The Transmission of Virulent Ideologies: Part I

In my last post, I wrote about the spreading disease and the creation of monsters, specifically the ways that virulent ideologies spread throughout a society. I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few years, and it is a theme that keeps coming up, again and again, in novels I’ve been reading, specifically two novels I am teaching in my Reverberations of World War II class: Pakistani writer Intizar Husain’s Basti and Japanese writer Yuasa Katsuei’s Kannani. Each of these novels deal with the ways that we repress our own histories and the ways that societies directly spread virulent ideas that harm countless individuals.

Husain’s Basti reminds me, in many ways, of Magda Szabo’s Katalin Street, specifically in the ways that it addresses memory and the ways we talk about our own personal experiences and our cultural experiences. The novel moves back and forth through time, ostensibly set it 1971 during the Indo-Pakistan War and going backwards to pre-partition India before 1947 and even referencing the Indian Rebellion against the British East India Company in 1957.

Zakir is the protagonist of Basti and the novel follows him through the events of 1971 and back into his past. He teaches history at a school in Lahore, and when one of the demonstrations breaks out, he is working on his lecture for the next day. As he sits at his desk and…