Clear Light of Day

Clear Light of Day takes place in the decades before and after India gains its independence from England. Though its focus is narrow—centered on the long-simmering tensions among the Das siblings and unfolding largely within the family’s crumbling house in Old Delhi—it uses that private, domestic story to reflect the larger transformations taking place within the nation as a whole. As the Das siblings argue over how to remember the past and how to carry their sometimes-traumatic memories forward into an uncertain future, they mirror the experience of a nation—also riven by seemingly irreconcilable disagreements—struggling collectively to define itself in a new era. The concept of the nation is central to postcolonial literature, as well as to nearly all independence movements. The colonizer has imagined the colony as a mere subsidiary of itself. In order to become independent, it must develop an image of itself as a nation. If a nation is—according to the political scientist Benedict Anderson’s influential definition—an “imagined community,” then creating one is an act of collective imagination and collective memory that necessarily involves disagreement and conflict. In this way, India in the mid-20th century is like the Das family—arguing over how to define itself, how to understand its past, and how to imagine its future.

The novel takes place in Old Delhi, in the Punjab province, which was bifurcated when Pakistan came into existence. Although none of the characters engage directly in nationalist politics, they are all affected by European colonization of India and by nationalist struggles to free India of its British rulers. They also must struggle to make sense of their lives in post-Independence India. The older siblings have absorbed the classics of English literature. Raja imagines himself as a Byronic hero, yet he also looks to Urdu classics from the period of the Mughal Empire, before English colonization. Bakul the diplomat speaks of an India found in tourist guides: the Taj Mahal, the Bhagavad Gita, the eternal India (40). Bim somewhat ironically describes her role in the family: “Modern times. Modern India. Independent India” (85). Bim tells her sister that the tumultuous summer of 1947 was “the great event of our lives” (47) which marked the end of their youth in a dramatic way. The departure of the Hyder family was a direct result of the growing anti-Muslim sentiment leading up to the Partition. Events that occurred in the public sphere mark events in the private sphere, even if inaccurately remembered by the characters, as when Bim believes that the last time she saw Dr. Biswas was on the night of Gandhi’s assassination.

If the nation appears stuck in time, unable to move forward, this stasis is reflected in the private lives of the characters. Raja can’t break free of his youthful obsession with a romanticized Mughal past—one that, though it draws on Indian history, is also deeply influenced by English literary romanticism. The diplomat Bakul clings to the vision of an “eternal India” that leaves little room for the messy political and economic realities of his own era. The image of Baba incessantly playing 78s from decades earlier on an outdated gramophone serves as a metaphor for these more abstract repetitions. The records go round and round, repeating the same melodies, just as Bakul and Raja keep repeating the same fantasies of the past. As Bim laments, “Old Delhi does not change. It only decays” (11). What Bakul notes about the neighbor’s house could also be said about the Das residence: “No one’s replaced a brick or painted a wall there for years” (44). Tara also tells Bim that she has noticed that “the house hadn’t been painted and the garden is neglected—that sort of thing” (157). For Bim, the issue is bigger than just the house; for her it is all of Delhi, which in her life experience is all of India. She tells Tara and Bakul:

‘My students tell me it is a great cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping graves. Now New Delhi, they say is different. That is where things happen. The way they describe it, it sounds like a nest of fleas. So much happens there, it must be a jumping place. I never go. Baba never goes. And here, here nothing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened long ago—in the time of the Tughlaqs, the Khiljis, the Sultanate, the Moghuls—that lot.’ She snapped her fingers in time to her words smartly. ‘And then the British built New Delhi and moved everything out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting duller and greyer I suppose. Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes away—to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They don’t come back’ (11).

Here, she has moved from the romanticized past of the Mughal Empire, to the recent past of British colonial rule, the diminished and stagnant present. Yet her statement in the end is not entirely accurate, for Bakul and Tara have come back, if only for a visit, and the story ends with her asking that Raja come back to visit too. Most of the Indian people who go to the Middle East are migrant workers who plan to return home. The stagnation of the family reflects the romanticized and dead Mughal past. The decay of bourgeois life under colonial rule reflects the disintegration and decadence of the postcolonial nation. Yet there seems to remain for the Bim and her siblings and for India a power of time and memory that can both destroy and conserve (per Eliot). Bim’s willingness to meet again with her brother, along with the re-enactment of the communal concert, suggests a possibility for renewal and preservation for the nation and the family.