“Cultural Spaces”

Vol. I, Issue 1
February 2018
Published by : The Department of English, Bankura

University, Bankura, West Bengal, India.

englishdept@bankurauniv.ac.in //

eng.bankurauniversity@gmail.com

Place of Publication : Bankura, West Bengal, India

Date of Publication : February 2018

Chief Editor : Dr. Sarbojit Biswas

sarbojit.biswas@bankurauniv.ac.in //

sarbojitbiswas@gmail.com

© All Rights reserved.

 Table of Contents

Introduction : 1

Critiquing Space and Unspoken Word: A Study of Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish : 2

------ Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay

Revisiting the Digger Myth in David Malouf’s The Great World : 10

------ Sourav Banerjee

Australian Stories of India 1850 -1950 : 21

------ Bruce Bennett

Re-reading ‘Mandala’ Motif: Identity formation in White’s The Solid Mandala : 39

------ Sarbojit Biswas

The Rediscovery of the Feminine Space in Peter Goldsworthy's Honk If You are

Jesus : 53

------ Tathagata Das

Reading HBO’s Game of Thrones: A Politico-historical Allegory of Climate Change: 59

------ Abhilash Dey and Indrani Mondal

The Unseen Hand: Hidden Intervention in Textual Production : 84

------ Margaret McDonell

The American Dream of The Godfather: The Life and Times of Don Vito Corleone: 103

------ Aparajita Mukherjee

On Remakes and Translations: a Study of the Tangle between Hindi Films and

Popular Culture with Special Reference to Paheli : 114

------ Ipsita Sengupta

Modernity, Nationalism and Culture: Cultural Transition /Tension and

‘Naga’ Cultural Reality : 129

------ Lalan Kishore Singh

Our Contributors : 136

 Introduction

This issue of the journal inflects on multiple forms of cultural negotiations across the world. It is

a world that believes in permeation and mixes, leading to discursive epistemological as well as

ontological experiences. This issue of the journal will therefore focus on distinctive cultural

formations. The idea of culture has therefore been a crucial point of debate in recent times. Thus

Zizek stands against the Lacanian principle of culture as a “symbolic system” with a linguistic

boundary. He therefore pre-empts the zero-sum of culture, thereby we implying a new paradigm

shift in terms of recognising the idea of history as a history of culture.

It may therefore be suggested that in a world of neo-nomadic spaces, culture should be

reconfigured in terms of transnational negotiations. We may therefore argue, how does culture

originate? How does culture disseminate itself? How does culture stride across boundaries and

renew itself in multiple cultural, economic and political forms?

This issue of the journal will therefore address a complex trajectory of culture in terms of

complex issues of spatiality and epistemological disruptions, cultural narratives and discursive

strategies, text, context and praxis, rewriting culture: history, identity and representation.

1
 1

Critiquing Space and Unspoken Word: A Study of Peter

Goldsworthy’s Wish

Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay

Peter Goldsworthy’s 1995 novel Wish may be regarded as a continuation of the theme of

heterotopologia that he had already treated in Maestro (1989) and Honk If You Are Jesus (1992).

The heterotopologic problematic had been first superbly theorized by Foucault and later

admirably developed by Edward Soja. These critical principles may be appropriately used in

interpreting Goldsworthy’s novels. While Soja’s discourse primarily shows a cartographic

centrality, Goldsworthy’s novel implicates multiplex forms of spatiality: topological, cultural and

psychological. These three forms of spatiality can be understood in terms of Goldsworthy’s

novel Wish.

In Wish, the central character J.J. moves in a world of unspoken world of sign language.

Belonging to both worlds - the spoken as well as the unspoken – he seems to negotiate a strange

space of semiotic complexity. While hovering between these two worlds, he encounters a

different space where the animal and the human merge and interact; it dismantles the

oppositional politics of the real and the hyperreal. It therefore contests the constructed artifice of

simulacra governing the so-called human world. Penelope Nelson while commenting on

Goldsworthy’s novel Wish considers it to be ‘hugely unsettling’. Again James Bradley in Courier

Mail considered the novel as ‘challenging, intelligent and heartfelt’. Jack Coulehan in his

annotation on the novel locates an element of American cultural imperialism (Literature, Arts,

Medicine Database). But these critics hardly ever seek to negotiate the working of

heterotopologic space in Goldsworthy’s novel.

Michel Foucault gave currency to the term ‘heterotopology’ which he interpreted in two

different ways. In ‘Of Other Spaces’, he interprets it as the co-existence of several incompatible

2
spaces in a specific real place. Again in The Order of Things, he explains it as an interweaving of

disjunctive, fragmentary spaces in one impossible space. Despite the contradictory position of

Foucault’s analysis in his two works on questions of heterotopologia, he clearly accepts the

multivalency of spaces. In ‘Of Other Spaces’ Foucault contests the nineteenth-century obsession

with time-related analysis iconised in history and suggests that the twentieth century will be an

epoch of space. He therefore comments,

“This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing

whether there will be enough space for men in the world - a problem that is

certainly quite important - but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity,

what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements

should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch

is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.” 1

Again in The Order of Things he contends how different forms of episteme relocate themselves in

different cultural sites in different periods of history. Although this work was largely attacked by

Jean Paul Sartre on grounds of an overt defense of bourgeoisie, it categorically displayed the

fragmentation of multiple spaces.

The history of the development of space as a significant problematic in recent criticism

may be traced back to the Australian historian Fred Alexander’s Moving Frontiers (1947). Though

Alexander’s thesis was largely constructed on the basis of J F Turner’s “Frontier Thesis”, yet

Alexander’s interpretation had a distinct relevance to the Australian context of space – a sense of

space that adequately supported the Australian national spirit. It was a seminal thesis that sought

to interpret the Australian history in terms of its quest for a distinctive national identity. In other

words, it was an attempt to correlate the contentions of space and identity in the wider spectrum

of the Australian history. Historians as well as creative writers have often turned to the problem

of space. Russel Ward in The Australian Legend (1958) often depended on questions of frontier

3
and space in his interpretation of Australian national identity. Henry Lawson even drew a sketch

map in which he substantiated the imagined territory as hush, outback or never never. It seems that

the problem of re-worlding or re-mapping the Australian space in terms of its different

significations has always been part of the Australian quest for national identity. This came to be

further more significant in Paul Carter’s Road to Botany Bay.

Wish is the story of J.J. who, born of deaf parents, feels the challenge of two different

spaces – the world of the sign language and that of the spoken word. But this world of formulaic

semiotics of sign collapses as he begins to train up Eliza (later named Wish by him) into the sign

language. As far as the sign world remains restricted to a mimetic version of external action,

things seem to fit into a codified pattern. But the arousal of emotive interactions in Eliza

conduces to a kind of complexity which breaks the barrier between the human and the animal

world.

In Wish multiple forms of space therefore collide, interact, clash and collapse. This

interspatiality moves along a complex direction of disrupting the traditional stereotyping of

semiotic/lexical cognitions. This problematising of the spoken word may be located in

Goldsworthy’s poem After Babel:

I read once of a valley

where men and women

spoke a different tongue

I know that any uncooked theory

can find its tribe

– but this might just be true.

For us there are three languages

4
 – yours, mine and the English between

a wall of noises

But J.J.’s parents are shut out from this world of noises - the world of the spoken word,

the world of English. The auditory world is substituted by the world of visual experience. As

they watch the TV, they cannot hear, but they “bask in its flickering presence, an electronic fire

in a corner of the room, warming them with a constant glow” (16). They watch sport, dance

movies, ballet programmes, wildlife documentaries. It is very much like a playful indulgence in a

world of the hyperreal that they can never participate in. The space of verbal semiosis creates a

sense of appetitive imaging that they can see but they cannot take part in it. Their sense of space,

therefore, brings to our mind the problematic of ‘simulacrum’, a point so distinctively structured

by Baudrillard in Precession of Simulacra. While contending on the relation between map and

territory, Baudrillard contests the earlier standpoint of the precession of territory over the map:

“...it is the map that precedes the territory — PRECESSION OF SIMULCRA – it is the map

that engenders the territory” (1733). According to Baudrillard, simulacra represents the images

that undermine our natural desires, forcing us instead to essentialise, to appropriate and accept

the images which are constructed by media, films, advertising; in other words, the natural desires

and deeds are determined by the images of the ‘hyperreal’. This is evident in J.J.’s childish pranks

on his innocent parents in terms of misinterpreting the movies they see. His mistranslation is

nothing but an attempt to create a deceptive simulacrum. As a runner, J.J’s father could never

win because he could never “hear the starting gun, and lost precious time watching the other

runners or waiting for the puff of the smoke” (20). Even when they would try creating a sound,

“it sounded like the speech of clowns, or spastics” (23).

For J.J., it was, not merely a problem of semiotic spatiality; it generated a problematic of

socio-psychic spatiality. In his teens, he intended to disavow their claim on him as a son in

public. It generated a dichotomous relationship of public and private space: “I still loved them,

5
that went without saying – at home, in private. In public I was shamed by them" (23). He used to

sing his way through The Bob Dylan Songbook; but it was a private space that he constructed

for himself to which his parents had no access: “... a private world they couldn’t share, or even

enter” (23).

JJ.’s acquaintance with Clive and Stella generates a different problematic of space. It

initiates a sense of spatiality that can be best understood in Foucaultian terms. Clive and Stella

joining JJ.’s Basic Auslan night class gradually transform and complicate his earlier sense of

space. The way Eliza - a gorilla in fact—is introduced to J.J. is nothing but the construction of a

hyperreal space. Eliza is described as a child, only eight years old, born without a vocal cord. She

cannot join J.J.’s class because, they argue: “Eliza’s very shy... We hoped that she would agree to

come but perhaps she’s not quite ready” (32). When J.J. further recommends that Eliza should

join classes, they again intensify the sense of the hyperreal. Stella says:

She is very shy, J.J. Maybe a classroom is not the right environment. We hoped –

we realize it’s a lot to ask... We hoped that you might consider taking her as a

private student. Tutoring her (43).

