete (i.e., historical) significance of time and place,
to social conditions and so on, it created the realistic, literary means of
expression for portraying this spatiotemporal (i.e. historical) character of
people and their circumstances. But this […] was a product of realist
instinct and did not amount to a clear understanding of history as a pro-
cess, of history as the concrete precondition of the present.” See The His-
torical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press,
1962), 18.
40. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 186.
41. Ibid., 190; Terry Eagleton widens this use in his understanding of “literary
mode of production,” where literature’s production of meaning appears
to be tied to the material conditions of production. See Terry Eagleton,
Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), 45–64. I am not stretching
the term this far in my use here.
42. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971), 33–35. For Frye, the last fifteen centuries of lit-
erary production have offered five predominant modes: myth, romance,
high mimetic (epic/tragic), low mimetic (comedy/realistic fiction), and
ironic. “During the last hundred years,” he writes, “most serious fiction
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been no paralysis, and the hemorrhages were probably not the
immediate cause of death.
Durand-Fardel gives a table of supposed causes in 21 cases of

persons over fifty: 8 of these were connected with either habitual use
of liquor or a debauch; 9 had an attack immediately after a meal.
After naming all these causes, it must be said that in many cases it is
impossible to find any reason for the occurrence of the hemorrhage
at the particular moment it comes. A person may go to bed in
apparent health, and be found some hours afterward unconscious
and comatose, or unable to stir hand or foot on one side, or to
speak. Gendrin, as quoted by Aitken, states that of 176 cases, 97
were attacked during sleep. The attack may come on when the
patient is making no special muscular effort and under no special
excitement. It is simply the gradual progress of the lesion, which has
reached its limit.
SYMPTOMATOLOGY.—If we take as a point of departure the fully-

developed attack, such as most frequently is found with a large and
rapid hemorrhage into the cerebral hemispheres, pons, or
cerebellum, the symptoms are those usually spoken of as an
apoplectic attack, shock, or stroke, or, as the Germans say,
Hemorrhagische Insult. Trousseau quotes as a satisfactory definition
the words of Boerhaave: “Apoplexia dicitur adesse, quando repente
actio quinque sensuum externorum, tum internorum, omnesque
motus voluntarii abolentur, superstite pulsu plerumque forti, et
respiratione difficili, magna, stertente, una cum imagine profundi
perpetuique somni.”
Loss of consciousness, abolition of voluntary motion and sensation,

and usually stertor, the appearance of the patient being that of one in
deep sleep, are found in the extreme cases. In others the loss of
consciousness and sensation are not complete; the patient can be
aroused enough to utter a grunt or raise a hand to his face in order
to brush away a fly or the hand of the physician who is trying to raise
his eyelids, or can make a grimace to show that he is hurt, the face
returning to its indifferent expression as soon as the cause of
irritation is removed. Although the grade of action, both sensitive and
motor, seems to be a little above the purely reflex, it is but very
slightly so, and probably is not sufficient to remain an instant in the
memory.
The rapidity with which this condition comes on varies widely, from a
very few minutes, or even seconds, to some hours. It may even
diminish for a time and return. The cases in which unconsciousness
is most rapidly produced are apt to be meningeal and ventricular,
and presumably depend upon the rupture of vessels of considerable
size, although the location among the deeper ganglia, where the
conductors of a large number of nervous impulses are gathered into
a small space, will, of course, make the presence of a smaller clot
more widely felt. Even in these, however, the onset is not absolutely
instantaneous, and the very sudden attack is rather among the
exceptions. Trousseau denies having seen, during fifteen years of
hospital and consulting practice, a single case in which a patient was
suddenly attacked as if knocked down with a hammer, and that since
he had been giving lectures at the Hotel Dieu he had seen but two
men and one woman in whom cerebral hemorrhage presented itself
from the beginning with apoplectiform phenomena. In each of these
the hemorrhage had taken place largely into the ventricles.
Lidell gives the following case: A colored woman, aged forty-nine,

was engaged in rinsing clothes, and while in a stooping posture
suddenly fell down upon her left side as if she had been struck down
by a powerful blow. She was picked up insensible, and died in ten or
fifteen minutes. The hemorrhage was chiefly meningeal, and
especially abundant about her pons and medulla oblongata. The
fourth ventricle was full of blood, and there were clots in the lateral
ventricles.
A woman, aged about forty, had been hanging out clothes in an

