Clear Light of Day is set in Delhi in part during the summer of 1947, as the partition of India and Pakistan gives both nations independence—but also sets off deadly riots between Hindus and Muslims across the subcontinent. Instead of experiencing these riots directly, the Hindu Das family, which is facing its own serious internal divide, gets to go up on their roof and watch them from a comfortable distance. After all, they live in a wealthy neighborhood where Hindus and Muslims generally get along, and they are progressive-minded liberals who try their best to fight the growing trend of religious polarization, segregation, and suspicion. Most importantly, Raja studies Urdu in school and falls in love with its long poetic tradition. He wants to attend an Islamic studies college, and while his father refuses on the grounds of safety, he still marries his Muslim landlord Hyder Ali’s daughter Benazir and goes to live in a predominantly Muslim community in Hyderabad. After all, this religious intermixing is part of his local heritage: India’s Muslim emperors ruled from Old Delhi, speaking in Urdu, long before the British built New Delhi.
Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Raja’s other great literary passion besides Urdu poetry is the work of English-speaking Romantic and Modernist poets, like Byron and T. S. Eliot. While of course these writers’ work was brought to India through colonialism, this didn’t make them any less valuable or inspiring to young Indians like Raja. The same principle applies to music throughout this book: Baba listens to American jazz and English Christmas music on his gramophone, while Dr. Biswas adores classical German composers and the novel ends with Bim attending a traditional mushaira (Urdu musical poetry recitation). For Desai, anything goes because there is no one single true Indian identity. Rather, she shows how art’s universal appeal can unite people across cultures, and she depicts her characters bridging religious and cultural divides through it in order to highlight the way that India, and Delhi in particular, has always been a place where different cultures come into contact and produce novel outcomes, ideas, and ways of life as a result.
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Art and Social Divisions Quotes in Clear Light of Day
“Old Delhi does not change. It only decays. My students tell me it is a great cemetery, every house a tomb. Nothing but sleeping graves. Now New Delhi, they say is different. That is where things happen. The way they describe it, it sounds like a nest of fleas. So much happens there, it must be a jumping place. I never go. Baba never goes. And here, here nothing happens at all. Whatever happened, happened lone ago—in the time of the Tughlaqs the Khiljis the Sultanate, the Moghuls—that lot.” She snapped her fingers in time to her words smartly. “And then the British built New Delhi and moved everything out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting duller and greyer I suppose. Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes away—to New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They don’t come back.”
[Tara] was prevented from explaining herself by the approach of a monstrous body of noise that seemed to be pushing its way out through a tight tunnel, rustily grinding through, and then emerged into full brassy volume, making the pigeons that lived on the ledge under the veranda ceiling throw up their wings and depart as if at a shot.
Raja had studied Urdu in school in those days before the Partition when students had a choice between Hindi and Urdu. It was a natural enough choice to make for the son of a Delhi family: Urdu had been the court language in the days of the Muslim and Moghul rulers and had persisted as the language of the learned and the cultivated. Hindi was not then considered a language of great pedigree; it had little to show for itself in its modern, clipped, workaday form, and its literature was all in ancient, extinct dialects. Raja, who read much and had a good ear, was aware of such differences.
“This is no college for you. It is a Jamia Millia form.”
“That is where I want to study. I went there to get a form.”
“You can’t study there,” his father said, taking the cigar out of his mouth and spitting out a shred of tobacco. “It is a college for Muslim boys.”
“No, anyone can go there who wants to specialise in Islamic studies.”
“Soul of my soul . . . Now I am going alone. I grieve for your helplessness, but what is the use? Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry the consequences with me. Strange that I came with nothing into the world, and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!”
With her inner eye she saw how her own house and its particular history linked and contained her as well as her whole family with all their separate histories and experiences—not binding them within some dead and airless cell but giving them the soil in which to send down their roots, and food to make them grow and spread, reach out to new experiences and new lives, but always drawing from the same soil, the same secret darkness. That soil contained all time, past and future, in it. It was dark with time, rich with time. It was where her deepest self lived, and the deepest selves of her sister and brothers and all those who shared that time with her.