It is the construction of a hyperreal space because Stella and Clive try to project the imaging of

an unfortunate family with a child who has no vocal cord. It is on the basis of this hyperreal

imaging that J.J. is gradually drawn into a new, different kind of space.

The world that J.J. enters is essentially closed and guarded, a kind of Foucaultian

panopticon. J.J.’s journey to the house of Stella and Clive initiates this sense of incarceration. As

he comes nearer their house, the bush, the fence and stubbled field conduce to a sense of

prevention and blockade. When he reaches the house of Clive and Stella he finds the words

PLEASE CLOSE (in upper case,) “inscribed on a metal plate wired to the gate” (51). The gate’s

latch can be operated electronically There is also an intercom. He has to push the buzzer and

then he hears the electronic voice of Stella: "Push the gate, J.J. - it’s open” (51). This is repeated

6
again in Chapter 4 (Book Two): J.J. is again confronted with the same mechanical command:

“Push. J.J. …it’s open” (110). Even Eliza hates open spaces. She never crosses the limit. Stella

explains to J.J.:

“She never ventures beyond the trees. She hates open spaces – it seems to be some deep-

seated instinct” (121).

But it is probably not so much a case of instinct as that of habitual incarceration. Wish has been

trained into living a life of incarceration. When J.J. wants to say good night to Wish, we find that

Wish sleeps in a locked room: “She [ Stella ] lifted a key from a hook in the kitchen and headed

for the stairs. I watched, startled. Did they lock their mute foster-child in her room at night?"

(78). When J.J. suggests putting her in a zoo, Stella immediately reacts: “...you’ve met her. You’ve

talked with her! And you want to put her in a zoo? A jail?” (102). They consider the zoo as a jail,

but the pattern of life they have set for Wish is nothing but a mode of incarceration. Clive

humorously talks about giving voting rights to animals: “Of course, to vote, they would have to

become Australian citizens. Which means – if they were treated as normal immigrants—passing

a basic comprehension test” (86). The questions of voting and citizenship may also be regarded

as symbolic references to the problematic of “consent” that perpetuates incarceration. Even the

training of Wish’s mind by sign language may be looked upon as an entrapment: for Clive, Wish

is a merely a test-case as to how animal mind can be acculturated into the human system. But J.J.

contests by pointing out that teaching her a human language surely sets a limit to what she can

think. But when Wish really tries to transcend the boundaries by indulging in the normative

human responses in terms of erotic experiences, things begin to collapse.

The physico-psychological bonding that develops between J.J. and Wish defies the

regular social codes. He is arrested by the police on charges of bestiality. When he was led to the

prison cell — the watch house — with his hands tied at the back, he lost his sign, his semiotic

function. It seemed to him as he had lost his speech. Inside the prison cell, he comes to be

7
incarcerated: “In the smallest hours I entered a state of delirium where I could no longer even

choose what to think, the twilight zone of insomnia where thoughts choose themselves" (264).

After the death of Wish, J.J. perhaps more seriously realizes the collapse of the world of sign, of

the world of language. He therefore tries to imagine a more resonant concept: "I lay back on the

soft winter grass and tried again to imagine a different language, a truly religious language which

might allow more resonant concepts of past and future, life and death. Could I put the future

behind me?" (298).

*Foucault’s “Des Espace Autres,” was published by the French journal Architecture

/Mouvement/ Continuite in October, 1984. It was the basis of a lecture given by Michel

Foucault in March 1967. As it was not reviewed for publication by the author, it is not

considered to be part of the official corpus of his work. The manuscript was released in an

exhibition in Berlin shortly before Foucault’s death.

8
 Works Cited

Anzaldua. Gloria: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizo, Norton Anthology of Theory and

Criticism, W W Norton & Co, New York, 2001

Baudrillard, Jean: The Precession of Simulacra, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, W W

Norton& Co, New York, 2001

Goldsworthy, Peter: Three Dog Night, Penguin Books, Penguin India, New Delhi, 2003

________________ : Wish, Angus & Robertson, Australia, 1995

Haworth, William: Imagined Territory: The Writing of Wetlands, New Literary History, 30.3,

University of Virginia, 1999

Moulthrop, Stuart: You Say You Want a Revolution, Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, W

W Norton & Co., New York, 2001

Soja, Edward: Heterotopologies: A Remembrance of Other Spaces in the Citadel - LA, Postmodern Cities

and Spaces, Eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, Blackwell, 2001

(* From “Critiquing Space and Unspoken Word: A Study of Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish,” by Deb Narayan
Bandyopadhyay, in Bandyopadhyay, Deb Narayan; Banerjee, Shibnath & Chakrabarti, Santosh (Eds.),
“Australian Studies: Themes and Issues” Volume II, pg. 57-62, 2007, Burdwan: Centre for Australian Studies.
Copyright 2007 by Centre for Australian Studies.

Reprinted with permission.)

9
 2

Revisiting the Digger Myth in David Malouf’s The Great

World

Sourav Banerjee

The Great World, written in 1990 is David Malouf’s sixth novel and is the first one to be

published in the USA. The novel covers almost three-quarters of a century, which ranges from

World War I to the stock market crash of 1988, in the lives of two Australian men and their

families. It is a sweepingly ambitious tale of seventy years in the lives of the two men knitted

roughly together by their POW experiences under the Japanese in Malaya. Malouf begins in the

present with Digger Keen, a former flyweight boxer living with his idiot sister Jenny. Then he

goes back to pre-war days for the boyhood of aggressive Vic Curran, orphaned by a brawl that

claimed his hard-drinking father and adopted by the genteel Warrenders. Digger and Vic strike

up a friendship as POWs after the Japanese casually overrun Malaya; but then when Mac, a

fellow prisoner, is killed in a fight between Mac and one of his Japanese guards, Vic feels himself

slip in another life- a life he never should have lived, marked on his return home by his loss of

Lucille Warrender to a Yank and his marriage to her sister Ellie, his futile affairs, his lonely years

wheeling and dealing in shaky financial deals. At the same time Digger, returned to the same

Australian town, begins a 20-year involvement with Mac's sister-in-law Iris (whom he'd first seen

in a vision in Malaya) and a profoundly uneasy friendship with Vic. Generations pass, bringing to

new prominence figures like Warrender grandsons Greg and Alex (now Vic's business manager)

in sharply etched scenes showing Digger's and Vic's lives as mere postludes to their wartime

disillusionment.

Commenting about this novel, Don Randall has said that ‘Australian identity, both

individual and national, is shown to emerge through continuous negotiation between

10
connectedness and separation (or loss). Australia, as modern nation and potential homeland,

comes into being through transactional movements- between past and present, between

Australia and Asia, Australia and America, between public and private life, between individuals

and their communities. Most particularly, the novel aims to show how contemporary Australia

has been formed by participation in the Second World War. Much of the novel narrates the

post-war decades, right up to the mid-1980s’. 1

As far as Malouf is concerned, he thought of history as the social and socially authorised

form of memory, as we understand from his interview with Richard Kelly, referred to later in

this discussion. It then becomes pertinent to seek and examine the ways in which memory

becomes history and of what kind of history it creates. Philip Neilsen suggested that Malouf’s

primary focus is upon ‘history that does not pretend to be empirically verifiable’. 2 This particular

novel, elaborates itself in large part by assimilating the human events that remain below the

consciousness of the historians. The novels asserts according to Buckridge, ‘the ineffable value

of ‘ordinariness’, in all its forms. 3 Again according to Rodgers, the primary aim of the novel is to

capture the ‘unrecorded life’ which occupies a great part of the ‘fabric’ of our lives.4 Peter-Knox

Shaw extends this line of thought further by saying that this novel attempts to undercut the

grand narrative of the national myths by portraying ‘the plain grind of everyday living’ and by

presenting a world of ‘irreducible quiddity.’ 5

Malouf himself commented in an interview with Richard Kelly that his interest as a

writer is in ‘the unwritten history that fills most of time in the kind of wars that people are

fighting every day in any society for their own small territory’. 6 True to that statement Malouf

begins his novel of unwritten history with a series of domestic skirmishes. The novel begins with

the tales of the numerous ‘wars’ that Jenny Keen wages, and almost on a daily basis. The first of

them was against the magpies. ‘She had a war on with the magpies. She had lots of wars, but this

was her fiercest and most continuous.’ 7

11
 These were not her only wars. These were her open wars. She had to fight human

intruders also. First of all she had to off the ‘young fellers and their girls, for instance, who came

into the shop just to tease and make a nuisance of themselves picking things up and putting

them down just to aggravate.’ (GW p.6-7) But this was perhaps the easier of the human wars.

The more difficult one was the one she had to fight against a host of human visitors (headed by

Vic) of her jealously guarded brother, Digger. Digger, the name itself becomes very significant.

We can see, as pointed out by Peter-Knox. Shaw that Digger is at the centre of a family conflict

throughout his formative years that brings about the novel’s main debate, and a major issue in

this conflict is in the way the hero gets his name. According to Randall, ‘Naming is the act that
8
inaugurates the transactional relationship with otherness, with great world and all things in it.’

