The Idiot

During its reception history, The Idiot has been evaluated by commentators in opposing terms. Some consider it one of Dostoevsky's best novels, others a literary failure and, indeed, The Idiot it is an ambivalent novel. The main character, Lev Myshkin, is psychologically interesting and he personifies a high ethical ideal, but he is not the Christ-like figure or the moral force the author intended him to be.

Neither does the structure of The Idiot help to strengthen Myshkin's character as lifelike. The first part has an improbable time scale: it covers one day, in which Myshkin, who must be dead tired and out of sorts after four days in a third-class compartment of a steam train from Switzerland to St Petersburg, has various meetings on arrival and long conversations in different places, becomes involved in a love intrigue, visits a party and is engaged in verbal peace-keeping until late at night. In comparison with the other characters, Parfyon Rogozhin, Nastasya Barashkova and Aglaya Epanchina, with their effervescent zest for living, Lev Myshkin appears as a passive person who becomes involved in events that originate outside his own world. But this is largely only appearance. As Sarah Young, in her study of The Idiot has shown, Myshkin has a major effect on the course of events through the ‘active expression’ of his compassion and humility. Through his originality, he even has ‘a plot-defining script’ to offer, right up to the final failure.

After the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009, the Sri Lankan government and international donors embarked on massive efforts at ‘reconstructing’ the war-torn areas in the north and east of the island. A closer look at the rhetoric surrounding these efforts shows that they are not only about the physical rebuilding of houses, livelihoods and infrastructure. There is also a hope that reconstruction can consolidate peace by making the benefits of peace clearly visible to the people and thereby preventing them from supporting new violent rebellions. ‘Post’-war reconstruction and the ‘buypeace’ thinking that comes with it is not new to Sri Lanka. Rather, it has been pursued at various stages during the ups and downs of conflict during over two decades. This chapter takes a critical look at the role of reconstruction during the peace process that was initiated in 2002, to see what the peace dividend debate from that time period can teach us about politics of reconstruction and popular support for peace.

When I visited Aleweddy in Jaffna peninsula in northern Sri Lanka in 2005 – over three years after the signing of the ceasefire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – the village was in a process of cautious reconstruction. Aleweddy had been abandoned and under army control since 1992, but the cease-fire had enabled the villagers to return home after a decade or more of displacement.

Introduction

This study explores Norwegian peace diplomacy in Sri Lanka, during 2002–2006 in the peace process between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The Norwegian mediation attempt is unique in several ways. It represents the first attempt of third-party mediation in Sri Lanka, where the mediator was invited and accepted by both main parties. The 2002 ceasefire agreement also established the longest pause in any major fighting between the LTTE and the government, in the trajectory of the conflict. Moreover, the Norwegians were not only active as facilitators of the negotiation process, they also played a key role in the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), a mission designed to observe the compliance to the ceasefire agreement. At the same time, the Norwegian mediation process has not been without criticism. The Norwegian mediators have been perceived as being too passive in the approach to human rights abuses committed both by the Sri Lankan government and the rebels. In addition, a large section of the Sri Lankan population, notably within the majority Sinhalese population, have seen Norway as favouring the Tamil cause and being soft on terrorism.

By now there is a growing literature dealing specifically with the different aspects of the Norwegian peace diplomacy in Sri Lanka. Yet, it is not possible to fully understand the Norwegian peace diplomacy without grasping the underlying guiding assumption on which it has been built.

Towards the end of the 90s, Ruskin Bond invokes the ghost of his abject self as it was lived in the uncertain days of yet another turning point in Indian history. The fictionalized expression of the self's desires and fears in A Flight of Pigeons now becomes an autobiographical experience.

