THE FATE OF BUTTERFLIES Nayantara Sahgal SPEAKING TIGER Rs.455, Pages 144 The Fate of Butterflies by the redoubtable Nayantara Sahgal is another testimonial to her versatile imagination. Interweaving personal and the political like many of Sahgal’s earlier books, this novel narrates a history of the present from a fast receding liberal-secular perspective. Butterflies traces the story of several people but centres mainly around Prabhakar, a professor of political science who has risen from destitution to becoming a respected author, caught in the maelstrom of contemporary history, and Sergei, a Russian arms dealer who has given up the idea of writing a book narrating the story of the trade to concentrate on his father’s business, and has shed his Russian inheritance and identity and assumed one of cosmopolitanism. It also includes, inter alia, Francois and Prahalad, a gay couple who own and run Bonjour, a fine dining restaurant and breakfast venue. Very quickly the novel establishes a cosmopolitan identity as the composite or definitive Indian identity. It is this identity that’s at stake in a majoritarian India, where pluralities are suppressed to present a singular, monolithic identity based solely on religion. At the heart of the narrative is also the story of Katerina, who, along with some rural women, is brutalized, gangraped and left to die. The novel also recounts the impact of polarization on Rafeeq and Rahman — an intrepid chef and owner of Kaif Cafe — who suddenly find that they are strangers in a country they had previously called their own. The trajectory of Prabhakar’s life is rudely interrupted one day when he comes across a corpse on the crossroads, naked but for a skullcap on its head. The pervasive violence of public life intersects in the story with his increasing intimacy with Katerina/ Katya. The novel is a political allegory providing a snapshot of the times we live in. The author maps the swing to the Right not only in the national but in a broadly international context. It narrates the rise of jingoistic nationalism and xenophobia in countries, leaders and people in Europe and an increasingly growing sense of intolerance in people of ‘others’. While the composition of the ‘other’ is shown to vary from one place to another, the core idea is communicated in no uncertain terms. The political discussion is around Prabhakar’s book in which his protagonist Mirajkar expresses interest in a hypothetical overturning of the traditional virtues of altruism and tolerance to replace them with a Nietzschean (and dystopic) view of history. Having endorsed eugenic experiments and the somewhat Darwinian perspective of ancient Spartans more as a hypothesis than anything else, Prabhakar realises that his book runs the risk of being appropriated by a ruthless, authoritarian regime to provide a theoretical bulwark and justification for taking extreme measures. Coming at a time when right-wing populism is ruling the roost, Butterflies is a timely reminder of what is at stake in the relentless pursuit of muscular nationalism that has emerged in countries which have…