Digger’s name is of course significant as it coincides with the most tenacious archetypes of the

Australian male. A term that, Richard White opined in his book Inventing Australia, had become

significantly more comprehensive than the terms used earlier to that like, ‘The Coming Man’, the

‘Bushman’, or the ‘Bondi life saver’. The term ‘Digger’ also was used as the nickname that the

Australian troops took for themselves during the First World War. Alos it was a term that

Geoffrey Serle, has described as being richer in connotation than its English counterpart,

Tommy. 9

Digger soon became a synonym for Aussies. According to the historian, C.E.W. Bean,

in the First World War, the national type faced ‘the one trial that ... all humanity still recognizes-

the test of a great war.’10 After this trial, the digger emerged as the national hero. He stood for all

that was decent, wholesome and Australian. He not only embodied Australianness, but also

became its greatest protector. Undoubtedly, at the core of this concept were the male prowess

and physicality, but also included a range of moral attributes. Boys (in Australia) were drilled in

school, cadet corps and froced from 1911 to take part in compulsory military training. The result

was that with the landing of the ANZAC troops in 1915 in Gallipoli, the already formed myth

12
was given a name, a place and a time. Acording to L.L. Robertson ‘Australia could not wish for a
11
more inspiring scene in which to make her European debutas a fighting unit of the Empire.’

Richard White states, that ‘whatever characteristics the diggers were credited with, they returned

to Australia as the upholders of what it meant to be Australian. It was through them that the

Australian identity could be given a heroic, legendary core, and they offered themselves, and

were used, as custodians of nationhood’.12

However, it would be pertinent to ask, how much should be believed of the Digger myth

at face value? Despite the many social and political abuses to which the legend has lent itself over

the years, few doubt, however, that the populist myth has held much of value twined in with its

noxious aspects. In a well-balanced account of the legend, Geoffrey Serle said ‘It remains for the

historian to explain, reinterpret and popularize the crucial role of the digger in the Australian

tradition and place it in truer perspective for the next generation.’ 13

In the light of the above statement, Peter Knox-Shaw opines that the digger stereotype is

so deeply woven into the texture of Australian society that it supplies a fair guide to that other

history, that record of ordinary life that Malouf sets out to trace in The Great World. The

analysis that Malouf provides in the novel is sustained by a deep suspicion of the prescriptive and

confining character of national stereotypes, such as he has voiced in an interview:

I’m always, I think, impatient of things that get closed off and finished and only

believe in things that are still open and moving in some kind of way. A couple of

examples - I hate all those notions about Australia that tell us what Australians

are like, that this is our national character, that this is what is central to the

Australian mind. I feel comfortable with the notion of Australia as a place that is

still in the process of being made. 14

Coming to the novel, we find that Malouf puts his opinion into weaving the story and

takes a critical look at the stereotype of the digger. In the story of the novel we find that the

13
Australian war experience began as a frenzy of exchange and transportation. It was as if the

‘movement, from one continent to the other, of a million articles of no great worth or use’ (GW

p. 43) - but a million articles that quickly decipher their status as invested objects, as the

previously unrecognised underpinnings of identity. Malouf says ‘Transactions. Deals. They took

up so much energy, endangered so much feelings, you might have thought they were the one

true essential of a fighting man’s life, of tenacious, disorderly civilian life inside the official

military one. (GW p. 43) There is a great deal of exasperation about the fact that more than the

opportunity to fight as heroic soldiers proving their valour and manliness, the Australian troops

became more of a ‘cargo cult’. As Malouf describes in the novel ‘Each man was weighed down

with twenty to forty pounds of it (cargo) and staggering; his shirt pockets stuffed, and such

lighter articles as bottle openers, penknives, screwdrivers, metal cups and water-bottles dangling

from the straps of his pack or his belt loops or from a thong from his neck.’ (GW p. 44) Many of

them did not even get a chance to fight to prove their worth, for the surrendered came quite

suddenly ‘Others, newcomers mostly but some old hands as well were still talking about the big

fight they would be in, tomorrow or the day after, that would finish the little buggers off... By

eleven o’clock it was official. In a meeting with the Japanese commander, General Yamashita,

the commander of the Allied Forces, General Percival, had signed an unconditional surrender.

(GW p. 43-44)

Malouf’s post war Australia is marked by war experience. It was not possible for the war

generations to return to the imaginary nation, ‘the nation constituted retrospectively, by the

rupture and rapture of trauma. The national “home” is the place one recognizes only after being

torn away from it’. 15 The question that the novel puts forward now is, how does one live in this

new world of post-war Australia? There are two ways, and these two ways are represented by the

two principal characters of the novel, Digger Keen and Vic Curran. The former is a country boy,

a stolid ferryman and storekeeper with an astounding memory. The latter is Digger's friend,

14
orphaned from a poor mining family and brought up in Sydney by a prosperous factory owner

and poet, one of whose daughters he eventually marries. Digger and Vic are unlikely

companions. We find that Digger remembers and contemplates, while Vic forgets and acts.

Digger is a man of acute sensitivity but few words, a very honest and unambitious loner. Vic is a

striver; boastful and insecure, he's a con man and an entrepreneur. Vic’s friendship with Digger

comes as a result of his own relentless efforts; Digger wants nothing to do with Vic.

Yet they are bound together- both of them are after a truth that they have in common.

They had met during World War II and for three and a half years together as Japanese prisoners

of war in Malaya and Thailand. It had become a shared experience that established an undeniable

intimacy. Malouf feels the personal knowledge that most individuals have of history comes from

family stories. In the first section of the novel, the story of Digger’s youth unfolds between Vic’s

visits to the Crossing; and the contrast between the two mature men (for the visits run right up

to the present) picks up the conflict in the Keen family itself. Digger’s set ways cause Vic to

relect on something ‘prim and old-womanish about Digger. “These are just the sort of things,”

he thought, “that mothers must say. Looking just like that, too. Half-horrified, half-impressed.”

This side of Digger was a source of amusement to him.’ (GW p.34) In contrast Vic seems to

undertake ‘activities, out there among the cannibals.’ (GW p.35) The narration of these activities

would elicit disbelief and even disapproval from Digger at times.

According to Peter Knox-Shaw, the two heroes presented as pointedly opposite types

from the very beginning of the novel. This contrast increasingly dominates the text and gives

fresh scope to the opening debate, and it is worth tracing the ways in which the digger stereotype

persists through the novel. The hunger for excitement that urges Billy’s son to leave home and

volunteer for the Second World War is sublimates, however, into a desire for the great world. It

almost becomes an urge to assimilate experience beyond his ken which carries further his

mother’s impulse to acquire and extend. Interestingly we find a successor to Billy Keen, not in

15
Digger but. Vic, who is a far more complex character, shares with Billy one notable attribute,

that of physical self-containment that turns down relation.

The seeds of diggerism are clearly evident in Vic from the moment he decides to shape

his destiny as a child. If his name means victory, then his victories are achieved at the cost of

eternal dismissal. It is only through the Warrenders that he arrives at some kind of a peace. Over

here Vic tries to erase his past with the new found luxury and the economic affluence. Yet the

essence of the realism of the Great World is that it does not allow an easy way of wiping out of

the past. Even long before Vic enlists, he had set up an ideal notion of self-containment,

emphasizing on the impossibility of there being any link with the past. This belief however

proves to be misleading, as what really sustains Vic through his years of captivity is a strong faith

in continuity, though he is not ready to admit it even in his dreams. Again we find that though

Vic claims to pay no heed to memories, he becomes a compulsive collector of objects that open

an avenue for the future.

Amongst all these things that Vic hangs on to, the most important is a length of thread.

This is a crucial yet unacknowledged indulgence to Digger’s philosophy of line. And ultimately

by the end, Vic becomes a proponent of ‘line’. But while Digger makes his thread of rationality

with his remembrance, Vic, on the other hand, builds his sense of self with more material things.

That is perhaps exactly why the digger image that we see in Billy Keen, and also in Vic, is

challenged by Malouf by the highlighting of a different and richer form of heroism- a kind of

heroism built on suffering. While in this heroism there is nothing that cannot be largely found in

the digger myth, like its egalitarianism and mateship, yet it cannot be denied that Malouf’s

presentation is a bit unique, and at times at loggerheads with the general notions about the

legend. In fact the belief that the digger myth has supplied an instrument for racism has been

noted by a number of critics like Russel Ward and Richard White. Ward speaks of the way the

image of the digger is used as a prop for ‘a lily-white egalitarian, Australian democracy’ and how

16
 16
it lends itself to a ‘tough, sardonic contempt for coloured people and foreigners generally.’

Richard White, too, in his book has given examples of how the legend had been exploited to

uphold an ideal of racial purity.

The idea that Australia was young, white, happy and wholesome, and in constant need of

protection, had been established before the Great War. The digger legend intensified the

obsession with virile youth and defensiveness...The ‘White Australia’ policy effectively kept out

the ‘Yellow Peril,’ and remained a fundamental principle of Australianness. 17

Malouf, for his part, demonstrates this bias, while at the same time sensationalizes the

hero’s relation to it. Malouf felt that the post war (or for that matter, even pre-war) Australia, is

predominantly represented by the Keens, Currans, the Warrenders and other such exclusively

Anglo-Celtic names found in Digger’s list. This white version of Australia only really discovers

itself through its war experience in South-east Asia. But the ‘other’ version of Australia,

represented by the Aboriginal people does not get much concern. Yet a major reason why

Digger sets himself apart from the other characters of this novel is the fact that he is the only

character of the novel who forms a close, personal and transformative relations with the black

Australia. In one of the novel’s most animated episodes where Digger works for the country

show for eighteen months before joining the forces, serves as a symbol of his idea of the great

world. Despite all these experience and insight Digger ultimately enlists in the Army. From this

episode we find that though Digger begins like the average, cocky, white Australian male, who

goes up to to fight up the black, he subsequently joins the troupe as a co-conspirator. Unlike Jim,

he is able to understand clearly that the white Australian masculinity is associated in a deeply

arrogant, yet anxious and adversarial attitude to the Aborigine. Yet he fails to generalize

effectively from his experience with the blacks. Sadly enough, despite his greater clarity, he

cannot restrain himself from participating in that game.

