The opposite of history: "Mr. Ashok's Monument" by Sanjena Sathian

Every year when I blog on Best American Short Stories, I end up pointing out at least a few times about how unusual it is to be reading a book celebrating our national literature that requires the reader to know so much about other parts of the world. Call it the literary consequences of being a superpower. Korean short story collections are mostly written by ethnically Korean people about ethnically Korean people, and nobody in Korea thinks twice about this. Ethiopian literature is written by people from Ethiopia, mostly about Ethiopians. That's the point of having Ethiopian literary anthologies: to encourage the development of native literature. 

Things are a little different in America. When you're a superpower, your country is made up of people from every corner of the globe. They come here and they bring their experiences with them. It makes for a pretty interesting literary tapestry, in much the same way the restaurant choices in most American cities are a lot more interesting than they might be in less cosmopolitan in other parts of the world. It also, however, creates challenges for an American reader, as some stories require an ability to adapt to new cultural contexts in ways that the native reader of an anthology of, say, Kenyan literature would not. 

In "Mr. Ashrok's Monument" by Sanjena Sathian, the story gets kind of deep into the reality of Indian life. There's a ton of satire going on, and while the story itself provides most of the keys a reader needs to at least know what the joke is supposed to be, I gather it's not as funny to me as it would be to someone who's actually been directly a part of Prime Minister Modi's historical and cultural flim-flam. 

My approach to "World Lit as American Lit" is to trust the story to tell me what I need to know. I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching what I come across in the story. If the story thinks I need to know more, it will tell me. If it doesn't, either I should have known it (in the estimation of the author), or it's not that important. So much like I did with Kenan Orhan two stories ago, I'm going to kind of go in with only the little bit I know about the country the story is set in.

The public and the personal in parallel

It's pretty common in a story that's so obviously skewering political leadership as "Mr. Ashok's Monument" is to put the public or political in conflict with the private or personal. That's what I thought this story was doing at first. I thought Mr. Ashok, caught up in the government's fervor to create a conveniently nationalist view of history, was getting his personal aims squashed by the political aims of the government, personified by the very funny Department of Symbolic Meaning. After reading to the end, though, and then reading through again, I think this story takes the more unusual approach of putting the public and the personal more or less on the same course such that they mirror rather than oppose each other.

The government is attempting to sell a particular version of history to the public. This version is build around "ITIHAS," or "glorious history," and involves the aggressive campaigning of a giant bureaucracy (the Ministry of Culture, National Identity, and Historical Interpretation). It is the job of this bureaucracy, which includes the Department of Symbolic Meaning in which the narrator works, to determine how to make history edifying for the public. Of course, any time you try to make history be edifying instead of just be what it is, you end up perverting it, and that's very much what the department does. Even though the narrator's boss is named "Satya" or "Truth," there is very little truth going on. Their version of truth is more about what can make the people feel they are part of a glorious destiny--a destiny the current administration is leading them on--than it is about dealing with the real complexity of history. 

One of the government's chief tools in its campaign is preservation. The main campaign of the department is called an "ITIHAS-Preservation Campaign," a term rife with both capital letters and bluster. One of the things they seek to preserve are monuments. Monuments, if well preserved enough, do not change. In a sense, this is the opposite of history, because history is always ongoing and therefore always changing. It is also always changing because scholarship is always helping us to rethink the past. With a monument, though, the point is to create a version of the past and ensure that it never changes. History is complicated. At one point, the narrator lists off a number of questions that history presents him with, questions that he feels so certain are not appropriate for someone in his job, he had to repress them during his patriotic polygraph. Monuments often erase complexity.

With this campaign going on in the background, Mr. Ashok, a wife-beating, confused, would-be upwardly climbing tour guide, turns to stone one day. We are led to believe that his turning to stone is his "comeuppance," as one journalists suggests. His wife has told him he is made of stone, so it seems an appropriate punishment. There's maybe more to it than that, though. Mr. Ashok is, if the bits of news can be believed that a Westerner like me who doesn't follow India with any particular intent hears, sort of a throwback. He is kind of a living monument to a type of man in India who time will hopefully one day soon leave behind.

The ITIHAS campaign talks a lot about how the West has stolen from India, but Mr. Ashok's wife has also learned from a Western NGO that she no longer has to have sex with her husband when he wants or put up with him hitting her. There is a giant generational battle being waged now in India to end rape culture in India, and Mr. Ashok is part of it. He is, in fact, part of the complicated evolution of history.

All of him has turned to stone except his "member." He's a particularly lascivious man, so that might be the one part of him that is most resisting being turned into a monument, a relic of the past. He doesn't want to change and stay within the complicated movement of history. He'd rather turn to stone than learn a new way of dealing with the world, especially after working so hard to get ahead in this one. He thought he'd done the right things to succeed in the world as it was, so changing now requires more of him than he can bear. 

Eventually, he decides to fully indulge his lust, and this is when the last bit of him turns to stone, and he is no longer able to move, but rather becomes a statue in the very caves in which he used to give tours. There's a double critique going on at the end. On the one hand, it's critiquing the government for trying to lionize a version of the past. By seeking to preserve, it has actually killed the thing it seeks to make use of. On the other hand, it's critiquing a version of Indian male identity that no longer has a role in the future and needs, frankly, to become "the opposite of history," or which is something preserved in the past and no longer a part of the present narrative.

There is a layered ossification at the end. The government's attempt to "preserve" the version of history most advantageous to it ends up killing history, and the personal attempt to ward off the march of time ends up doing nothing more but condemning oneself to no longer being able to change. 

I may have butchered this reading, because I don't really follow Indian issues and there are certainly all kinds of inside jokes I don't get. I can kind of guess at them, but there is certainly a lot more going on that someone in India would get. On another level, though, it's not hard at all for a contemporary American reader to comprehend the attempt to create a mythical nation that once was, call it "great," and call on others to return to that greatness that never was. It's not hard at all to imagine the result of refusing to change as becoming the very monuments that false preservationists wish to preserve.