August sun. She was observed to run out of the house screaming,
and fell to the ground unconscious. This was at 1 P.M., and she died
at 3.30 P.M. Her temperature just after death was 107.2°. The
neighborhood of the posterior surface of the pons Varolii was
occupied by a broken-down-looking mass, appearing like an
aggregation of small apoplexies (hemorrhages), involving and
breaking down the middle crura of the cerebellum. There was no
fatty degeneration nor any miliary aneurism. (I do not know upon
how thorough an examination this last statement rests.)
In a large number of cases it is difficult to say, in the absence of any

observation, intelligent or otherwise, exactly how rapid the onset of
the symptoms may have been, but in those which occur where the
patient is watched or is in the company of observant persons it is
almost invariable to meet with symptoms less than unconsciousness
which denote the actual beginning of the hemorrhage. From the
nature of the lesion it can rarely give rise to symptoms which justify
the epithet of fulminating in the sense of struck with a thunderbolt.
The unconsciousness, so far as can be known, does not depend on
the injury of any one special small point of the brain in which
consciousness resides, but upon the compression of a considerable
portion, which must necessarily take place gradually, but with a
rapidity proportioned to the size of the current which issues from the
ruptured vessel and the ease with which pressure can diffuse itself
over a large area. It is undoubtedly the greater facility offered to such
diffusion by the communication of the hemorrhage with the so-called
cavity of the arachnoid and the ventricles which gives to these forms
a peculiar severity. The difference between a hemorrhage spreading
through all the ventricles or over a large surface of the brain, and
one which is limited to a focus in the substance of one hemisphere,
being restrained by more or less firm tissue, may be illustrated by the
gain in power in the hydraulic press from the transfer of the stream of
water from a small cylinder to a larger one.
Vomiting is a symptom of some importance in diagnosis, being not

very common in cerebral hemorrhage, but very frequent in
cerebellar.
Whether of sudden, rapid, or slow development, the apoplectic

attack is, in its main features, described in the aphorism of
Boerhaave given above. The muscular relaxation of the face imparts
to it an expressionless, mask-like character; the limbs lie motionless
by the side, unless they can be excited to some slight movement by
some painful irritation or are agitated by convulsions, or in a
condition of rigid spasm; the face may be pale or flushed; the cheeks
flap nervelessly—le malade fume la pipe.
Swallowing, in the deepest coma, is not attempted. The fluid poured

into the mouth remains, and distributes itself according to the laws of
gravity without exciting reflex movements of the pharynx. When the
depression is less profound, it may excite coughing or be swallowed.
An attempt to swallow when the spoon touches the lips indicates a
considerably higher degree of nervous activity. Respiration may be
slow, but when the case is to terminate fatally rises with the pulse
and temperature. It is often stertorous and difficult, the obstruction
consisting partly in the gravitation backward of the soft palate and
tongue, and partly in the accumulation of fluids in the pharynx.
Hence stertor is in some cases only an accidental phenomenon,
depending upon the position of the patient on the back, and can be
relieved by turning him on his side and wiping out the mouth as far
back as can be reached. Cheyne-Stokes respiration occurs in severe
cases, though not confined to necessarily fatal ones.
The general temperature in cerebral hemorrhage has been studied

enough to make it of considerable value, especially in prognosis. In a
case which extends over a sufficiently long time several stages can
be distinguished which in shorter ones may be wanting. An initial
period of depression is described by Bourneville17 as occurring
immediately after an attack, in which the temperature falls a degree
or two below the normal, and, according to his view, continues
depressed if death takes place rapidly. He gives the case of a man
who died very shortly after an attack (his second one), where the
temperature, taken in the rectum at the moment of death, was 35.8°.
In cases which survive longer this initial fall passes either into a
stage where it oscillates within the neighborhood of the normal or
immediately begins to rise; the latter occurrence indicates an
impending fatal termination (unless, of course, something else can
be found to account for it). In the former condition we find patients
whose life may be indefinitely prolonged for days or weeks, when, if
a fatal termination is to result, the thermometer again indicates a
rise.
17 Études cliniques et thermométriques sur les Maladies du Système nerveux, 1872.
The initial fall of temperature is not so likely to be observed except in

institutions like the Salpêtrière, where large numbers of old persons
are collected and under close medical surveillance; and, indeed, it
may be doubted, even from Bourneville's own table, whether the rule
is one without exceptions. At any rate, the rise is a more important
phenomenon than the fall. When the rise of temperature is
interrupted by a fall, and then continues again, it is due, according to
the author already quoted, to a renewal of the hemorrhage.
These changes of temperature may be noted with various locations

