In The Idiot, the ideological battles which form the basis of Dostoevsky's other major novels are decentralized, in favour of experimentation with the ethical value of literary form, exploring narrative as a mode of interactivity which is fundamental to self-perception and orientation towards the other within both interpersonal and textual relations. As control is ceded to the characters, the structuring of the text becomes dominated by the tension between the openness and presentness of Prince Myshkin's saintly scripting, and the determinism and impulse to closure of Nastas'ia Filippovna's counterscripts. The clash of worldviews represented by their scripts provides the dynamics of the text, and gives the novel a sense of unity in spite of the ad hoc manner in which it was written. As Nastas'ia Filippovna gradually increases her control over the text, and disrupts the narrator's attempts to tell the story of the positively beautiful man, the novel develops according to her refusal to define a single script and the attempts of the other characters, and in particular of the narrator, to resist her scripting. The pressure she brings to bear on the narrative, as she attains a level of power not granted to any other female character in Dostoevsky's oeuvre, allows her, when she finally comes to a decision regarding her script, to make her own denouement the denouement of the entire novel.

Reading The Idiot: the hero and other problems

The Idiot (Idiot, 1868) is perhaps the strangest and most problematic of Dostoevsky's major fictional works, and over 130 years after the novel was published, it continues to vex and divide critics. It lacks an easily definable plot, and has a messy, ad hoc structure, in which an enormous temporal gap opens up and the central story and relationships are sidelined in favour of sub-plots, with major characters disappearing, while apparently unimportant ones become central. Its hero, who bears no resemblance to Dostoevsky's initial conception, has invited the most contradictory interpretations, and its narrator, who at the beginning of the novel appears omniscient and sympathetic to Myshkin, by the end resembles the embodied chronicler of The Devils (Besy, 1871–72) and spurns the hero. Its confusion on the structural and thematic levels has led to the suggestion that it ought not to work as a novel at all, yet it remains compelling and retains a curious unity. Dostoevsky's question, ‘Who is the Idiot? A terrible rogue or a mysterious ideal?’ (reference to PSS in end note here instead of note 4, with vol/page ref. IX, 195), applies just as much to the novel as a whole as to its hero.

The Idiot also appears to lack several features of the quintessential Dostoevskian novel. For example, doubles in The Idiot are far less well developed than in his other fiction, and of little significance on the thematic or structural levels.

While our difficulty in interpreting Nastas'ia Filippovna is primarily a result of her absence from the text, the figure of Prince Myshkin, in spite of his near-constant foregrounding in the narrative, proves equally problematic, as the contradictory interpretations of him discussed in the introduction attest. He is a complex creation, unknowable and indefinable, conceived as an ideal, but evidently falling some way short of being ‘Prince Christ’ (IX, 246, 249) in the final version of the novel. Another appellation in the notebook, the open-ended ‘The prince is a sphinx’ (IX, 248) is perhaps the best description of the hero, and the overriding problem of the novel is the question of how to solve the ‘riddle’ his character represents. The aim of this chapter is not to examine the character of Prince Myshkin as such, but to look beyond the traditional axis of the saintly and the malign, in order to see how his personality and vision changes. In order to establish why the prince's fate becomes so closely bound up with Nastas'ia Filippovna's, and the effect of this on his personality, this chapter will examine the foundations of his script and the ways in which it changes for the worse during the course of the novel, concentrating on Myshkin's vision of a ‘higher reality’, its origin in his epileptic fits, and its connections with his fundamental ideas (‘Compassion is the most important and the only law of human existence’; ‘humility is a terrible force’; ‘the world will be saved by beauty’; ‘there shall be time no longer’ (VIII, 192; 329; 317; 189)).

