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Literary Review
BOOKWATCH
As the curtains came down...
ANITA JOSHUA
The Last Durbar: A Dramatic Presentation of the Division of British India, Shashi Joshi, Lotus, Rs. 295.
Another book on Partition! Indeed, but, pardon the cliché, with a difference. Working on the premise that the continued dissatisfaction with the answers provided by scholars to complex questions regarding Partition is testimony to the fact that
“the narrative mode of history writing cannot reflect the simultaneity and multiplicity of perpetually shifting positions and accents”, Shashi Joshi has dramatised the last days of the Raj.
Academics might find fault with her choice of medium but if history can be made more readable then so be it. Joshi’s work, in her own words, is not a play meant for the stage but a “dialogical history” — history in dialogue form for the uninitiated. Culling out relevant portions from the Mountbatten Papers, besides biographies and memoirs of key characters of Partition, Joshi has turned the reference material into dialogues and set them into sets and scenes; 59 in all.
Into the tense moments as the sun set on the British Empire to mayhem and bloodshed, Joshi brings in the personal — the special relationship that the Mountbattens, particularly Edwina, had with Nehru — besides some asides like journalists’ banter at a watering hole. Presented in this form, the tall leaders of the times — on whom history has thrust greatness — come across as human beings allowed their fair share of follies.
Whether her treatment of the subject clears the muddle around Partition is a moot point but it does pique interest in a subject that has been written about once too often. And, it provides some interesting, if irrelevant-to-the-course-of-history, details like the fact that Mountbatten took away the entire stock of wine in the Viceregal House on his departure and foreign embassies were seen as a good market for vegetables grown in what was soon to become Rashtrapati Bhavan!
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