The Idea of a Hybrid India

Abstract

The idea of an inclusive, composite Indian nation based on tolerance and cultural synthesis was a key component of secular nationalist discourse in the 1930s and 1940s. This concept of India which emphasised both an ancient capacity for synthesis and a ‘fundamental, essential unity of India’ was a reaction to the increasingly hostile communalist confrontations from the 1920s onwards and the danger of the partitioning of the subcontinent (Pandey 1990: 247–52). The idea of a harmoniously composite India was represented both as a reality in the past and as a model for the future independent nation. With the increasing communalist violence in the 1980s and 1990s, however, the credibility of this concept of India has come under severe strain. One of the major concerns of The Moor’s Last Sigh is the representation and interrogation of this idea of an inclusive, creatively diverse India against the background of Hindu nationalism’s campaign for an exclusive Hindu nation. This chapter explores how this idea of India is represented in The Moor’s Last Sigh and whether it is depicted as a viable concept for the future, in contrast to the notion of Mother India, which the novel eventually abandons as a usable conception of the nation. Like the figure of Mother India, the idea of the composite nation is closely associated with Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last Sigh, the character who artistically re-creates the ‘myth of the plural hybrid nation’, personified by her son Moor in her paintings (MLS 227).