Multiculturalism - Other Worlds in Ray and Poe

University of Minnesota Press
Chapter Title: Multiculturalism: Other Worlds in Edgar Allan Poe and Satyajit Ray
Book Title: Lying on the Postcolonial Couch

Book Subtitle: The Idea of Indifference
Book Author(s): Rukmini Bhaya Nair
Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (May 2002)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv8dc.9
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5
Multiculturalism: Other Worlds in
Edgar Allan Poe and Satyajit Ray
Multiculturalism as an educational project transparently seeks to bring

utopia into the classroom. It is the astounding naïveté of this vision of Babel
domesticated and institutionalized that contributes both to grave suspicions
of multiculturalism and to its seductive allure. No wonder, then, that the
simple tenets of American multiculturalism come home to roost so quickly in
an environment like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)—where apo-
litical meritocratic egalitarianism is a dominant ideology. In this sense,
global multiculturalism may be seen as a kind of haunting obverse to a
naive universalism, as I discovered when trying to teach short ghost stories by
Edgar Allan Poe and Satyajit Ray side by side in an IIT classroom.
I had just started to question the ways in which the world-wide web of
muticulturalism was cast when I was coincidentally requested by the
American National Council of Teachers to participate in their World
Classroom initiative. The experiment sought to introduce literary classics
from America to other cultures. Apart from having become fascinated by the
shadowy figures of the engineers in my classes, I had also started to conceptu-
alize the IIT as a U.S. outpost, a first-class production unit in the Third
World that exported likely American citizens out of India each year—a per-
manent fount of diaspora. Hence I was not unaware that taking part in
this sort of institutional game was to leave oneself open to the charge of par-
ticipating in a neocolonial venture. A World Classroom can easily be inter-
preted as just another code for a specifically American Classroom, commodi-
fied and sold as “the best” of intellectual production. However, given my
commitment to resurrecting “naive queries” about the teaching of English
literature in a postcolonial classroom, I felt I had no option but to rise to the
challenge—or was it the bait?
118
Multiculturalism — 119
The focus in this chapter is on those who construct the postcolonial couch.
These are a special class of beings who both make the beds and lie on them—
the technocrats. Pillars of postindustrial societies, engineers who naturally
move into high-level managerial positions when they enter the work space,
command tremendous respect within a Third World scenario. Our best bets
to deliver a pragmatic utopia in the not impossibly distant present, engineers
are prized carriers of the genes of modernity as well as of export-quality mul-
ticulturalism. Indeed, that “exit-tentialism” of the migrant, noted in the
final chapter on the elite cosmopolitan intellectual Salman Rushdie later in
this book, manifests itself in an intriguingly different mutation.
Strange centaurlike creature, half human, half machine, the engineer-
technocrat embodies the image of the bureaucrat perfected—clerkdom as au-
tomated clockwork. He is the linchpin of contemporary global—not merely
subcontinental—society, and yet his achievement goes relatively uncelebrat-
ed, though not unrewarded. An engineer may earn a lot, may be a desirable
matrimonial catch or match, but part of his social appeal is that he is reli-
ably faceless. The engineer, like the perfect technological creation, functions
smoothly in well-oiled silence. Unlike the pure scientist, myths of trouble-
some and heroic discoveries seldom attach to the engineer. How many tech-
nologists, whatever their contributions, have the towering intellectual repu-
tation that attaches to an Einstein, a Chandrashekhar, a Bose, or a Hawking?
The invincibility of modern technology, in short, appears to be directly pro-
portional to the invisibility of its makers.
You are aware of the great barrier in the path of an American writer. He
is read, if at all, in preference to the combined and established wit of the
world. . . . for it is with literature as with law or empire—an established
name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession. Besides, one may
suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel—their having
crossed the sea is with us so great a distinction. Our antiquaries abandon
time for distance; our very fops glance from the binding to the bottom
of the title page, where the mystic characters which spell London, Paris
or Genoa, are precisely so many letters of recommendation.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Letter to Mr. ———”
More than a century and a half before the utopian designs of multicul-
turalism coalesced, rainbow hued across the classrooms of the world, Edgar
Allan Poe’s musings seem to have anticipated some of the consequences of
120 — Multiculturalism
a text “crossing the sea.” For it is with literature as it is with law or empire.
Then, as now, the national appeal of a work of literature was considerably
enhanced by the fame it found abroad—its international cachet. Being
published, or at any rate read, in London, Paris, or Genoa was to be sever-
al steps closer to having arrived at home. Poe died destitute in Baltimore,
neither established nor the fashionable envy of fops; yet within decades,
apart from his acknowledged influence on Hawthorne, his works were to
inspire European movements as distinct as the French symbolism of
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, and the English stories of detection
pioneered by Conan Doyle and Chesterton. So one wonders what further
mordant ironies Poe would find in being evaluated today as an author dis-
tinctively part of the American canon by students and teachers of English
literature from an environment as geographically remote as Delhi and as
imaginatively alien as India.
It is conceivable that Poe’s attitude to the reception of his work in
India might have been considerably more ambivalent than his views on
the interdependence of the American and the European literary scenes.
As his “Letter to Mr. ———” demonstrates, Poe made an explicit con-
nection between the imperatives of literature and those of empire.
America was still a “colony” when Poe wrote, and like many of his con-
temporaries, he was haunted by the ghost(s) of European culture. India,
in contrast, existed beyond the pale of American cultural consciousness.
A British colony at that time, India shared with America some of the
natural disadvantages of self-representation to which colonies are histori-
cally subject. For this reason, India was not, indeed could not have been,
taken seriously by Poe as a venue for the dissemination of his writing.
Looking closely at the ways in which two groups of Indian students
today interpret a Poe ghost story, “The Black Cat,” leads me to add an-
other, other-worldly dimension to the project of inferring a poetics of the
postcolony. I ask, among other things, whether much has really changed
in the area of literary transactions between America and India since Poe’s
time. The evidence I present from my students’ readings of Poe will, I
hope, enable a reconsideration of those issues of possession—demonic,
yes—but also linguistic, psychological, economic, and cultural—that
lurk just below the surface of a calmly universal text. How does a narra-
tive earn the epithet “universal”? What enables it to cross the cultural
barriers to which Poe refers? One naive, but usually reliable, answer
must surely be its theme. Poe’s “The Black Cat” belongs unabashedly to
the ghost story genre, and ghost stories, surely, are good candidates for
cultural universals. Some years ago, casting about for a text for an
NCTE World Classroom project—the initiative that first got me in-
volved in thinking about multiculturalism as an international education-
al strategy—I therefore settled fairly quickly for this genre, which I also
saw as typical of the great tradition of the American Gothic (Hawthorne,
Irving, James, and so on).
The students who were to receive Poe’s text were aggressively male
technologists in the making. I knew from experience that their toler-
ance, at least their expressed, public, and collective tolerance, of poetry,
of stories of love and domesticity, of anything remotely feminine, was
abysmally low. As the time we could spend on the NCTE project was
inevitably short, I had no intention of using this particular forum to
convert my students to less chauvinistic modes of thought. So a ghost
story, not unrelated to the genre of the boy’s adventure-thriller and the
tale of detection, was more or less an ideal practical solution. Apart from
being short and gripping, the story I ended up choosing also had to be
readily available and affordable. Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination
was to be found in most libraries and in low-priced Indian editions (yet
another indication of his posthumous popularity as well as of the way
print capital circulates). But the clincher in my choice of “The Black
Cat” came from the kind of serendipitous coincidence that I think Poe
would have approved.
I have invoked the role of coincidence in chapter 2, and I continue to
worry about it here. For coincidence, to me, seems to represent a kind of
aporia in logic. It means seeing a relationship between events while si-
multaneously denying that such a relationship exists. Coincidence, which
implies not so much a causal as a casual predestination, allows for some-
thing like fate or the hand of God to slip into an otherwise down-to-
earth account of history. It privileges inexplicability over contingency.
Although I tell myself that I must not permit the notion of coincidence
much theoretical license, it seems obdurately to refuse banishment from
my lexicon of postcoloniality—a constant agent provocateur on the
margins of my rationalizing text, as indeed it is in Poe’s.
At about the time when I was trying to decide whether “The Black
Cat” was a suitable guide into the rocky terrain of multiculturalism and
postcoloniality, I happened to read a collection of stories by the film-
maker Satyajit Ray, who had just died. Ray was India’s leading figure in
world cinema. His death attracted much publicity and many publica-
tions, including a translated version of several of his own ghost and mys-
tery stories, originally written in Bengali. Paperwork, after all, always
attends a death. Reading through Ray at the time, attended by that dim
sense of loss felt by a passerby when an always-there monument is sud-
denly gone, it occurred to me that there was a supplement to the ongoing
saga of the pragmatics of postcoloniality. Ray’s stories provided just the
kind of multicultural foil that Poe’s tales needed. Like Poe, Ray, a talent-
ed writer of fiction, combined the horror tale with the detective or sci-
ence fiction story; like Poe, he used ghosts and often animal protagonists
as metaphors for deep, psychic disturbances.
It happened that the first of the twenty stories by Ray that I read, at
random, was called “Mr. Brown’s Cottage”—on the face of it, nothing
to do with black cats. Curiously, though, it turned out that this story,
too, called up the ghost of a black cat. That settled it. I would ask my
students to read both stories—“Mr. Brown’s Cottage,” which had an
Indian context but had been translated into a “new” language, English,
and “The Black Cat,” which was originally written in English, but was
now “transiting” from a Euro-American cultural milieu into a “new”
Indian one.
The questions that occurred to me at this initial, initiating moment
did, I must admit, seem a little absurd. Can protagonists like cats actually
be said to have a cultural identity, and could the experiences projected
through them somehow be categorized as either American or Indian?
Does experience possess a national color, and how, if at all, can it be ac-
quired through reading a literary text? What characteristics might Poe’s
and Ray’s black cats share, other than their ominous ghostliness? Could
these two cats, separated across a century and across the proverbial seas
(time as well as distance, using Poe’s words), possibly possess a common
literary ancestry in popular European folklore that might provide their
readership(s) with grounds for cultural comparisons? If Poe was pos-
sessed by the cultural ghosts of Europe, Ray, too, I intuitively felt, was
not impervious in his ghost story to the shadowy influences of India’s
colonial past (symbolized by Mr. Brown’s cottage). Poe and Ray, as well
as their feline fictions, I suspected, did have something of a common
cultural ancestry. Yet these dark surmises, so typical of a groping post-
colonial critic, remained, I knew, mere esoteric hypotheses until they had
withstood the test of my students’ robust skepticism. To get any further,
it was apparent I would have to let both cats out of the bag and into the
classroom. Which, spurred on by the demon of coincidence, is precisely
what I did next.
the cl assroom
The five Indian Institutes of Technology (at Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur,
Kharagpur, and Madras) were set up in the years immediately after the
declaration of Indian independence in 1947 to groom an elite cadre of
engineering and science students who would meet the country’s techno-
logical needs. The IITs are symbols of the postcolonial Indian state’s
tryst with modernity. Declared “institutes of national importance”
through an act of Parliament—which is quite a bit like an act of God—
entry into the institutes is based on the toughest competitive examina-
tion in India. Only about two thousand from among the one hundred
thousand who sit for the joint entrance examination make it into our
hallowed portals. So there’s little doubt that gaining admission to an IIT
is a sure passport to a successful career, including the very real prospect
of immigration to the prosperous shores of the United States. It seems to
follow naturally that the students who get into an IIT are mostly clever,
single-minded, and earnest young men, who do not have much energy
left over from their forty-hour weekly workload to take an education in
the humanities very seriously. However, they are compulsorily required
to do a number of credits, which count toward their grade point average
at the end of their four or five years at the institute. Hence they cannot
quite afford to neglect their courses in the humanities.
For these institutional reasons, I was hopeful from the start that if I
introduced “The Black Cat” to the undergraduate class I was teaching
they would respond with characteristic seriousness. Perhaps it helped
that my class was a first-year English class entitled, without much ambi-
tion but with some irony, “English in Practice.” As its name indicates,
the aim of the course was to give students, whose medium of instruction
in school had not necessarily been English, confidence in handling the
language, not only through reading literary texts, but also through
grammar drills, audiovisual instruction, face-to-face discussion, quizzes,
essays, and so forth. There were thirty-five students in this particular
class; eighteen came from rural and/or small-town backgrounds, twelve
from in and around metropolitan Delhi, and five were “foreign” stu-
dents (three from Bangladesh and two Palestinian students from Iran).
Only one student in the entire class was female, which roughly reflected
the male/female ratio in the IIT generally.
Part of my task, as I saw it, was to harness the tremendous motiva-
tion that was one of the few things this heterogeneous group of students
had in common, so that they would take not merely an instrumental
view of learning a language—in this case, English—as a means to
achieving the goal of a successful career, but would learn also to take a
certain pleasure in their engagement with the language. Such a stab at
pleasure within an overall structure coordinated and administratively
preorganized in an ungainsayable and admirably efficient military fash-
ion was doubtless foolhardy, but I have to admit that I found the pros-
pect of exploring stories as unpredictable and irrational as Poe’s especially
exciting in this kind of regimented classroom—a sort of deconstructive
challenge.
Perhaps worth mentioning is the fact that I had also discovered with
some sense of shock that many of my students had come from homes
where it had been emphasized that it was a waste of time to read some-
thing as frivolous as a novel. My students carried a very heavy load of
parental and societal dicta. Some—four out of my class of thirty-five—
were first-generation literates and were expected to contribute at the end
of their stay in IIT to the financial well-being of the family. Most had
attended expensive coaching classes for more than a year before they
attempted the entrance exams of the IIT, and this had already meant
considerable sacrifice on the part of their families.
That soldier’s ethic of duty-boundedness was further reinforced by
the institutional structure in which they now found themselves. The
strict economy of sacrifice, I knew, permits no transgressions; the sacrifice
is the ultimate boundary, the end of the road. And I recognized that my
students were, in a sense, human sacrifices at the altar of an all-powerful
institutional god—the postcolonial god of modernity. As a human
being as well as a teacher in the Indian context, I therefore felt very
strongly that, whatever the methodology I followed in class, it had to re-
spect that hidden law of sacrifice and the concealed stresses and aspira-
tions to which several of my students were inevitably subject.
Achievers par excellence, these young men needed, in my opinion, to
be gently introduced to the idea that not everything in life has to be
strenuously earned. Idleness, especially in the form of idle reading,
could also be a source of learning, and the imaginative world of litera-
ture was not just a fluffy substitute for rigorous mental exercise but was
rather an extension of the culture of sacrifice, because it was doing some-
thing for nothing—for nothing, that is, but spiritual gain, as it were.
Reading for pleasure was their dharma, an intrinsic part of the intellec-
tual endeavor to which they were already so committed.
In such a context, I felt that a text like Poe’s, disruptive at several lev-
els but at the same time entertaining, could be particularly liberating.
Therefore, I placed their reading of the Poe story toward the end of their
course, in the last month. This strategy—of leaving the literary to the
very end—had three consequences: First, the students were as prepared
as they could be, within the institutional scheme of their four-month
semester, to read a “difficult” text like “The Black Cat” and react confi-
dently to it. Second, they were shortly to be freed from the pressures of
the classroom for a longish period of three months during the summer
vacation, a fallow time when it was at least possible that their minds
might conjure again with Poe or some kindred spirit. Third, and most
immediate, they were gearing up for their major exams in this, as in
other subjects, and thus could be counted on to pay attention—a sacri-
ficial tribute, payment to the master or gurudakshina demanded by both
Poe and Ray. In other words, retaining the link between exams and read-
ing for pleasure meant that a lifetime of ideological persuasion, in which
hard work was favorably and quite understandably, given the economic
circumstances, contrasted with “idle reading,” was not directly chal-
lenged within my course. Instead, I sought to actually strengthen the link
between the precepts of a familiar work ethic that dictated that one had
to work hard to attain goals such as success in one’s exams, and a more
alien pleasure principle that suggested that working at interpreting a lit-
erary text was an activity enjoyable as an end in itself.
In the event, it turned out from my students’ interpretations of the
Poe text that I was only partially successful in eliciting frank responses to
the Poe story, whose difficulty triumphed over my ingenuity. Because I
did not want to coerce them, the questions in the final examination in-
cluded a substantial element of choice. A student could either choose to
answer questions on the Poe text or bypass it altogether in favor of the
Ray text. For reasons later discussed more fully in the section entitled
“The Text,” only ten students chose to answer a question on the Poe
story, while twenty-five chose the Ray story—which seemed to indicate a
pattern of preferences that needed explanation.
Analysis and explication of reactions, however, must be preceded by