In 1997, the fiftieth year of India's independence, the BBC chose to broadcast a short but significant biographical vignette, ‘The Playing Fields of Shimla’, which Bond wrote as part of his Memoir. The author narrates the nostalgic experience of his adolescent friendship with a Muslim friend, Omar, in Bishop Cotton School at Shimla in India during the days of the Raj; how they come close to considering each other their alter-egos and in one of their joint intrigues find a tunnel in a defunct drainage pipe in the school's third flat to escape into a no man's land. These idyllic excitements cease with the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, forcing Omar to migrate to an unknown land called Pakistan. The feeling of estrangement comes to a head during the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, when Bond finds out that one of the pilots of the Pakistani bomber, which is shot down by Indian flak near the playing field of his Shimla school is Omar. Bond's apparently innocuous manner of narrating his childhood memories hides concerns of identity.

The unconscious in Ruskin Bond's literature is formed through his everyday encounters with the world prior to its objectification of the world of his fictions. A particular episode in the adolescent days of the author's real life will be a case of much relevance to my present analysis. I will analyze two versions – the first is a newspaper publication and the second, a revision of the first by the author for inclusion in an anthology – of a fantasy story taken from an early stage of the author's career.

The significance of the story is that it is an allegorical reflection upon the meta-fictional crises that engender the transference of romantic desires of a young man into inscribed fantasies. A comparison of the two versions of the story will lead us to understand how contingencies of the zeitgeist sometimes intervene to confuse an author at an experimental stage about the authenticity of the literary idiom that should represent him best. The version that least represents him might get circulated when the best is not included in any anthology, and is soon forgotten. It is the task of critical scholarship to rescue the most representative version from obscurity.

The title given by the author to both versions of the story is ‘The Eyes are not Here’. To acquaint the readers with the slender plot of the story I will depend on the popular version included in the Sahitya Academy compilation, Contemporary Indian Short Stories in English (36–39) (hereafter referred to as the SA version).

Whenever Ruskin Bond was beset by personal and professional problems, he claimed to have turned to writing for children. He thought that writing for children needed a less subjective approach that would help him get away from himself. Bond's wish to get away from himself is in fact a psychological quest to be his other. Perry Nodelman (29) equates orientalism with the concept of ‘the Other’ – of that which was opposite to the person doing the talking or thinking or studying. According to Lacan, ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’ (Fundamental Concepts, 172). Lacan explored how the other is what defines the self not only by being what the self is not, but by being only what it lacks and therefore what it both fears and desires. The way in which Bond tends to see children as wonderfully innocent, primitive, and desirably different reveals their function for him as this Lacanian sort of other. He makes childhood his own unconscious, prior to and separate from his real human life. In claiming to write for children, he uses a generic space to enact the quest for self-discovery. As an adult writing for the child, he carefully structures a self-referential trope or hides a reflective core within the narrative. Here I will take up two of Ruskin Bond's apparently innocuous ghost stories, written in 1999: ‘Wilson's Bridge’ and ‘Night of the Millennium’ – otherwise pleasant reading for young adults – to show how they represent the dynamics of identity formation that engender the author's mind. I will attempt a comparable analysis of Rudyard Kipling's The Phantom Rickshaw, which appears to me a partial model for Bond's stories.

Ruskin Bond was born to a British father, Aubrey Alexander Bond, and a supposedly Anglo-Indian mother, Edith Dorothy, at Kasauli Military Hospital in Himachal Pradesh, India on 19 May 1934. It is useful to bear in mind from the outset that I will be working with Bond's own sense of the self rather than any objective truth about his lineage or descent. Whilst he is undoubtedly aware of his father's British heritage, his mother's lineage is far more mysterious, even to him. I will return to this matter in greater detail later. Before that, however, let me introduce the subject of the self/other dialectic – referred to in the title of this study – which seeks to deal with the author's anxieties of identity.

