Review: When The Moon Shines By Day

When The Moon Shines By Day by Nayantara Sahgal
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Aside from her literary achievements, Nayantara Sahgal is well known in India for her forceful and unrelenting critique of Hindu Nationalism. In 2016, Sahgal returned her Sahitya Akademi Award to protest what she described as increasing intolerance in India and the Akademi’s indifference to attacks against rationalist thinkers. She thinks of the BJP and Modi in particular as ‘fascist’ in orientation and has displayed courage throughout her career in combating the right-wing nationalisms of the Sangh Parivar. This is the political womb, so to speak, from which her latest novel emerges. The novel has been described as a political satire and this seems to me an apt description. The novel’s setting is a dystopian India (which Sahgal believes has already arrived) in which racial segregation, book-burning fiestas, and state-sanctioned torture all feature. As regards its literary merit, the books disappoints for many reasons. The plot is disjointed and not easy to follow; the characters that populate her novel lack depth and the novel, more generally, seems to have been hastily produced solely to inflict as much reputational damage as possible to the current political dispensation. Be that as it may, Sahgal’s short novel serves as a chilling commentary on disquieting developments in contemporary India that are increasingly unleashing illiberal instincts in multiple Indian constituencies. It takes just 30 minutes of watching Indian news channels to see how bitter and coarse India’s political discourse has become. As the space of liberal expression seems to be shrinking and as minorities continue to be reminded of their precarious position in Indian society, literary activism of Sahgal’s sort is required to remind us of the true dystopia that awaits us should we allow the present illiberalism to gather steam and percolate throughout the country.

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