Images for a Godless World: Violence After the Sacred in the Millennial Indian Novel

Abstract

The passage from The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaff) where Nietzsche’s aphorism “Gott ist tot” makes its first appearance on the stage of philosophy could serve as an epigraph for this chapter, since it contains the crucial terms which frame my discussion of the representation of political violence in the Indian novel of the millennium, a period whose tone is inflected, fittingly for the end of one century and the beginning of another, by the image of apocalypse, and the trans- valuation of the Nehruvian nationalist and secular paradigms, reflected in the Indian Constitution¹, by transnational political violence, most recently and apocalyptically figured in the Mumbai attacks of 26/11. The thought of the death of god appears three times in The Gay Science: in section 108 (New Struggles), in section 125 (The Madman), and for a third time in section 343 (The Meaning of Our Cheerfulness). While Thus Spoke Zarathustra ( Also sprach Zarathustra) is the text by Nietzsche most responsible for popularizing the phrase “god is dead,” it is the passage from “The Madman” that provides the germinal seed for this paper:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? (181)