completing the task of scene setting. Although I have so far concentrated
on the undergraduate classroom context within which I hoped to ob-
serve interpretations of “The Black Cat,” there was another group of
readers whose help I sought. Five graduate students in the small, select
Ph.D. program in English happened to be doing a course with me on
narratology. I do not know if it makes a difference, and the sample size is
too miniscule to make any generalizations whatsoever, but it will be ob-
served that the balance of sexes (three men, two women) was a great deal
more natural in this class. I saw my access to this Ph.D. seminar as an-
other lucky coincidence, which enabled me to garner “evidence” from a
more critically skilled audience.
Including the insights of this group meant that a definite contrast
could be delineated between two types of readings of American literary
texts within the postcolonial Indian classroom—the naive, and by ex-
tension nativized, undergraduate position and the trained, self-reflexive,
but colonized one. My undergraduate students, aged between eighteen
and twenty, in general read their stories qua stories and said they found
it very difficult to think through their reactions to them as cultural pro-
ductions, while my graduate class, well into their twenties and even
early thirties, understood well, by virtue of their immersion in literary
criticism, the requirement to react to a story as text. Consequently, their
appreciation of the issues of pluralism and the political consequences of
multiculturalism as educational policy was more sophisticated, as the
section on interpretation entitled “The Text,” in which I quote from
their essays, shows.
the world
As part of my strategy to crack open the Pandora’s box of multiculturalism
and as a light-hearted preliminary to the vexed business of interpreta-
tion, I began by suggesting to both groups of students that we play a
game of associations, a language game sometimes made use of by gestalt
psychologists. I asked everyone to write down the words that immedi-
ately came to mind when they thought of the complex concepts of India
and America. Surely, I conjectured aloud in class, the impressions that
we had formed about these cultural spaces had something to do with
whether we categorized a text as belonging to one or the other territory.
How did our world knowledge about these countries help us evaluate
textual properties? What, if any, was the connection readers made be-
tween reading a text in a classroom and “reading” a nation in the world
at large?
At first glance, however, this move appeared a failure. A deep, if not
unexpected, gap now appeared to yawn between “world knowledge” and
“textual reading,” with the one being apparently quite disengaged from
the other in the minds of my classroom subjects; but upon reflection, I
realized that the “negative evidence” that I had collected through the
students’ associations had more significance in defining the Americanness
of the Poe text than I at first grasped. Consider the sample lists tendered
by ten of my thirty-five undergraduates as well as four of my five Ph.D
students in Figure 10. Strong stereotypic patterns emerge from this list.
For example, America unfailingly evokes images of political power, tech-
nological preeminence, and wealth and economic resources. In these
gross ways, it is the absolute “other” to India’s “self ” defined by tradi-
tion, a huge population, and poverty and economic underdevelopment.
These impressions could well be ones that are shared worldwide; they
might almost have been produced by students in the Philippines or
France or even in America. Yet if they do not seem especially “Indian”
that fact is hardly surprising, given the exigencies of electronic globaliza-
tion, not to mention the deathless flutter of Orientalism memories
everywhere in the postcolonial world.
Since not one of the students in this sample had been to America, their
views of the country had to be entirely mediated—formed by television,
including series like NYPD Blue, Santa Barbara, and Baywatch, as well as
newspapers and magazines. In this sense, it strikes me that America is to
them a fictional country, almost as much an imagined world as might be
found in a Poe story. One student simply describes America as “very far,”
prompting a memory of Houseman’s Edwardian line “Into my heart an
air that kills from yon far country blows.” America is a far country, men-
tally as well as geographically, and this is partly revealed in the depersonal-
ized images of violence it summons up for these students—crime, de-
struction, an interfering nature, arms and ammunition, NASA, nuclear
power, drug addiction, weapons, strong army, missile technology, in-
secure, into the rat race, loneliness, deprived Red Indians, bullying, arm-
twisting, the breaking of Russia, global policemen. Into my heart an air
that kills. Another student encapsulates all America in just a single, strik-
ing description: “freedom even in killing people,” he writes.
figure 10
Undergraduate
Students America India
1 superpower unity in diversity