of the lesion, but it seems probable that further study might make
them useful in diagnosis as well as prognosis. Hale White reports the
case of a boy aged six and a half years, who was found unconscious
with right hemiplegia, and who afterward had many and various
paralyses with hyperpyrexia, the highest temperature being 107°. He
lived long enough for secondary degeneration to extend down the
crura and into the anterior cornua. A small soft patch a quarter of an
inch in diameter existed at the anterior part of each corpus
striatum.18
18 Guy's Hosp. Rep., 1882.
FIG. 37.
The chart W. H. (Fig. 37) is from a man aged fifty who fell in the
street while returning from work at noon, and whose axillary
temperature was taken at 5 P.M. and every two hours thereafter until
death. The hemiplegia was not very marked, but the hemorrhage
was extensive, involving the pons and left crus cerebri, the external
capsule, left crus cerebelli, and medulla, bursting through into the
fourth ventricle.
FIG. 38.
The chart M. M. (Fig. 38), as taken from Bourneville, represents the
course of the temperature in a rapid case: each perpendicular line
denotes an hour.
The difference in the temperature of the two sides has been

variously stated, and probably depends on a number of factors
besides the length of time that has elapsed since the first attack.
There is probably, however, a tendency to excess of heat on the
paralyzed side soon after the attack, owing to vaso-motor paralysis;
and this difference will be more marked in the hands than in the
axillæ. After a length of time which may be from days to months the
temperature becomes equalized, or more frequently the relation is
reversed, the paralyzed side being colder as atrophy takes place.
Lepine19 gives a case where the axillary temperatures of the two
sides continued the same within a small fraction of a degree for three
days, and then separated very slowly, until at death the paralyzed
side was six-tenths of a degree (Cent.) hotter than the other, in both
being inferior to the rectal (107° Cent.).20
19 Mémoires de Société de Biol., 1867.
20 The chart in the original, and as reproduced by Bourneville, is wrongly lettered. The
text says that the left side was the hotter.
FIG. 39.
The chart C. M. (Fig. 39) shows the excess of temperature in a case

of meningeal hemorrhage. The dotted line is from the paralyzed side.
The first observation was made two and a half hours after the attack.
A very interesting case is reported by Johnson21 of crossed
hemiplegia, where the temperature was about a degree higher on
the paralyzed side of the body, and, corresponding to this, the
sphygmograph showed a great diminution of tension; the lesion is
supposed to have been a hemorrhage in the pons. Johnson, in
commenting on the statement of Lorain that in all cases of
hemiplegia the pulse is more full on the paralyzed side, says that it is
incorrect for ordinary cases of hemorrhage into the corpus striatum,
though true in his own case.
21 Brit. Med. Journ., Jan. 6, 1877.
The most marked differences of temperature have been observed

where the lesion has been in the neighborhood of the pons, crus
cerebri, or medulla oblongata. In a case reported by Allbutt there
was a difference of 1.6°; the radial pulse was softer and fuller on the
paralyzed side, and the cheek upon that side was flushed.22 The
pulmonary hemorrhages which have been noticed by Brown-
Séquard and others in animals after cerebral lesions, and the
extravasation, congestion, subpleural ecchymoses noted by Ollivier23
in cerebral apoplexy, are probably to be referred to vaso-motor
disturbances.
22 Med. Times and Gaz., Dec. 4, 1869.
23 Archives générales, 1873, 167.
Much more attention has been paid to the pulse than to the
temperature, but it is less easy to lay down definite rules in regard to
it. It may vary in either direction. When the case is approaching a
fatal termination the pulse is apt to accompany the temperature in a
general way in its rise, though not necessarily following exactly, as is
seen in the chart in Fig. 38.
The throbbing or bounding of the arteries often described may

indicate increased activity of heart, but means at the same time
vaso-motor relaxation. The urine and feces are often passed
involuntarily.
In some rare cases symptoms closely resembling those produced in
animals by section of the sympathetic have been seen. These are
false ptosis, narrowing of the palpebral opening and sinking of the
globe of the eye into the orbit, diminution in the size of the pupil,
higher temperature on the paralyzed side of the face and the
corresponding ear, abnormal secretion of the eye, nose, and mouth
on the same side.24 They are supposed to indicate a paralysis of the
sympathetic.
24 Nothnagel, quoted by Grasset.
The condition of general relaxation may be so profound as to cover

up everything else, but in many cases true paralytic symptoms may
be discovered or provoked, which even at an early period give us
information as to the locality and nature of the lesion.
A greater degree of muscular relaxation may be manifest on one

