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The Solitude of Emperors (2007)

par David Davidar

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Suffocating in the small-town world of his parents, Vijay is desperate to escape to the raw energy of Bombay in the early 1990s. His big chance arrives unexpectedly when the family servant Raju is recruited by a right wing organization. As a result of an article he writes about the increasing power of sectarian politicians, Vijay gets a job in a small Bombay publication, The Indian Secularist. There he meets Rustom Sorabjee - the inspirational founder of the magazine who opens Vijay's eyes to the damage caused to the nation by the mixing of religion and politics. A year after his arrival in Bombay, Vijay is caught up in violent riots that rip though the city, a reflection of the upsurge of fundamentalism everywhere in the country. He is sent to a small tea town in the Nilgiri mountains to recover, but finds that the unrest in the rest of India has touched this peaceful spot as well, specifically a spectacular shrine called The Tower of God, which is the object of political wrangling. He is befriended by Noah, an enigmatic and colourful character who lives in the local cemetery and quotes Pessoa, Cavafy, and Rimbaud but is ostracised by a local elite obsessed with little more than growing their prize fuchsias. As the discord surrounding the local shrine comes to a head, Vijay tries to alert them to the dangers, but his intervention will have consequences he could never have foreseen.… (plus d'informations)
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The Solitude of Emperors
by David Davidar
McClelland & Stewart, 288 pages, $32.99

“It was in December 1992 that Bombay lost its way.”

In 1992, Hindu nationalists destroyed a mosque in the town of Ahodhya, India. Muslim retaliation was to be expected, and the resulting sectarian violence led to one of the bloodiest and most shameful incidents in India’s long history.

David Davidar, president of Penguin Canada and author of The Solitude of Emperors, presents the riots with unflinching directness. As his protagonist Vijay watches people being torn apart in the street, “internal organs visible as if in a urology lab demonstration,” the nature of mob violence attains a gruesome intimacy.

It is not violence, however, that drives Davidar’s plot, but the lust for power in those who would feign religious righteousness as a masquerade for their dreams of glory. And in a world that sees the increasing reliance on fundamentalist dogma rather than logic to guide those in power, the themes of The Solitude of Emperors are all too familiar.

Vijay is an aspiring journalist with the Bombay-based newspaper The Indian Secularist. After a close brush with death during the riots, he is sent to the tea town of Meham to relax, but discovers instead that the religious tensions of the big cities are slowly making inroads into rural India as well.

While Solitude is ostensibly Vijay’s story, Davidar interweaves his tale with the words of an unpublished treatise on past leaders of India, written by Vijay’s mentor Mr Sorabjee. In this fashion, Davidar manages the not-inconsiderable feat of seamlessly couching a diatribe on India’s “compact with the Gods” within a personal drama of sizeable power.

Attempting to encapsulate the timeless lessons of Ashoka, Akbar, and Gandhi, while tying them to the state of the country in the 1990s, Mr Sorabjee hopes that his text will serve as a call to arms for young Indians. While admitting that poverty and poor educational resources are rampant throughout the nation, “our surfeit of Gods, one for every three or four of us, more than makes up for any lack of doctors, policemen, school teachers, nuclear scientists, and judges.”

Sadly, while India may very well be the most religiously diverse country on Earth, Mr Sorabjee worries its reputation as a nation of tolerance is rapidly being eroded by “small-minded men who will use [religion] to advance their own petty ends.” Vijay’s adventures do nothing to dispel this belief, and as the plot steadily advances toward an almost-foregone conclusion, the hideous inevitability of conflict creates almost unbearable tension.

While there is undeniable bleakness in Davidar’s words, it would be a disfavor to label The Solitude of Emperors as disheartening. As Mr Sorabjee ends his essay with words of hope, asking the young to “fight in whatever way you can to restore sanity and decency to our nation,” so too does Davidar, arguing that the solutions to such religious dilemmas are far more complicated than the overt easiness of blind fundamentalism would have us believe.

Starting a war is a straightforward affair; ending a war requires compassion, thought, and reason. The Solitude of Emperors never offers any answer but this one certainty, and in reminding us of it, Davidar may be gearing us up for what lies ahead.

Originally published in The Winnipeg Free Press, September 9, 2007. ( )
  ShelfMonkey | Sep 11, 2007 |
The writing is good – expressive when it needs to be but mostly economical, which gives the feeling of a newspaper article. Vijay as narrator is somewhat boring, which made me feel stifled as he must have in his home village. But it’s hard to really feel the action through the words of this narrator, and as a result the exciting moments are not exciting and the tragedy doesn’t feel very tragic. I think, to get a proper feel of it, I will need to read it again. And that’s not a bad thing.
ajouté par camillahoel | modifierRead And Find Out, Rebekah (Sep 24, 2009)
 
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Suffocating in the small-town world of his parents, Vijay is desperate to escape to the raw energy of Bombay in the early 1990s. His big chance arrives unexpectedly when the family servant Raju is recruited by a right wing organization. As a result of an article he writes about the increasing power of sectarian politicians, Vijay gets a job in a small Bombay publication, The Indian Secularist. There he meets Rustom Sorabjee - the inspirational founder of the magazine who opens Vijay's eyes to the damage caused to the nation by the mixing of religion and politics. A year after his arrival in Bombay, Vijay is caught up in violent riots that rip though the city, a reflection of the upsurge of fundamentalism everywhere in the country. He is sent to a small tea town in the Nilgiri mountains to recover, but finds that the unrest in the rest of India has touched this peaceful spot as well, specifically a spectacular shrine called The Tower of God, which is the object of political wrangling. He is befriended by Noah, an enigmatic and colourful character who lives in the local cemetery and quotes Pessoa, Cavafy, and Rimbaud but is ostracised by a local elite obsessed with little more than growing their prize fuchsias. As the discord surrounding the local shrine comes to a head, Vijay tries to alert them to the dangers, but his intervention will have consequences he could never have foreseen.

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