high status democracy
advanced technology rural people
developed country developing country
interfering nature caste politics
destructive good at copying
inventive people devoted to religion
racial discrimination disrespect for mother tongue
2 rich and strong kindly people
very far very big
good universities beautiful civilization
expensive cheap
technology poverty
high buildings old monuments
freedom high culture
comfortable mismanaged country
3 advanced complex politics
basketball (Magic J) many languages
insecure disordered
sports paradise cultural paradise
technology festivals
space demonstrations, unions
computers culture
power economy population problems
racial society home
4 perfection heritage
powerful emotional
many murders developing society
coming out of recession terrorists
plenty of money hard-working people
justice domination
science history
concern for world peace peaceful society
5 most powerful country vast, poor country
busy economy religious society
higher studies poor economy, good relations
high buildings historical places
expensive cars family relations
figure 10 continued
Undergraduate
world leaders several languages

racism golden history
wrong use of power freedom struggle
advanced technology mismanagement, corruption
6 forceful, powerful large population
freedom, even in killing peaceful ideology
people
crime, madness political disturbances
Hollywood beautiful places
the Rockies Himalayas
greatest secular country vibrant democracy
7 New York City poor cities
higher education cultured people
scientists high growth in population
rich lack of technicians
developed different languages
patent laws unemployment
atom bomb corruption, reservations
educated secularism
arms and ammunition terrorism
8 superpower less export, more imports
well developed developing
powerful good
democracy democracy
high-tech no education for poor
scope for research no scope for research
good living conditions lack of social justice
few political problems bad political problems
9 George Washington M. K. Gandhi
Chicago Agra
George Bush Kapil Dev
Bill Clinton Vivekananda
Abraham Lincoln Shahjahan
New York Akbar
NASA Ayodhya
first country to make nuclear missiles
atom bomb against Pakistan
figure 10 continued
Undergraduate
10 patent law Vivekananda

super 301 foreign policy
movies brain drain
high-tech changeover to market
economy
Michael Jackson/ Madhuri Dixit
Madonna
CIA written constitution
Hollywood Taj Mahal
American football cricket
Ph.D Students America India
Sudha garish traditional

shallow hypocritical
loud conservative
materialistic poor
different for the sake of a culture of extremes
difference
liberated tolerant
land of opportunities corrupt
melting-pot culture superstitious/highly
mythologized culture
drug addiction apathetic
curious rural and urban
tolerant highly demarcated
insecure, into the rat race open to influences, resilient
Neelima individualism tradition
rationality Sanskrit
science great and golden past
affluence oldest literature (Rigveda)
capitalism village culture
easy divorce joint families
single parents/unmarried farmers
mothers
depression poverty
loneliness of old people’s Mahatma Gandhi
homes
nicest airports the Himalayas, the Ganges
big, fast cars lack of work ethic
figure 10 continued
no bearings of the past spiritualism, religion as a

way of life
manual labor respected traditional literature
cult of earn ’n’ learn wear sari, arranged marriages
generation gap communal riots
nation of the most faith in gods, goodness,
liberated people respect for old
deprived Red Indians Panchsheel, nonalignment
scholarships educational backwardness
myth of the self-made man philosophy of contentment
(from rags to riches) (as opposed to the materi-
alism of the West)
Kulbir innovative resists innovation
achievement oriented relationship oriented
individuality collectivity
family institutions almost family institutions still
broken down alive
progressive (look to regressive (fall back
the future) on past)
material spiritual
individuals aware of most individuals still
their rights unaware of their rights
flux stability
tradition deliberately tradition consciously pre-
forgotten served, old and new
politicians responsible for politicians responsible for
better living standards miserable living conditions
social change began from social change initiated from
below above and imposed on
economically lower strata
strong work ethic work not primary
preoccupation
punctuality a norm punctually unpunctual
concern for others’ concern that others do not
progress progress
Harbir extrovert society introvert society
extremism (not neces- old and new (plough, bul-
sarily violent) lock cart; tractor, Maruti)
hippies agriculture
women’s bodybuilding lack of education
figure 10 continued
gays, lesbians, etc. indolence (shirking,

irresponsibility)
good sellers religion, family ties
important
global policemen (bully- variegated culture
ing, arm-twisting,
breaking of Russia, Iraq)
money, opportunity caste-consciousness
federation federal structure
major polluters of global pollution in cities on
environment the rise
Hollywood, CNN as nostalgia as entertainment
entertainment
relatively liberal, feminist, aping Western mores in
wearing jeans dress and deportment
material comforts overpopulation
common man’s freedom oppression of women,
of expression dowry deaths
individuality bureaucracy
Note: Associations were not listed by Prashant, the fifth graduate student, although he did contrib-
ute the long essay to which this task was meant to be a prelude. Prashant’s essay, like those of the
others in his narratology class, is discussed and quoted from in the next section of this chapter,
“The Text.”
As I read these evaluations, it strikes me that America is very much a

contemporary country for my students, emphatically not the metaphor
for a twenty-first-century paradise nor God’s own country, whose stan-
dards India might aspire to in some remote future. Both this inescapable
contemporaneousness of the American dream and the depersonalization
I just mentioned are revealed in the personalities who are associated
with America. They are, for one student, Michael Jackson and Madonna;
for another, Magic Johnson; for the third, George Bush and Bill Clinton,
all very much a product of the here and now. The only historical figures
mentioned are Abraham Lincoln (am I being too fanciful if I suggest
that his name is currently easily recalled because of its phonological simi-
larity to Clinton?) and Columbus. The Red Indians (in one instance
with the qualifying adjective “deprived”) occur twice (again I suspect the
mnemonic role played here by the reflexive word “Indian”).
Hollywood is the only locale that crops up three times. One facet of
American life is certainly its glamour, symbolized by the unreal film world
of Hollywood. Many students call up this ideal world when they use ad-
jectival nominalizations like beautiful, advanced, expensive cars, nicest
airports (!), movies, extrovert society, land of opportunities, high build-
ings, high standard of living, fast life, high taxes on income, open sexual
relations, liberated, affluent, easy divorce, hippies, women’s bodybuild-
ing, lesbians, gays, jeans, material comfort, feminism, individuality. In a
word, freedom of every conceivable sort, but not abstract. What we see in
these bare, binary lists is freedom studded with the psychedelic materiality of
a dream—airplanes, skyscrapers, jeans, and women’s aerobically designed
bodies flying every which way. Indeed, after September 11, 2001, and the
extraordinary images of carnage witnessed on-screen, these innocuous
lists produced in the mid-1990s seem to possess a strange and gory pre-
science, especially in their references to overarching concepts like “power”
and “freedom” in relation to the United States of America.
“Freedom,” like Hollywood, is used three times in these lists, twice
in the composite phrases “freedom of thought,” and “common man’s
freedom of expression.” In conjunction with other words and phrases
like democracy, social justice, melting-pot culture, concern for others’
progress, greatest secular country, developed, good facilities for research,
strong work ethic, material comforts, it suggests that American “power”
has a compelling force. It enables the growth of the individual within a
progressive, urban environment. I emphasize “urban” because the cities
New York, Chicago, and Washington are mentioned in these lists but
hardly any of the spectacular geography of the country is recalled, except
for one stray reference to the Rockies.
India, in contrast, is repeatedly linked to the natural landscape (the
Ganges, the Himalayas), historical architecture (the Taj, Ayodhya), and
saintly figures like Vivekananda and Gandhi. In my students’ estima-
tion, their country paradoxically appears both buoyed up and burdened
down by the sheer weight of its history and tradition. India, to them, is
steeped in a medium they refer to blithely and unself-consciously as
“culture.” Incidentally, this word is not once used in connection with
America. Apparently, whatever its implications, culture, like poverty, is
only to be found on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Technology, on the
other hand, prefers never to leave the shores of the United States.
An interesting difference between my graduate students and their
undergraduate counterparts is that I was unable to find a single instance
of the actual word “technology” used in association with America in the

