The Map and the Scissors: A Dialogue with Amit Majmudar
Where we discuss his historical novel on Gandhi, Jinnah and the Partition, Hillary Mantel, a bad review in The Hindu and a curious incident with Indian Maoists
Dear Readers,
Thank you for your patience. It’s been an eventful several months, but I am happy to say that I now have the time to deliver some compelling dialogues to your inbox through the end of the year. Today’s dialogue is with Amit Majmudar (@AmitMajmudar on Twitter) about his new novel, The Map and the Scissors, which I highly recommend for its propulsive content and lyrical beauty. I also learned much about Partition-era history.
You can purchase it on Amazon here.
VM: This is your second novel on the Partition. What made you return to the subject?
AM: A sense that I had unfinished business with it. Basically, my first novel didn't deal with the personalities and politics leading up to the Partition. It focused on innocent people who faced hardship as a result of it. I'm pretty sure I didn't even mention Gandhi or Jinnah in the entire book.
I should point out here that reading Wolf Hall by the recently deceased genius Hilary Mantel gave me courage to write real-life historical figures as characters in a novel. Her death is a great loss to the English language.
VM: Let’s talk about the central characters and their families. I was impressed by the depth of your characterization. As I was reading, I thought of what Emerson said of Montaigne, “Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” The Anglicized Jinnah comes off as a highly intelligent, calculating politician. His wife, Rattanbai “Ruttie” Jinnah, the “Rose of Bombay” is childlike to her tragic end, a victim, it seems to me, of Jinnah’s elemental cold-heartedness. His sister Fatima is a domineering woman who keeps an ironclad intimacy with her brother, jealous of any woman (including Ruttie) in her brother’s life. Gandhi, full of the moral fervor that we all know, withers into an ineffectual old age with his fasts and experiments in controlling desire. How close to the historical record are Jinnah, Gandhi and their families? What is open to interpretation?
AM: The letters between Ruttie and Jinnah are my invention. Also the dialogue, except for a few very famous lines or encounters, are my invention. But the details of all those people are very close to the historical record. So the event or encounter will be documented, but I flesh it out in my own way, having the characters speak in ways that fit my idea of their character. I didn't find much actual transcribed speech or conversation by, say, Fatima Jinnah in the record, or I didn't come across it if that exists. But I had a feel for her personality, and I was able to feed her lines that fit that feel. It's a mysterious process, just guesstimating what someone would say or think. The key is to be willing to make the language contemporary. That is another thing I learned from the late Mantel; she made her olde English people speak absolutely 21st century English. But that is the identical practice that Marlowe and Shakespeare used in their own historical plays, or plays set in Italy or elsewhere. No matter where or when a Shakespeare play is set, including Ancient Rome, everybody speaks Elizabethan English. The opening scene of Romeo and Juliet contains a reference to "carrying coals to Newcastle." That isn't a degree of anachronism and culture-cross-referencing that is permissible by modern historical fiction conventions, but linguistically, you have to do the equivalent of that.
VM: I need to read Mantel! Even though your characters use contemporary English, I “heard” an accent and register that to me fit the character: upper-class British for Mountbatten; more Gujarati than Anglo for Patel. Ruttie’s letters are some of the most brilliant passages in the novel and brought vividly to the fore a person I had known little about. I wanted to talk about a review of The Map and the Scissors in The Hindu by Saikat Majumdar, an almost namesake, which focused on the characterization of historical figures. Majumdar claims that your characters are abstractions that hew too closely to an unnuanced view of the historical record. All reviews are subjective, but I frankly wonder how closely he read the novel. Did you read his review?
A: I did, and what can I say? Traditionally it has been deemed inappropriate to strike back at one’s reviewer, but that custom evolved before the Internet, so.... I’ll just give your readers a few facts on that reviewer and review. One, his review barely mentioned the novel; the majority of the review was a professor’s pedantic meditations on the relationship between reality and fiction. Two, the reviewer himself is a novelist, and he writes campus novels in a momentum-less style, with nothing like the dramatic verve of a Mantel or the vivid violence of a McCarthy; can he be expected to appreciate a novel that takes as its lodestars and models two writers so thoroughly different, dare I say superior, to him? Three, the review he published in the Hindu the week after the job he did on me was a rave review of a campus novel written by a fellow professor who works in the same writing department at Ashoka University! Literally the guy in the office next to him. You can’t make this stuff up. Four, with a subject as sensitive as this, you are obligated ethically to hew close to the historical record. You shouldn’t make this stuff up. Five, reader feedback and all other newspaper reviews about this novel insist on the diametric opposite of his charge. That is, they praise the book because the characters are the opposite of “abstract and theoretical”; they note how the accretion of detail, dialogue, and psychological study of the characters is such that even peripheral characters, like Fatima and Sardar and Nehru, all come to distinctive life. So Professor Saikat Majumdar is the lone voice talking trash, and I suspect he read the book with his mind already made up about how it didn’t match his own praxis as a novelist and his own theory as a professor. So now your readers have the basic facts.