17
 Yet the very fact that Malouf makes Digger come in contact with the blacks and travel

with them, even gain a new perspective makes the ‘other history’ get acknowledged if not

brought into the foreground. Rather than denial, if we take our cue from some other novels of

Malouf, like Fly Away Peter and Remembering Babylon, we may see this differential treatment as

an example of autocriticism. According to Peter-Knox Shaw:

Unlike many of his legendary namesakes, Digger is happier to assimilate than

oppose. In choosing to treat an experience of war that has less to do with conflict

than with subjugation, Malouf in The Great World rids the digger myth of its

triumphalist associations. 18

Malouf shows that the battle in which both Digger and Vic becomes engaged is an elemental

one. It’s one of survival. In conclusion we may say that in post-war Australia, Digger becomes

the living memory of the war and its legacies. It is interesting that the character, who, at least

initially, exhibits the stereotypical characteristics of the digger, is not named Digger in the novel.

The character who is named Digger, becomes an archive made of flesh and blood. His principle

of memory, which is almost akin to prayer, is a spiritual union with all that has happened in time.

‘He wanted nothing to be forgotten and cast into flames. Not a soul. Not a pin.’ (GW p. 179) We

find that through this novel, Malouf has not only challenged the myth of the digger, but has

given it an alternative, broader and an inclusive perspective in his literary attempt to define

Australianness.

18
 Works Cited

Randall, Don. David Malouf. Manchester University Press. 2007. p 109

Neilsen, Philip. Imagined Lives: A Study of David Malouf, St. Lucia; University of Queensland

Press, 1990 p. 152

Buckridge, Patrick. ‘Colonial Strategies in the Writing of David Malouf’, Kunapipi 8.3, 1986, p.

181

Rodgers, Shelagh. ‘The Other History that Never gets Recorded’, Australian and New Zealand

studies in Canada 5, 1991, p. 95

Knox-Shaw, Peter. ‘Malouf’s Epic and the Unravelling of a National Stereotype’, Journal of

Commonwealth Literature 26.1,1991, p. 81

Tipping, Richard Kelly., ‘An Interview with David Malouf’, Southerly 49:3, 1989, p. 496

Malouf, David. The Great World. Chatto and Windus Ltd., London, 1990, pg 4.

Randall, Don. David Malouf. Manchester University Press. 2007. p 119

Serle, Geoffrey. "The Digger Tradition and Australian Nationalism", Meanjin 101, 1965, p. 158

Bean, C.E.W. The official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Sydney, 1921-1942,

vol.VI, pg. 195

Robertson, L.L. (ed) Australia and the Great War 1914-18, Melbourne 1969, pg. 44-45)

White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688- 1980. Allen & Unwin: NSW.

p.130

Geoffrey Serle, "The Digger Tradition and Australian Nationalism", Meanjin 101, 1965, p. 158.

Willbanks, Ray. ‘A Conversation with David Malouf’, Antipodes, 4:1, 1990, p. 16

19
Randall, Don. David Malouf. Manchester University Press. 2007. p 111

Ward, Russel. The History of Australia: The Twentieth Century, 1901-1975, London, 1978, p.

141

White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688- 1980. Allen & Unwin: NSW.

p.140

Knox-Shaw, Peter. ‘Malouf’s Epic and the Unravelling of a National Stereotype’, Journal of

Commonwealth Literature 26.1,1991, p. 94

20
 3

Australian Stories of India 1850 -1950

Bruce Bennett

This paper grows from a larger project which examines Australian encounters with India and

Indians in fiction, especially short fiction from the 19th to the early 21st century and may lead to

an anthology devised with university colleagues in India. The focus in this paper is on the

Australian colonial and Indian Raj phases of cultural history in our respective countries and their

hangover into the early and mid-20th century—from about 1850 to 1950.

Few Indians may be aware of the pervasive lexical effects of the noun 'India' on the

southern hemisphere. In 1770, Captain James Cook's naturalist on the Endeavour, Joseph Banks,

wrote: 'Our boat proceeded along shore, and the Indians followed her at a distance, 1 Indians?

This early linkage of Indians with a people later to be called, `aborigines’ ‘aboriginals’ or blacks

has its counterpoint in early 21st century scholarship as a number of early career or senior

scholars from India investigate psychological, social and environmental links between indigenous

Australian people and similarly underprivileged Indians, especially Dalit people. And by one of

those strange coincidences, ‘India’ is becoming a favourite name for European Australian girls, I

have not yet heard of `Australia’ as a favourite name among Indian people of the Indian

subcontinent.

The literary record of [white] Australian encounters with people of the Indian

subcontinent, or with ideas of India and Indians, is a long one, which I will approach here in its

early phases chiefly through published stories in magazines and newspapers. I might also note in

passing that present-day Australian Aboriginal writers, including Sally Morgan and Alf Taylor,

have indicated their affinity with India, and Jack Davis's grandfather was a Sikh.

21
 Thanks to, or curses upon, the British empire, 21st century Australians can reflect upon a

partially shared socio-cultural history of representations and misrepresentations with British

people of India and Indian people with certain opinion-makers in Britain that represents a quite

different pattern from Australia's historic relationship with our other great northern neighbour,

China. Invasion scare novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, feature China

and Japan as invaders of Australia, but never India.2 By the 1960s, Australian novelist

Christopher Koch could write his novel Across the Sea Wall (1965)3 which showed a certain

rapport with India, while Greg Clark wrote his symptomatic analysis of a still current attitude, In

Fear of China (1967).4

By contrast with Clark's litany of perceived historical, political and psychological barriers

to engagement with China, Koch shows his Australian protagonist travelling through India and

recognising that he and his Indian friends are really ‘brothers under the skin’. But it's an edgy,

taut relationship between Robert O'Brien and Sunder Singh, which is exemplified in a stand-off

between them on Marine Drive, Madras, when Sunder speaks out:

`You see O'Brien,’ he said, you bloody Australians don't know what you are. You

don't think much of colonialism, but then suddenly you're waving the Union

Jack. It's disheartening’. They passed a statue of Queen Victoria, on a plinth

beside the Drive, and he pointed up at her. There you are, why don't you salute

her? You’d like her back, wouldn't you?' 5

The novelist does not let his character off this particular hook. Indeed, he reinforces the

point:

[To] his own surprise, O'Brien found himself looking up at the pudding-faced

queen with a certain wistfulness. Relic of the Raj, bereft in independent India, she

grilled in the terrible heat, a figure of fun, her majesty a joke; and he felt sorry for

22
 her, Victoria Regina, Empress of India, perhaps simply because she was familiar,

and he had a sudden thirst for anything familiar. 6

Koch's Indian scene reverberates backwards into our real colonial history and forwards

into the new reality of the American empire vying with Australia’s still awkward and tentative,

though developing, cultural relationship with the countries of Asia, including India. (I

differentiate here between the notion of deeper cultural relations, which are my central interest,

and the development of trade and commerce, though the two are clearly linked in some

respects.)

In more visionary mode, Christopher Koch also wrote a scenario wherein a greater

‘family closeness’ might be developed through spiritual and cultural links between Australia and

the countries of what he called ‘the Indo-European zone’, especially Australia, Indonesia and

India :

Without myth, the spirit starves, and in postcolonial Australia, we are going to

have to build a new myth out of old ones. And I would suggest that these old

ones will not belong simply to the European zone, but to the Indo- European

zone, of which India and Indonesia are both inheritors, as we are. Other great

cultures, such as China, we may admire, we may-gain from, but we will not find

such family closeness with; the sense of common roots. 7

We have been made aware recently of fundamental geographic links between these

countries through the earth’s plate. We are told by seismologists that when the India-plate —

which is part of the Indo-Australian plate and is drifting north-east an average of 5cm a year —

suddenly slipped 15 metres below the Burma plate in late December 2004, the seabed was thrust

upwards by 10 metres. It would normally take three centuries for the India plate to move as

much as it did in that instant. At any rate, the fourth largest earthquake recorded since 1900

unleashed what an Indian fisherman later called ‘the angry sea’ which devastated many coastal

23
areas in the region.8 It remains to be seen how the slow recovery from this catastrophic tsunami

will be played out in terms of ‘a family closeness’, or otherwise.

Against the background of such shattering events, the smaller human dramas of late 19th

and early 20th century Australians’ encounters with Indians, and the idea of India, may seem

inconsequential. Yet these are the kinds of small but significant human interactions, played out

under the banners of different empires and geo-political forces, that are proceeding all around

our region today. Perhaps, in retrospect, - we can even afford the ironic smiles that our

forebears’ represented behaviour, as represented in short stories, novels and travel narratives,

may evoke.

For in retrospect, it is clear that many white Australians who visited India, or thought

about inhabitants of the sub-continent, saw themselves as proxy representatives of the British

empire, however lowly their status in Australia may have been. Behind this, of course, was a

racism that saw ‘white men’ as superior to ‘brown men’ (men, rather than women taking the role

of representatives of their race). This, we have seen, was a continuing tradition of thought and

attitude since as least Captain Cook's voyages in the 1770s. But for the particulars of lived

experience and their emotional tonalities we turn here to literature, in particular prose narratives.

The place to begin is perhaps in the mid-19th century in the figure of John Lang,

accurately described by C.D. Narasimhaiah as ‘the first Australian-born novelist on Indian soil’.9

The grandson of a Jewish convict at Botany Bay, Lang was educated in Australia and in England

and moved to India in 1842, where he continued in his profession as a lawyer, wrote novels,

stories and a travel book, and edited a newspaper — The Mofussilite in Meerut. A recent essay by

Rick Hosking has examined Lang's first novel set in India, which bears a typically long Victorian

title: The Wetherbys; Father and Son; Or, Sundry Chapters of Indian Experience.10. The book was first

serialised in The Mofussilite, then in Fraser's Magazine in London, before being republished in book

form in 1853 by Chapman and Hall. Hosking summarises his impressions of The Wetherbys:

24
 [The Wetherbys contains] no fine and solemn writing about Empire. Instead,

Lang describes the sordid experience of cantonment life where rakish subalterns

and ancient, incapable colonels are supposedly in charge of disorderly regiments,

where ‘the Titans of the Punjab’ are seen as barely able to cope with disorderly

marital situations and brittle domestic arrangements. India as a place has little

impact on the colonizers, and India as a place of complex and ancient cultures

simply does not exist. The few Indians who are represented are without,

exception subordinate and inferior, and typically nameless servants.”