four lists tendered by the graduates, while it appeared in thirteen of the
twenty-one undergraduate associations. I do not know whether this ab-
sence is a result of graduate students’ greater maturity or of the back-
ground in the humanities that they possess and the undergraduates con-
spicuously lack, but in general, a change in orientation seems indicated
by such a choice of verbal categories. The graduate students concentrate
on the social angles (easy divorce, melting-pot culture, awareness of
rights, open gay activism), while the undergraduates locate their evalua-
tions mainly in the spheres of technological progress and power politics,
these two semantic domains often appearing linked. Likewise “bad
India” (casteism, mismanagement, corruption, riots, disorder, economic
backwardness, lack of education and social justice, dowry deaths), for
both graduates and undergraduates, seems also to arise from a noxious
dirty politics acting upon the usual reagents—traditional cultural rooted-
ness and an acceptance of chronic poverty.
The single thing that India and America appear to have in common
is in fact politics—to be specific, the grand political process of “democ-
racy,” a word that occurs again and again under the columns for India as
well as America. For India, democracy seems to be related by my stu-
dents mainly to concepts like diversity, several languages, many political
parties, various religions, different cultures; for America, democracy
seems to imply not so much existing cultural variety but freedom of choice
instead. Thus, I would suggest that even a singular concept like democ-
racy clusters quite differently in relationship to other ideas in the con-
text of these two countries of the mind. According to these student im-
pressions, in India “democracy” seems to mean hearing many voices,
while in America it means providing several choices.
If we credit the assumption that readings of texts like Poe and Ray in
world classrooms have something to do with the cultural implications of
democratic politics/policies as played out in the institutions of a nation,
then we might begin formulating perceived differences between India
and America. The problem American democracy faces is that of main-
taining multicultural identities in a predominantly monolingual society.
How best to preserve the fragile traces of immigrant culture (Chinese,
Vietnamese, Gujarati, Punjabi, Hispanic) in the face of the unques-
tioned hegemony of one language, one worldview, one culture? Even the
National Literacy Act passed in the United States, for example, defines
literacy in terms of functional proficiency in English. In India, the prob-

lem of democracy must be formulated in terms almost exactly reversed,
because it involves encouraging monoculturalism in a basically multi-
lingual society. How might it be possible to maintain national unity and
a delicate balance, given all the strongly regional linguistic pulls that
exist in the Indian state?
When an American text is introduced into an Indian classroom, it is
important to keep in mind this difference in national imperatives.
Although English, for the reasons of empire mentioned by Poe, does
play an important unifying role in Indian classrooms such as in IIT, it
must be recognized that not only is English not the mother tongue of
the students, it is not the language of street or home either, nor heard all
around in the air. In America, for the most part, standard English is the
language of home and street. It is a power language capable of obliterat-
ing other cultural registers unless care is especially taken to focus on
these other tongues. In other words, the American classroom has in-
creasingly become one of the main places inside which cultural/linguistic
choices are introduced and nurtured. The situation in India, in contrast,
is that educational institutions constitute one of the principle environ-
ments where English is used, and different linguistic/cultural voices are
heard most clearly in the tumultuous world outside class.
Were one to ask what relevance this digression on pedagogy has for
our reading of Poe as a cultural document, the answer would briefly be
this: Anyone trying to call up a particular country in memory is besieged
by fragmentary images. To make sense of these images requires a prag-
matics that relates them to the task at hand—reading a Poe ghost story,
for example. This task, in turn, is framed by a definite context, which in-
cludes the Chinese box of the classroom but extends into a series of other
boxes containing the complex world outside the classroom. It is this al-
ways impinging exterior world, Indian or American, that I have tried to
argue is describable, and indeed we have just witnessed some Indian stu-
dents’ representations that do describe it via certain rudimentary, often
crudely binary, principles of categorization likely to be found in most ed-
ucational contexts. Such identifying categories, I imagine, cannot but in-
fluence perceptions of what an individual text, written in a language with
grave political implications, can come to mean to a reader.
Even more intriguing for teachers entrusted with negotiating the pas-
sage of literary texts across cultural boundaries is the possibility that it is
not the cultural cargo that we already carry in our heads that is off-
loaded onto a text, but the text that may lead us into new territories.
Texts like “The Black Cat” and “Mr. Brown’s Cottage” tend, after all, to
end up subverting the conventional perceptions we hold of other cul-
tures, and force us to rethink our ideas about what an Indian or an
American text is, or ought to be. The fact that a classroom context in
many immediate ways puts the teacher in control, whatever the socio-
political scenario is outside the classroom, could thus have the paradoxi-
cal result that it, too, is permeated by the heady scent of freedom.
Classroom compulsions free students in the sense that they must now
explore dimensions of cultural contact that they might, left entirely to
their own devices, have chosen to ignore. It is like being in a zoo—safe,
but there is danger behind the bars. Since any classroom, but especially
highly disciplined ones such as those found in the IIT, allows, by its very
structure, the manipulation of reading material, it is possible in these set-
ups not just to introduce new texts, but to research through examina-
tions and other forms of literacy hegemony what a text does to a student
as well as what it does for a student. In the next section, I will follow
through on this theme, already discussed in chapters 1 through 4—the
strange, tigerish power of the literary text.
the text
It is generally assumed that reading a work of literature competently
must involve some knowledge of its cultural presuppositions. If this
is so, then most of my undergraduate students did not in fact “get” the
underlying values that informed the Poe text because they were thor-
oughly put off by “The Black Cat.” “I cannot understand him [Poe] at
all,” declared one student. “His language is too difficult, and his behav-
ior is horrible.”
Of Linguistic Alienation
It took me a minute to grasp that two levels of analysis usually kept
apart in literary criticism had been conflated in that spontaneous, spo-
ken comment. For this particular student, Poe was both author, the con-
scious artist using language with deliberate effect, and protagonist, the
first-person narrator possessed by the perverse urge to be extremely cruel
to the dumb creatures who loved him. Difficulties of language thus
became bound up with difficulties of psychological explanation. Ad
hominems abounded. The fact that I had told my students while dis-
cussing the text that it was not improbable that Poe used his writing
therapeutically to explore some of his own psychological traumas only
made it more difficult for them to separate the author from the narrative
voice in the text. And just as the narrator in “The Black Cat” was guilty
of awful moral aberrations, it seemed to most of my undergraduate stu-
dents that the author of the tale was guilty of taking the wrong linguistic
turnings. “He could have told the story more simply” was a constant
grudge. Even if these were the complaints of an unskilled readership, the
dissatisfaction was genuine and succeeded at once in problematizing the
text for us. The convolutions of Poe’s nineteenth-century prose did get
in the way of my students’ responses, but could this be attributed to his
Americanness? Quizzed like this, my students reacted overwhelmingly
with “No!”; some of them pointed out that they would have had equal
difficulties reading “old-fashioned” Hindi stories.
In the view of this undergraduate class, then, language was a barrier
to understanding, but it was not a cultural barrier, because the emotion-
al terrain described by Poe was universal. Poe’s archaisms did indeed
block emotional empathy, said one student, referring to sentences like “I
blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity,” which he
couldn’t imagine anyone really using. Another undergraduate observed
that while the language of “The Black Cat” distanced it, it was not as
bad as having to decipher cat language, and maybe not even as taxing
as having to decode a Yankee accent in the immediate process of hearing
it being spoken!
Everyone in the undergraduate class was unanimous that clues to
Indianness and Americanness in these two stories were to be found not
in their language at all but in their indexical details. They argued, rea-
sonably, that proper names like Anikendra Bhowmick, Mr. Bannerji,
and Bangalore in Satyajit Ray’s story were a dead giveaway. The use of
these proved that the setting of this story had to be India, which made
“Mr. Brown’s Cottage” unquestionably an Indian story. Although I did
try to suggest that there was more to a cultural environment than simply
names and references to geography, my undergraduates were not per-
suaded. It was not just the names used but what they suggested that
mattered, a student told me—for example, the fact that any Indian
reader of the Ray story would recognize its main characters as North
Indian Bengalis in a comparatively strange South Indian environment
(the city of Bangalore). Indian readers would also automatically register

