My favorite depiction of the slums is not so much a description as it is a state of mind. I am referring to the scene where Gudiya is about to get molested by her father and Ram feels the need to tell somebody. In this particular scene, Ram goes to get the landlord, Mr. Ramakrishna, so that he can prevent Gudiya from getting hurt. It is Mr. Ramakrishna’s response to Ram that really put into perspective the way that people of the slums view themselves. He says on pg. 68, “We Indians have a sublime ability to see the pain and misery around us and yet remain unaffected by it.” The whole paragraph is a good example, but this quote sums it up nicely. This idea that pain and misery are an inevitable part of the slums so all that they can do is ignore them really sets the tone for what is to come in the rest of the novel. We see rape, torture, and very poor living conditions in the slums and the only way to cope with it is to pretend it doesn’t exist. This adds to what we talked about in class about the incapacity of poor people to ascend from the slums because if that is the mindset of the poor then it there is no motivation to change how they live.
Juxtapose to this view is Ram. He does not ignore the pain or the misery. In fact, I think he takes the pain and misery and uses it as his motivation to leave his life in the slums. Ram remembers these moments in his life that have caused him pain and he uses it to answer a question on the show, which will eventually lift him out of his miserable life and into the life he so fondly dreamed of on the train before he was robbed.
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I think the mindset of the characters definitely has a lot to do with our view of the slums in this novel. There are only a handful of moral characters in this novel. For the most part, they are the ones that succeed in getting out of the slums. Ram, of course, goes on to win and set things straight with Nita, Salim ends up landing a future part as an actor, and Gudiya lives on to help set Ram free. The people who have no problem with cruelty, however, generally end up stuck where they are. I have to wonder, though, if that is an effect of personality or of the slums themselves.
ReplyDeleteWell, I think that there is a larger point here about the expectations of the Bildungsroman -- i.e. the sense that upward class mobility is not only possible but likely. It seems to me that this runs pretty counter to most of our expectations about realism (where there would be substantial barriers to moving between classes so smoothly). The question of morality seems to enable the aesthetic expectation of class mobility (the good literally rise to the top) but even this is a fairly forced connection, even if it is sutured together with some really lovely language at times.
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