Nevertheless, Hosking suggests an Australian slant to Lang's writing of India as that of ‘a

12
larrikin outsider’ and ‘against the convention which found romance in empire’. An aspect of

research that remains to be done is a full bibliographical record of Lang's short fiction and other

writings about India. But the available record suggests a mid-century perspective on British India

that was alert to the absurdities of life there as in Australia.

Many Australian narratives of India are stories of travel. As David Walker has shown,

Australia’s first major travel book about India is James Kingston’s The Australian Abroad (1880;

1885), which is witty, informative and unrepentantly imperialist in outlook.13 Hingston's

enthusiasm for new places is infectious. Walker remarks that Kingston was drawn to ‘the

strangeness and intractable difference of the mysterious East’ and was influenced in this by the

Arabian Nights tales.14 According to Kingston, India had a special place in any educated man's

imagination and was seen to have a spiritual dimension: to see India was to learn ‘there is an

object in life.’15 Hingston’s wit is his saving grace, and perhaps a sign of an emergent 19th century

Australian-ness. Like Clive James, Kingston places an image of himself at the forefront of his

travel stories, where he is vulnerable to the charms of places and people, and he looks for

philosophies of living behind appearances. In his short narrative of a visit to the Parsees’ Towers

of Silence at Bombay,16 Kingston light-heartedly presents himself as a somewhat clumsy

25
detective wanting to solve a mystery, who drops his new hat into an enclosure at the Towers and

goes searching for it. He feels like ‘bluebeard’s wife among the remains of her predecessors in

the forbidden chamber’ and is swooped by the vultures who are there to pick the bones of the

dead. Almost a century later, in the mid-1960s during a stopover at Bombay from the P&O liner,

The Himalaya, on my way from Australia to study in Oxford, I too visited this same tourist site,

but with a greater readiness to accept its evocation of awe and horror rather than to see myself as

a detective and travel guide. I suspect that some of my fellow travellers, though, may have

viewed the Towers with something of the same jaunty insouciance as Kingston had shown

eighty-five years earlier.

Military life provided one of the main avenues for Australian understanding of life in

19th and early 20th century India. Many narratives reflect this, ranging from journalistic sketches

in magazines or newspapers such as The Australian Town and Country Journal, the Bulletin, or The

Lone Hand to the whimsical, historical romance tales of Ethel Anderson and Molly Skinner’s

novel Tucker Sees India (1937). I will return to both of these women writers shortly.

A theme that runs through much early Australian writing about India is the puzzle of

masculinity that this country poses. The ‘manly’ military virtues of courage, strength and

solidarity are comically tested, for example, in an anonymously published piece, ‘A Strange

Night-watchman: A Story of Northern India’, in The Town and Country Journal in 1889.17 The story

features the fears of a tremulous English visitor, advisedly named Mr Tremmel, when he visits

military and missionary friends at a hill station in northern India:

[ Mr Tremmel] looked upon all India as a ‘ravening tiger’ crouching behind every

tree, and a boa-constrictor, as long as a ship’s cable, hidden in every thicket.18

His fears seem to be realised at the missionary’s house, when he sees a six-foot black and yellow

snake gliding along the floor towards him. He yells loud and long before he is told that this is

Dickie, the ‘house-snake’ and a pet of the children. Like colonial tales of Englishmen lost in the

26
Australian bush, this story purports to show the comical short-comings of men who fail to live

up to the Boys’ Own Annual adventure-tale format of stoical courage in adversity. Such tales

reinforce notions of wild and exotic otherworlds where only ‘true’ men can be men. The men

who retreat in fear provide a comic counterpoint to the many other action/adventure tales of

tiger or cheetah hunting in India, in which men are said to be men.

Women’s fiction contains some illuminating comparisons. Both Ethel Anderson and

Mollie Skinner experienced something of barracks life in India and used it as a point of departure

in their fiction. Born in England of Australian parents in 1883, Anderson was educated in Sydney

before, in 1904, she married a British officer who served for ten years with the Indian Army.

Anderson’s colourful Indian Tales (1948) and Little Ghosts (1959) range in their subject matter

from the 16th century to the last days of the British Raj, and show an appreciation of Indian

legends and folklore.

The women of India especially fascinate Anderson and many of her tales deal with

thwarted love, or love triumphant, in the face of military violence or racial difference and

discrimination, past and present. In the long story ‘Mrs James Greene’, 19 the eponymous heroine

survives uprisings, violence and threats to her virtue in Sitapur to become the adored mistress of

Mirza Khan, to whom she in her turn devotes the rest of her life.

Anderson takes an inquisitive and ironic stance towards the complexities of racial and

cultural inheritance in India in her story ‘The Eurasian’. In Dinapore, where the story is set,

Anderson notes a tendency towards isolation in the Eurasian community. Such households, she

observes:

vary as their blood fluctuates between British, Spanish, Portuguese, French and

Dutch origins on the paternal side and between the admixture of Mogul or

Hindu strains on the maternal.20

27
 She also observes the extreme fascination of British-men, especially for Eurasian women,

and the ironies of fate which sometimes enable the crossing of racial lines. Her appreciation of

India, past and present, shows a curiosity about exotic facts and details, and is at times rhapsodic

in its exuberant, peacock display of language. The following scene-setting paragraph from ‘The

Eurasian’ shows something of the flavour of Anderson’s prose:

So these figures met, the servant Nedoo with his child, the jealous colonel, the

young soldier, the Eurasian girl, the half-seen watcher by the wall. They stayed

grouped among the immense trees, under a sickle moon, beside an unruly river.

They had collected there by chances as fortuitous as those which assembled the

butterflies in their dances above the red bouvardias, as causally gathered together,

as carelessly dispersed. Yet forces which governed the human pattern—hate,

greed, love—were perhaps deeper in origin than the love of sunlight, the joy of

colour, that linked the dancing butterflies together above the red flowers. It may

be so. For a moment the jealous colonel saw the young Eurasian girl in Hew's

arms. For one moment Hew held her, a girl whose name was unknown to him

(later, under tragic circumstances, he was to swear ignorance of it), and then the

pattern made by those meeting figures dissolved. They parted and went their

several ways. (186)

21
Mollie Skinner’s novel Tucker Sees India is less subtle and insightful than Anderson's

stories of India, but more definitively and self-consciously Australian. Skinner was the co-author

with D.H. Lawrence of The Boy in the Bush (1924), a novel about the tribulations of English

settlers in Western Australia in the 1880s which shows the passionate individuality of one of

them, Jack Grant, in defiance of a conventional, colonial society and a sense of the threatening

bush.22

28
 Tucker Sees India draws on Skinner's time when she worked during much of the First

World War as a nurse at hospitals for soldiers in Calcutta, Rawalpindi near the frontier, Peshawar

at the end of the Indian railway, Bunnu, the Malakand Fort, Lahore, Baroda and elsewhere.23 As

an Australian nurse in Lady Minto's private nursing service, Skinner was aware of the way

Australians could be put down as mere ‘colonials’, by their British superiors and this insight

informs her novel. Skinner’s leading character, Tucker, is a member of the Australian Imperial

Force sailing for Europe, who is left behind in Bombay when he misses the boat after a hard

night out. Tucker is a rough-and-ready Australian male of his generation who gets caught up in a

number of Indian adventures en route to the ‘real’ war. At the end, he has ‘seen India’ and is

ready for anything life may throw at him.

In Skinner’s novel, Tucker is a feckless but generous Australian, basically uninterested in

authority or position, who is happy to throw himself into any adventure and make a joke of it.

He specialises in narrow scrapes. In Chapter 7 of Tucker Sees India, for example, our hero, who

has been in India for only a fortnight finds himself caught up in a kidnapping for ransom of a

young English woman by tribesmen in the Khyber Pass. He disguises himself as a mad mullah

and, failing to find himself a ‘black tracker’—he claims he would be able to find one in a similar

situation in Australia—he travels by camel with a local man, Ali Mohammed, to free the white

woman. The events that follow are a comical adventure narrative of stock characters and narrow

escapes. As he hurriedly disrobes from his mad mullah outfit, after saving the girl who has

caused him too much trouble, Tucker remarks that ‘if the only way to succeed in such stunts as

these is to be the other fellow, we'll get away before the enemy knows I'm me’.24 This is of

course comical, opportunistic disguise rather than the more subtle merging of personalities in

search of deeper understanding which we might find in other kinds of novels or stories. It shows

the kind of straightforward narrative adventure tale that D.H. Lawrence transformed from

Skinner’s draft in the The Boy in the Bush.

29
 The popular British image of an exotic, exciting, extravagant India on which Skinner

could draw, albeit with a certain humorous undercutting of British pomposity, is deployed by a

number of short fiction writers in Australian magazines and newspapers of the late 19th and

early 20th century. Albert Dorrington's ‘The Mouth of the Moon-God’ in The Town and Country

Journal in 1907 25 is a good example. Dorrington uses the figure of the legendary American pirate

and buccaneer of the Pacific, Captain ‘Bully’ Hayes, to tell a yarn of an adventure in India after

he has landed in Calcutta.

