http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-amritsar-massacre

 It is another work by VM Straka and is barely mentioned in the book. However, as it says in the footnote of  Page 365 of the book, it is “a novel that exposes grievous acts of misrule and collaboration in colonial India”. This is a true event that occurred in Amritsar, india in April 1919.

Lots of Indians were killed while protesting against the high war tax on Indian people and the forced involvement in the army. 

This massacre started to ignite revolutionary feelings in the colonial India; especially with the initiative of Mahatma Gandhi through civil disobedience against the British regime. This correlates with the scene happening in the book between S and the governor. As it is stated in Page 353 of the book,

“The governor’s guards will see them only as a couple of old villagers who are stuck in the old ways, sweating and scorching themselves out on the river– a joke, really, these people who cannot grasp that there are easier and better ways to make a living than praying a fish will impale itself on your hook, these people whom one cannot help but pity, at least until that pity grows tiresome, at which point, one draws one’s gun and chases them back to the sad, pointless mudflats of their ancestors.”

This paragraph follows with the footnote as follows: “Straka was never more outraged than when he was contemplating the exasperating endless condescension imperial outsiders have shown throughout, history,boasting a cultural and spiritual superiority while bring their “interiors” little but death, disease, and despoilment. ”

This clearly infers Straka’s hatred towards colonizers and imperialists. So, Straka writing a book about the Amritsar massacre would suggest his inner outrage towards the Colonial regime. Also, as Eric and Jen are discussing the similarity of this book with Washington and Greene, Eric says that

There’s not really a hero in either book

Perhaps something about Straka’s country of origin will relate back to his feelings of colonizers.

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