TY - JOUR
AU - Windsor, Tara, Talwar
AB - Abstract Taking Kamila Shamsie’s 2014 war novel A God in Every Stone as its core case study, this article examines the development of increasingly complex, heterogeneous and inclusive understandings and memories of the Great War in the twenty-first century. It demonstrates how the novel’s complex and intricate narrative, as well as its paratextual framing and much of its reception, offer a timely engagement with a range of hitherto hidden or marginalized histories, particularly in relation to the role of women and experiences of South Asian soldiers, as well as with colonial violence and anti-colonial resistance in the war’s aftermath. At the same time, the novel underscores the ambivalences contained in those stories. Through this analysis, the article considers the extent to which A God in Every Stone can be seen as a ‘more expansive form of commemoration [...] with the scope for multiple narratives’.1 The novel is also ‘historically and ethically responsible’, not least in its critical reflection on the purposes, practices and power structures behind longer-standing historical narratives and cultural memories of the war itself and the (imperial) past in a post-colonial global context. In August 2014, the novelists Kamila Shamsie and Louisa Young took part in a public discussion at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Under the rubric of ‘Words and War’ – one of the 2014 festival themes – their conversation with the Guardian Books editor Claire Armitstead explored their recent literary treatments of the context and aftermath of the First World War: Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone and Young’s The Heroes’ Welcome. Commenting on the challenges of writing historical fiction about this period, Young drew a connection between the writer’s overarching task and her own reaction to Shamsie’s novel: What a novelist is doing is peering into the cracks. [...] You know, the First World War does not need chronicling, there’s so much written about it from so many different directions, but what it can always benefit from is peering into a particular area and for me it was facial damage. And, I mean, of course, the period that Kamila is writing about, you know, the angle that Kamila has taken, has not been hugely written about, and so for me, as somebody who thinks she knows loads about the war, I read that and [it’s like] ‘nice, thank you, interesting, had no idea’, which is a great response to have to a novel.2 Young’s comments highlight two central premises of this article. Firstly, while she does not specify exactly which aspects of Shamsie’s work were most illuminating for her, Young’s professional endorsement of the originality of A God in Every Stone suggests that Shamsie’s novel addresses important blind spots in the literary and wider cultural memory of the war – in this case in the British context, but also, as we shall see, beyond it.3 Secondly, Young’s candid acknowledgement that the novel alerted her to gaps in her understanding of an era with which she is otherwise so familiar highlights the novel’s invitation for critical (self-)reflection on the extent of one’s own historical knowledge and assumptions, which are, in turn, embedded in wider historical narratives and memory discourses. The article demonstrates how the novel’s complex and intricate narrative, its paratextual framing and much of its reception, contribute to its staging as a timely account of a range of hitherto hidden or marginalized histories, particularly in relation to the role of women and experiences of South Asian soldiers, as well as colonial violence and anti-colonial resistance in the war’s aftermath. In this way, the article examines the place of A God in Every Stone within a broader re-framing of the war and the development of an increasingly heterogeneous cultural memory of the conflict at a point in time which Ann-Marie Einhaus terms the ‘centenary moment’.4 At the same time, however, this article shows that A God in Every Stone does more than simply retrieve the stories of ‘those silenced from the pages of history’.5 The novel underscores the ambivalences contained in those stories, while also commenting on – and encouraging the reader to re-evaluate – the purposes, practices and power structures behind longer-standing historical narratives and cultural memories of the war itself and the (imperial) past more generally. The article therefore cautions against the temptation to read the novel as a straightforward recuperation and recognition of the South Asian war experience and as a simple challenge to the Eurocentric narrative of the war, however important and robust its contributions in this regard may be. Rather, it underlines Shamsie’s interweaving of various strands – from the history of ancient empires, archaeology and the Armenian genocide to amnesia and contested narratives within South Asia – all of which shape the novel’s alternative, and necessarily complicated, framing of the war and how it has been remembered. As such, the article takes up and delves deeper into Santanu Das’s recent suggestion that A God in Every Stone is an example of a ‘more expansive form of commemoration’, which has ‘scope for multiple narratives’ and creates ‘space for critique and discussion’.6 I argue that Shamsie’s novel is not only an example of the compatibility of what Das refers to as ‘instrumental and ethical uses of the past’,7 dealing with multiple, sometimes contradictory histories, but that it also engages in and prompts critical reflection on the mechanisms of memory across (trans-)national contexts in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. A twenty-first-century war novel In the afterword of his recent study India, Empire, and First World War Culture, Das refers to A God in Every Stone as a ‘war novel’.8 Published in 2014 and first issued in paperback with additional paratextual material in 2015,9A God in Every Stone is, remarkably, the first fictional treatment by a South Asian writer of Indian sepoys’ involvement in the Great War since Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters, which was originally published in 1940 and reissued in a centenary edition in 2014.10 This means that Shamsie’s novel is, moreover, the first ‘post-memory’ and ‘post-colonial’ novel to explore the South Asian war experience. While this genuinely unique position in the literary market as a – indeed, the – contemporary war novel of the Indian subcontinent does not appear to have been exploited explicitly for promotional purposes, the publication date and Shamsie’s participation in events such as the aforementioned Edinburgh festival clearly stage and situate A God in Every Stone as a contribution to the ‘centenary moment’. As Rajender Kaur has commented, ‘A God in Every Stone is nicely timed’ to coincide with the centenary year of the outbreak of war and ‘participates in revaluations of the “Great War” ’.11 Yet beyond reviews such as Kaur’s and brief comments from Das and Einhaus, the novel’s place in and contribution to the cultural memory of the war has not yet received detailed scholarly attention. While this can be partly attributed to the fact that