the caste affiliations of names such as Bannerji (a Brahmin), even if caste
was not important at all in the thematics of the story. Although these
points rose from my students’ sheer exasperation with Poe, it showed
that they appreciated, even in a “dumb” text, that the simplest referen-
tial terms carried cultural connotations, so that a text like Ray’s was sub-
liminally announcing itself as Indian even when its subject matter was
colonial. Ray’s story was laden with cultural symbols associated with
Englishness—the high-backed fireside chair, the cottage, the diary, and
the cat as a pet—yet because its language was racily contemporary, my
undergraduates all found “Mr. Brown’s Cottage” easier to respond to
than “The Black Cat.”
For my graduate students, in contrast, language was not a problem
and therefore, amazingly, hardly mentioned directly in their essays.
When they discussed the issue of linguistic alienation, they did so in re-
lation to thematics alone—the internal progression of Poe’s story and
the overall literary context within which the story was written. Kulbir,
for instance, made the excellent point that, in the course of Poe’s story,
the black cat, which is designated by the pronoun “she” at the beginning
of the tale, becomes “it” by the end, foregrounding the nonhuman
ghostly character of a pet that comes to be totally alienated from its once
doting owner. And of course, a clear pattern emerges from this qualita-
tive difference in linguistic perspective on the part of the graduate and
undergraduate students: all the undergraduate students thought the Ray
story both a better read and better value-for-money as a ghost story,
while the graduate students all agreed that the Poe story had greater
complexity and depth, although one of them (Neelima) insisted that it
was flawed as a ghost story.
Literary Traditions
Au fait with the ways in which expectations of genre shape literary re-
ception and cultural receptivity, my graduate students seemed able to
place the Poe story very competently. How exactly? I reproduce below,
verbatim, some of their responses, beginning with Kulbir:
A work of literature is said to be culture-specific when the experiences
and the themes contained in it can’t be thought to have developed in the
literature of any other culture or nationality. This specificity can also re-
sult from the ways that these experiences are handled by a particular cul-
ture or nation. Just as a “period piece” enjoys an exclusive relation with a
particular period of history, a work typical to a culture has a special rela-
tion with that culture. A work dealing with the issues of sin or salvation
or good or evil shows no sign of specificity to any culture, whereas a
work dealing with the theme of resignation to fate in the face of adver-
sity may be said to be typically Indian. It is not descriptive details (say,
flora and fauna) which make a literary work typical to a culture, but
ideas and experiences.
This strong definition of cultural specificity, based on an exclusive link

between a nation and its modes of narration, leads Kulbir on to examine
the thematics of Poe’s story in terms of its Americanness:
Now if we examine Poe’s story . . . the narrator’s experience of killing his
wife and his black cat take on the larger dimensions of the commission
of a sin . . . [and] the story becomes a general portrayal of a mind tor-
mented by the spirit of “Perverseness” and inability to feel remorse. As is
evident from this analysis, there is nothing typically American about the
theme of this story.
Kulbir’s hypothesis is that Poe’s ambition is to address readers across na-

tional boundaries by deliberately portraying feelings like irrationality
and jealousy. Kulbir seems to attribute the universality of “The Black
Cat” to this connotative penumbra of emotions, typographically and
otherwise indicted by Poe. There was, however, some slippage in Kulbir’s
argument, I felt, when he went from being non-American, i.e., not writ-
ing a story that depends heavily on some stereotypic national construc-
tion ( let’s say the idea of the Wild West, projected in a typically American
genre, the western), to being universal, i.e., writing a story that appeals
to everyone. It is perfectly possible, after all, to have an all-American
story that is nevertheless universal in its implications, and conversely, it
is equally possible to have a nonspecific story of the Poe sort, which
could in effect take place anywhere, anytime, and which yet fails to pro-
duce any universal echoes. Was not the artfulness of literary presenta-
tion, then, as much a factor as content in evaluating the effects of “The
Black Cat”? Or was it rather that our own historical positioning as read-
ers occupying a postcolonial cultural space inevitably affected our judg-
ments of the universality of literary texts? I addressed these asides to
Kulbir, but Sudha and Neelima were the ones who answered them. I
quote first from Neelima:
The first thing I asked myself after reading “The Black Cat” was what
kind of story was it? Was it a ghost story, a work of psychological fiction,
or was it a simple crime and punishment story? . . . Most important of
all, what kind of poetic justice did the text invoke?
Neelima knew that the answers to her questions about the generic cate-
gory to which “The Black Cat” belonged would depend on the tradi-
tions of reading that she herself brought to the story.
In India, there are several stories on this theme (of the human-animal
relationship). The Panchatantra is a compendium of such stories.
Thinking back to my childhood, I remembered the story of a woman
who became a leopard during bright moonlit nights and her lover. Then
there is a story by Tagore in which a skeleton relates its past life to
a medical student studying the skeleton. This turns out to be a compli-
cated story of love, disappointment, infamy, and suicide, rather than a
simple ghost story, like my grandmother’s in childhood. “The Black
Cat” is similarly difficult to categorize.
Neelima is quite comfortable, apparently, with situating Poe in rela-

tion to the traditions of Indian fabula (such as the Panchatantra, which is
similar in its role as a source text to Aesop’s Fables in medieval European
literature). She can summon up, without embarrassment, Tagore’s talk-
ing skeleton as well as Coleridge’s albatross in order to describe her own
reaction to the pattern of guilt and fear that Poe weaves in “The Black
Cat.” This is her inheritance as a postcolonial reader of an American
story. The same set of texts forms the basis of her critique of “The Black
Cat” and assists her when she analyzes “Mr. Brown’s Cottage,” which,
according to her, imposes “less strain on the reader.” Neelima feels that
too much happens in “The Black Cat” for it to work effectively; events
are “heaped up,” and the pace of the story is so frenetic that in the end
the reader loses the capacity to be shocked. She knows from her reading
of Tagore that a ghost story need not be a simple ghost story, yet she feels
that Poe is not really in control of his own experiment. The rational/
irrational tension does not limit itself to a confrontation with the ghost
of a cat, but becomes an unwieldy examination of alcoholism, marriage,
cruelty, secrecy, and a host of other obsessions. All these themes are too
much for any one short story to contain. Ray’s story is more satisfying as
a ghost story than Poe’s because Ray gives his “anxieties of influence” less
free rein than Poe.
Poe’s story is judged more challenging by Neelima. Why? To return
to the matter of poetic justice raised earlier by Neelima when she men-
tion an albatross thematics in Poe, my own inkling would be that “The
Black Cat” challenges because the reader is left with a strong apprehen-
sion of unfinished business in it, whereas the Ray story is neatly docked
and tailed. “Mr. Brown’s Cottage” seems innocent of this ethical dimen-
sion, although, as I shall briefly argue in my concluding section, it may
have a submerged political agenda that it shares with “The Black Cat.”
Poe’s story continues to haunt us because it is at bottom a morality tale
good and proper. Original sin remains and guilt never quite goes away in
the morality play.
Sudha’s essay, which focuses on the construction of the cat in the folk
and literary traditions of both West and East, also traces the ways in
which Poe’s self-conscious use of this powerful signifier enables him to
describe a perpetual moral struggle in/for the soul of man:
Traditionally, the cat has been associated with superstitious beliefs and this
tradition is common to both Eastern and Western cultural systems. The
cat is a difficult animal to categorize, since it is neither wild nor entirely
domestic. Many myths are associated with cats. The Egyptians, for ex-
ample, identified the cat with the moon goddess, probably because of its
eerie eye reflections. This compelling eye of the cat finds mention in both
stories—in “the cat’s solitary eye of fire” (Poe), and in the “pair of brilliant
eyes” that “had the pale green and yellow glow of phosphorus” (Ray).
Obviously the eye of the cat is privileged, within Poe’s narrative, to see
further than the fallible human eye of the narrator. There is a kind of
moral omniscience, a judgmental incandescence, about the cat’s vision
that pierces through human duplicity and reveals, ultimately, the moral
transgression of the narrator. Sudha’s emphasis on the symbolism of the
cat suggests to her that Poe’s story differs from Ray’s in terms of psychic/
psychological impact rather than of cultural detail.
Ghosts are a transcultural phenomenon. Although “The Black Cat” and
“Mr. Brown’s Cottage” deal with ghosts differently, the difference is not a
cultural one. The ghost experience is distanced in “Mr. Brown’s Cottage”
because the narrator is only confirming someone else’s observation of a

