The Solitude of EmperorsDavid DavidarPenguin, Rs 495The best thing about David Davidar’s The Solitude of Emperors is the part when the narrator, a journalist called Vijay, conducts an interview with Rajan, a self-made businessman, whom Vijay suspects of having been involved in the riots in Bombay in 1992. Further, Vijay suspects Rajan has an agenda to create communal discord by laying siege on a Christian place of worship in a sleepy south Indian town.Rajan’s narrative illuminates a dominant 1990s mindset, which sees no contradiction between wanting to grow as a nation, achieving “superpower status”, and blocking out 20 per cent of the country’s population. Skillfully constructed, Rajan’s character comes through as one of the most realistic in the book, as someone who without batting an eyelid goes about executing his plan to show “them” their place and with cold reasoning articulates why he wants to do so. In Rajan’s opinion, “The country is poised for greatness, and the only way it will achieve this is if we are resolute and move forward in a united fashion. And that will happen only if the majority leads the way; no nation is strong that has its people pulling in all different directions. If the majority community is powerful and determined, the minorities will automatically fall into line, and then we can all coexist peacefully.”Davidar’s second novel is very much a sketch of the mid-1990s with divisions tearing middle India apart. Exactly the opposite of Rajan is Rustom Sorabjee, who edits The Indian Secularist. Sorabjee is Vijay’s boss. He hands Vijay a manuscript that has accounts of three Indian “visionaries”, Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi. These “Emperors”, their powerful vision drawn from their ability to deal with inner silences and an idea for India, serve as inspiration for Vijay at difficult times. Half of the novel centres around his visit to the town of Meham, where he is sent to cover the tension around a Christian shrine equally revered by all faiths but now under siege by fundamentalists who wish to claim it as a mandir alone. Rustom’s commitment to secular India alongwith the mindlessness of the violence in 1992/3 Bombay that Vijay experiences, firsthand, turn Vijay from someone who is lackadaisical, with few opinions, into an impassioned secularist. Vijay ends up doing all he can to, somewhat clumsily, try to change the course of events he has been sent to cover.The author does talk about the Bombay riots in chilling detail, and what they do to India’s finest city. Mercifully, no famed “Bombay spirit” is invoked here. To the contrary: “The trains and buses ran packed to capacity everyday. Office workers and mill hands and shoppers and hawkers and beggars and pickpockets and policemen went about their daily routine, but it was only because they had no option but to feed their families; they did not have the luxury of staying at home and building bomb shelters and stocking them with mountains of toilet paper and grapefruit juice and low-fat yogurt as their counterparts in a Western city might have done. Bombay would live and die on its streets, its crowded bazaars and mohallas, and even as they went about their daily lives, its millions watched and wondered if they would be expected to sacrifice themselves for their city.”But one regret. There are no women characters who play a significant role in the plot.