it is still a relatively recent text, it also seems likely that scholars have thus far focused on other aspects – notably anti-colonial attitudes and critical cosmopolitanism12 – not least because the First World War, as Kaur also notes, ‘is merely a small part of the sweeping historical backdrop of the novel’.13 At this point, a brief outline of the novel’s complex plot, structure and narrative levels – its ‘sprawling’ character, as Kaur has commented elsewhere14 – is required. Divided into two main parts (Book I and Book II), the novel follows the intertwined stories of three main fictional protagonists: Vivian Rose Spencer, a British archaeologist; Qayyum Gul, a Pashtun lance corporal of the British Indian Army who loses an eye in battle at Ypres; and Najeeb Gul, Qayyum’s younger brother who becomes Vivian’s protégé as an aspiring historian and archaeologist. Book I is set between July 1914 and March 1916 and spans multiple locations – the Ottoman Empire, England, the Western Front, and Peshawar on the North Western Frontier of British-ruled India (in present-day Pakistan). Book II begins with Najeeb’s correspondence with Qayyum and Vivian between 1928 and 1930. By this time, Najeeb has become Indian Assistant at the Peshawar Museum; Qayyum has joined a pacifist anti-colonial protest group, the Khudai Khidmatgars (‘Servants of God’), led by the real historical figure, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, an associate of Gandhi; and Vivian is a Senior Lecturer in archaeology at University College London. The second half of Book II covers just a few days (23–27 April 1930), is set almost entirely in Peshawar, and depicts the unfolding and immediate fallout of the British massacre of unarmed anti-colonial protesters at Qissa Khwani Bazaar, known in English – and referred to in the novel – as the ‘Street of Storytellers’. This central narrative is flanked by an opening and closing chapter, each presented in typewriter-style font, under the respective headings 515 BC and 485 BC, which narrate two episodes of the story of Scylax, the ancient explorer who was sent by the Persian Emperor Darius I to reconnoitre the River Indus, but who later supported a rebellion of the Carian people against Darius’s imperial rule. This aspect of ancient history is also woven directly into the main narrative as Vivian – inspired by her mentor and lover, the Turkish-Armenian archaeologist Tahsin Bey – travels to Peshawar to search for Scylax’s silver circlet, a quest which is later taken up by Najeeb. According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who is quoted at the beginning of Book I and frequently referred to by the novel’s twentieth-century characters, Scylax began his journey down the Indus at Caspatyrus, the location of which, we learn from the ‘Author’s Note’ at the start, ‘has never been determined, but some historians have placed it in or near Peshawar’.15 At the end of Book II, the reader learns that the ‘typewritten’ accounts of Scylax are the work of Najeeb, dated ‘14 August 1947, Caspatyrus, Pakistan’, thus making another jump in time to the eve of the partition of the South Asian sub-continent and linking the presumed ancient location of Peshawar (Caspatyrus) with the new nation state (Pakistan). Finally, this fictionalized historical document is followed by an ‘End Note’, which presents an official British account relating to the disposal of bodies after the 1930 massacre, complete with a British Library reference number. In her own comment on the ‘inspiration’ behind A God in Every Stone, which is included in the paratext of the 2015 paperback edition, Shamsie explains that the war years were not part of her initial plan for the novel, framing its genesis as her own voyage of discovery through little known aspects of history: This story, I imagined, would start in 1930, with an archaeologist obsessed by Scylax getting caught up in the bloody protest because it involved his brother who was part of the ‘Unarmed Army’. And then it would move forward to the present day with the Taliban threatening the museum in which the archaeologist’s greatest finds were housed. But once I started to write my way into 1930, the story drew me backwards in time instead of forward. [...] So before I knew it I had a British woman archaeologist and an Indian soldier in the First World War, and the novel started in 1914. I tried to stick to my initial idea of bringing the novel up to the present day – and actually wrote a draft that went all the way until the mid-1980s before I realised it simply wasn’t working. My imagination was too transfixed by the period between the outbreak of the war in 1914 and the protest on the wonderfully named Street of Storytellers. One of the best writing days of my life was when I decided to throw out ten months of work and contain the story within the 1914–1930 period.16 Several interrelated points arise here. First, as demonstrated above, although the main plot is confined to the 1914–1930 period, the novel as a whole is not and spans the fifth century BC to the partition of India in 1947. Second, by including this section and addressing the reader of the paperback edition about the inspiration and genesis of the novel, Shamsie brings the novel up to the present day, beyond the other arguable end dates of 1930 and 1947, while her mentioning of the Taliban’s threat to the Peshawar Museum is a nod towards one aspect of the novel’s contemporary relevance. Third, Shamsie’s comments both confirm the character and position of A God in Every Stone as a war novel, while also putting pressure on and expanding the very definition and nature of the genre. Thus, while it may appear that A God in Every Stone is not merely, or even primarily, about the war, it is precisely this multi-layered complexity – including its depiction of the Indian sepoy experience – which shapes its particular contribution to the ‘centenary moment’ as an expanded form of war novel. The manner of this intervention in the field of First World War literature gains further significance in light of the fact that this field has thus far remained ‘steadfastly Eurocentric’.17 This stands in notable contrast to the ‘global turn’ in historical scholarship – which began longer ago but has often coincided with the centenary years – and the considerably more global coverage and reach of other media, including radio, television and online digital platforms, which have played an important part in shifting and enriching previous master narratives of the war and its legacies in Europe and, indeed, creating space for discussion of this previously neglected era on the South Asian subcontinent itself.18 On the one hand, then, the contrast between the otherwise multimedia character of the global centenary and the paucity of South Asian war novels underscores the decidedly Western or Eurocentric nature of the genre. On the other hand, this simultaneously elevates Shamsie’s position within the field and enhances the importance of her globalizing effect on that very European genre of the First World War novel which has played – and continues to play, according to Einhaus – a vital role in forming and developing the war’s cultural