Dorrington's yarn is purportedly told in an opium shop in Port Darwin to a group of

‘shellers and beche-de-mer men’. The story’s subject matter and theme hark back to Rider

Haggard and forward to Raiders of the Lost Ark. ‘Bully’ Hayes, the storyteller within Dorrington's

yarn is an unreconstructed scoundrel who loots foreign treasure wherever he can find it. The

specific adventure he recalls takes place in a Hindu temple in Meeraj, where a guide, Keddah

Singh, has taken Hayes and his mate. The guide persuades the men to put aside a sack of their

treasure from the floor of the castle, where the skeletons of previous looters, dead of the plague,

lie around:

some lay in the open courtyard, others sprawled in front of the altars, with silver

and gold gee-gaws clutched in their skeleton hands. We could see, too, where the

jackals had been and stripped them bare, leaving nothing but the bones and the

jewels.26

Undeterred, the pirates continue their gothic adventure, but they have not counted on

the treachery of their Indian guide. Persuaded by Singh to reach into the jaws of the moon-god

to retrieve his tooth, Hayes is trapped when the jaws snap shut on his arm. A bizarre comedy

ensues when Hayes' companion, Bill, uses a crowbar to smash the moon-god's face in and free

his mate. The fabulous tooth is lost and Jeddah Singh escapes with the loot. No moral is drawn

from this tale. Hayes, the loser on this occasion, concludes that much gold and silver remains in

30
Indian temples. The American pirate vows he will return to get some more one of these days’.

An old dream of imperial India—of a treasure trove to be plundered—is played out for Western

readers.

A recurrent feature of exotic India in Australian magazine and newspaper stories in the

early 20th century is the life of Maharajahs and their retinues. Australian playwright Louis

Esson’s 1910 story ‘My Friend, the Maharajah’, published in the Bulletin, 27 is a witty spoof on

excessive wealth and the extravagant styles of living it generates. The chief figure of this story is

the sporting Maharajah of Jodhpur, whose tailor has fashioned the Jodhpur riding breeches

which became famous around the polo-playing world and beyond. Louis Esson’s socialistic

views do not lead him to sober criticism of the Maharajah’s excesses, however. In present-day

terms, his point of view might be described as that of a chardonnay socialist. Indeed, his own

Australian-derived love of sport draws him into an affectionately humorous account of

quintessential Jodhpur polo among the Maharajah’s elite followers and friends:

Was this polo, or was it only a dream? They didn’t play that kind of game in

Victoria. It was fierce. The Jodhpur team? Well, there was his Highness a reckless

rider, famous for his dash, meteoric. There was Fute Singh, as solid as the Rock

of Ages. There was Zelim Singh, blue-turbanned, a fierce set look in his eyes,

cantering all around the gallant English officers, and giving them naught. And

finally there was Dokal Singh, the world’s Champion. Who shall describe Dokal?

A handsome man, nearly 6 ft. high, 12½ stone, perfect in build, a cavalier in

manner, a very Napoleon of polo. As rover he was everywhere, two men trying in

vain to stop him. Full back, his defence was as that of Gibraltar. Shooting for

goal, he would have bagged all the peanuts in the Eastern markets. His attack was

a charge of the heavy brigade, officers, ponies, even his Highness himself, if he

were in the road, being bumped, and then scattered like chaff blown before the

31
 autumn gale.....he was a whole team in himself, a champion, a Caesar. He was the

personal factor in history. He moulded events.28

The Australian visitor, feted by the Maharajah, seems to accept and enjoy these sporting

excesses—in hunting, horse-races and billiards as well as polo– and the hyperbolic heroes that

grow from them. ‘This sporting Maharajah takes sport seriously’, says an observer, admiringly.

His companion agrees: ‘The stables–they are the State.’

Esson's visit to India in 1908 also included a string of articles, essays and stories for The

Lone Hand, an Australian nationalist journal which both played up the fear of China and Japan

and criticised the morals and manners of the British in India and Australia. This kind of anti-

imperialist nationalism, like Esson's rather theoretical socialism, was an avenue to uncertainty

and confusion. As David Walker has shown, Esson mocked the ‘unedifying mix of racial

arrogance, brutality and bureaucracy’ in British India and the imperialists’ tendency to see

‘sedition’ everywhere, and urged Australians to dissociate themselves from the British in India.29

At the same time, he was drawn to the eccentric individuality of Maharajahs and to images of

traditional village life in India.

If military life, and the high life of British and Indian elites are generally preferred by

Australian writers in the era of the Raj to the life of the streets, and the ambiguities and troubling

doubts about foreign occupation of India, there are nevertheless some exceptions. While many

writers sketchily refer to beggars or the anonymous life of crowded streets and bazaars, Mary C.

Elkington’s ‘The Soul of the Melon Man’, published in The Lone Hand in 1908,30 uses the form of

a fable to contemplate foreign ways of thinking and believing, and how they may affect giving

and receiving. In ‘The Soul of the Melon Man’, an Ayah tells her Memsahib about how, despite

being hungry herself, she has given some pan to a poor, hungry family. What has helped her to

do this, she says, is ‘the soul of the water-melon man hovering near.’ Then follows a tale about a

seller of melons in the bazaar who was once generous but has selfishly and dishonestly grown

32
relatively well-off by cutting thin slices or giving dry, stale pieces of melon to little children and

other customers. When a traveller passes, he finds the water-melon man asleep beneath a tree

with his soul departed from him in the branches above. The traveller persuades the soul to

return to the sleeping body which, with some grumbling it does. The traveller then gives the

renewed Melon Man two melons, to recommence his trade, one to eat himself and one for his

soul which, ‘if that is starved it is better that a man should cease to be’.31 After some temptation,

the seller of melons responds to his now indwelling soul and becomes kind and generous again.

When the soul grows, he feels it blossoming 'through all his being'.32 Thus, the Ayah tells her

Memsahib, when ‘we who pause and put our own needs before the sad lack of others, we hear

the rustling wings of the melon seller's soul’.33 It is a tale designed to appeal to the better,

feminine self of imperious foreigners, which female rather than male writers in English seem

more licensed to draw attention to. The contemplation of a single soul in this story transcends

the confused messages of the crowded streets of poor people.

By the 1920s, a number of fissures were appearing in the easy confidence expressed by

British authorities and their sometimes resistant friends and allies in India, such as the

Australians. Mahatma Gandhi had begun his strategy of non-violent confrontation with India’s

British rulers in 1920. E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which showed the near impossibility of an

equal friendship even among liberal, educated men of goodwill across the racial divide was

published in 1924. Occasional stories in Australian magazines and newspapers in this decade also

showed cracks in the wall.

Such a story is R. Francis Strangman’s ‘Black and White’, which appeared in The Triad in

1926.34 The story's title seems to invite the rejoinder, ‘There’s no such thing [as black and white]’.

The first-person narrator is identified early as an Australian who tends to see things in terms of

his home country. As he sits on the verandah of his bungalow, where he is lord of all, he surveys

the scene at dusk :

33
 Looking before me, I could see the dull-green rolling plain scarred by yellow

sheep-tracks; the narrow winding river and the trees, like willows, dotted along its

banks; beyond this again the wheat-fields, miles in extent, and the little white

farm-houses. Away in the distance, dark ranges of hills. What a pity there, were

no rabbit-proof fences.35

The writer has already shown readers that this Australian newcomer in India is a dreamer

who does not see clearly what is before him. He is an unreliable observer. He is sufficiently self-

aware, however, to recognise in himself ‘the patronising attitude of all newcomers’ when he

speaks with his servant and bearer Naghu, and is mystified when Naghu speaks nervously and

passionately about the ‘damn Parsees’ who are alleged to be taking the best jobs from other

Indians. These are deep waters and the Australian is adrift in them. He recognises that in any

conversation with an Indian there are ‘so many detonators waiting to be touched off’.36 He is

even more surprised that evening when he learns from his chief that the bearer is using a false

name and is suspected of murdering a Parsee a couple of months ago. He must therefore be

dismissed. But the story has a twist in the tail. The bearer has been using drugs supplied by

Europeans–cocaine in this case–and a neat exchange between the newcomer and his chief

concludes the story:

‘We do cause rather a lot of trouble–by being here, I mean–don’t we, sir’?

'Oh yes. That's one reason we’ve got to stay.’

‘Shall I get you a drink, sir?’

‘Oh please. Hell of a day this.’

‘Yes, sir. Hell of a day.’37

Such stories hint at an unconscious sphere of colonial relations which Bart Moore-

Gilbert has discerned in Homi Bhabha’s recognition of ‘complicitous kinds of psychic effect

34
 38
circulating between coloniser and colonised.’ In the 1920s, even in distant Australia, relations

with India can be seen to become more interesting, intriguing, complex and dangerous than the

prospect of cheetahs or tigers in the jungle. Yet it must be remembered that Australia was still six

colonies of Britain until 1901 and the colonial hangover was evident until at least the mid-20th

century.

What must be admitted is that none of the Australian story writers referred to in this

paper from the mid-19th century to mid-20th century saw India or Indians with quite the range,

depth and youthful enthusiasm of Alfred Deakin, who was to become Australia's most literate

and visionary Prime Minister. (Deakin University at Geelong, near Melbourne, reminds us of

him.) Deakin vigorously promoted a federated Commonwealth of Australia during the 1890s and

was a three-time Prime Minister of the fledgling nation in 1903-4.

At the invitation of the editor of the Age newspaper, Deakin visited India for two

months in 1890, from which a series of articles and two books, Irrigated India (1893) and Temple

and Tomb (1893) emerged. Deakin's first biographer, Walter Murdoch, remarks that, ‘if his stay in

India was brief, the preparation for it had been spread over many years of study; he knew the

history of the country as few Englishmen knew it'.39 Although he considered British rule a net

benefit to Hindus in India, Deakin remarked that ‘Officialdom is nowhere more rampant than in

India’; but that ‘the net result is a beneficent tyranny’. He praised knowledgeably the irrigation

systems of India and the temples and tombs.40 Nor were Deakin’s essays restricted to buildings

and landscapes. An indication of the broad sweep of humanistic thinking allied with an astute

sense of policy development that informs Deakin's Irrigated India is shown in the following brief

quotation:

We are near enough to readily visit India and be visited......Its students might

come to the universities of our milder climate, instead of facing the winter of

35
 Oxford, Paris or Heidelberg. Our thinkers may yet become authorities upon

questions which need personal acquaintance with India and its peoples.41

As Australia's first major international statesman, Alfred Deakin needs to be re-read and

reconsidered. As a man of letters, he reminds us of the traditions, including literature, that

provide an avenue of continuing linkage between Australia and the Indian subcontinent as our

two-way exchanges increase. The ‘family closeness’ that novelist Christopher Koch envisaged

between the literate peoples of our countries needs to be explored further and the links that were

forged back then brought seriously into play once again.