side of the face than the other; the forehead may be a little smoother
on one side, the corner of the mouth drooping, the downward line
from the ala of the nose flattened, and the cheek flapping. There
may be a little greater resistance to passive motion of the limbs on
one side; one hand on being raised may drop helplessly back to the
bed, while the other is laid slowly down; the right hand when pinched
lies motionless and without power to escape the pain until the left
comes to its assistance. Irregularity of the pupils, if present, is an
important sign, but its absence signifies nothing.
One of the most significant signs is the conjugate deviation of the

eyes, both eyes and the head being turned strongly to one side or
the other. When the lesion is above the pons and is irritative, as in
the early stage of hemorrhage, the deviation is toward the side of the
body affected and away from the lesion; when paralysis is
established, away from the paralysis and toward the lesion. Below
the pons the rule is reversed. The spastic stage of conjugate
deviation may coincide with stiffness (early rigidity) of the paralyzed
limbs. This deviation must not be mistaken for an accidental position
of the head. The patient should be addressed from the side away
from which he is looking. Sometimes the eyes can be brought to the
median line, and not beyond. An attempt to turn the head forcibly
beyond the median line occasionally causes pain. The value of this
symptom in diagnosis has been denied, but a part at least of the
apparent contradictions have arisen from the neglect to notice
whether it were of a paralytic or spastic character.
As the condition of unconsciousness gradually passes off, the face

regaining, at least in part, its natural and more intelligent expression,
the eyes trying to follow the movements of surrounding persons, an
attempt being made, perhaps only by an unintelligible sound or by a
nod, to answer questions, the tongue being protruded, or at least an
attempt toward it made, and some motions being made with the
limbs,—the exact extent and intensity of the paralysis become more
apparent. Conjugate deviation, if it have existed, may disappear
before the other symptoms, or, if it has been of the rigid form
depending on an irritative lesion, it may become paralytic, and is
then in the opposite direction. The patient is then usually found to be
in a condition of hemiplegia, and at this point the history of
hemorrhagic apoplexy becomes identical with that of paralysis from
hemorrhage where no truly apoplectic condition has been present.
Lidell states that in more than one-third of all cases of cerebral

hemorrhage hemiplegia is developed without loss of consciousness
or coma. In some, the paralysis precedes unconsciousness, which
then slowly supervenes.
Hemiplegia (ἥμι, half, πληγη blow) is a paralysis or paresis of a part

of the voluntary muscles of one side of the body, and a few, in some
cases, on the other, and is undoubtedly to be referred to a lesion
interrupting the nervous communication between the cortical centres
of motion and the nuclei of the motor nerves, cerebral and spinal; the
conductors passing through the corpora striata, the internal capsule,
the peduncles, and crossing in great part to the other side above or
at the lower border of the medulla oblongata, and passing down the
crossed pyramidal tracts of the cord, to be finally connected with the
anterior gray columns of the cord. The portion which does not
decussate passes down the inner border of the anterior columns
under the name of columns of Türck. The amount of decussation
which takes place varies somewhat, and the suggestion has been
made, in order to explain certain cases of paralysis occurring on the
same side with the lesion, that possibly in some rare cases there
may be no decussation. It has never been shown, however, that this
condition, highly exceptional if even it ever occurs, is present in such
cases.
It may be said in a general way, although exceptions to the rule can

be found, that it is those muscles trained to separate, specialized, or
non-associated movements which are chiefly affected, while those
which are habitually associated in function with those of the other
side are less or not at all so. It would not, however, be in the least
correct to say that specialized or educated movements of any set of
muscles are alone paralyzed, since the fingers, which are trained to
the most independent movements, are often just as incapable of
making the slightest movement of simple flexion as of writing or
sewing.
We have in ordinary hemiplegia more or less paralysis of the upper