VM: In the novel, Jinnah is encouraged by a dreamy Iqbal and a bumbling Liaquat Ali Khan into the idea of Pakistan. The novel makes clear that his aspirations for Indian Muslims evolved. Some historians like Ayesha Jalal claim that Jinnah never wanted Partition, that his goal was unification of Muslims within the Muslim League, and that Punjab and Bengal were negotiating chips aimed at obtaining a better settlement for Muslims within an Indian union. What is your view?
A: That is not something that is borne out by Jinnah's own speeches, to be honest. It would be a truly consummate act to carry that out over ten years—duplicity has its limits—in public speeches, private discussions, and even negotiations with the people he was dealing with. At some point you would have to level with Mountbatten behind closed doors, at least. But that doesn't seem to have happened. A lot of people base this opinion on the fact that Jinnah accepted a late plan that grouped Indian provinces, with one "Group" being all the Muslim majority provinces in one. But that plan had an escape clause that would have given Jinnah his Pakistan after a delay of a few years, with the entirety of Punjab and Bengal. He seized it because it was the best possible deal; it would ward off the threatened division of the two border provinces, and it would give him a pre-formed Muslim bloc that could secede in time. Nehru saw through it and declared that he might reshuffle the groupings as he saw fit, and Jinnah realized that, if that happened, he could lose one or more border provinces. So he pulled out and declared Direct Action Day. The rest is history.
VM: The violence that ends the novel is cinematic, reminiscent of the great Russian novelists on the one hand and Cormac McCarthy on the other. Despair pervades both the Hindu and the Muslim sides, and Gandhi seems to have predicted it. Could this have been avoided? What counterfactual can we consider?
A: Thanks for those comparisons! I love both the Russians and McCarthy, and I am going to keep that sentence in my pocket for a rainy day.
No way to state counterfactuals with confidence, but I will pretend. Could mass death and displacement have been avoided? By 1947, or even 1940, the answer is no. A religiously-based war of secession would have broken out. Large scale riots would have happened, with associated migrations and deaths. The military would have been dispatched, some form of occupation. Imagine three or four bleeding Kashmirs.
However—earlier? 1930, or 1920? Maybe an Indian Union would have worked. At first. But then secessionist parties would have arisen. It would then depend on whether there was a strongman at the Centre or a weak PM willing to let provinces basically grow autonomous, becoming fiefdoms. Small-scale persecutions of minorities would have taken place, with associated piecemeal migrations. Perhaps by 2022, a de facto Pakistan and a de facto Bangladesh would have existed. Along with a de facto Dravidistan and a de facto Khalistan and a de facto five or six other countries-within-a-country. But there might not have been a war and bloodshed and mass rapes and nuclear armed rivals. There are many possible paths. Infinite, in fact. But we can only take one path at a time. And we have taken this one. Where does it lead? I do not know. Hopefully not to the abyss.
VM: If I had to guess your view on whether Partition was a good thing, you would say, “it depends.” Am I right?
A: Yes. It depends on which group, what part of the subcontinent, short-term, medium-term, long-term, future.... There is no one answer to this. But from the perspective of everyone in the border provinces and refugee-flooded cities like Delhi and Karachi, it was a bad thing short-term. From the perspective of all Hindus of Bangladesh, Kashmir, and Pakistan, it was a bad thing across the short, medium, and long terms. For South Asian Muslims in general and Indian Hindus specifically, it is more of a mixed bag and depends on various factors. The answers are not always clear-cut. West Pakistanis might think it was an unmitigated good for West Pakistan's Muslims, but that is not necessarily true; a lot of capital flight and economic self-destruction took place when the region's rich Hindus fled. Networks, credit, capital, knowhow—these can't be easily replaced. Poland's economy never recovered from the WWII-era destruction of its Jews; Turkey's never recovered from its 20th century expulsion of its Orthodox Greek merchant population, which began with Ataturk's 1923 Treaty of Lausanne (which inspired Jinnah, incidentally) that exchanged 1.5 million (rich, landowning) Turkish Greek Christians for half a million of Greece's (poor, landless) Turkish Muslims. There is a reason Athens has a district called New Smyrna.... The 20th century was big on ethnoreligious consolidation of nation-states. Some proved more successful than others--the German attempt backfired with Nazism; the Burmese Buddhists just ventured it a few years ago when they expelled their Rohingya; meanwhile, the Muslims of Pakistan nearly completely "purified" their country of Hindus. The Bangladeshi Muslims are doing the same thing, but slowly. The Hindus of India have yet to attempt it, and though a fringe fantasizes about it, they never will. Ancient Jewish communities of Iraq and Afghanistan are gone; much of the Arab world has driven its Christian population toward zero. People seem to have forgotten that many of these regions, during British or Ottoman rule, were very "diverse," not just racially but religiously also. British Lahore was 34% Hindu and Sikh. Ottoman Baghdad, in 1910, was a 25% Jewish city. The combination of Near Eastern religion and European ideas of nation-statehood has proven a powerful and deadly combination, historically. Just as Heaven consists exclusively of believers, so must the ideal nation-state. This is how such rapid demographic changes can take place over a century or less. "And then there were none."
