Speaking about the new politics of time undertaken by Gandhi upon actively joining the Indian Independence struggle, Ashis Nandy explicates the fragmentation that occurs therein. Under the purview of Indian fatalism, it is implied “in the past there are always open choices” (Nandy), allowing it the same state as the present. When the past is thus malleable, a fractured present state of being is made. Here, the past is allowed the luxury of being remade. As a result, the new past allows for an “alternate determined future” which elevates myth to the anti-historic level, whereby these myths are the essence of a culture. However, for such cultures as India’s, which ascribed importance to these myths, a second-grade demotion was made. Nandy formulates this demotion thus:
“Historical societies are the true representatives of mature human self-consciousness and, therefore, their constructions of the ahistorical societies are more valid scientifically than those of these societies themselves. The latter must act out their ahistorical fates as understood by those who are historians to the world.” (Nandy)
Hereby, the ahistoric society’s narratives of their own past may be questioned and replaced with so-called ‘credible’ histories. Gandhi’s fragmentation of time, in such a circumstance, comes through as a defense against the threat of a dominating Eurocentric history of the Indian subcontinent. This strategy, however, finds a different echo in the words of Tarun K. Saint. His Partition World is created, not from the myths that characterize it, nor the historic narrative, but a tradition of writing that emerged following the partition. The text in question here is Tamas by Bhisham Sahni, a piece of historical fiction set in Partition-era Punjab. It underlines the gross violence that was undertaken during the mass migration/exile, providing scenes not amiss in a Hobbesian nightmare. With a keen focus on realism, it follows a series of gruesome events amounting to a riot which unfolds after a pig is slaughtered and its carcass dumped before a mosque. Tamas thus makes statements and conjures images that Saint’s story itself shies away from making explicit. These statements on rampant caste/creed/religion-fueled violence also hint at the Originator’s justification for setting up the partition theme park. It was created owing to a need for a “more direct encounter with memories of the past” (Saint) which a museum would not afford owing to a sense of time frozen. In museums, it is material production into which the labor of history has been embodied as opposed to the theme park’s experience of the process of embodiment in person. The historification is thus deliberate here. Baudrillard’s work on the postmodern condition offers a way to examine the theme park, a monument unveiled in the centenary year of independence.
In his book Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard identifies three orders of simulations before presenting his critique of the postmodern condition and our reliance on representations as opposed to grounded realities. The first order of simulation Baudrillard identifies is that of identifiable counterfeits, which are place markers. The second order marks a blurring of boundaries between the imitation and the real, but retains the qualitative bindings of the real world. Finally, the third order is where the “distance... between the real and the imaginary tends to abolish itself” (Baudrillard). Hereby, there is creation of the hyperreal world where fiction no longer exists in its paradoxical precedence to reality. Upon utilizing this lens to understand the orders of simulacra in the short stories, the Partition Theme Park as well as the modular human minds of Menon’s “Shit Flower” can be read here as second-order simulacra, insofar as they retain an identifiable antecedent. The present state of the simulations in the stories arises as a function of time. In the trappings of precedence, Sahni’s novel in Tarun K. Saint’s story provides an earlier representation from which the park’s simulation is constructed. Similarly, Radha’s personality in its uploaded form in Menon’s story is a clear imitation of the original. The simulation in Saint’s story borrows from historical fiction. Yet the novel’s realism does not erase the distinction between a literary representation and the events it represents.