facial, the patient not being able to close his eye or to wink quite so
well as on the paralyzed side. The forehead may be smoother on the
paralyzed side. This condition is usually slight and of short duration,
but varies in different cases. Paralysis of the lower facial angle of the
mouth and cheek is usually better marked, but not absolute. The
corner of the mouth droops, perhaps permits the saliva to escape;
the naso-labial fold is less deep, and the glabella deviated away from
the paralyzed side. The cheek flaps with respiration. The difference
between this facial paralysis connected with hemiplegia and that
dependent upon a lesion of the trunk or distribution of the nerve
(Bell's), as in caries of the temporal bone or the so-called rheumatic
paralysis, is very striking, the latter being so much more complete,
and, by affecting the orbicularis palpebrarum so as to prevent
closure of the eye, giving a very peculiar expression to the
countenance. This distinction between the two portions of the facial
seems to make an exception to the rule stated above, since in most
persons the movements of the corner of the mouth and of the cheek
are quite as closely bilaterally associated as those of the eyelids.
Paralyses of the third, fourth, and sixth pairs upon one side of the
body are comparatively rare in hemiplegia, and when present are
usually referable to localized lesions in the pons. They are to be
looked upon as something superadded to the ordinary hemiplegia.
These nerves, however, are affected in the peculiar way already
spoken of as conjugate deviation, which phenomenon would seem to
denote that muscles accomplishing combined movements in either
lateral direction of both eyes, rather than all the muscles of each, are
innervated from opposite sides—i.e. that the right rectus externus
and the left rectus internus are innervated from the left motor
centres, and vice versâ. Exactly the same remark will apply to the
muscles of the neck which cause the rotation of the head seen
together with the deviation of the eyes. The muscles controlling
deviation to one side, although situated upon both sides of the
median line, are apparently innervated from the side of the brain
toward which the head is turned in paralysis.
The tongue is usually protruded with its point toward the paralyzed
side; and this is simply for the reason that it is pushed out instead of
pulled, and the stronger muscle thrusts the tongue away from it. The
motor portion of the fifth is, according to Broadbent, affected to a
certain extent, the bite upon the paralyzed side being less strong.
The hand and the foot are the parts most frequently and most
completely affected, but one or the other may be partially or wholly
spared, though the latter is rare. The muscles of the limbs nearer the
trunk may be less affected, so that the patient may make shoulder or
pelvis movements when asked to move hand or foot. In severe
cases even the scapular movements may be paralyzed. The
muscles of the trunk are but slightly affected, though Broadbent
states that a difference in the abdominal muscles on the two sides
may be perceived as the patient rises from a chair. The respiratory
movements are alike on the two sides. A woman in the hospital
service of the writer had a quite complete left hemiplegia at about the
seventh month of pregnancy. There was some return of motion at
the time of her confinement. None of the attendants could perceive
any difference in the action of the abdominal muscles of the two
sides, although, of course, the usual bracing of the hand and foot
upon the left side was wanting. The pains were, however, generally
inefficient, and she was delivered by turning. Muscular weakness
often exists, and in some cases the non-paralyzed side shows a
diminution of power.
The sphincters of the bladder and rectum frequently, and in severe

cases almost invariably, lose their activity for a time. It is possible,
however, that in some cases of alleged inability to retain urine and
feces the defect is really mental, and akin to the dirty habits of the
demented. The involuntary muscles probably take no part in
hemiplegia, with the very important exception of the muscular coats
of the arteries, which apparently share to a certain extent, and
sometimes the iris.
Speech may be attempted, and the words be correct, so far as they

can be understood, though the patient is apt to confine his remarks
to the shortest possible answering of questions. It is, however, thick
and indistinct, since the muscles of the tongue and lips are but
imperfectly under the control of the will. This condition may be
connected with paralysis of either side, and is to be sharply
distinguished from aphasia or mental inability to select the proper
word or to determine the necessary movements for its pronunciation.
Aphasia is almost invariably connected with paralysis of the right
side, and will be minutely spoken of hereafter. There is, of course,
nothing to prevent the coexistence of the two conditions, but aphasia
cannot well be shown to exist until we have reason to suppose, first,
that the patient has ideas to express, and secondly, that the
paralysis of the muscles of the lips and tongue has more or less
completely disappeared. The patient may indistinctly mumble a word
which, however, can be understood to be appropriate to the occasion
(defective articulation, glosso-labial paralysis), or, on the other hand,
pronounce with distinctness an entire wrong word or a number of
sounds without meaning (aphasia).
Sensibility—that is, ordinary cutaneous sensation—and, so far as we
can judge, the special senses, are not greatly affected after the deep
coma has passed off, but exceptions to this rule will be noted later.
Having described this most typical but not most common form of
cerebral hemorrhage—that is, the form in which both lesion and
symptoms are most distinct and can be most clearly connected—we
have a point of departure for conditions less clearly marked and less
easily explained.
It is probable that cerebral hemorrhage is much less likely than

