Manohar Malgonkar's Character Comparison

Here, Malgonkar shows through the character of Debi-dayal the strong impact of Gandhism, though he expresses his doubts about the validity of the claims of non-violence, the probability of this ideology having any success, as all the world over, gains such as the freedom struggle in India, had not been attained by this new fangled idea of non-violence. This is amply clear to Malgonkar who had been in the British Indian army and had travelled far and wide on army assignments, so for him it must have been a totally new concept of warfare; a warfare without weapons was unimaginable.
During the rally, Gandhi is depicted as working on his spinning wheel, and while doing so, there is a break in the thread, which he deftly joins together. The writer …show more content…
He does this by introducing us to Debi-dayal Kerwad, the son of Tekchand Kerwad, a wealthy businessman associated with a very successful construction business. Debi-dayal, belonging to the privileged class, is strongly opposed to the rule of the British in India, and utilizes much time in learning and polishing the art of Judo at the Hanuman Physical Culture Club, partially to circumvent the repetition of an incident in his adolescent in which he had been humiliated by a British soldier attempting to rape his mother. This was not at all surprising, as the youth at that time had taken to physical training, having taken a leaf out of the teachings of Gandhi, to counter the British belief that Indian men were weak and effeminate. And the reader is later not at all surprised to discover that the Club is really a front for a group of freedom fighters, engaged in creating terror in the minds of the British. Through these protagonists, Malgonkar traces the political actions and other happenings, and it is through their contrasting actions and reactions to the tremendous upheavals that he puts forward the divergent ideologies that each follows and discusses the question of which of these ideologies was more suited to tackling the complex nature of the freedom …show more content…
“…And then we talk of non-violence! The creed of non-violence is a naked insult to the land of Shivaji, and Akbar and Ranjit.” (ABG 59)
By means of Shafi Usman, another key character of the novel, Malgonkar intertwines history as it happens, wherein another real life figure, that of the freedom fighter, Jatin Das, is kept alive in the memory of Shafi. And it is through the character of Shafi that Malgonkar invokes the images of the barbaric Jallianwala-Bagh massacre and its aftermath and at the same time, he delves into the causes of this violence, and shows that it can be very self-consuming and destructive, giving a peep into human psychology, giving weight to the school of thought: ‘violence begets