Book: WHEN THE MOON SHINES BY DAYAuthor: Nayantara SahgalPublisher: Speaking Tiger167 pagesRs: 399

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What does a writer do to register her political dissent after she's returned state honours, written petititons in newspapers and spoken out at various public fora? She writes a novel, using art to get across the message that polemics, perhaps, could not.

When The Moon Shines by Day by Nayantara Sahgal, who at 90, is one of our most respected writers in English, touches on all the issues that she'd raised two years ago when she returned her Sahitya Akademi award – namely, "the vicious assault" on "India's culture of diversity and debate", intolerance by the majority community leading to widespread persecution of Muslims and Dalits, the use of violence or intimidation to suppress artists and scholars, etc.

Set in India, sometime in the here and now, it imagines the country under a majoritarian regime where it's mandatory to greet one another with Bharat Mata ki Jai, where a government department called 'Directorate of Cultural Transformation' presides over ghettos where minority commmunities are forced to live in, where books that say things contrary to the official line, are just taken off the shelves, where art exhibitions by senior Muslim artists are vandalised by mobs, who also randomly lynch people they suspect of eating or transporting beef.       

Fiction here is a thinly disguised cloak for recent events and the plot, a ruse for conveying a message. Sahgal's larger frame of reference, however, is historical – to see the present in terms of the past, specifically *1930s Europe when fascist rulers came to power in Spain, Italy, and Germany. The point, as Franz Rohner, one of the characters in the book, articulates is that all revolutions, and all dictatorial regimes, follow the same patterm, that they "copycat each other, even to their craze for uniforms to carry out their commands. Black Shirts, Brown Shirts."

When... isn't a dense novel – actually, at just 167 pages, it's a short, breezy read. But Sahgal packs in a lot, including a lot that's not really apposite to the plot. Such as a description of an encounter with Mexican muralist Deigo Rivera, and a long passage on the Taj Mahal, the facts of the Shah Jahan-Mumtaz Mahal love affair and whether Shah Jahan was in an incestuous relationship with his daughter Jahanara, which stick out like disconnected, though interesting, elements in the narrative.

In the novel, Sahgal has Kamlesh, a retired diplomat turned writer, speak about the Taj to a book club he's invited to address – it's the subject of a book he's researching. The book club consisting of four women in their forties – among them Rehana, the principal protagonist and in some ways Sahgal's alter ego – is a convenient plot device, giving Sahgal room to bring in a range of themes, ideas, and characters. Kamlesh is one, and the other is Rohner, who gets to mouth some of the best lines in the book. Asked to describe revolutions, for instance, Rohner replies, "Are they not the man who mounts his woman with no please-may-I, gallops to glory, rolls of his mount and snores himself to sleep? And the woman? Ah, the woman! She lies awake plotting how to kill him." Thankfully, for all its didacticism, the novel doesn't lack a light touch!