memory.19 As a review in the Hindustan Times put it, the novel ‘speaks as much to someone in Finsbury Park as it does to someone in Faridabad, Mulund or Marathalli’,20 while Shamsie herself has commented that the novel is ‘as much about the UK’s history as Pakistan’s’.21 Shamsie thus stakes out a place within an established field and discourse, throwing its Eurocentrism into sharp relief. At the same time, as an internationally acclaimed author of prize-winning post-colonial literature, she also transports the genre and addresses a global readership beyond the European domain. Hidden histories, ambivalent histories As Louisa Young’s comments quoted above demonstrate, Shamsie is, of course, not the first or the only writer to peer into the cracks of otherwise well-trodden ground, even if A God in Every Stone, as an expanded and globalized war novel, occupies a unique position and makes a particular contribution to the field. Das points to a recent ‘powerful expansion in the canon of British war literature to include civilian and women’s war writing’,22 while Einhaus highlights contemporary efforts to address more diverse aspects of the war, including homosexuality, shell-shock, facial injuries, the home front and colonial soldiers’ war experiences, citing A God in Every Stone and a number of short stories as examples of the latter.23 Similarly, the editors of a recent volume on ‘post-memory’ literature and film of the Great War have also identified a ‘discernible need’ in contemporary war fiction ‘to include hitherto marginalized perspectives for reasons of race or gender, and restore the unduly “forgotten” Great War battlefields’.24 In the British context, Einhaus argues that contemporary war fiction often presents ‘variations on the same themes of pity, sacrifice, horror and disillusionment’, but the ‘conservative narrative of suffering is gradually [being] tempered by a desire to make the war’s memory more inclusive’.25 While a dominant narrative framework remains largely in place, ‘one can trace small, incremental changes to the war’s cultural memory, which are visible in media representations [...] but also in teaching and in fiction’.26 Einhaus’s observation that contemporary war literature ‘can serve to not only confirm existing memory discourses, but to introduce new ideas and interests into existing narratives about the First World War’ both rings true and requires further scrutiny in relation to Shamsie’s expanded, globalized war novel.27 In her depiction of the war years, Shamsie interweaves the existing and the new, the dominant and the marginalized, the conservative and the inclusive. While there are indeed many familiar and conventional themes in A God in Every Stone, its multiple geographical and temporal settings, as well as its focalization on the characters of Vivian and Qayyum, decentre and complicate traditional narratives that revolve around the impact of four years of trench warfare on British and European soldiers and society. In her otherwise complimentary review of A God in Every Stone, the late British war novelist Helen Dunmore criticized Shamsie’s treatment of Vivian’s experiences as a VAD nurse and the depiction of Qayuum’s regiment, the 40th Pathans, on the Western Front. These, Dunmore suggests, are explored more successfully by Irene Rathbone and Vera Brittain, on the one hand, and Mulk Raj Anand, on the other, while Shamsie’s novel tends to ‘make gestures towards key moments of history rather than creating an imaginative embodiment of these events’.28 While one can certainly quibble with some aspects of Shamsie’s treatment of character and event, the validity of Dunmore’s critique is of less interest here than what it reveals about the rather conventional benchmarks against which she judges Shamsie’s war fiction. Neither the VAD experience nor the Western Front and its trenches are the novel’s main concern, even though they are, of course, important episodes and reference points within the wider narrative, both for the characters and for the reader. Indeed, they are key examples of how Shamsie takes up the existing memory discourse and not only inserts neglected stories and perspectives, but also shifts and reframes familiar themes and motifs. It is Vivian’s ambitions as an archaeologist, rather than her wartime nursing, which determine her role in the novel; through Vivian, Shamsie reflects on the links between archaeology and espionage during the war, while also commenting on gender politics in wartime Britain and the ways in which women were both affected by and complicit in the war’s conduct. When it comes to Qayyum and the Indian sepoy experience, the sense of foreignness and the sheer violence encountered by the 40th Pathans at Ypres is the background, not the focus, of Shamsie’s exploration of the personal and political impact of their war service when they return home. Familiar themes of European war literature such as comradeship, alienation and disillusionment are approached from the sepoy perspective and facilitate, in turn, a broader engagement with fraught questions of loyalty, racism and (non-)violence under imperial rule. The combination of Vivian’s female colonial perspective and Qayyum’s male ‘subaltern’ perspective – that is, the perspective of the colonized and oppressed, in the sense of postcolonial subaltern studies – is also important to the novel’s treatment of the First World War. Together they highlight, for example, that this was an era of uneven emancipation along gender and racial lines, while also pointing to marginalized or repressed aspects of the war and its legacies that are ambiguous and/or uncomfortable, not only in the British and European contexts, but also in South Asia. Vivian is a vehicle for Shamsie’s discussion of the fate of internationalism and the nature and trajectories of feminism during the war. She is part of a generation and of a class which are beginning to challenge gender norms, as well as a fictional representative of Shamsie’s interest in the ‘British women who started entering the previously male preserve of archaeology in comparatively substantial numbers in the early twentieth century’.29 The main plot opens with Vivian taking part in her first archaeological excavation at Labraunda in Turkey in July 1914, together with her father’s old friend, Tahsin Bey, five other Turks, and three German archaeologists. Her presence and participation in the dig is highly unusual given her unmarried status, but has been permitted by her father, ‘a man without sons, [who] had turned his great regret at that lack into a determination to make his daughter rise above all others of her sex; a compact early agreed on between them that she would be son and daughter both – female in manners but male in intellect’ (11–12). Vivian’s discovery of the Temple of Zeus during the dig proves her archaeological talent and skills and earns her the admiration of the international team, especially Tahsin Bey. However, the outbreak of war disrupts the international community of archaeologists, Vivian’s nascent relationship with Tahsin Bey and, it seems, her career. Although she begins training as a VAD nurse as soon as she gets back from Turkey, it is a