Bond's life (and, for that matter, his semi-autobiographical literature) is an allegory of the colonial aftermath. For him, India is a place in which, in his youthful days, he overcame daunting rejection in order to work out a congenial absorption. Suitable absorption accommodates both integral and differential styles of living. It caters to ‘identity’ formation in so far as the term refers to both similarities with and differences from others or ‘the other’. His is an unusual but exemplary attempt at the absorption of a member of a minority ethnic community whose role in the shaping of the postcolonial Indian psyche is not seriously addressed elsewhere. This is an attempt to explore the dialogue between the biographical and authorial selves of the man whose subjectivity is informed by the fantasies of space and time.

Introduction

Sixty years of Sri Lanka's existence as a post-colonial nation-state has seen a number of failed and incomplete state reform projects. Some of these attempts were made when the island nation in South Asia enjoyed the reputation of being a model of democracy with relative social peace. Others were made after Sri Lankan politics had taken a decisive turn towards civil war and violence. State reform in the Sri Lankan context has meant re-constitution of the state structure in order to create arrangements for power-sharing between the majority and minority ethnic communities through regional autonomy. The earliest reform attempts were in 1958 and 1966. On both occasions, leaders of the ruling Sinhalese political elite and the Tamil political elite agreed to implement limited arrangements for regional autonomy. Those were attempts made during Sri Lanka's ‘peace times,’ before the ethnic conflict developed itself into a civil war. Amidst opposition from Sinhalese nationalist constituencies, both attempts were abandoned. The others came up later, in the new context of a violent and protracted ethnic civil war – 1987, 1994–1995, 2000, 2002 and 2007–2008 being the crucial years in a continuing process of state reform failure. The details of these episodes are quite well-known and many of them are adequately documented in the literature on Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict (Coomaraswamy 1996, Loganathan 1996, Thiruchelvam 2000, Uyangoda 1999, 2007).

Sri Lanka has repeatedly gained international attention among scholars of politics and development as an illustrative case of development theory and practice. This was initiated with Sri Lanka's strong emphasis on importsubstitution industrialisation and social welfare in the 1960s and 70s, but the country also gained critical attention for its shift to economic liberalisation in 1977 as well as the subsequent coexistence of neoliberalism, authoritarianism and armed insurgencies in the 1980s. The last decade has seen a new focus on Sri Lanka as a test case for internationalised conflict resolution and liberal peacebuilding in protracted intrastate conflicts. The final attempt at negotiating an end to the armed conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was characterised by active involvement by a range of international actors as facilitators, donors and monitors of liberal peace. From being an intrastate conflict that was of little relevance beyond the South Asian sub-continent, Sri Lanka became a test for liberal peacebuilding facilitated and funded by the US-led ‘international community’ (Goodhand and Klem 2005, Liyanage 2008, Lunstead 2007). As the peace process broke down and was replaced by an intense and successful military campaign by the government, Sri Lanka has been seen by some as providing evidence of the possibility of defeating ‘terrorism’ and creating peace by military means. Other observers emphasise that the final stage of the conflict demonstrates the changing geopolitics of the Indian Ocean and an emerging new politics of security and order as well as the injustice and humanitarian costs of a victor's peace.

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is a striking optimism about the emerging India. The country that only had a past is beginning to be seen as a country with a future. The land of scarcities is being thought of as a land of opportunities. The land of snake charmers is now considered a land of fashion designers. The land of traditional crafts is increasingly perceived as a land of information technology. The land of bullock carts or steam trains is beginning to be seen as a land of automobiles or jet planes. This dramatic change of mood is particularly discernible among the rich and the literati in India. There is a similar change in thinking about India in the outside world, mostly among interested individuals or concerned institutions. The mood is contagious, and the images are larger than life, because those who articulate such views have both voice and influence.

It would seem that perceptions about India are changing rapidly. The realities are also changing, but much more slowly. And there is a mismatch. The perceptions, as also the realities, depend on who you are, what you do and where you live. Captains of industry, editors of newspapers or ministers of governments see one India. So does the software engineer in Bangalore, the stockbroker in Mumbai, the lobbyist in Delhi or the entrepreneur in provincial India.