Notes & References

1
Joseph Banks, Journal 28 April [1896], p. 263. Cited in the Australian National Dictionary, ed. W.S.

Ramson (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1988). 234.

2
See David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia (St. Lucia: University of

Queensland Press, 1999), Chapter 8.

3
C.J. Koch, Across the Sea Wall (Sydney. Angus & Robertson, 1965; revised edn, 1982).

4
Greg Clark, In Fear of China (Melbourne; Lansdowne, 1967).

5
Across the Sea Wall, 96.

5
ibid.

7
C.J. Koch, Crossing the Gap: A Novelist's Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1987), 15-16. For a

further consideration of some of these issues, see Bruce Bennett, ‘A Family Closeness? Australia,

India, Indonesia’, in Ttie Regenerative Spirit, ed. Nena Bierbaum et al (Adelaide: Lythrum Press,

2003), 57-67.

8
Robert Lusetich, ‘Unimaginable Until Now’, Weekend Australian, January 1-2, 2005, 13.

36
9
C.D. Narasimhaiah, ‘Introduction’, The Literary Criterion XV, nos. 3 & 4 (1980), xxi.

10
Rick Hosking, 'Realms of Possibility: Australia, Britain and India in John Lang’s The Wetherbys’,

in The Regenerative Spirit, vol. 1, ed. Nena Bierbaum et al (Adelaide: Lythrum Press, 2003), 45-56.

11
ibid., 49.

12
ibid., 53.

13
Anxious Nation, 17-19.

14
ibid., 17.

15
ibid., 19.

16
Reprinted in Hotel Asia, ed. Robin Gerster (Ringwood: Penguin, 1995), 46-50.

17
Anon., ‘A Strange Night-watchman: A Story of Northern India’, The Town and Country Journal,

16 November, 1889, 29.

18
ibid.

19
Ethel Anderson, Little Ghosts (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1959), 57-87.

20
ibid., 180.

21
M.L. Skinner, Tucker Sees India (London: Martin Seeker and Warburg, 1937).

22
D.H. Lawrence and M.L. Skinner, The Boy in the Bush, ed. and introd. Paul Eggert (1924;

London: Penguin, 1996).

23
M.L. Skinner, The Fifth Sparrow: An Autobiography (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1992), Chs.

14-15.

24
Tucker Sees India, 132.

25
Albert Dorrington, ‘The Mouth of the Moon-God’, The Town and Country Journal, 25

December 1907, 187.

37
26
ibid.

27
Louis Esson, ‘My Friend, the Maharajah’, Bulletin vol. 13, no. 1574, 14 April 1910, 40.

28
ibid.

29
Anxious Nation, 35.

30
Mary C. Elkington, ‘The Soul of the Melon Man’, The Lone Hand, November 2, 1908, 53-55.

31
ibid., 55.

32
ibid.

33
ibid.

34
R. Francis Strangman, ‘Black and White’, The Triad, June 1, 1926, 34-5.

35
ibid., 34.

36
ibid., 35.

37
ibid.

38
Bart Moore-Gilbert, Writing India 1757-1990 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, n.d.),

5.

39
Walter Murdoch, Alfred Deakin : A Sketch (London: Constable, 1923), 170.

40
ibid., 172-3.

41
Robin Gerster (ed.) Hotel Asia (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1995), 72-83.

(* From “Australian Stories of India 1850 – 1950,” by Bruce Bennett, in Bandyopadhyay, Deb Narayan;
Banerjee, Shibnath & Chakrabarti, Santosh (Eds.), “Australian Studies: Themes and Issues” Volume II, pg.
14-26, 2007, Burdwan: Centre for Australian Studies. Copyright 2007 by Centre for Australian Studies.

Reprinted with permission.)

38
 4

Re-reading ‘Mandala’ Motif: Identity formation in White’s

The Solid Mandala

Sarbojit Biswas

The origins of the Sanskrit word ‘mandala’ meaning ‘disc, circle,’ can be traced to Rig

Veda where it stands for the title of sections of the book, and Hindu and Buddhist art and

religious practices, where it refers to a formation where a square is enclosed in a circle. The

mandala has manifold representations and meanings – it can stand for a circle, a polygon, a

community, a connection, a support for a meditating or tantric person, a palace with four gates

facing four corners of the Earth, a sacred space and even a geometric pattern for microcosm of

the universe in the human mind. (Hansen) With respect to Oriental Art, it is defined as “a

schematized presentation of the cosmos, chiefly characterized by a concentric configuration of

geometric shapes, each of which contains an image of a deity or an attribute of a deity” and “any

of various designs symbolizing the universe, usually circular” with reference to Hindu and

Buddhist Art. (Mandala) Similarly according to Lessing and Wayman in their edition of Mkhas

Grub Rje’s Fundamentals of the Buddhist Tantras, the mandala word can be divided into two

parts. Thus “manda” would mean “essence” or “pith” and “la” would mean a “seizing” with the

implication that it conveys an idea of “seizing the essence” or “enclosing the essence.” (Rje)

A study of various mandala formations in various locations between India and China

would reveal the application of the design to architecture, rituals, beliefs and faiths. Thus for

example, if we look at the Buddha Vajrasattva Mandala design, symbolizing original crystalline

purity, we can visualize the sacred centre which is a lotus blossom of eight petals resting on a bed

of gold and surrounded with a square palace with gates pointing to the four corners of the Earth.

And on the outside, are four outer circles, the fire of wisdom, the vajra circle, the tombs circle

39
and lotus circle in the inside which the meditating human being must pass through to arrive at

the gates. The sacred centre is inhabited by the symbol of Buddha whose enlightenment is the

ultimate goal.

(Hansen)

Picture 1: Buddha Vajrasattva Mandala

A look at the archaeological wonders in Cambodia would reveal that the ancient Khmers

used an architectural style where there was a pyramid of steps crowned by five towers. Thus

Angkor Vat, the most famous of the temples present there is designed in the shape of a mandala

and reveals a geometric pattern of a perfect world with square nested walls and passages leading

past deity images to a central tower as Picture 2 reveals. Thus the Kalatman Mandala at Angkor

Vat refers to a rare ‘tantric prayoga’ or usage related to a ‘yaga’ (fire rite) known as the

‘Parameshwara Agama’ and its mantras and rituals are related to the basic plan, as revealed in the

diagram, of a dodecagonal plan with 12 spokes leading to the outer rim with petals or circles and

40
surrounded by a decagonal rim. Thus this Kalatman mandala envisages Lord Shiva

encompassing time and space and is a continuity of Vedic traditions.

(Taramgini)

Picture 2: Kalatman Mandala at Angkor Vat

Then again, the Temple at Borobudur, a domain of the Vajradhara sect, a form of

Tantraism, is a huge three dimensional mandala with six squared stories, each higher but smaller

than the previous one enclosing a three concentric inner circular terraces and a central stupa in

the middle. Thus the ground plan, as Picture 3 reveals, references both Buddhist cosmology and

the nature of the human mind, with the three divisions standing for three realms of Buddhist

cosmology, the world of desires, the world of forms and the formless world. Thus humans, who

have overcome desire, live in the world of forms, with no attraction to them and ultimately

experience reality at its purest form in the formless world or ocean of nirvana. Thus it is without

41
doubt, as P.H. Pott states, that the monument is something for the Buddhist pilgrims, a sort of

external aid to attain the level or stage of Buddha, the level of nirvana.

(Kartapranata)

Picture 3: Borobodur Temple ground plan in the shape of a mandala

42
Picture 4: Borobodur Temple central stupa

II

C.G. Jung, in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections uses the term mandala

to refer to circular images drawn by his patients and himself while trying to attain a sort of

psychic wholeness. He describes the mandala to be a representation of “an inner

image….gradually built up through (active) imagination …when physical equilibrium is disturbed

or when a thought cannot be found and must be sought for.” (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy)

Thus for Jung, in Buddhism, there are representations of the cosmos based on a “quarternary

system” (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy). As Guillemette Johnston writes, “For Jung, two

attitudes (introversion/extraversion) and four function types (thinking, feeling, sensing, and

intuiting) serve to measure the self-regulatory nature of the psyche. Hence, Jung adopted a form

resembling the mandala when he identified the character types that describe the process of

becoming conscious while trying to develop a psychoanalytic theory of individuation. The

mandala serves to symbolize a process of transformation, a crossing between conscious and

unconscious that provides the impetus for psychic growth.” (Johnston) Thus for Jung, the magic

centre or circle of the mandala represented the gradual movement of the individual towards a

sort of psychic wholeness and the mandala came to be represented as “a circle which “signifies

the wholeness of the self.”2” (Albanese 1)

In his quest for a theory of individuation, Jung uses the principle of opposites, and pits

the conscious mind against the unconscious mind with the hint that proper mental health is

attained when there is a “proper and harmonious balance, a right gradient, between the poles.”

(Albanese 2) As such, Jung is not concerned with normal human instincts like hunger, pain, or

aggression but the motives behind such instincts in the unconscious mind. And in analysing the

unconscious mind, he comes across ““primordial images” which are ancient and universal

thought forms of humanity.3” (Albanese 2) Thus, they are these archetypal forms and images,

43
common to all humans across times and cultures which reveal themselves in the conscious mind.

