Fragments Shored Against Ruins: Defragmenting India through the Gathering Storm

Abstract

Travel between territories which exists contemporaneously is baffling in a psychogeographical sense. What had previously been considered as movement through indifferent space seems to be movement through time, into the future or into the past. The spatial assemblages within which these figures travel each have their own temporality, a rhythm that is produced and maintained by the processes that produce and maintain the human and nonhuman elements of the territory. Therefore travel narrative manifests itself as a narrative of space and difference and consequently travel writing as a format reflects an incessant surge of new concepts, new ways of seeing and being.. In this context, I argue that such an attempt is made by Harish Nambiar in his Defragmenting India: Riding a Bullet through the Gathering Storm, a travelogue narrative of a motorbike trip of the author and his friend across various states. Written in the dramatic backdrop of the 2002 Godhra riots, it provides an account of the various fault lines of Indian society quivering in the temblors that the communal riots of Gujarat sent across the nation. The book maps the urban consciousness of India by juxtaposing lives, issues and situations of educated and the uneducated, craftsman and conservationist, teacher and businessman, daughters and drunks from small towns and non-metro cities of India. It thus succeeds in capturing the undercurrents that flow through the life of a nation, community, city, families and individuals, simultaneously cutting across narrow divisive borders.