India has changed. Rehana finds her father’s books on medieval history have been ‘disappeared’ from bookstores and libraries. Her young domestic help, Abdul, discovers it is safer to be called Morari Lal in the street, but there is no such protection from vigilante fury for his Dalit friend, Suraj. Kamlesh, a diplomat and writer, comes up against official wrath for his anti-war views. A bomb goes off at Cyrus Batliwala’s gallery on the opening day of an art show.
Presiding over this new world is the Director of Cultural Transformation, whose smiling affability masks a relentless agenda to create a Hindu master race.
In this atmosphere, Rehana and her three book-club friends, Nandini, Aruna and Lily, meet every week to discuss a book one of them has chosen—their oasis of peace amidst the harshness of reality—even as Rehana’s German friend, Franz Rohner, haunted by his country’s Nazi past, warns her of what is to come. All revolutions, he wryly observes, follow the same path. But is India about to prove him wrong?
In this brilliant, dystopian satire, Nayantara Sahgal draws a telling portrait of our times.
When The Moon Shines By Day is a dystopian satire written by
Nayantara Sahgal & published by Speaking Tiger. The author is an Indian
writer in English. Her fiction deals with India's elite responding to the
crises engendered by political change. She was one of the first female Indian
writers in English to receive wide recognition. She is a member of the Nehru
family. She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her
novel Rich Like Us (1985)awarded by India's National Academy of Letters.
The story takes us to a different India. A country which has
lost its democratic values & in the name of religion segregation & discrimination
is practiced. People from minority communities have to live in isolation or
change their names altogether. Art is controlled & so is knowledge. Our
protagonist Rehana is a part of a book club along with 3 other friends of hers
where they try to read different kinds of books. Apart from her there are
characters like Kamlesh whose anti-war thoughts land him in trouble. As our
protagonist’s German friend tries to warn others about the blatant similarities
between the path Nazi Germany went & that of India, it seems close to
impossible to make people understand how disastrous that may be. Get this book
here to read this exciting story,
Nayantara Sahgal is a brave woman who returned her Sahitya
Akademi Award to protest against the rising intolerance in India at a time when
several rationalists were getting murdered. As expected people discredited her
concerns which I believe needs to be focused on. Hence, I was quite excited to
read this book as it serves as a warning to what can happen to India if it
doesn’t mend its ways, also it was my first book by the author. The book being
a short read was a breezy read & with a topic like this it was justified.
What didn’t work for me were the pace & the narration. The author took too
much time to set the scene of the story & hence even though it is a breezy
read, I was bored for quite a major part of the book. The cover is beautiful
& is the title. An important read for our times.
