National Stories

Abstract

Much attention has recently been devoted to how nations as imagined communities forge their identity through a consensual ‘national story’.¹ Focusing on the relationship between the individual and society — in Rushdie’s words, ‘How […] may the career of a single individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation?’ — this chapter examines national stories by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry and Jonathan Coe, in which families serve as a microcosm of the nation.² Despite their geographical diversity, they display considerable similarities. From a middle-class, left-leaning perspective, all emplot the breakdown of the post-Independence or postwar socialist consensus, enshrined in Nehruvian secularism or the British Welfare State, into communal (that is, sectarian) or class polarisation, significant responsibility for which is attributed to Indira Gandhi or Margaret Thatcher. In varieties of conspiracy theory, their regimes are represented as enmeshed with other power groups — the Shiv Sena and underworld of Bombay, the British establishment — to form all-encompassing networks which inspire depressive resignation among the disempowered or newly marginalised. Significantly, none of the novels envisages organised resistance to these developments; their political protest assumes satirical form. But although their location of agency within the individual rather than in larger social structures has attracted Marxist criticism, this focus enables them to investigate moral responsibility, in the form of complicity with the developments they abhor, and, in Rushdie’s and Mistry’s case, to suggest that societal change is only possible through a transformation of the self, affecting the interactions on a micro scale through which society is (re)produced.