Constructed religious feelings and communal identities in Hamārā śahar us baras by Gītāñjali Śrī

Gītāñjali Śrī's Hindi novel Hamārā śahar us baras (Our Town That Year, published in 1998) presents a story placed in a town that could be anywhere and everywhere in north India, and in a time that could be any time since the 1980s up to the demolition of the Bābrī masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 and its bloody aftermath. Characters in the novel voice doubts and questions that worry the intelligentsia. Hamārā śahar us baras asks the following basic question: how does it happen that during an insurgence of communalistic violence even people who refuse the opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ end up nolens volens applying it? It does so focusing on a particular environment: the academia. Universities and research institutes in India have for a long time been considered a nest for secular and progressive thinking, but at the end of the 20th century, under the saffron cultural regime, free thinking and discussion became progressively out-fashioned and the central Government managed to diminish the autonomy of academics – e.g. through the direct choice of Vice-chancellors –and to put loyal people into key positions in the prominent research and cultural institution. Hamārā śahar us baras is set within this historical framework, referring in particular to the sanguinary events connected to the Babri mosque demolition, and depicting the process through which the ‘old’ secular, pluralistic identity is slowly substituted by a ‘new’, communalistic tinged one. This paper presents an analysis of the character system and of the narrative structure, freely using some tools borrowed from narratology. Hamārā śahar us baras is a novel about the crisis of secular reasoning and the problems of a rigidly polarised ideology. The Indian intelligentsia represented in it is shown facing the crisis of secular tolerance in the demolition of the secular state, being incapable of giving alternative answers. Anguishing in confusion, they fall helplessly prisoner of the ‘us vs. them’ logic, with a negative effect both from a private and from a collective point of view. Rather than solving the existing problems of Indian universities, communal ideology seems to emphasise the tendency to sycophancy and subservience characterising a great deal of Indian public life. This attitude, though - as the story suggests - can hardly lead to a flourishing intellectual life.