ghost. The atmosphere in “Mr. Brown’s Cottage” is nostalgic rather than
eerie, conveying a sense of dilapidation and a lost, forgotten world.
Like Neelima, Sudha maintains her right to her own traditions. She
makes a point of being philosophically plural by drawing not just on the
Christian reading of guilt to which Poe had access, but also on subconti-
nental material that presents “other” metaphors of the cat and its asso-
ciation with evil.
An interesting departure of the traditional association of the cat with
evil is the cat-hold theory of Vishist-advaita or modified nondualism in
Indian philosophy. As distinct from the monkey-hold theory, the cat-
hold theory defines the Brahman as a mother cat in whose hold we, the
kittens, are secure. This philosophy finds expression in Raja Rao’s “The
Cat and Shakespeare.” However, this aspect of the cat does not find
mention in “Mr. Brown’s Cottage” . . . [where], paradoxically enough,
it is colonial India that is emphasized in the story of the ghost cat,
Simon. . . . Similarly, it is not in his use of the cat motif so much as in
his analysis of sin and the consequences of sin that Poe belongs to the
literary tradition of America as typified by Hawthorne. The figure of the
dead cat, Pluto, as it appears on the wall, can be compared to the scene
in The Scarlet Letter when Dimmesdale, in a moment of great emotional
intensity, sees the letter “A” emblazoned across the sky. In “The Black
Cat,” the cat is not so much a ghost as a projection of the narrator’s
experience—his philosophical experience of evil and of nemesis.
Emotional Universals
Harbir’s essay begins where Sudha’s leaves off. For him, the experience of
evil that finally becomes the narrator’s nemesis within “The Black Cat”
also shapes the reader’s fear outside the structure of the story. Harbir’s inter-
pretation shifts focus from the dynamics of crime and punishment internal
to the story to a contextual interplay between the text and its reader(s):
By nature, I am neither superstitious nor a great believer in God, but
what does one say about fear: I have sometimes reasoned myself out of
the fear of the existence of ghosts, yet I chose not to read Poe’s story be-
fore going to bed. Without attempting to answer, I’d like to ask—is this
the power of the ghost story?
Harbir’s analytic framework is broadly Freudian, a schema that univer-

salizes psychological anxieties about morality by giving them a common
basis in the human subconscious. What, asks Harbir,
does Poe’s narrator expect from his readers? How does he get into their
minds? Is the focus of the story on the events, or on the narrator him-
self ? Is it proper to pass any judgments at all? Yet how is it possible to
not evaluate the narrator’s actions in moral terms? The answers to these
questions may provide us with some clues to the psychology of the story,
but the whole narrative will still not be covered—perhaps it could never
be covered by any set of questions.
Reading Harbir and empathizing with his critical frustration at being

unable to cover the text adequately in a decent garb of questions, I was
struck again by the almost irresistible parallel to be drawn between the
uncontainability of the literary text and the pervasiveness of those ghost-
ly presences that remain ubiquitous metaphors across cultures for the
workings of the subconscious mind and its banished emotions.
There is always a spillover in the authentic literary enterprise from
what we can claim to explain and understand rationally to what we can
only apprehend. At this “dangerous edge of things,” in Browning’s
words, cultural crutches are not much use and may as well be dispensed
with; members of all cultures are equally at a loss in what Derrida might
call this story-world of absences. And it is at this point, therefore, not of
understanding but of faltering in the dark, that cultural contact of the
most basic kind is likely to be made. At least, this is one insight that
seemed to emerge from my attempts to read Poe with “fearful” students
like Harbir in an Indian classroom.
Harbir tries to decide whether the triggers for the narrator’s repeated
acts of cruelty and violence are substantial enough for himself as a
rational reader to excuse the narrator. Throughout this book I consider
the theme of postcolonial violence in relation to the excuses generated
for it in various rationalizing institutional narratives of state. Harbir re-
turns via the literary text to these same issues concerning connections
between extreme cruelty and rational tolerance:
We have three incidents of physical violence in the story. First, the nar-
rator gouges out Pluto’s eye, second, he hangs Pluto, and third, he kills
his wife. How are these acts of violence justified? . . . One can accept
violence as part of the human personality, but if great pleasure is derived

from cruelty the reader finds it difficult to identify with the passion.
Hitting Pluto with a stone or stick can be understood, but deliberately
cutting “one of his eyes from its socket” is not acceptable, whatever the
provocation. Stumbling and wanting to kill the second black cat again
falls into the realm of the believable, and so does his anger at his wife for
restraining him, but taking pleasure in the walling-up of his wife as a tri-
umphant achievement goes beyond sympathy. The narrator’s long dis-
quisition on perverseness may be an aid to understanding, but one
feels he goes beyond the limits of perverseness too. Perverseness in one
action may be swallowed, but constant repetitions force the reader to
question the sanity and normalcy of the narrator’s mind and results in
the loss of sympathy. For such reasons, too, one can’t give a satisfactory
cause-and-effect explanation of the narrative.
Harbir’s analysis of Poe’s story as a study in irrationality, which fascinates

and yet baffles and repels the normal reader, leads him to conclude that,
“finally, the interpretations of a literary text are multidirectional and
multidimensional.” It brings him to the point of multiculturalism. Not
“Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis alone,” he writes, “but paradigms such
as the Gothic romance, which Poe would have been familiar with, or
even a biographical interpretation would not be out of place.” These
variegated lines of inquiry seem to Harbir to be justified not because he
finds “The Black Cat” culturally unfamiliar, but because he has arrived
at the conclusion that the evocation of extreme violence can drive any
reader, in any culture, to the limits of understanding. He is in danger
of being pushed off the treacherous cliff of rationality. Texts like Poe’s
psychologically endanger the reader.
To be multicultural, in this sense, is to admit that many readings of a
literary text are necessitated not so much because we come from differ-
ent cultures, but because all cultures are equally puzzled by some kinds of
acts, some categories of gratuitous brutality. Again, recall the “international”
bafflement at and condemnation of the events of September 11, 2001.
Multiculturalism thus becomes a means of problematizing the rational,
the taken-for-granted practices and modes of behavior that cultures in-
ternally sanction. Looking outward toward social processes while evalu-
ating a text is, in this interpretation of multiculturalism, just a means of
traveling inward to psychological understanding.
Personal Equations
As if in confirmation of this intuition, Prashant, the fifth and last of my
graduate students, is vividly personal in his initial reaction to “The
Black Cat.”
I remember having read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in my early
schooldays. I was at once swayed by its haunting music and horrifying
imagery. It made me shudder in my bones. I would recite the poem
loudly, almost in a single breath, alone in my house. And, as a strange
coincidence, there nearly always used to be a raven sitting on top of an
abandoned water tank, just a little distance from my house, or on the
rooftops of the deserted military barracks of the American contingent of
Allied forces during the Second World War. At the time, I did not know
that Poe was an American. That he was the one who had composed
“The Raven” was enough for me. “The Raven” was really like part of my
own landscape. Now, in this paper, having to react to “The Black Cat”
as an American text, my childhood fascination for “The Raven,” and
subsequently, as I grew up, for Poe himself, takes precedence over any
critical framework that I might strive to impose upon the story.
Unlike the other graduate students, except perhaps Neelima, Prashant

roots his reading of Poe in reminiscences of childhood—deserted
American barracks, no less. This attitude not only seems particularly ap-
propriate as a response to Poe, who as we know produced much of his
own work on the basis of childhood memories, it is also a useful coun-
terweight to more self-consciously critical appraisals. Even though the
demands of the classroom do take some toll, as he admits, on his un-
abashed Poe worship, Prashant speaks from the heart of the universal
pleasure principle. He speaks of reading for pleasure—that unlikely
virtue that I had tried to inculcate in my single-minded undergraduate
IITians.
I read Poe’s stories and poems for the sake of the delight they provide
me. And I have always found them to be remarkably alien from his time
and country. They seem to me to be a product of all ages, all people, and
all countries and cultures. In one word—universal. But doing a critical
reading demands that I become conscious of the fact that these stories
and poems have been written by a man living in nineteenth-century
America. How did this man write? What use did he make of the world
around him, and how was his artistic sensibility and personality molded
by his society? But Poe is such a deliberate artist. We do not anywhere
find a direct picture of America in his writings. The form of the ghost
story makes it even more difficult to read Poe’s texts as American texts.
Ghosts signify very subjective experiences. My ghosts, my fears, my hal-
lucinations, are going to be typically and entirely mine. And so were Poe’s.
His uncompromising belief in the absolute individuality of the ghosts

