Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia by J. Edward Mallot (review)

Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia begins with a fundamental question: "should communities remember?" (3). The answer, for J. Edward Mallot, is not as obvious as it might initially seem. While trauma studies, drawing on the Holocaust and its aftermath, positions memory as a necessary-and even healing -act, attitudes towards remembering South Asian traumas, such as the partition of British India in 1947, have been far more conflicted. In fact, Javeed Alam and Suresh Sharma argue that remembering partition may serve to rekindle the interreligious violence that characterized that event (13). J. Edward Mallot also points out that the bilateral nature of the violence makes the terrain of memory decidedly different for both partition (9) and the Sri Lankan civil war, two events treated in this monograph. Even when individuals and communities do remember, the question of "who should remember, how, and at what cost" (59) is a source of tension that may explain the lack of official public monuments to the victims of partition in South Asia to this day.

While partition is well-established as a subject of critical inquiry, Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia breaks new ground in several ways. Mallot deftly brings urban planning, Bollywood film, and cartography into conversation with diasporic English-language fiction to illustrate the diverse sites of memory and to interrogate their limits. This inter- and multidisciplinary inquiry convincingly demonstrates that such diverse 'texts' belong together and are, indeed, mutually illuminating. Mallot begins with the city of Chandigarh, purpose-built by Le Corbusier as the capital of the newly truncated, post-1947 Indian Punjab, which is necessarily haunted by the loss of the former capital, Lahore, to Pakistan. Controversial from the start, Chandigarh, the subject of Mallot's second chapter, is, the author argues, a site of both remembrance and forgetting, which spatially negotiates universality and difference, the future, and the past.

The book's third chapter examines memory as subject and trope within contemporary Bollywood film, with particular attention to partition, the figure of M.K. Gandhi, and the question of Gandhi's legacy. Mallot's analysis demonstrates the lability of both the sites and contexts of memory. For instance, in Lage Raho Munna Bhai ("Carry on Munna Bhai"), Gandhi appears to the feckless title character, helping him succeed in romance and change his life for the better. Munna Bhai does not "remember" Gandhi per se, since these encounters are not recollections. Yet, as Mallot demonstrates, the representation of these visions, particularly as they are contrasted with other forms of memorialization of the Mahatma (in statues, on currency, etc.) serve to interrogate what it means for any contemporary Indian individual or community to properly remember Gandhi. Mallot demonstrates that in contemporary Bollywood film, there is a fine, and uncertain, line between attempting to explain the violence of partition in contemporary film, and attempting to justify it.

From the fourth chapter onwards, Memory, Nationalism, and Narrative in Contemporary South Asia turns its attention to works of literature, beginning with the work of two Sri Lankan writers, A. Sivanandan and Romesh Guneskera. Sri Lankan literary nationalism has received less critical attention than its Indian counterpart, and bringing these two rarely-compared phenomena together is one of Mallot's most refreshing and original scholarly contributions. The Sri Lankan civil war itself, Mallot argues, was fought as much on the terrain of memory as on any physical landmass, as competing Tamil and Sinhala narratives were deployed to claim both the past and future of the island nation. Conflicting and contradictory memories, in such a context, are not mere evidence of human frailty, but, as Mallot demonstrates, are occasions for both individual and communal crises.

Even works of literature often displace the act and site of remembrance from the textual realm. Saleem Sinai's pickling of history in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is a well-known example, and one that is brought into conversation in Memory, Nationalism, and...