VM: Let’s close this out by talking about Gandhi. I know we both grew up with the view that Gandhi was the most exemplary Hindu of the 20th century. His contemporary reputation has taken a hit, particularly in India among some Hindu Nationalists, who disdain his non-violence and his efforts to compromise with Jinnah and the Muslim League, and among followers of Ambedkar, who think his approach to the untouchables (now better known as “Dalits”) was deceptive and patronizing. In the West, some early racist statements in South Africa and his “experiments” with his grandnieces (which you portray so luridly in the novel) have tarnished his reputation. Yet his statue stands in Union Square in New York, in Parliament Square in London (not too far from Churchill’s statue), and in many other locations, where they are often vandalized. What of Gandhi do you still think is great? For what does he deserve scorn?
A: Gandhi alone set himself the task of trying to unify, not just the widely divergent groups of early 20th century Hindus, but Hindus and Muslims of every political leaning, Socialists like Nehru and capitalists like Birla, urban and rural populations, upper caste Tamils and Gujarati “Harijans.” We shouldn’t compare him to a one-group advocate like Ambedkar (as Arundhati Roy has done) and accuse him of insufficient modernity or insufficient wokeness—it says more about the limitations of the accuser’s understanding of Gandhi’s task, and the accuser’s understanding of that historical moment.
Could mass death and displacement have been avoided? By 1947, or even 1940, the answer is no. A religiously-based war of secession would have broken out. Large scale riots would have happened, with associated migrations and deaths. The military would have been dispatched, some form of occupation. Imagine three or four bleeding Kashmirs.
Did he advocate for or feel solidarity for Africans while in South Africa? No, but at that point in his career, he was, like Ambedkar or Jinnah, a one-group advocate. Ambedkar and Jinnah had a relatively homogenous set of people to work with and advocate on behalf of. The task they set themselves was different, more limited, and easier—it resembles the task of every modern-day “activist” for this or that in-group. In a war among groups, in a spoils system, Ambedkar is the model leader. Not Gandhi the conciliator, Ambedkar the polemicist. The BJP supports Ambedkar’s reputation actively. Indians of all backgrounds making that figure their lodestar is not just the sign of a renewed focus on social justice—it’s also a sign of the return to a Period of Warring Groups, which is the default mode of Indian history. Sardar Patel was the INC’s Independence struggle era figure who came closest to a type of pan-Hindu advocate, or at least they idealize him into that kind of advocate (Patel outlawed the RSS for a time)—so it is Patel’s statue, not Gandhi’s, that towers today in Gujarat.
With Gandhi, there is no idealizing him into a pan-Hindu advocate. (Ironically, that was Jinnah’s primary attack on Gandhi during the Pakistan movement of the early 1940s—that Gandhianism was the Trojan Horse for Hindu communalism.) In Gandhi’s last months he wasn’t even a pan-Indian advocate, insisting that Pakistan get its rightful share of the partitioned treasury. Gandhi tried to turn the whole omnium-gatherum of British India into an anti-imperialist movement while avoiding Direct-Action-Day-like shenanigans or hurting a single Britisher. And he got damned far doing that. His greatness lies not just in his accomplishment but in his vision of what could be.
Was he weird around his grandnieces? Yes. But people forget he didn’t try to hide it. We know about it in part because he was open about it. He even told Manu Gandhi to write an explainer. The world would do better to reserve its scorn for Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao. Yet India has a state with a Chief Minister with the last name Stalin, and a not-inconsiderable political fringe movement that takes its inspiration from Mao.
Side story: my own parents were held at gunpoint a decade ago by Maoist terrorists in the northeast of India, while returning from a yatra. They closed down the road and my parents’ van (they were there with friends from Tennessee) was literally the first vehicle not to be allowed through. So they’re right there, face to face with the goons with guns. So my dad gets impatient and decides he’s going to get out of it, so he has his friend’s wife fake appendicitis (my mom refused to play along). The terrorists call over their head guy, who saw right through the ruse. If those Indian wannabe Maoists had truly been the heirs of Mao’s Red Guard, I’d be an orphan right now. A few hours later, my dad negotiates a potty break for him and his three elderly companions—there’s a roadside store. The Maoists let the old people go in together. My dad chats up the store owner, who shows them a way out through the back, so these four elderly Indian-American tourists sneak around the blockade and hire another car about a kilometer down the road. The blockade was lifted the next day.
VM: What’s next for you?
A: I'm all over the place as usual, my friend. I don't have enough hours in the day to write in all the different forms and on all the different subjects I want to write on. Stay tuned!