A Critique of Nayanatara Sahgal’s “The Fate of Butterflies”

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(By Dr Karanam Rao)

Nayantara Sahgal’s “The Fate of Butterflies” is a slender novella that defies an easy
categorization. It’s more about contemporary politics in India than about a chronicle of a story in the
conventional sense of the term, where “ plot, character and action” (Percy Lubbock’s “The Craft of
Fiction”) are conceived and drafted with a discerning moral element subsumed into the narrative
structure. The present novella follows neither a predictable linear nor a cohesively non-linear pattern ,
where the present and the past , space and time are merged as in a continuum . The novella effortlessly
moves through a catalogue of events, with a fewer characters to carry the narrative burden , and meant
to project the dystopian vision .The form is a complex mosaic of felt-experiences interwoven into the
facticities of contemporary reality, not untypical of Arundhati Roy’s “Ministry of Utmost Happiness “,
where Roy almost turns abrasively acerbic against the present dispensation, and makes a frontal attack
against undemocratic regime of suppression and intimidation,

There is not much of a story in the prsent book under review. It ‘s very much like a
conventional “bildungsroman” that centers around a pivotal character, and the events of the story are
conducted through a crew of subsidiary characters that weave out the structural pattern . Prabhakar,
the protagonist, gets unwittingly embroiled in the well- laid out web by the right wing politicians to
implicate him in the political unrelieved political imbroglio. Ironically though, he is invited to attend a
function arranged by the people to speak about the contents of the treatise which he is said to have
written. It was about contemporary politics where he has appealed to the nation for a fresh start of life
after the Gandhi, an era of uncertainty and solidity. He was aware of the fact that he would be hurled
into the ideological scaffold of “otherness”, where he gets separated from the rest of the humanity. A
party was arranged, which was attended by the “Master Mind”, a powerful political theorist, who is
close to the ruling dispensation .In fact, he is the prime mover and actor in the contemporary drama
that the post-Truth world holds out. The party that Parbhakar has thrown to the intellectuals has all
nuanced elegance, for it’s celebrated with all the grandeur of sipping beverages, and drinks amidst loud
chatter and clatter We are told, much later, that Prabhakar belongs to a lower- rung social structure.
Born into a family of brick layers, he steadily moves up on the social ladder by sheer luck and hard work.
Sahgal compares the predicament of the central character against the changing chiaroscuro of
contemporary realities, in which he is made to participate as a hapless witness to watc the destruction
and mayhem brought about by modern Frankensteins . Sahgal minces no words to condemn the
horrors of lynching , and the destruction doled out by the cow vigilantes . The forces of intimidation and
unceasing oppression are let loose on the civil society by the new dispensation. They are all presented
by Sahgal with a pointillist accuracy. It’s in fact, “man’s inhumanity to man” that become verily becomes
the central axis from where the novelist takes off into yet another view of perdition that contemporary
situation in India turns out to be,
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The story begins with the description of a guy couple Prahlad and Francois, owners of a
boutique hotel “Bonjour” which is frequented by Sergie, the arms dealer , and Katrina, a social worker
who is gang-raped amidst communal tensions. Sergie moves through the changing scenarios driven by
the regime of regimentation where the “Cow Commission” works scrupulously, disabling beef eating, an
abnormality of repressing the people into submission. And the story moves into another angle of horrid
vision where unarmed citizens are dragged into and humiliated on, and threatened with the punishment
of death. The unrelieved trauma continues to haunt the people of the country who watch horrors and
sufferings inflicted upon them by the ruling dispensation with muted voices, and freedoms pilloried. It’s
almost through this grotesquely chronicled events that the novelist takes us through on a tour de
horizon that leads into the final apocalypse. The Orwellian bizarrerie gets distilled into a shrill voice of
the narrator who describes the spree of vandalism .Here’s the description of the broken image of
Gandhi , the father of the nation. The narrator asks:” What about the procession of statues behind
Gandhi ? Did those statues get bulldozed. They’re still there .I suppose they’ll be following the statue
they’re planning to put up in Gandhi’s place,(p,99)”.The “Master Mind” controls everything. His policy
makers follow him implicitly, and the mood of the nation is described succinctly;” Hate and kill.(p,127”.
And again;”Lies have to be told when the truth is too dangerous.(p,126).” This is the dictum with which
the government functions, ”Bonjour”, the breakfast retreat, is vandalized, and all its costly furnishings
are pulled down by a group of altered reality. The refugee camp where the helpless people are huddled
up like animals, and beaten to death, and thrown on the roadside It’s from here that we hear of
lynching that becomes a pattern of punishment heaped upon individuals who fail to fall in line.
Prabhakar goes through the incidents reported in the news papers. Sahgal says:” This is the
psychosomatic mania” that grips the lynching. and it’s said that Rehman who serves Prabhakar a meal at
a hotel is picked up and taken away , an incident that resembles the fate of Aklakh . . As Prabhakar
observes:”I haven’t imagined quite this. There’s a finality about the mass removal clearly no hope of
escape from it.P.114”.This is like living in the perdition, a predicament into which unarmed citizens are
thrown into.the

It’s important to note the novella oscillates between time and space, between the
antithetical polarities of race and religion, propaganda and bigotry that encompasses humanity at larg,,
. Significantly the narrative jostles between India and America, and then moves on to Russia. In the
space of about 140 spaces, the novelist takes every care to see to see that the dystopian vision doesn’t
get distorted or lost in the proliferation of catalogued details .With almost a nuanced accuracy, Sahgal
takes us on the extensive tour of horrid and miasmatic world of Orwellian nightmare. The proverbial
truth of “democracy for the people, by the people and of the people” lies shattered and fetishized as
historical blunder”. Sahgal seems to suggest that humanity must rise above the implicit faith and
baggage of beliefs, and must be prepared to fight for their legitimate constitutional rights and privileges
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Or else, humanity, and nay the whole fulcrum of civilization will be lost in the hallow of what Naipaul
describes in his novel, “ An Area of Darkness.”

The whole burden of the novella tries to enliven the sunken hopes of
people who are lost in the maze of self- contradictions, and self-engendering bandwagon of hindutva
rhetoric. Sahgal must have written this novella under the extreme stress of living through the hell of a
life in the artistically projected contemporary India. She must tell the story and tell it without art or
artifice, the accidie and the depravity of the situation which the country was hurled into.The brevity of
the novella is once again a superbly managed artistic device superb narrative skills could alone manage,
It’s as tantalizingly brief and fascinating even as the truth is alluringly acerbic and hard and slippery.
With a sheer master stroke of writing, Sahgal carries the dystopian vision through t a welter of “altered
realities”. The truth is that the post-Truth contemporary situation in India seems to lie suspended
between the luminously dark worlds as presented by Conrad in “The Heart of Darkness” and Naipaul in
“India: A Wounded Civilization”. And at the advancing age of 92, sahgal has brought out a fictional
tome that is Kakaesque in its visionary intimacy and profoundly meaningful as Tolstoy’s “The War and
Peace>”

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