Lesser Breeds- a novel.  – Nayantara Sahgal
375 pp. Harper Collins. Rs. 395  ISBN:81-7223-444-9
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If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe-
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law-

These lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem Recessional, printed on the first page of Mrs. Nayantara Sahgal’s latest novel- Lesser Breeds suddenly arrest our attention providing a hint of what lies ahead in the next three hundred and fifty odd pages.
The so called Lesser Breeds struggling against the self-decreed superior ones, is, what a considerable pat of human history has been and it is to this breed-mania that racism, imperialism and colonialism owe their parentage. Mrs. Sahgal’s novel is set in a period when these evils were rampant in the world and the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors was the fiercest.
This struggle was on with all the might in the colonies in Asia and Africa but there was something different with it in India where the struggle was on with a weapon that the world had never seen or heard of before: the power of soul. This power soul was supposed to combat the power of bayonets, machineguns and bombs. This was the weapon of the ‘new creed’ which the world was watching evolve with awe; a creed which declared: “If blood must be shed in this battle, let I be your own”.
The world was watching with wide eyes, the prophetic Mahatma proclaiming this mantra to millions of India’s men and women. “If the enemy realized,” he was telling them, “you have not the remotest thought in your mind of raising your hand against him even for the sake of your life, he will lack the zest to kill you.” Gandhiji’s Great Experiment of Non-violence was definitely being watched by the world with awe, but did it work or was it just a lunatic’s fantasy or dreamy idealism? Does it have any significance for us today?

Mrs. Sahgal’s novel brilliantly discusses these still burning questions that history has put to us. The novel opens in early 1930s, one of the most turbulent epochs in Indian as well as world history. Nurullah, the protagonist, is a young man of twenty three who arrives at the historic city of Akbarabad to teach English literature to the ‘first years’ at the university. For nearly ten years since 1932, he lives with a non-violent family, actively involved in the freedom struggle in their once splendorous domed mansion which, after the family’s plunge into the quest for freedom, has now become a ‘national monument’. It is during his stay here, that Nurullah feels the heat of the freedom struggle and gets closely acquainted with the ebb and flow the movement through Bhai or Nikhil, the head of the family who himself is a freedom fighter and a firm believer in Non-violence. Continue reading →