cerebral embolism to take place without any disturbance of
consciousness or abnormal sensations; but there can also be little
doubt that a certain amount of paralysis is often accompanied by no
other symptoms, and post-mortem appearances often show the
remains of small hemorrhages which have passed unnoticed or are
lightly estimated. It is highly probable that small hemorrhages may
give rise to symptoms which pass for only a little accidental vertigo
or a slight feeling of faintness, until a later and more serious attack
gives a more definite explanation.
On the other hand, we have a set of cases in which all the symptoms
of cerebral hemorrhage may be present without the lesion. Many of
these are of course due to embolism, which will be considered later;
but besides this condition, recognized as softening for many years,
we find described under the head of simple, congestive, serous, and
nervous apoplexy cases where sudden or rapid loss of
consciousness occurs with general muscular relaxation, which, when
fatal, show nothing beyond changes in the circulation—i.e. in the
amount of blood in the cerebral vessels or of serum in the meshes of
the pia or at the base of the brain.
Besides these, there are cases of temporary unconsciousness with

complete recovery—the coup de sang of the French, or rush of blood
to the head, which are attributed to congestion of the brain—a theory
difficult to prove or disprove, but not in itself unreasonable.
Trousseau, without denying the possibility, or even probability, of
such a condition, says that which has been called apoplectiform
cerebral congestion is in the greater number of cases an epileptic or
eclamptic accident, sometimes a syncope. Simple epileptic
vertigoes, vertigoes connected with a bad condition of the stomach
or diseases of the ear, are wrongly considered as congestions of the
brain. He speaks of various conditions, such as violent attacks of
whooping cough, the expulsive efforts of women in labor, the
congested faces of laborers under heavy burdens, to show that
cerebral congestion does not give rise to an apoplectiform attack;
and it is undoubtedly true that, as a rule, no long-continued attack is
the result; but it must be within the personal experience of almost
every one that decided cerebral disturbance is produced for a few
moments by such efforts, as, for instance, blowing a fire with the
head down. Besides this, a laborer under a heavy load is
presumably healthy and accustomed to his work, so that his arteries
may be supposed capable of maintaining a due balance between
arterial and venous blood in the brain; and, again, although the
ordinary efforts of women in labor do not cause unconsciousness,
puerperal convulsions, involving a longer period of violent muscular
action, may do so, and even give rise to hemiplegia.
Whatever name we may adopt for the temporary cases which

recover, there are others, and fatal ones, which are not explained by
any change in nomenclature. Epilepsy may, it is true, occur under
such circumstances that no convulsion is observed, but, on the other
hand, convulsions may accompany not only an attack of
unconsciousness, but actual cerebral hemorrhage.
Cases of sudden death with no discoverable lesion furnish abundant

opportunity and temptation for conjecture, and it is well known that
too much dependence must not be placed upon the post-mortem
appearances as to the amount of blood in the brain before death,
and probably just as little upon the amount of serum, except as
indicating a condition of atrophy.
Syncope, either from over-stimulation of the pneumogastric or from

simple failure of the heart, may be put forward to explain some cases
of sudden death, but seems to have no advantage as a universal
theory over the older one, which meets with so little favor. Lidell
gives no less than seventeen cases which he classifies as
congestive or serous apoplexy. They are not all equally conclusive,
and were almost all of alcoholics. In some of these there were
absolutely no appearances which could account for death. The two
most characteristic of congestive apoplexy were, first, a young
negress who experienced a violent fit of passion, became
unconscious, with stertorous breathing, and died, having had some
tonic spasms. The brain contained a large amount of blood in the
vessels, but no effusion. Second, a semi-intoxicated woman, aged
thirty, became very angry, fell insensible, and expired almost
immediately. The brain contained an excess of blood, with no
effusion. In both these cases the patients were subject to fits under
the influence of strong excitement, but in both the author took pains
to inquire into and negative the probability of epilepsy of the ordinary
kind; and a change of name does not go far toward clearing up the
pathology.
Lidell's case (XXII.) was that of a man accustomed to alcohol, thin

and pale, who had an apoplectic fit with coma and hemiplegia. He
regained consciousness on the second day, and the hemiplegia
disappeared in a fortnight. This rapid and complete recovery,
exceptional to be sure, cannot be regarded as proof of the absence
of hemorrhage or embolism. In fact, the latter is highly probable. It is
possible that the clot may have been partially dislodged, so as to
allow some blood to pass by it, or that an exceptionally favorable
anastomosis allowed a better collateral circulation than usual to be
established.
The following case occurred in the service of the writer: An elderly

