PERSPECTIVES Economic & Political Weekly EPW april 27, 2019 vol lIV no 17 27 Rule of the Uncanny ‘Governmentality,’ and the Question of History in Basheer’s Novels Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil The author thanks the anonymous reviewer for comments and wishes to express his deep gratitude to Satish Poduval for his guidance in writing this article. He also acknowledges the assistance of the CSDS–ICSSR Fellowship in conducting a major portion of this research. Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil (shafeeq.k@ manipal.edu) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education. The novel as a form is argued to be the literary counterpart of an individuating world. In the postcolony, however, the novel as a form will have to find new ways to account for the rupture from history effected by the duplication of the same names across two registers, one in popular memory, and the other in governmental registers. Select works of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer are analysed to decipher how this crisis in historicity was negotiated in terms of the literary. T he rise of novels has been associ- ated with the installation in the representational regime of real individuals placed in real time and place (Watt 1957). This real individual would soon be identified as the “proto-bourgeois” who could then imagine a community around them (Anderson 1983; Arm- strong 2006). The themes of divergence in the postcolony with the European ex- perience have been attentive to the var- iegated nature of reality in the novel mi- lieu (Anjaria 2012), and what is realisti- cally aspirational for the colonial subject there, in their individuation (Mukherjee 1985). That the category of the individual, a product of the colonial encounter, often has to contend with another project of the same pedigree—governmentality— against the homogenising logic of which individuation has to strive through cor- poreal and verbal expressions too have been noted (Tharu 2000; Bose 2006; Majeed 2009). The concern here, on the other hand, is the representational strug- gle in narrating the community as inher- itors of a past even as it lives through the times of governmentality when commu- nities acquire new meaning in the state register. But, the community itself under- goes a transformation as it is refracted in the governmental prism, bringing forth a crisis in representation. The concern of this article is the resolution of this crisis, one variety of which is analysed through examining the works of Vaikom Mu- hammad Basheer (1908–94). The Inheritance of Loss In the introduction to Ntuppuppakkorane- ndarnnu, published in 1951, Basheer lays out the objective of his work as: to project the glory of the bygone days of Islam and at the same time to point out the failure of present-day Muslims to adjust to the modern life because of this mythical past. Every beggar and every butcher even now claims that he is a direct descendant of Akbar the Great. The elephant is the symbol of that obvious past. 1 (Basheer 1980: x) What is interesting about this objective is the link that Basheer mends between a past that is characterised by Akbar the Great and the degraded present of the Mappila community. The community of Mappilas in Kerala is not linked to Akbar in their memory or political past. Mappila literature in Kerala, which is usually identified from the 16th century in the events post the arrival of the Portuguese, either proffers political links to the Zamor- in, the king of Calicut, and thereby a local grounding, or an imagined Muslim globality. The cultural memory of the Muslims in Kerala connects them to Arabia through the many linkages of trade, the memory of Zamorin who embraced Islam in the presence of the Prophet himself, and the long interaction in the intellec- tual tradition between Egypt, Yemen, and the Malabar coast. That Basheer chose the figure of Akbar, the pre-eminent ruler acceptable to secular India from the Mughal dynasty, posits a case for this novel as framed by pan-Indian rather than regional concerns. That the Muslim com- munity of India could then be imagined as a whole through the figure of Akbar, rather than say an Ottoman Caliph— which has had more resonance among the Muslims in Kerala through M K Gandhi’s and Ali brothers’ Khilafat movement— and who would, thus, conjure the catego- ry of a global Muslim, already signals in Basheer the awareness of the coming of the nation state in which the older self- definitions do not hold water any more. Invoking Akbar, a past is made available through the notion of the nation state. Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu is an “Indian” novel written in a “vernacular” tongue that serves, as illustrated in the novel, as the medium through which this “Indian- ness” can be performed. The institution of the nation in India has been understood in terms of a passive revolution, whereby the colonial-educated bourgeois elite of India strove to bring to nationhood, given the varied population