role she takes up less through conviction than because of pressure from her friend Mary – a previously militant suffragette turned zealous ‘patriotic feminist’30 – and her own father’s expectations. Vivian gives up trying to argue against Mary’s ‘unreasonable’ nationalism (28–29) and masks her lack of enthusiasm about her imminent transfer from a convalescent hospital to a Class A auxiliary hospital after her father comments that a ‘daughter nursing in a Class A hospital was almost as fine as a son going into battle’; ‘[t]hat “almost” had struck at Viv’s heart and prompted her to say if only she were twenty-three already, she would volunteer straight away to join the nurses at the Front’ (29). In contrast to Mary’s zeal and apparent stoicism, however, Vivian longs to return to archaeology – to find ‘refuge in antiquity’ (40) – and cannot ‘become accustomed’ to the traumatic ‘world of the Class A hospital’ (36). By June 1915, Vivian is so overwhelmed by her nursing experience that she suffers a breakdown. Whereas her father, a leading British gynaecologist, attributes this to exhaustion, her mother recognizes a more complex set of pressures resulting from a patriarchal ruling elite, which is not only willing to sacrifice its sons in battle but also to create a lost generation of young women: Are you to spend the rest of your life making up for my womb’s insistence on killing his sons? [...] Will you give your entire youth to [the war]? [...] Every time I see you there’s less of you there. I don’t think you have any idea what you want for your life other than pleasing your papa. Making up for the fact that he doesn’t have sons to send into the trenches to have their heads blown off. (41–42) Together with Vivian’s struggle, and reluctance, to come to terms with nursing, Mrs Spencer’s insights suggest that the familiar themes of futility and waste apply as much to women as men.31 Although she has thus far been most worried about Vivian’s marriage prospects, Mrs Spencer is now concerned about the war’s damaging effect on her daughter’s well-being and the curtailment of her freedom. When Vivian admits she wants to travel to Peshawar, ‘because there’s more past than present there’, her mother translates this as a desire ‘to be away from the war’ (42). Mrs Spencer’s relief that Vivian has shown ‘some sense’ (42) prompts her to use the family’s privileged position to arrange for her daughter to go to Peshawar, where she can resume Tahsin Bey’s pursuit of Scylax’s silver circlet, recover from the trauma and fatigue of wartime nursing, and escape the sense of obligation imposed by father and country. The fact that she is able to remove herself – aided by her mother and their upper-class status – from the immediate strains of wartime Europe presents a more complex female narrative, in which self-preservation and self-interest take precedence over the selflessness traditionally expected of women. At the same time, A God in Every Stone probes the relationship between the patriarchal structures of Empire and women’s complicity in the conduct of the war and the wider imperial project. Through the fictional character of Vivian, the novel ties the historical collaboration between archaeologists and intelligence services to narratives of the war as an accelerator of female emancipation. When she is visited by a man from the British War Office during a brief trip home from the Class A hospital, Vivian is given a fleeting taste of ‘how it felt to be of singular value to Empire’: ‘There was no one – no one! – in her position. No one else had spent an entire summer in the company of Germans and Turks and then walked along one of the most militarily significant stretches of land in the world, and observed it so closely’ (31). While her father and the War Office representative mock her ambition, the latter also emphasizes and exploits Vivian’s apparently unique position, belittling the role more commonly associated with women’s wartime activity in doing so: ‘Of course, many women are nurses, but you alone Vivian, may I call you Vivian, you alone can tell me what I need to know’ (34). If men such as T. E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley are considered ‘indispensable’ in times of war, Vivian’s drawings have already made her ‘halfway to indispensable’ and she has the potential to make up ‘the other half’ by providing further intelligence (31). Thus, although she is initially hesitant, a combination of her father’s expectations, the government official’s patronizing flattery and persuasiveness, and Vivian’s desire to demonstrate her usefulness as a female archaeologist convince her to comply. Despite her attempts to ‘reveal a certain amount without revealing everything’ (32), she is persuaded to name Tahsin Bey as the source of her knowledge, betraying his private confession of his Armenian roots and allegiances which complicate and supersede his apparent loyalty to the Ottoman Empire. Delighted to be told she has contributed ‘as much as any man’s son on the battlefield’, Vivian wonders if this was ‘how it felt, every day, to be a man – relied upon, responsible, in a position to guide decisions about how to conduct a war? The weight of it was terrible and wonderful all at once’ (35). By the time Vivian returns from her first trip to Peshawar in 1916, where she has indulged in her own imperial ‘civilizing mission’ of educating Najeeb in ancient history, British women have attained much greater freedom, visibility and, indeed, involvement in imperial institutions: ‘Today if a woman archaeologist were to suggest going to Cairo to work on maps no one would laugh. Gertrude Bell had joined Lawrence at the Arab Bureau, and it was whispered that Margaret Hasluck was with Intelligence too’ (164). Like these real historical figures, Vivian’s life now harbours so many ‘overwhelming’ possibilities that she decides to ‘resume VAD duties for a short time until she [has] made up her mind about what else to do’, a decision which is guided by ‘convenience, rather than duty’ (164). This time, however, her nursing service is not a burden but a ‘privilege’, not least because her role is now more educational as she helps blind men learn Braille, which makes her ‘feel more useful’ (164). Just at a point when Vivian has resumed her home-front service and is poised to reap further benefits from improvements in women’s rights and opportunities, a letter from Tahsin Bey’s nephew reveals that – contrary to the assurances of the War Office representative – details of the intelligence she provided, including names, had been included in a British communication that was intercepted by the Germans and passed on to the Ottoman authorities, leading to his uncle’s execution as an Armenian sympathizer (166). The nephew’s accusation that she may regard Tahsin Bey ‘as just another casualty of the war, one suffered by the enemy’ (166) contrasts with her personal devastation and feelings of guilt, but also underlines the fact that she has played an active part in the conflict, inflicting harm when she had believed she was serving the ‘greater good’ (35). Whereas Vivian’s mother articulates her cynicism about the war’s emancipatory impulses early on – ‘How quickly everything that was inconceivable for a woman has become her duty. Isn’t it miraculous that competence has sprung up in us in the exact shape of men’s needs?’ (41) – it is not until after the massacre in Peshawar in 1930 that Vivian finally reflects on the imperial and patriarchal parameters of her own feminist pretensions and her inability to ‘resist male colonial authority’:32 For what had she betrayed that dear man, that mentor, that friend, that love? For men like Remmick [a colonial officer in Peshawar]. For the crumbs of their approval. Not just the whip-thin man from the War Office, but Papa, too, who even now was a shadow in her mind, telling her women didn’t understand the weighty decisions that men must make on their behalf. (249) Through Vivian’s ‘dangerous naivety’33 and complicity, the novel offers and invites a feminist critique of empire, but also a post-colonial reckoning with ‘the long history of Western feminism’s ties to imperialism’,34 both during and after the war. If Vivian’s character raises uncomfortable questions and introduces complexities into narratives surrounding (English) women and the First World War, Qayyum represents the ambivalence not only of South Asian involvement in the war, but also of subsequent memories of the conflict. In her review of the novel, Rajender Kaur argues that A God in Every Stone underscores and ‘pays homage to’ the ‘heavy toll paid’ and ‘grand irony’ of the ‘unsung sacrifices’ made by thousands of Indian soldiers ‘fighting an unfamiliar enemy in unfamiliar lands’, as well as tracing their ‘slow disillusionment’ and ‘consequent radicalization’ as they directly encounter the racial discrimination and political hypocrisy of British liberal imperialism, which ‘exhorts the natives to fight for freedom and justice but denies them these very rights as second class citizens in their own countries’.35 Yet Shamsie’s exploration is, in fact, more reflective on ambiguities similar to those discussed by Jay Winter and Das in relation to memories of colonial troops, including older war memorials such as Neuve-Chapelle and India Gate: Who or what had those men fought for? Did their contributions accelerate or delay liberation from colonial rule? As Winter points out, there are ‘many narratives [...] imbedded in the very same site’ and there can be no clear choice between ‘stark and inseparable alternatives’.36 If the contributions made by Indian troops have long been ‘blind spots in the collective memory of the British’,37 the multiple and ambiguous meanings of those contributions have also been a reason for the reluctance until very recently to confront such memories of the war within South Asia itself. In place of a simple narrative of (willing) sacrifice, heroism or martyrdom, the novel sensitizes the reader to the complex, heterogeneous and often contradictory nature of those memories. Shamsie exposes and takes on these difficult questions through Qayyum’s character as he and his comrades grapple with their own multiple and often conflicting loyalties. The novel certainly ‘raise[s] the question of why an Indian man might wish to fight for the colonial oppressor’.38 Yet it also highlights many different personal, local and cross-cultural bonds and conflicts that shape the sepoys’ lives and experiences, both as active soldiers and as veterans. For instance, one Indian sergeant – an Afridi havildar-naik of the 57th Wilde’s Rifles – comments wryly on a group of Pashtun and Rajput mutineers, who are willing to ‘join an army which fights fellow Pashtuns in the tribal areas, but they’ll mutiny at the thought of taking up arms against the Turks. That’s our people for you’ (48). Qayyum’s closest friend and comrade, Kalam Khan, later deserts the British Army to join the jihad against the British, led by the historical figure Haji Sahib, and accuses Qayyum of betraying his own people when he refuses to do the same: ‘You’ll fight for the Europeans who want to keep their land away from invaders but when your brothers want the same thing you turn the invaders into your beloved’ (116). The fact that Kalam is ultimately killed not by the English but because of ‘an old family feud’ (130), according to his wise and weary father, is not only bitterly ironic but also adds another layer of (dis-)loyalty and conflict to the tale; having survived Ypres and Aubers Ridge while fighting for the British, avoided execution for desertion, and joined the Pathan insurgency to resist colonial oppression, Kalam falls victim to ‘a man who took a life for duty, for family, for tradition’ (139). Qayyum’s decision not to follow Kalam to the jihadi insurgents – despite the intensity of their bond and the debt he owes his friend for taking care of him when he was injured on the battlefield – is just one example of how his own allegiances are tested in various ways throughout the novel. As such, Qayyum embodies the paradoxical and challenging nature of coming to terms with the war in the South Asian context. While convalescing at the Brighton Pavilion hospital, he finds himself intervening when he writes letters for ‘wounded, unlettered men’ who ask him to write ‘for God’s sake don’t don’t don’t allow my brother my cousin anyone from our village to sign up’ (55). Aware of the censorship process, Qayyum fears this would ‘reflect poorly on the Indian troops who had been trusted to come halfway round the world to fight for their king though there were many in England who thought their loyalty would fail the challenge’ (55). While this might be seen as an act of loyalty to the Empire in itself, it is also a measure to protect the honour of his own people. In one crucial scene, as Qayyum re-enters Peshawar for the first time after returning from England, he recalls one sepoy’s letter, which had been addressed directly to the ‘King-Emperor’: ‘If a man is to die defending a field, let the field be his field, the land, his land, and the people, his people’ (56 and 101). However, his sense of alienation on returning home compared with the strength of male wartime comradeship – which transcended ethnic boundaries – leads him to reflect that this kind of loyalty is not clear cut: ‘But these were not Qayyum’s people – the merchants and traders, the courtesans and maulvis, the money-changers and beggars. The 40th Pathans, those were his people; not just the Yusufzai [Qayyum’s tribe], but also the Afridis, also the Dogras' (101). Then, after travelling through the Peshawar valley, visiting the families of his comrades, either still fighting in France or dead, he begins to feel ‘himself rinsing Europe from his eyes’ (109), while helping his father as a letter scribe in the city reminds him of how he loved the men of Peshawar and leads him to question ‘why he had ever chosen to live his life away from them’ (115). While his gradual reintegration into home life and the rekindling of his affinities with his native land are accompanied by an incipient sense of shame at having served the British Empire, his war experience and identity as a veteran, as well as his residual affection and respect for the men of the British Army, continue to shape his thoughts and actions, even as his anti-colonial stance and