negress, who had extensive anasarca and signs of enfeebled action
of the heart without any valvular lesion being detected, after washing
her face was heard to groan, and found speechless and unable to
swallow, with complete right hemiplegia. There was a slight
improvement in a few hours, but she died two days later. The
autopsy disclosed some hypertrophy and dilatation of the heart
without valvular lesion. A careful search failed to discover any
change in the brain or obstruction in its vessels, although there was
chronic endarteritis.
The relations between epilepsy, apoplexy, and syncope are

interesting and important, but are certainly far from clear. Little is
gained by shifting obscure cases from one category to the other. If
sudden deaths be synonymous with apoplexy, we shall certainly
have to admit that apoplexy does not always demand for its cause
cerebral changes sufficiently marked to be recognizable after death.
If, on the other hand, we refer them to heart disease, we shall have
to admit that a heart without valvular disease or extensive changes
in its muscular substance may cease to beat under influences as yet
not well understood.
Since the paralysis arising from hemorrhage resembles so closely in

its progress that dependent upon occlusion of the cerebral vessels, a
further description will be deferred until the latter lesion has been
described; but this remark does not apply to the premonitory and
initiative symptoms, which may be of great importance, and which
are not always the same with the two or three sets of lesions. There
are many of them, but, unfortunately, no one among them taken
alone can be considered of high significance, unless we except what
are sometimes called premonitory attacks, which are in all probability
frequently genuine hemorrhages of so slight extent that they produce
no unconsciousness, and but slight paralysis easily overlooked. A
little indistinctness of speech or a forgetfulness of words, a droop of
one angle of the mouth, or heaviness in the movement of a foot or
hand, lasting but a few moments, may be real but slight attacks,
which may be followed either by a much more severe one, by others
of the same kind, or by nothing at all for a long time. They are
sufficient to awaken apprehension, and to show in what direction
danger lies, but they give little information as to the time of any future
attack.
Retinal hemorrhage is admitted by all modern authors to be

connected with disease of the vascular system, and hence also with
renal inflammation and cerebral lesions. The writer is greatly
indebted to Hasket Derby for the following facts: Out of 21 patients
who had retinal hemorrhage, and of whose subsequent career he
had information, 9 had some sort of apoplectic or paralytic attack; 1
had had such an attack before she was examined; 3 died of heart
disease, 1 suddenly, the cause being variously assigned to heart
disease or apoplexy; and 6 were alive when heard from, one of
these, a man of forty-eight, being alive and well fourteen years after.
Bull25 describes four cases of his own where retinal hemorrhage was
followed by cerebral hemorrhage, demonstrated or supposed in
three, while in the fourth other symptoms rendered a similar
termination by no means improbable. He quotes others of a similar
character. The total number of cases which were kept under
observation for some years is, unfortunately, not given. In a case
under the observation of the writer a female patient, aged fifty-seven,
who had irregularity of the pulse with some cardiac hypertrophy, was
found to have a retinal hemorrhage two and a half years before an
attack of hemiplegia. The hemorrhage was not accompanied by the
white spots which often accompany retinitis albuminuria.
25 Am. Journ. Med. Sci., July, 1879.
In a case reported by Amidon26 retinal and cerebral hemorrhages

seem to have been nearly simultaneous a few hours before death.
There was diffuse neuro-retinitis and old hemorrhages besides the
recent one.
26 N. Y. Med. Rec., 1878, xiv. 13.
The highly interesting observation has been made by Lionville27 that

when miliary aneurisms are present in the brain, they may often be
found in the retina also. In one case where they were very numerous
in the cerebrum, cerebellum, pons, and meninges, aneurismal
dilatations were found also in the pericardium, mesentery, cervical
region, and carotids (the latter not being more minutely described).
There was very general atheroma and numerous points of arteritis.
The retinal aneurisms varied in size from those requiring a power of
ten or twenty diameters to be examined up to the size of a pin's head
or a millet-seed. He thinks they might have been recognized by the
ophthalmoscope.
27 Comptes Rendus de l'Acad. des Sci., 1870.
The hemorrhages accompanying idiopathic anæmia and other

diseases with a similar tendency are not to be taken into this
account. Hemorrhage accompanying optic neuritis is likely to be due
to some disease of the brain other than the one under consideration.
Mental disturbances of various kinds have been considered as