that haunt each one of us leads Prashant on to proffer an interesting hy-
pothesis. He begins by comparing Poe, the artist, to his creation, the cat;
and he ends with Poe’s longing for the stabilities of the Old World while
living in and with the insecurities of the New World.
In Pluto, the black cat, Poe finds not just his playmate but his soul mate.
Poe, a consummate and deliberate artist, is concerned about order and
decorum in his art, while a cat, as a domestic pet, is usually a very disci-
plined and orderly creature. But both have a wildness. The cat’s wildness
is in her nature. Poe’s craft is restrained but his imagination is a wild-
fire. . . . For Poe the black cat represents the haunting past, Europe and
the idealism of Greece coming to him through the Renaissance and the
Age of Reason. But Poe, as an American, had to find his own blend of
emotion and reason, wildness and discipline. “The Black Cat” is a pic-
ture of this struggle of contraries in Poe. Poe’s poems and stories show a
deep longing for some unattainable beauty, and this quest for the un-
attainable takes him to the realm of the supernatural. The ghosts in Poe
stem from his fascination for the Old World, for his cultural roots, for
his traditions. Being in the America of his time means living in a root-
less culture, which at once despaired of the search for a settled existence
and was always panting and running after the wild possibilities that the
New World seemed to offer. This contradiction gets transformed in
Poe’s story into both his extreme love and hate for the black cat. The
story is about the despair that this perverseness leads to, i.e., the narra-
tor’s killing of Pluto and his own wife, his attempting to kill the other
cat, and ultimately killing his own possibilities in life. But Poe the
American lives on as Poe the artist.
the critic
That long passage about literary death and artistic redemption from
Prashant’s essay appears to have three implications. The first is an implied
challenge. Why should any critic quote so prolifically from her students?
These are not poetic Walcotts or provocative Rushdies, figuring high on
some global quotability index. Is it not possible just to summarize their
views? But no, I believe not, because democracy in the classroom is
bought at a high price. It is bought at the price of boredom when one at-
tempts to retail/retell the goings-on in class in a larger critical market.
Yet it is in the schools and universities of the global postcolony that one
witnesses the circulation of the small change of print capital today.
Nowhere is the power of the text—that is, the transformation of texts
into various forms of intellectual capital—more apparent than in the
postcolonial classroom, that proliferating scenario of endangered En-
lightenment utopia. Therefore, if the aim of multicultural programs is
to democratize the classroom by making it a place where many cultures
make their presence felt, then it should also be the place where such ac-
tivity is recorded in the first place. The critic is always a scribe, a clerk,
and if she doubles as a teacher, she must also keep the accounts and be
accountable. For in the pieces of paper entrusted to her care—essays,
notes, examination scripts—are to be found the first smudged signs of
both the institutionalization and the politicization of literature. That is
why they must be preserved or even, as in this case, paraded.
A second implication connects with a suggestion that I’d casually
made in class about Poe and Ray—that in their different ways, both
were attempting to repossess their colonized pasts through their ghost
stories. Although I myself remained in doubt about the plausibility of
this hypothesis, Prashant’s inspired argument that “The Black Cat” sym-
bolized a longing for the precolonized Old World brought me to a re-
newed awareness that even the most “other”-worldly and personal of fic-
tions could be read in terms of history and the politics of memory. It is
not surprising that our students teach us; what is surprising is that they
sometimes teach us to learn from ourselves by picking up on things we
had said but forgotten and by reminding us of that accountability. Thus
they are our unsure guarantors against amnesia because they somehow
retell “our” text. As readers of Poe’s and Ray’s fictions born in indepen-
dent India, neither my students nor I had any direct experience of colo-
nization, yet that colonized past is still so available in our educational
institutions and so engraven in our national consciousness that it con-
tinues to offer a powerful—powerful because problematic—way of read-
ing these texts.
The third implication—this time a more universal one from that

passage of Prashant’s—is that the primary appeal of Poe, the modernity
of Poe’s text, if you like, resides in its ability to describe exactly such con-
tradictions. Poe lives on for us because his work is a distillation of that
famous spirit of perverseness, of going against the grain. In this conclud-
ing section of my chapter, I am unable to resist the temptation of pre-
senting an anecdote from Poe’s biography illustrating that unforgettable
perverseness. I believe, too, that the incident has a peculiar bearing on
an issue that we implicitly discuss throughout this book—cross-cultural
estrangement in our contemporary reading of world classics. This is how
the Poe story goes:
Edgar Allan Poe was expelled, we are told, from West Point (the military
academy) for following to the letter instructions to appear on a public
parade in “white belt and gloves, under arms.” He turned out with his
rifle over his bare shoulder, wearing belt and gloves—and nothing else.
It is apparent from this vignette that Poe had to pay a heavy price for
his nonconformity. He was himself the sacrifice—to return for a mo-
ment to that theme of the sacrificial dharma of intellectual endeavor
that I earlier tried to run past my recalcitrant undergraduates. Poe’s ges-
ture stands not only for defiance, but for a kind of sacrificial courage—
courage in exposing the fundamental arbitrariness of those “rational”
rules that required the most absolute obedience in his society. Drawing
too close a parallel between a writer’s life and his work is always viewed
with skepticism, but in Poe’s case, his literary ventures do seem to signal
continuity with an urgent questioning of the conventions of morality,
civility, and indeed of normality itself.
When cross-cultural responses to Poe’s writings are being recorded, it
is this consistently skeptical attitude toward the sacredness of societal
codes of conduct that comes to the fore. Indeed, it is here that the two
cats of Poe’s story might have some significance. Just as the second cat, a
doppelgänger of the first, the hanged cat, functions as an agent of re-
venge who exposes the narrator’s secret sin, the narrator in Poe’s text
stands in as a double for the author, whose weaknesses and losses of con-
trol in real life are mercilessly explored within the structure of his story.
To me, this mimic doubling in “The Black Cat” appears self-consciously
masochistic. Poe holds the mirror up to Poe—and is horrified by what he
sees. Such self-condemning self-knowledge, which is what postcolonial
readers are most adept at reading into a text, was the most disturbing
aspect of “The Black Cat” for my students. It visibly upset them, as they
were up against several grave moral contradictions in their own society.
And yet, most of the time, the logic of circumstance and their own ap-
parent powerlessness made them acquiesce willy-nilly in the systemic
promotion of injustice and sociopolitical corruption. Reading “The Black
Cat” may not quite have roused my students to stand up and be counted
as rebels, but it did, I think, at least for a few moments, make them re-
gard their own place in society and their well-directed social ambitions a
little more askance.
The forced classroom reading of the text of “The Black Cat” provided
a forum, for my undergraduate students in particular, to confront the
increasingly complex and violent world in which they live. In this
world, a global network of influences makes it especially difficult for
those English-using but not English-speaking people—like my students,
who have migrated to metropolitan centers like Delhi—to preserve an
uncomplicated cultural identity. Augmenting their own caste/class, gen-
der, age, and group affiliations (e.g., Jain, Marwari from Rajasthan, tra-
ditional occupation cloth trading, lower middle class, male, eighteen,
IITian), my students also carried in their heads, as we saw in “The World”
section, certain raw images of the entities India and America. It was
these common New World images that my students brought with them
into that special space described in “The Classroom” section. Clichéd
though it is to repeat that every classroom has a special character, it re-
mains important to note the specificity of a literature classroom within an
institute that prides itself on being the premier technological institution
in the country.
Stripped of its ghostly trappings, “The Black Cat” is about the disas-
trous moral consequences of losing control over one’s will and reason.
When a student spends most of his time learning formulae and the prac-
ticalities of engineering, it is odd to have to read a story where one’s em-
pathies are engaged by a highly unreasonable, half-crazed narrator, and
a narrator, moreover, who seems to uncannily resemble the real-life
author! It really stunned my undergraduate students that the unpre-
dictable, “bad,” and “bolshie” author of “The Black Cat” was in actual
fact a success, whose books were now prescribed as classics and read by
the likes of them! Their reading of this story pointed to avenues of
achievement outside the confines of a narrowly defined successful career.
The discussions prompted by “The Black Cat” awakened my under-

graduate students, as it were, to the possibilities and attractions of a dis-
ciplined anarchism of the kind exemplified in Poe’s life and writings.
They also made connections between author and text, between life-
story and text-narration in ways notoriously difficult to achieve if the
text one is grappling with is, for example, a tome on fluid mechanics.
That “The Black Cat” made my goal-oriented undergraduates con-
scious of other definitions of success and that it invoked a close connec-
tion between an unconventional life and a classroom text could, I sup-
pose, be counted a contribution to their education as well as their
precious grade point averages. Despite its many stylistic obscurities,
struggling through the Poe text also made my undergraduate engineers
realize that the story was more than a mere story; it posed difficulties not
just of language but of interpretation. As readers of this text they could
not rely on their preconceived notions of what America was like. They
put this down, correctly, to Poe’s belonging to an older America. Never-
theless, “The Black Cat” succeeded in making them view the country as
less culturally “other,” not simply as the antithesis of a poverty-stricken
India, but as a place where strangely unique persons like Poe happen to
have lived and written. It helped, too, that they read the story alongside
Ray’s, because this gave us a handle on the difficult matter of cross-
cultural perspectives. Reading the two texts together tended to break
down those binary dichotomies of the Eastern/Western, Christian/
Hindu, American/Indian type that they were so used to relying on. The
universal phenomenon of ghosts as it was handled by Poe and Ray
prompted a more complicated picture of cultural production, related to
human emotions such as terror, remorse, love, and curiosity on the one
hand, and to historical agencies like the influence exerted by coloniza-
tion and the prevalence of Old World ideologies over New World values
on the other. These texts made indifference impossible.
Diverse my students’ approaches might have been, but they had one
factor in common. They all invoked, in one way or another, Poe’s initial
idea of a text crossing the sea. The IIT students who read “The Black
Cat” worked with some rudimentary intuition that when a text moved
over from its original cultural terrain it underwent a sea change and be-
came, in effect, a different text, perhaps a postcolonial text. But did it?
The challenge before my students and myself was to put our collective
finger on that vital but, as always, elusive différance —if there was any.
And while we use Derrida’s special word here, we should perhaps allude
to both his and Lacan’s famous readings of Poe’s “Purloined Letter” be-
cause they have a theoretical bearing on our special problematic of locat-
ing a text. Derrida, basing his own reading on Lacanian psychology,
makes the point that Poe’s is a “truth-discourse”:
By determining the place of the lack (of the letter) . . . and in constitut-
ing it as a fixed centre, Lacan is proposing at the same time a truth-
discourse, a discourse on the truth of the purloined letter as the truth of
“The Purloined Letter.” In question is a hermeneutic deciphering. . . .
The letter could not be found, or could always possibly not be found, or
would be found less in the sealed writing whose “story” is recounted by
the narrator and deciphered by the . . . readers of the text, less in the
content of the story, than in the text which escapes, from a fourth side,
the eyes of both Dupin and of the psychoanalyst. The remainder, what
is left unclaimed, would be “The Purloined Letter,” i.e., the text bearing
this title, whose location . . . is not where one would expect to find it, in
the framed content of the “real drama” or in the hidden and sealed inte-
rior of Poe’s tale, but rather in and as the open, the very open, letter that
is fiction.1
The much remarked-upon convolutions of Derridian prose should not