Introducing the field of discourse

Jain Studios is a media software production company located in New Delhi. Set up in 1985, it has produced over one hundred political videos related to Parliamentary and Assembly elections in India as well as issue-based videos on campaigns and other events organized and staged for the purpose of mobilizing supporters for the Hindutva agenda. The president of the Studios is Dr Jinendra Kumar Jain, a medical doctor, ambitious and visionary businessman, and active supporter of Hindu cultural nationalism (Hindutva) in the 1980s and early 1990s. In political and ideological circles of India's capital Delhi, for the duration of those years, J K Jain and his studios were mostly known for their alliance with the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Party of the Indian People; hereafter referred to as BJP) and other organizations related to the ideological body of Hindutva, all of which are subsumed under the umbrella of the Sangh Parivar. The ‘Sangh’, or association/brotherhood, is a pan-national network of affiliated organizations that functions on a variety of levels, such as parliamentary as well as non-parliamentary, educational, social and cultural activities. This complex infrastructure caters to a wide range of groups, interests and needs.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s in particular, the BJP—as the official political branch of the Sangh Parivar—had come to function as the major speaker and catalyst for a social movement taking place particularly in north and west India.

Walter Benjamin's quotation addresses the role played by new audiovisual media in the construction of national identity, and the way in which the perception of individuals and groups in a society is influenced by modern technologies. Benjamin's comment is part of a large body of reflections accumulated in his Arcades Project, a montage on the rise and the ‘signatures’ of modern societies and public life in Europe in the context of popular culture, politics and capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Naturally, his concern with production and distribution of various visual media demands to be read within the historical context from which it arose. Yet, despite today's very different technological, social and economic conditions, which impact on, and are shaped by, postmodern and postcolonial societies, Benjamin's concern with the relationships between actuality and virtuality, fantasy and rationality, and the complex invisible and visible strategies of ideological power that enhance ways of seeing and displaying, is still relevant.

The voice-over for a Jain Studios video entitled The Making of a Chief Minister addresses potential political clients interested in marketing themselves with confident lines such as: ‘If your target is victory, then your medium is VOW!’ Equally, in my conversations with J K Jain and other employees of Jain Studios, the BJP's victories in Parliamentary and Assembly Elections were frequently attributed to the power of the Studios’ facilities, in terms of both production and distribution.

These brief examples indicate the hopes and desires shared among several BJP representatives that political transformation could be successfully enhanced with the help of new media technologies, and that the videos produced by Jain Studios could have a strong impact on the audiences. As discussed in the previous chapter, it was in this way that the party sought to exploit new media technologies that had thus far been restricted through state monopolization. In the prologue to his work, The Rise of Network Society, Manuel Castells speaks of a similar interaction of technology, politics and society in the context of identity constitution and focuses on the question of the actual impact of media on social change.

The introductory scene of the video God Manifests Himself (hereafter, also referred to as GMH), produced in early 1990 by Jain Studios, opens with a speech by J K Jain, who appears on screen against the backdrop of a white temple and blue skies. The temple is a model of the proposed Ram temple due to be ‘rebuilt’ at the disputed site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in order, according to spokespeople of the Hindu Right, to honour Lord Ram's birth and reinstall national integrity and justice to the Hindu majority. The site is particularly well known to us because of the mosque's demolition by supporters of the Hindutva movement on December 6, 1992, and because of the riots between Hindus and Muslims that swept across the subcontinent in the subsequent months. In the video, J K Jain addresses the viewers like this:

There then follows a montage of different calendar prints of Lord Ram, one of the main gods of the Hindu pantheon, referred to as the beholder of supreme authority.

This chapter explores Hindutva spokespeople's attempts to exploit the video media in the context of nation building with respect to the notion of history. The key argument is that Jain Studios’ videos were used to create consensus in the viewers that India's history had to be rewritten by re-making it. The new media technology was one tool through which Hindutva spokespeople strove to persuade audiences to get personally involved in what was referred to as an unavoidable ‘turning point in history’, and another step to Hindu people's self-empowerment. The idea behind this was that those who hold the past control the future.