significant, and Forbes Winslow gives a great many instances of
different forms, but they are to be looked upon rather as indicating
chronic cerebral changes which may result in various conditions, of
which hemorrhage may be one, than as furnishing any definite
indication of what is to be expected. Loss of memory should be
regarded in this way. Some acute or temporary conditions of
depression may affect the nutrition of the brain in such a way, without
having anything to do with hemorrhage actual or anticipated.
Aberrations of the special senses are often observed, such as noises

in the ears more or less definite, the sight of colors (red), or being
unable to see more than a portion of an object. The fact to which
these testify is probably a localized disturbance of the circulation
which may not precede rupture of the vessels.
Distinct hallucinations of hearing, followed by those of smell and

succeeding irritability, sleeplessness, were observed by Savage28 in
a case which terminated soon after in apoplexy.
28 Journ. Ment. Sci., 1883, xxix. 90.
There are few symptoms which are more likely to excite alarm and
apprehension of a stroke of paralysis than vertigo or attacks of
dizziness, but it is too common under a great variety of
circumstances to have much value, and is, as a matter of fact, rarely
a distant precursor of intracranial hemorrhage, although it frequently
appears among the almost initiatory symptoms, especially when the

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Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian

Novel: On Catastrophic Realism 1st ed.

More information about this series at

New Comparisons in World Literature

Cover image: © Deepak Kumar/EyeEm, Getty Images ID: 713868639

Thank you for believing in me.

This book is based on my Ph.D. thesis. So, let me first acknowledge my

“Colonial Governance, Disaster, and the Social in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s

“In this urgent and compelling study, Sourit Bhattacharya makes a

“This is an original book that offers a welcome discussion of liter-

1 Modernity, Catastrophe, and Realism in the Postcolonial

2 Disaster and Realism: Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine 41

3 Interrogating the Naxalbari Movement: Mahasweta

Representation of the Movement and the Form of Critical

4 The Aftermath of the Naxalbari Movement: Nabarun

5 Writing the Indian Emergency: Magical and Critical

Modernity, Catastrophe, and Realism

On 15 August 1947, India gained formal independence from British colo-

© The Author(s) 2020 1

The Historical Context: The Theory

of the foodgrains.6 And, as economic historians such as Amiya Bagchi

to use the word “situation” in a Sartrean sense to suggest the contin-

[F]or if the break is initially characterized as a perturbation of causality as

In this longue durée framework, Jameson finds aesthetic modes to be

The Dialectic of Crisis and Event

maligned by the state or glorified by the communities in the acts of declar-

To recover such embodied narrations [voice] seems to me the only way

legitimacy on the sufferers’ bodies (reifying their individual experiences),

of memorialisation, and repurposed later as an instance of “politics by

The context of this formulation arises from Althusser’s understanding of

empiricism, and determinism. Althusser here explains the content of a let-

“conjuncture” to remind us that these events are specific in their context,

The Dynamics of Realism:

reveals in the act the totality of structures unavailable to the fragmenting

famine-based novel and a contemporary starvation-based one does not lie

However, he does not discuss the complexities and innovations within

traumatic realism “mediates between the realist and anti-realist positions

Writing the Indian Postcolonial:

Through the use of allegory, symbol, or metafictionality, Anjaria adds,

The conjunctural terrain of Indian nation formation in the decades just

of opposition. Their activities ranged from trade union activism to peasant

This offers a clear picture of the sociopolitically tempestuous nature of the

Oriya Matira Manisa (Man of the Soil, 1931), Tarashankar Bandyopad-

social therapy or to reflect on how to represent the pain and suffering

As I have been arguing, an event of catastrophic nature creates a new con-

of famine, peasant insurgency, and emergency in the postcolonial Indian

History and Temporality: Outline of the Chapters

literary-temporal registers of the future event. For instance, Amalendu

the desire to fix a limit and to overcome it as a “situation” or a “being-

31. Of course, several dialectical philosophers (from Gillian Rose to Timo-

Durand-Fardel gives a table of supposed causes in 21 cases of

SYMPTOMATOLOGY.—If we take as a point of departure the fully-

Loss of consciousness, abolition of voluntary motion and sensation,

Lidell gives the following case: A colored woman, aged forty-nine,

A woman, aged about forty, had been hanging out clothes in an

In a large number of cases it is difficult to say, in the absence of any

Vomiting is a symptom of some importance in diagnosis, being not

Whether of sudden, rapid, or slow development, the apoplectic

Swallowing, in the deepest coma, is not attempted. The fluid poured

The general temperature in cerebral hemorrhage has been studied

The initial fall of temperature is not so likely to be observed except in

These changes of temperature may be noted with various locations

The difference in the temperature of the two sides has been