Book of Secrets Smriti Varma

“I WONDER AT THIS INTRUSION OF THE PERSONAL INTO MY RESEARCH”: THE INTERSECTIONS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY IN M.G. VASSANJI’S THE BOOK OF SECRETS

Smriti Varma Hansraj College

The roots of that present lay in the past and so I made voyages of discovery into the past, ever seeking a clue in it, if any such existed, to the understanding of the present. The domination of the present never left me even when I lost myself in musings of past, events and of persons far away and long ago, forgetting where or what I was. If I felt occasionally that I belonged to the past. I felt also that the whole of the past belonged to me in the present. Past history merged into contemporary history: it became a living reality tied up with sensations of pain and pleasure.

- Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India

Nehru elaborated upon his personal concept of history as perhaps an interaction of the past and present, situated in a continuum. He saw the past as vital, as a significant participant in the trajectory of history, carrying a weight which historians all over the world needed to heed in order to move forward. This moving forward was the act of writing history, wherein the very act of putting words to paper became a method for liberating the individual and the collective society from what he called was “the burden of the past.” The purpose of this burden, ultimately, was to understand that our lives do not exist in a vacuum, that the past occurs as “an aspect of that living present,” and finds its strength in its memory (Nehru 36). This concept holds significance as we begin to grapple with M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets, published in 1994 and the personal vision of history and memory propounded in the novel as enormously powerful shaping forces which are both capable of inciting terrible curiosities as well as means and methods of liberation. This view of history and memory filters itself throughout the text as an understanding of silences which guard the spaces of personal history, and of articulating these silences through the agency of individuals, primarily the central character’s, Pius Fernandes, as he attempts to unravel the unsaid and the unknown in a diary written more than sixty years ago. As Pius engages with the past to liberate the present, history and memory serve defining roles within the narrative as energetic, uncontrollable forces which determine not only the large monumental movements and events of our past, but also the trajectory of personal lives.

M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets masterfully scrutinizes these shadow lines between the private and the public, between what is known and what is remembered. The past and present overlap repetitively in the course of the narrative, and history is relocated from its existence in the past and made into “a living tapestry, to join the past to the present,” in Vassanji’s words. The novel becomes an exercise in historical reconstruction of this repository of memories, thus creating a matrix wherein each of the characters locates their subjective narratives. This paper seeks to analyse the nature of this reconstruction, of this joining of the past and the present, in The Book of Secrets