The unnamed Originator’s desire to “reconnect with her family’s roots” (Saint) drives her to create an extension of what the hyperreal theme park of the television series Westworld partly recreated for her. In the television show, the theme park begins to malfunction and the robots (hosts), vestiges of a Wild West past, turn loose upon their human guests. This symbolizes a spillage – that of the artificial into the human world whereby the former could begin to dictate reality quite literally. Saint’s short story also terminates its narration near the brink of such an (albeit far less sinister) end, as seen when the psychologist recognizes a glimmer of cognizance in the eyes of Nathu, a character from Tamas. The theme park’s ambition, result aside, was the establishment of a “temporal location outside of history” (Saint) which would affect the social reality of their times. In this manner, the simulations carried out by the artificial intelligence entities within the theme park share a place with the space of theatre, where adaptations of works become texts with bits tailored to their own times. Thus, the simulations are texts by themselves. However, the text of the simulation is not in the tradition of acute realism. The spectator in the theme park is allowed to maintain their distance from the live action and remain an unharmed spectator who is at once present and absent in relation to the performance. The presence exists at the level of the ‘created world’, with the apparent absence being from the level of the ‘text that is performed’. However, this does not make the text of the theme park or the Sahni simulation extraordinary. Linda Hutcheon elucidates this in “Historiographic Metafiction”:
“In its characteristic attempt to retain aesthetic autonomy while still returning the text to the "world," postmodernism both asserts and then undercuts this formalistic view. But this does not necessitate a return to the world of "ordinary reality," as some have argued (Kern 216); the "world" in which the text situates itself is the "world" of discourse, the "world" of texts and intertexts. This "world" has direct links to the world of empirical reality, but it is not itself that empirical reality.” (Hutcheon)
The autonomy retained by the simulation is in the select representation of parts of Sahni’s novel and the constraints that it imposes on the participants and the actors of the text to produce its intended effect. The robots in the theme park, which are actors of the various texts’ representations, are disallowed a presence outside of their function. They cannot interact with the human participants outside of Isaac Asimov’s three laws: “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; a robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” This strengthens their binding to the human participants, who, interestingly, may also be allowed to affect the text of the simulation, given the second law which would allow the input of orders from a spectating human being. Furthermore, the text of Tamas was part of the simulation that allowed participants to “relive character incidents” (Saint). The recreated location is Rawalpindi, and the scenes considered here foreground violence. The events leading up to the massacre and its political pretexts remain less visible in this account. While the recreation does show Nathu being chased by a bellicose bloodthirsty mob, this scene offers no equivalent of the political explanation in statements such as “the government doesn’t look for people’s similarities, it’s interested in seeing how they differ from one another” (Sahni), which showcases the design behind the riots. Similarly, the novel’s pacifist perspectives receive less attention in the scenes discussed here. The theme park can thus be read as metafiction, exposing a tension between its ambitious intent and the selective representation through which it pursues that intent.
The theme park’s intent is also advertised to be the creation of a “time capsule” which allows participants to “Experience freedom from unwanted intrusions from the past” (Saint). The cryptic ‘intrusions’ of the past are made clear to the reader in the Originator’s tale. She explains, “Indian society still faced those age-old problems of recurrent violence” (Saint), marking the issue as a residual occurrence which may be alleviated by the theme park. The appropriation of ‘catharsis’ has two implications here. First, the consolidation of the simulation as a theatrical production. Second, the psychoanalytic position where the theatrical production is used to surface repressed trauma. This trauma has been carried over from the past and allowed seepage into contemporary reality. The hope is that the simulation of violence and an unfurled past would drive violent elements of society into reconsidering the roots of their action and refraining from repeating the errors of the past. Hereby, the hyperreality aspired for is an inverted one. The imposition on reality (the hyperreality) is hoped to be antonymous to what the simulation showcases. The presumption in this case, however, is that the use of an illustrative deterrent with an emphasis on expression of repressed trauma will help cease violence. However, if one were to take into account Nandy’s account of colonialism’s role in shaping violence – as a result of supplanting the androgynous Indian with the “martial” Indian male to further the agenda of the British Empire in India – the simulation may be questioned. By foregrounding violence while leaving its causes less visible, the simulation risks reproducing the image of the martial Indian without examining how that image was constructed. However, at the same time, the text’s presence as a subject’s (Sahni) narration from memory stands out in opposition to the looming authority of historical societies’ narratives. Such a narrative adds to the Occident’s history, and contributes to what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “The project of provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty). Such a project entails a presence “of contradictory, plural, and heterogeneous struggles whose outcomes are never predictable, even retrospectively”. They reclaim their stature even as they appear as “antihistorical devices of memory and antihistorical ‘histories’ of the subaltern classes” who “can only be spoken for and spoken of by the transition narrative that will always ultimately privilege the modern (i.e., ‘Europe’).” (Chakrabarty) Thus, the invocation of Sahni’s novel, particularly in the form that would characterize modernity (the sim-pad simulation), showcases the excentric nature of the medium as it delivers a demotic narrative.
This reclamation goes hand in hand with the mimicry that Partition World represents, where expectation of catharsis is replaced with a melancholia that takes over the family of three (the Historian, Student and Psychologist). By adapting the Westworld theme park while attempting to constrain the robots’ autonomy, the Originator produces a partial imitation whose effects exceed her intended catharsis. This gap between intention and response carries the germ of rearranging the notion of the theme park as a tool of social engineering.