non-violent activism intensify. Indeed, he does not feel ‘enmity’ but ‘love and pity’ (206) for the soldiers lined up facing the crowds of unarmed protesters at the Qissa Khwani Bazaar on 23 April 1930, ‘seeing in each one of them the comrades he had lost at Vipers, and himself, too’ (205). What is more, this sympathy also extends to some degree to the English officer class; although he laments the betrayal of the ‘sense of honour which the English and the Pashtun had in common, as the officers of the 40th Pathans so often reminded their men’ (206), he cannot bring himself to feel hatred, even after the massacre, ‘so long as he remembered Captain Dalmohy shot again and again, getting back to his feet each time as though his body were an irrelevance; and Captain Christopher, dying with Urdu words of gratitude on his lips for the sepoys who had rushed to help him’ (234). Shamsie’s treatment of the continuities and shifts in Qayyum’s conflicted loyalties thus retrieves the complexities of the sepoy war experience, acknowledging their seminal character and persistence without either condemning or celebrating them. Equally, Qayyum’s path to pacifist nationalism in Ghaffar Khan’s ‘Unarmed Army’ thematizes the complex relationship between the war experience, anti-colonialism and decolonization, adding nuances to nationalist narratives in which ‘the trenches become the site for political radicalisation’.39 Although he is no longer a serving soldier and certainly not amongst the Indian troops ‘whose minds were [still] enslaved’, Qayyum’s indelible connection with the army – however ambivalent and underpinned by shared trauma it may be – is a reflection that there was no ‘neat teleological narrative relating the war-returned sepoys and the nationalist movement’, while also illustrating, as Das notes, that ‘the connections between the two are oblique but, for that matter, no less deep.’40 Qayyum summarizes this himself late in the novel: ‘Everyone, even Najeeb, assumed Qayyum’s stand against Empire stemmed from Vipers, the suffering he’d been led into for a fight that wasn’t his fight. But he had never felt closer to the English than on that day. [...] It was later, at Brighton, that the questions began’ (234). Although he initially felt well-treated in the Brighton Pavilion hospital, his time there is a marked watershed as he begins to notice and experience more overt discrimination, not least the removal of English female nurses from hospitals treating Indian soldiers following the ‘outrage created in official circles by a newspaper photograph of a nurse standing beside the bed of Khudedad Khan, the first Indian to receive a Victoria Cross’ (58).41 Shamsie’s inclusion of minor characters who subtly challenge institutionalized racism underlines the injustice and hypocrisy still more: as she is about to leave the pavilion, the supervising nurse gives Qayyum a handkerchief to protect his glass eye, remarking to an official observing her, ‘Put this in your report. Tell them a fifty-six-year-old widow was seen giving signs of a favour to a Pathan boy. Let the Empire tremble at that’ (57). Later, Qayyum reflects on this as a defining moment of political awakening and even empowerment: ‘he’d been astonished by her audacity, the dismissal of Empire. Everything started there’ (234). Unlike young Vivian – but rather more like her mother – the older nurse sees through the Empire’s double standards and gives Qayyum a glimpse of its potential fragility from within. To be sure, interventions such as the nurse’s and Mrs Spencer’s might seem somewhat schematic, but they are also uncomfortable and thought-provoking in their candour; moreover, if some individual utterances and thoughts are occasionally too tidy, the combined ensemble of characters nevertheless opens more sophisticated meanings and messages for the reader to contemplate overall. In Qayyum’s case, they feed into his reflective journey, which is far from linear, as he observes the complex world around him, interacts with various figures and absorbs different perspectives. While his experiences in Brighton sow early seeds of his opposition to imperial rule, it is Kalam’s father, another older, seemingly peripheral character, who criticizes not only the English colonizers but also local Pashtun responses to their subjugation, and sends Qayyum in search of Ghaffar Khan, whom he calls ‘the only true Pashtun’ of the younger generation (141). When he embarks on this search, Qayyum finds himself ‘chasing the story, not the man, finding different pieces of it across the Valley’ (141), a fitting representation of the gradual, considered process he undergoes as his outlook matures and evolves, building not only on disillusionment and resentment, but also an affirmative (re-)discovery of local tradition and non-violent resistance. Like much postcolonial scholarship, then, the novel identifies the First World War as ‘the beginning of the end’ of the British Raj, even if it ‘did not lead directly to decolonisation’,42 and underscores the agency of Asian actors in that historical process.43 On the other hand, Shamsie shines a light on a historical figure and a movement that are often overlooked, even in postcolonial histories of the backlash after the First World War against imperial rule. Tellingly, Maggie Ann Bowers’s discussion of the novel likens Qayyum’s pacifist resistance to the far better known Rabindranath Tagore, without mentioning Ghaffar Khan.44 Shamsie has commented that she ‘wanted “to tell a story that was unknown, unfamiliar” in order to explore why and how Pashtuns had joined the non-violent resistance struggle’.45 Her research into soldiers’ letters suggested that joining such a pacifist movement ‘was in many ways a logical reaction’ to the violence of the war, while historical photographs of Ghaffar Khan’s followers highlighted striking similarities between their clothing and military uniforms – ‘as though they had exchanged one uniform for another, one army for a non-violent army, in a bid to recapture a sense of camaraderie, community and home’.46 That Qayyum’s involvement in the Khudai Khidmatgar helps him channel the more positive aspects of his war experience into something meaningful can be seen in his pride that his conversations with Ghaffar Khan about the ‘great spirit of brotherhood and discipline in the Army’ had helped Khan ‘formulate the idea for the Khudai Khidmatgar’, as well as Qayyum’s delight that he will be given the rank of General in the unarmed army, even if he finds the so-called Red Shirts’ uniforms ‘far less appealing to the eye than the drab and green of the 40th’ (192). At the same time, Shamsie’s foregrounding of Ghaffar Khan’s non-violent reform and resistance movement – which championed education, for both men and women, that was ‘untainted by the superstition of the mullahs and the brainwashing of the English’ (142)47 – challenges the widespread stereotyping of Pashtuns as a ‘violent race’.48 Within the narrative, this fuels the British use of force against the peaceful protesters in the ‘Street of Storytellers’: as Qayyum comments after the massacre, ‘they couldn’t believe we were unarmed; they wouldn’t believe we weren’t intent on violence’ (209). Similarly, Shamsie reintegrates this example of Muslim non-violence into the wider narrative of Indian civil disobedience in the fight against British imperialism; Qayyum anticipates an incipient and unjust overshadowing of Ghaffar Khan’s ideas when he writes to Najeeb in 1928 that there are already rumours ‘put about by the English and the mullahs that Ghaffar Khan’s ideas of non-violence are Hindu beliefs taken from Gandhi’ (177). In doing this, the novel challenges contemporary Western media representations of Muslims as terrorists, as well as blanket associations of Peshawar and the surrounding border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan with the Islamic fundamentalism of the Taliban.49 Yet it also draws attention to a figure and movement which Shamsie ‘felt that Pakistan as a nation had simply ignored’.50 In the Guardian podcast quoted above, Shamsie suggests that Ghaffar Khan does not fit with Pakistan’s national narrative because he opposed Partition and the creation of a separate Muslim state. Meanwhile, the positive reception of the novel in India highlighted the importance of remembering and reclaiming a shared history – in terms both of the war experience and of the long fight for decolonization – that is often forgotten when the two nations ‘spend so much time locking horns’.51 As such, Shamsie’s contribution to the centenary moment has been not only a ‘valuable reminder’ for British and European audiences ‘that the legacy of the Great War stretched far beyond Versailles’52 but also an attempt to reconjure transnational memories in the South Asian context which have been fractured and stifled since the post-imperial division of the sub-continent. Conclusion: history, fiction and memory A God in Every Stone is a literary expression of, and reflection on, the palimpsestic character of colonial and postcolonial sites of memory. These sites, as Winter has emphasized, are ‘hybrid’; each of them is a palimpsest in the sense of an ‘overwritten text’ and ‘something that is reused or altered but still bears visible traces of its earlier form’, enabling us ‘to see better how we layer meaning on top of meaning to make sense of the world in which we live’.53 As an expanded and globalized form of the traditionally Eurocentric war novel genre, which includes a variety of historical and fictional events, characters and documents, Shamsie’s novel not only retrieves hidden histories and insists on multiple perspectives and multi-layered narratives, but also underlines the contested and complex nature of each of those histories, perspectives and narratives. It illuminates blind spots and disrupts accepted memories of the war on several levels and in diverse contexts. As with all forms of commemoration, there are certainly contemporary agendas underlying the novel, which in this case extend beyond re-evaluating memories of the war itself to critique a wide range of issues, including Western feminism and racism, religious extremism, nationalist memory politics – not only in Europe but also in South Asia – and even Indo-Pakistani relations. However, the novel is also deliberately ambivalent, encouraging the reader to delve into ‘the minutiae of history, in all its asymmetries and messiness, as well as [...] the moral and cultural complexities’.54 In this way, Shamsie reconciles the tension between what Das calls the ‘instrumental and ethical’ uses of memory, by moving beyond simple recognition and ‘sanitized’ celebration of previously neglected actors to accommodate the multi-vocality and incongruities of the past, and by looking ‘painful histories squarely in the eye’ in order to interrogate their implications and resonances in the present.55 Perhaps most importantly, Shamsie engages in a self-reflective and meta-discursive commentary about different (hi)storytelling traditions and the very relationship between history, fiction and memory. This is captured symbolically and literally – since it was a real occurrence – when the Street of Storytellers is ‘turned into a battleground’ (205). Whereas one of the Indian soldiers wonders if ‘one day they’ll tell stories about us in the Street of Storytellers’ (48), the British massacre on the very site where local oral histories are traditionally passed on means that memories of those soldiers, as well as the bottom-up storytelling practice itself, are crushed by imperial power. It is equally revealing that the British assault on the Street of Storytellers took place in the same city where eighty years later – as Shamsie notes in her paratextual reflections on the inspiration behind the novel – the Taliban was threatening to destroy the Peshawar Museum, a site which the novel also problematizes as both a site of British imperial power and a repository of the region’s rich and ancient history. That is not to say that Shamsie is relativizing the Taliban’s actions, but rather pointing out that the multi-valency of historical experience and memory suffers at the hands of both religious fundamentalism and (neo-)imperialism. Similarly, the novel’s discussion of the covert disposal of bodies by the British without proper ritual burial – something which Shamsie’s research revealed to be true – and her inclusion of a subsequent report from Olaf Caroe who oversaw the British cover-up, points to the role that fiction can play in critically highlighting and, indeed, cautiously intervening when there are discrepancies between official records and eyewitness accounts. Her self-awareness of this creative and potentially influential role in shaping cultural memory emerges through her comments in the Guardian podcast cited above that such discrepancies in historical accounts and narratives are fascinating for the novelist, who has the opportunity to ‘lunge in’ with yet another version.56 Moreover, the inclusion in the 2015 paperback edition of a ‘Reading Group Guide’, consisting of ten discussion questions, can be seen as an editorial attempt to direct readers’ understanding of the novel but also as an invitation to reflect critically on the histories and memories with which it engages. A God in Every Stone not only retrieves and complicates memories of the war, but also dissects how and why historical narratives and memory discourses are shaped, perpetuated and challenged in different times and contexts. The novel is therefore not just an inclusive and multidirectional historical novel about neglected aspects of the Great War and the relationship between war, empire and decolonization in its aftermath. It is also a novel about multi-layered histories and history-telling practices, about local, (trans-)national and global memory cultures, and about the role of literature in providing alternative perspectives and narratives on the past and the present. While they find much to praise in the novel, reviewers such as Dunmore and Kaur have highlighted the potential pitfalls of writing such an ambitious, complex book and have correspondingly criticized certain elements as under-developed, unconnected or overloaded. However, when it comes to reading the novel with a view to twenty-first-century memories of the Great War, as this article has argued, it is precisely this ambition and complexity that constitutes its important intervention in this field. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments and suggestions. Footnotes 1 " Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 416. 2 " The discussion was published as a Guardian Books podcast (Edinburgh International Book Festival), 14 August 2014, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2014/aug/14/kamila-shamsie-louisa-young-edinburgh-books-podcast> [accessed 28 August 2019]. My transcription and emphasis. 3 " See Rajender Kaur, ‘Review of A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie’, Transnational Literature, 7.1 (2014), 1–2, <https://dspace.flinders.edu.au/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2328/35079/Kaur_God.pdf?sequence=1> [accessed 30 August 2019]. 4 " Ann-Marie Einhaus, ‘Cultural memory, teaching and contemporary writing about the First World War’, Literature & History, 25.2 (2016), 187–204 (p. 195). 5 " Guardian review, back cover of paperback edition: Kamila Shamsie, A God in Every Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 6 " Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, p. 416. 7 " Ibid. 8 " Ibid. 9 " All in-text page references refer to the 2014 hardback edition: Kamila Shamsie, A God in Every Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 10 " Mulk Raj Anand, Across the Black Waters (London: Shalimar Books, 2014). See Rajender Kaur, ‘Review of Across the Black Waters by Mulk Raj Anand’, South Asian Review, 37.2 (2016), 241–43 (p. 241). For a detailed discussion of Anand’s novel, see Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, pp. 343–66. 11 " Kaur, ‘Review of A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie’, p. 1. 12 " See Maggie Ann Bowers, ‘Asia’s Europes: Anti-colonial attitudes in the novels of Ondaatje and Shamsie’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 51.2 (2015), 184–95, and Pei-chen Liao, ‘Engaging Politically from the Margin – Critical Cosmopolitanism in the Works of Kamila Shamsie, EurAmerica, 47.3 (2017), 263–97. 13 " Kaur, ‘Review of A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie’, p. 2. 14 " Kaur, ‘Review of Across the Black Waters by Mulk Raj Anand’, p. 241. 15 " Kamila Shamsie, ‘Author’s Note’, front matter of both hardback and paperback editions (see notes 5 and 9). 16 " Kamila Shamsie, ‘The inspiration behind A God in Every Stone’, in paperback edition (see note 5), pp. 397–99 (pp. 398–99). 17 " Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, p. 342. 18 " Ibid., pp. 406–12. 19 " Einhaus, ‘Cultural memory, teaching and contemporary writing about the First World War’, p. 188. 20 " Hindustan Times review, front matter of 2015 paperback edition (see note 5). 21 " Shamsie, quoted in Liao, ‘Engaging Politically from the Margin’, p. 283. 22 " Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, p. 306. 23 " Einhaus, ‘Cultural memory, teaching and contemporary writing about the First World War’, p. 198. 24 " Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz and Martin Löschnigg, ‘Introduction: “Have you forgotten yet?...” ’, in The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film, ed. by Martin Löschnigg and Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 1–13 (p. 2). While this extensive volume includes several articles which deal with post-imperial reimaginings of the war, these focus primarily on Canadian, Australian, Irish and West Indian volunteers, with Indian troops featuring only briefly in Anne Samson’s chapter on ‘Fictional Accounts of the East Africa Campaign’. 25 " Einhaus, ‘Cultural memory, teaching and contemporary writing about the First World War’, pp. 189, 193. 26 " Ibid., p. 198. 27 " Ibid., p. 188. 28 " Helen Dunmore, ‘A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie – review’, The Guardian, 18 April 2014, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/18/a-god-every-stone-kamila-shamsie-review-story-histories> [accessed 3 September 2019]. 29 " Shamsie, ‘The inspiration behind A God in Every Stone’, p. 398. 30 " See William Murphy, ‘Suffragettes’, in 1914–1918–online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel et al., issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2018–12–05, <https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/suffragettes> [accessed 8 September 2019]. 31 " For other recent treatments of women’s suffering, see Einhaus, ‘Cultural memory, teaching and contemporary writing about the First World War’, p. 199. 32 " Bowers, ‘Asia’s Europes’, p. 191. 33 " Ibid. 34 " Liao, ‘Engaging Politically from the Margin’, p. 288 35 " Kaur, ‘Review of A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie’, pp. 1–2. See also George Morton-Jack, The Indian Empire at War from Jihad to Victory: The Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War (London: Little, Brown, 2018). 36 " Jay Winter, ‘In Conclusion: Palimpsests’, in Memory, History and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts, ed. by Indra Sengupta (London: German Historical Institute, 2009), pp. 167–73 (p. 168). 37 " Kaur, ‘Review of A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie’, p. 1. 38 " Bowers, ‘Asia’s Europes’, p. 193. 39 " Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, p. 407. 40 " Ibid., p. 408. 41 " As Das has noted elsewhere, Indian soldiers were ‘well looked after but fenced in’ at the Brighton Pavilion. See Santanu Das, ‘The first world war and the colour of memory’, The Guardian, 22 July 2014, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/22/first-world-war-whitewashed-eurocentric> [accessed 10 September 2019]. 42 " Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, p. 408. 43 " This is a key argument in Bowers, ‘Asia’s Europes’. For a reassessment of decolonization as the result of Asian agency rather than European failure, see Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013). 44 " Bowers, ‘Asia’s Europes’, pp. 193–94. 45 " See Lotta Schneidemesser, ‘The Myth of Homecoming’, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, <https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-shamsie-god-every-stone/> [accessed 3 September 2019]. 46 " See ibid. 47 " Rajmohan Gandhi, Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008). 48 " See Schneidemesser, ‘The Myth of Homecoming’. 49 " See Liao, ‘Engaging Poltically from the Margin’, pp. 284–90. 50 " Schneidemesser, ‘The Myth of Homecoming’. 51 " Guardian Books podcast, 14 August 2014 (see note 2). 52 " Sunday Times review, front matter of 2015 paperback edition (see note 5). 53 " See Winter, ‘Palimpsests’, esp. pp. 167, 173. 54 " Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture, p. 415. 55 " Ibid, p. 416. 56 " Guardian Books podcast, 14 August 2014 (see note 2). © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Marginalized Memories and Multi-Layered Narratives of the Great War in Kamila Shamsie’s A God In Every Stone (2014)
JO - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqaa005
DA - 2020-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/marginalized-memories-and-multi-layered-narratives-of-the-great-war-in-IhBoyi1hda
SP - 229
VL - 56
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -