Nailing Gandhi for Cracking India in Manohar Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges and Raj Gill's The Rape

This article makes a comparative analysis of two canonical Indian English Partition novels--Manohar Malgonkar's A Bend in the Ganges and Raj Gill's The Rape. It assumes that insofar as both the novels, configured after right wing history, look upon Mahatma Gandhi's doctrine of non-violence as perverted in the face of what they see as Islamic terror, they enunciate a view at odds with the nationalistic history of Partition and evoke an affect of revenge against the Muslims. It posits that while Malgonkar conspicuously encapsulates the Hinduvta view of Partition through an unambiguous dramatization of an intense dialectic between violence and non-violence, and between V. D. Savarkar and Mahatma Gandhi to dexterously develop the theme of revenge, Gill bungles the transmutation since he dubiously hovers between a right-wing Khalsa view that calls for revenge and conversely a tempered, secular line accentuating forgiveness. Keywords: Indian English Partition novel, Manohar Malgonkar, A Bend in the Ganges, Raj Gill, The Rape, right-wing history, Gandhi, non-violence, Islamic terror, nationalistic history of Partition, revenge, Hindutva view of Partition