obscure the acuteness of his observations here. Fiction such as Poe’s ex-
emplifies the difficulties of locating a work within boundaries, including
such literary-cum-national boundaries as the American canon. The
appeal of texts like “The Black Cat” lies precisely in the fact that they
extend our experience in unforeseen ways and draw our attention to
that ever-present pattern of “absences” that Derrida claims is typical of
all language use, but most particularly of literary fiction.
If the literary work cannot, ghostlike, be contained within national
boundaries, then we are forced to ask somewhat uneasy questions about
the possibly hegemonic designs of even an enterprise such as the NCTE
World Classroom project that first prompted me to write this essay. The
NCTE project seemed admirably clear, as well as politically correct, in
its attitude toward multicultural perceptions of American authors. Yet,
Derrida’s emphasis on “what is left unclaimed” constitutes a corrective
to a wholly benign view of multiculturalism because it suggests that the
reception of a text hardly depends at all on what the text actually says.
Or, as Derrida puts it more poetically, solutions to the problems raised
by a text cannot be resolved with reference merely to the “hidden and

sealed interior” of the text. Nor, he implies, would Poe have wanted it
that way. The pleasures of detection reside as much outside the text or at
its boundaries. And the real drama occurs in the very open world that fic-
tion directs us toward. In this open world, ideologies like multiculturalism
may themselves turn out to be (phallogocentric?) fictions with under-
lying political agendas such as reinforcing the cultural power of America
in the global society of speakers of English.
As I see it, a possible moral counter to this sort of justifiable indict-
ment is to be found in opening out or, as Derrida would probably put it,
multiplying the logical possibilities of the multiculturalism that an ex-
periment like the NCTE project apparently endorses. Such an opening
up or out would necessitate, in the long run, a reverse flow of texts—
from places like the Indian subcontinent to the United States. If texts
like Poe’s can offer the student in the Indian classroom such varied and
exciting possibilities of interpretation and self-reflexivity, there seems to
be no intrinsic reason why the classics of Rabindranath Tagore, Faiz
Ahmad Faiz, Premchand, Vallathod, or Ismat Chughtai should not offer
undreamed-of avenues of exploration to a student in the American class-
room. It is obvious, of course, that English is a world language, with a
dominant colonial past and an equally dominant present, but this is
all the more reason why the conceptualization of multiculturalism
and openness to other cultures, when voiced in English, needs to take
seriously the emancipatory claims of non-English, and especially non-
Western literatures.
At its worst, on the bad days, “The Black Cat” was indeed a prison, a
sealed text, and not in the least liberating, but at its best it enabled my
class to undergo a process that I can only describe as something akin to a
rite of passage ceremony. Reading Poe’s American text encouraged us to
believe in a universe of shared interpretations within which our own
fragments also belonged. Simultaneously, it made us aware that in such
a process of attempting to belong we might risk leaving something very
valuable behind. Thus, as in any authentic rite of passage, we experi-
enced at once the sense of loss and gain, of absence as well as presence.
A comparative reading of “The Black Cat” and “Mr. Brown’s Cottage”
helped this process not just because it foregrounded cross-cultural com-
munication, but because it stimulated a possible critique of such com-
munication. We discovered that as the recipients of texts from other cul-
tures, we could not play a simply passive role. Rather, the openness of
Poe’s subversive and perverse text prompted us to explore, and indeed
extend, the internal logic of cross-cultural exchanges. We were led to
conclude, unsurprisingly, that such exchanges are far from equitable—
even when they come couched in an academic language of fair trans-
action and objective assessment. Language itself became a focus of crisis in
our class, as did the chimera of equitability. Yet the fact that the exchange
of American texts and Indian views is consciously initiated could be a
hopeful sign because it forces out into the open all those potential con-
flicts of culture(s) that it is the role of fiction to rehearse. For fiction is
obviously the mode for stretching out on that postcolonial couch and
resurrecting one’s ghosts.
Like any true ghost story, my own involvement with Poe’s text had a
surprise ending. We, or at least I, had begun with the thought that in
the safe and controlled space of the classroom, it would prove relatively
easy to pin down an Indian reading of an American text. Instead, Poe’s
Americanness turned out to be so elusive that it began to threaten our
own apparently invulnerable identities as good, solid Indians. We were
forced to conclude that our unself-conscious category “Indian” depend-
ed on demonstrably shallow, mostly media-given stereotypes of self;
“Mr. Brown’s Cottage,” originally written in Bengali, could no more be
identified as essentially Indian than “The Black Cat” seemed naturally
American. Though both stories were about the ghosts of black cats, this
resemblance failed to yield much similarity between the stories, al-
though we could perhaps posit a common reference to a colonial past in
both tales. There was therefore no fixed location for the notions Indian
and American within these stories, and good grounds for stalking these
notions outside the classroom were equally difficult to find.
The best and indeed the only possible move we could make was to
see some of the text’s problems refracted through the light of our own
historical stereotypes, emotions, experiences, and aspirations and, con-
versely, bring the avowed strangeness of the text to bear on our internal
problems of identity. It was the self-imposed frame of cultural con-
frontation or contact that we placed around them that in fact comprised
the alchemical element—making us reconsider the entire set of assump-
tions that we brought into the classroom. We were thereby startled into
imagining a rather radical alternative scenario for textual study with-
in the classroom. That this scenario was not short on either fantasy or
impracticality was, I feel, especially liberating in the environment of the

Indian Institute of Technology.
Instead of the fixed notions of an American canon or an Indian one,
my students envisaged something more like a floating canon, where
what was claimed by a nation or educational program had always to be
evaluated against “what is left unclaimed.” A floating canon has the ad-
vantage that it is never in danger of losing its national moorings because
it is not moored at all but floats buoyantly—changed by the variable
contexts it encounters, always renewed, always renegotiable. No culture
or cultural group “owns” this canon, so there is little need for its texts to,
Houdini-like, “escape from a fourth side,” as any deconstructive analysis
necessarily demands. We could then rest awhile with our narratives in-
stead of constantly running after them, tracking their interpretations,
nationalities, etc.
An Eden dream of narrative peace—that was the surprise ending to
which the violent, feline text of Poe had brought us. It had brought us to
the point of impossibility, to that region where floats the ethereal post-
colonial couch, waiting for its subjects. Yet to discover that there could
in fact be a fourth side, and a fifth and sixth and seventh and so on, to
the task of finding a multicultural classroom in the colonial text, not to
mention a universal text in the postcolonial classroom, was in itself a
tribute to the truth-discourse of Poe. And I think I hear the ghost of the
master fiction maker receiving this final compliment with a wickedly
appreciative “Evermore!”

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University of Minnesota Press

Book Title: Lying on the Postcolonial Couch

Multiculturalism as an educational project transparently seeks to bring

Analysis and explication of reactions, however, must be preceded by

1 superpower unity in diversity

world leaders several languages

10 patent law Vivekananda

Ph.D Students America India

Sudha garish traditional

no bearings of the past spiritualism, religion as a

gays, lesbians, etc. indolence (shirking,

As I read these evaluations, it strikes me that America is very much a

of the actual word “technology” used in association with America in the

literacy in terms of functional proﬁciency in English. In India, the prob-

(the city of Bangalore). Indian readers would also automatically register

This strong deﬁnition of cultural speciﬁcity, based on an exclusive link

Kulbir’s hypothesis is that Poe’s ambition is to address readers across na-

Neelima is quite comfortable, apparently, with situating Poe in rela-

because the narrator is only conﬁrming someone else’s observation of a

Harbir’s analytic framework is broadly Freudian, a schema that univer-

Reading Harbir and empathizing with his critical frustration at being

violence as part of the human personality, but if great pleasure is derived

Harbir’s analysis of Poe’s story as a study in irrationality, which fascinates

Unlike the other graduate students, except perhaps Neelima, Prashant

His uncompromising belief in the absolute individuality of the ghosts

The third implication—this time a more universal one from that

The discussions prompted by “The Black Cat” awakened my under-

The much remarked-upon convolutions of Derridian prose should not

by a text cannot be resolved with reference merely to the “hidden and

impracticality was, I feel, especially liberating in the environment of the

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