Clear Light of Day

At midnight on August 14, 1947, the formerly colonized nation of India was divided into the two independent nations of India and Pakistan. Clear Light of Day begins roughly 10 years before this event and ends a few decades later, in the 1970s. Though it takes place during the tumultuous era surrounding Independence and Partition, Desai’s novel takes account of a much longer history of colonization and struggle. British colonization of the Indian subcontinent began in 1757, under the auspices of the British East India Company after the collapse of the Mughal Empire (or Moghul as spelled in the novel). Direct British rule came in 1857 and continued until India gained its independence ninety years later. This period of direct rule is often referred to as the British Raj. Although India did not have to fight a war of independence like the United States or Algeria, gaining independence from its colonial ruler required a long and continuous struggle by Indian nationalists.

Organized resistance was happening as early as the first year of direct British rule, which was the year of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The Indian National Congress was organized 20 years later in 1885, and although they remained instrumental in achieving the goal of independence and leading the first Indian government, many accused them of being elitist and too Hindu-oriented. While many nationalist movements preferred peaceful forms of resistance such as strikes, others saw armed resistance as the best path to victory. One of the most famous nationalist figures is Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), also known by the honorific Mahatma Gandhi, famous even today, as is evident by Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi (1982).

Gandhi’s death is an event in Desai’s novel, as he is one of the main players in the years leading up to Independence, along with Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah on the Indian side, and Louis Mountbatten and Prime Minister Clement Atlee on the British side (62). Nehru envisioned India as a secular country with an equal place for all creeds and religions, and Gandhi, despite using the Hindi language and Hinduism to inspire resistance to colonial rule, believed that Muslims were to play an important part in an independent and united India after the end of British rule. Muslims were initially in favor of remaining part of India, and when the All-India Muslim League (AIML) was established in 1906 a main goal was to guarantee Muslim rights within a united India. That began to change in the 1930s when the League became less elitist and leaders like Sir Muhammad Iqbal and later Muhammad Ali Jinnah began to push for a separate Muslim state. Most Sikhs, an important minority group in India, preferred the nation to stay united, as many of them lived in the Punjabi region and feared persecution under Muslim rule.

The British, as the colonial rulers of India, had the final say in how the independent country would be created. The British Empire had pursued a “divide and rule” policy for centuries, deliberately exacerbating tensions between religious and ethnic groups throughout the empire to shore up their own power. In this context, the decision to break the newly independent India into two separate countries—one nominally Hindu and the other nominally Muslim—was simply a continuation of a long-established pattern. However, India’s actual population was nowhere near as neatly divisible along geographic lines as the British imagined. The resulting bloodshed exceeded anyone’s worst imagination. A mass migration of approximately 14.5 million people occurred, with Sikhs and Hindus moving south into India and Muslims moving north into Pakistan. An estimated 2 million people died before or during the migration, and up to 100,000 women were estimated to have been raped and thousands more abducted during the year of violence (“Violence Against Women During the Partition of India”). While the novel Clear Light of Day references the turmoil and communal violence, characters mostly live in the protective cocoon of family in Old Delhi.