Page 71 - EW July 2021 final

did as testified by the per- times subsequently. Samp-
vasive poverty, illiteracy son examined the power THE FATE OF BUTTERFLIES
and misery which the vast structure of the UK and
majority of the populace its well-networked public Nayantara Sahgal
suffers on a daily basis — school and Oxbridge elite SPEAKING TIGER
to transform into creative which ruled Britain and Rs.455
minorities to raise general half the world for several Pages 144
living standards of the centuries, and continues
proletariat and maximise to rule the UK through the
the potential of indepen- Conservative Party.
dent India. This enduring po- story of several people but Butterflies is a
In this 228-page book, litical party was — and centres mainly around timely reminder
Baru makes no comment is — driven by a continu- Prabhakar, a professor of what’s at stake
about the foolish left-turn ously evolving elite which of political science who in the relentless
down the road to socialism supports this tiny nation’s has risen from destitution pursuit of muscular
of the Nehruvian-Lutyens mercantile and indus- to becoming a respected nationalism
power elite. Surely given trial revolution traditions author, caught in the
their excellent education and its great education maelstrom of contempo-
they should have known institutions. This creative rary history, and Sergei, a that they are strangers in a
that pre-British raj India minority laid the founda- Russian arms dealer who country they had previ-
had been a highly success- tions of the world’s largest has given up the idea of ously called their own.
ful private enterprise driv- empire which has since writing a book narrating The trajectory of Prab-
en subcontinent with well- made an orderly retreat the story of the trade to hakar’s life is rudely inter-
established mercantile into comfortable national concentrate on his father’s rupted one day when he
and banking traditions. It prosperity. business, and has shed his comes across a corpse on
was utterly foolish to have A study of Britain’s Russian inheritance and the crossroads, naked but
ignored this advantage self-perpetuating public identity and assumed one for a skullcap on its head.
and replace it with bu- school and Oxbridge elite of cosmopolitanism. It The pervasive violence of
reaucrats managing public would have provided Baru also includes, inter alia, public life intersects in the
sector enterprises which answers to why India’s Francois and Prahalad, a story with his increasing
soon became millstones of ephemeral power elites, gay couple who own and intimacy with Katerina/
the Indian economy. Nor which he has described run Bonjour, a fine dining Katya. The novel is a po-
does the author comment in detail, failed, and will restaurant and break- litical allegory providing a
on how state govern- continue to do so. fast venue. Very quickly snapshot of the times we
ments dominated by rural DILIP THAKORE the novel establishes a live in. The author maps
castes and combinations cosmopolitan identity as the swing to the Right not
have deliberately and the composite or definitive only in the national but
continuously neglected Whose India Indian identity. in a broadly international
education — the ultimate It is this identity that’s context. It narrates the
leveller — of the masses to binary at stake in a majoritarian rise of jingoistic national-
perpetuate their rule in the India, where pluralities ism and xenophobia in
hinterlands of India which HE FATE OF are suppressed to pres- countries, leaders and
remains mired in poverty, Butterflies by ent a singular, monolithic people in Europe and an
lawlessness and misery. Tthe redoubtable identity based solely on increasingly growing sense
Baru’s reflections on Nayantara Sahgal is religion. At the heart of the of intolerance in people of
American writer C. Wright another testimonial to narrative is also the story ‘others’.
Mill’s The Power Elite her versatile imagination. of Katerina, who, along While the composition
(1956) which examined Interweaving personal and with some rural women, of the ‘other’ is shown
the US establishment, the political like many of is brutalized, gangraped to vary from one place
inspired him to write this Sahgal’s earlier books, this and left to die. The novel to another, the core idea
book. Perhaps he should novel narrates a history also recounts the impact is communicated in no
have read Anthony Samp- of the present from a fast of polarization on Rafeeq uncertain terms. The po-
son’s Anatomy of Britain receding liberal-secular and Rahman — an intrepid litical discussion is around
first printed in 1962 and perspective. chef and owner of Kaif Prabhakar’s book in which
rewritten by him several Butterflies traces the Cafe — who suddenly find his protagonist Mirajkar

JULY 2021 EDUCATIONWORLD 71