Thus as Albanese writes, “Because of the archetypes, men will produce again and again basically

similar mythical ideas. Ghosts, wizards, witches, demons, angels-and mandalas are all cases in

point.” (Albanese 2)

It should be understood that for Jung, the process of individuation is ultimately a

movement towards mental wholeness by passing through stages of the archetypal forms in

proper sequence. It is thus a movement from the first confrontation with the evil side of human

nature, to the internalized femininity or masculinity of humans, to positive and negative inflation

to a standing before a mana-personality or an absolute Heavenly Father. If then, the inflation is

deflated, the conscious mind is able to attend transcendence and realize the true personality, the

original wholeness. (Albanese) Thus, for Jung, as evident in his own dream about the city of

Liverpool, which brought a sense of finality for him, “the goal has been revealed. One could not

go beyond the centre. The center is the goal, and everything is directed toward the center.

Through this dream I understood that the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and

meaning.” (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections 23) Thus as one individual moves towards

realization of oneself, of one’s inner consciousness, of fulfill one’s goal, one reaches the mandala

which is basically the goal.

Jung is also of the opinion that quaternity archetypes are older than the Greeks and are

universal expressions of one’s collective consciousness. These archetypes or symbols are

fourfold and taking the shape of a mandala corroborate to the ancient ideas of four seasons, four

elements, four faculties of human mind, etc. Thus the main aim is unity and wholeness and the

mandala ultimately aims to attain a unity of God and man. As Edward F. Edinger elucidates, for

Jung, “all images that emphasize a circle with a center and usually with the additional feature of a

square, a cross, or some other representation of quaternity, fall into this category.” (Edinger 4)

44
 As already dwelled upon, in his adoption of the mandala concept, Jung was drawing

upon an Eastern traditional symbol, but interestingly, for Jung, the Eastern and Western circles

or mandalas were all and the same, with both standing for a magic circle. To validate his claims,

he speaks of the use of the mandalas among the Egyptians, or even among Navaho Indians.

Thus Navaho/Navajo Indians used to create sand mandalas akin to those created by Tibetan

monks as the evident in Pictures 5 & 6 respectively.

(Navajo Sand Painting)

Pictures 5: Navaho Indian mandala sand painting

45
 (Monastery)

Pictures 6: Tibetan mandala sand painting

But strangely, as Albanese writes, “Jung is possessed of a curious kind of double vision in

viewing the mandalas of the East: that is, he sees and at the same time he doesn't see them in

their contextual dimension.” (Albanese) Thus for him, Eastern mandalas, in Buddhist works

indicated a sort of ritualistic space and he did not analyse the psychological implications of the

same, most probably because he was more interested in his patients and the concept of the

overarching archetype. And in that, Jung seems to have limited himself, for he did not consider

the role of the mandalas in Buddhist religious practices aiming for nirvana. Unfortunately for

him, “he mistook analogy for identity” (Albanese) and equated the “uniqueness of the historical

event” with the archetype. (Albanese)

III

It has been variously debated that maybe, towards the later part of his literary career,

Patrick White had turned into a religious novelist – its greatest evidence lying in his novels, The

46
Solid Mandala and Riders in the Chariot. In the latter novel, White made his four main

characters conform to the quaternity of the mandala so as to transform them into the riders of

the divine chariot. Interestingly, the chariot symbol is a Jungian mandala image, and White in

drawing from Jung, attempts to consolidate it with symbols from the New Testament,

Cabbalistic tradition, the evangelical Christian tradition and archetype presented by Jung. For he

wants to state that ultimately all ways, all religious paths or mystical ways are human attempts to

become one with God and the self. (Chapman 197-198) Thus White’s four seekers in the novel

seek four different mystical traditions, ranging from nature, to the inner way of the spirit, to

evangelical piety to use of painting to recreate the tradition of Christian art. All attempting to

attain the chariot mandala, the four riders, imbibed with a special Jungian psychological faculty

(Chapman 198) present unity in diversity and ultimately reveal “White’s own massive Jungian

mandala symbolizing an identity of humanity and divinity.” (Chapman 198)

As the title suggests, the eponymous motif of White’s The Solid Mandala is the mandala

which makes its presence felt throughout the novel to bring about totality and wholeness in a

spiritual sense in the main characters. Interestingly, White interweaves the mandala with simplest

of daily life happenings to most probably suggest that such wholeness is both easily accessible

and attainable. And more interestingly, such easy approachability and attainability seems a

departure from previously mentioned mandala formations evident in Eastern traditions. Thus

White seems to do away with exoticism and the esoteric quality associated with the motif and

make it more commonplace, as evident in the way in which he first uses the term to present the

tension between the twin brothers Arthur and Waldo in the novel: “‘One of the carpets had,’

Arthur whimpered, ‘right in the centre, what I would say was a mandala.’….he hated his

brother.” (White 30) White harps on the bitterness, the discontent, the tension between the two

evident in intellectual terms and even though the two brothers attempt to unequal in all aspects,

47
White, using the mandala motif tries unity in diversity, tries to resolve their tension into a

wholeness.

White also narrates an incident when as a child, the family was coming from England and

Arthur had been greatly attracted to the sun which was like a red gold disc. On his attempting to

go near the rails of the ship to see, he was stopped by his mother with the stern word that he

might fall off and be lost forever. Immediately Arthur had replied that “‘Yes I might. For ever.’

Feeling the cold circles eddying out and away from him.” (White 215) In the description of the

waves, eddying out and way, receding in the distance behind the ship one can mark the presence

of a patterned set of mandalic formations, once again referring to the fact that there is totality

and wholeness in everything and he can never be lost.

The central mandalic motifs in novel are the marbles used by Arthur which are once

again in tune with White’s use of things from everyday life and which in a sense are

representative of the finer things in life that Arthur is bereft of. White wonderfully describes

Arthur preoccupation with and dependence on the marbles:

He was different then, in several ways. But did not mind since he had the

marbles.

However many marbles Arthur had – there were always those which got lost, and

some he traded for other things – he considered four his permanencies. There

were the speckled gold and the cloudy blue. There were the whorl of green and

crimson circlets. There was the taw with a knot at the centre, which made him

consider palming it off, until, on looking long and close, he discovered the knot

was the whole point.

Of all these jewels or touchstones, talismans or sweethearts, Arthur Brown got to

love the knotted one the best…. (White 228)

48
In this context, Bill Ashcroft opines that “Arthur sees the ‘flaw’, that the ‘knot’ at the centre of

his marble, is the ‘whole point.’ The mandala shows that man is ‘surrounded’ by perfection in the

sense that it remains the ultimate horizon of his existence, and while wholeness is unenclosable

by consciousness, man ‘obtains’ infinity when he becomes aware of its imitation in ordinary

experience.” (Ashcroft 126) Thus the presence of the four marbles replicate the quaternity of

the mandala and the knot in the marble the centre, the goal for wholeness. Interestingly, the knot

in the marble, which ultimately Arthur had decided to give Waldo, also symbolically represents

the opacity in Waldo’s nature as contrasted to the openness in Arthur. Unfortunately, Waldo

does not get the marble in the end, for it is lost in a back alley the night he dies and symbolically

reveals White’s design of unrequited hope associated with his life.

Arthur also realizes that, as Ken Godwin opines, he is the keeper of the mandalas and it

is only he who can stop them from being misrepresented as mere marbles. For him, such

crassness of opinion needed to be avoided and hence his aim was always to protect the

mandalas. He also realises that all these ideas were his own and he was not in a position to

impose his views on others, especially his brother. Still, he wanted to protect and honour the

mandalas for they would reveal, he believed, the wholeness and totality all humans aspire for.

With time, “Arthur contemplates his marble almost in a religious sense, seeing in it mysteries,

realities, symbols, and significances – an endless range of reality enclosed in a miniature

universe.” (Walsh 92) And in that, he connected to the Jungian concept of mandalic totality

which is a conscious presence in the novel evident in the incident when Arthur goes to the house

of Mrs. Musto and read from the encyclopaedia the meaning of a mandala:

‘The mandala is a symbol of totality. It is believed to be the “dwelling place of the god.” Its

protective circle is a pattern of order super-imposed on – psychic- chaos. Sometimes its geometric

form is seen as a vision (either waking or in a dream) or—’

His voice had fallen to the most elaborate hush.

49
 ‘Or danced,’ Arthur read. (White 238)

After such a reading, he is able to synchronize his personal vision with the vision of entire

mankind and lead him onto his mandalic dance. He asks his father the meaning of totality but his

father is clueless making realise that, none, not even Waldo knew it and that “it was himself who

was, and would remain, the keeper of mandalas, who must guess their final secret through touch

and light.” (White 240) “So Arthur Brown danced, beginning at the first corner, from which he

would proceed through stages to the fourth, and beyond. He who was so large, so shambly,

found movement coming to him on the hillside in the bay of blackberries.” (White 265) to bring

to a culmination and climax the mandala motif in the novel.

Thus, Arthur dances to integrate the various components of his life, and embodies the

entire (McCulloch 52) meaning of the text according to Ann McCulloch. Melinda Jewell quoting

from Rodney Edgecomble opines that “it allows Arthur to order his life into ‘pattern and

significance’ (84), a pattern and design that Ratnakar Sadawarte feels resembles an Indian

spiritual practice called Tantra Sadhana (40).” (Jewell 36) Before he starts, Arthur states that he

would dance a mandala, referring to his conception from the encyclopaedia and one can realise

that White intentionally connects the mandala motif with dance to allow Arthur to overcome his

surroundings, his emotional and physical problems and live beyond the intellectuality of his

brother.

Thus Thelma Herring finds the mandalas to be the main linking devices in the novel,

represented through Arthur’s four marbles which ultimately present the oneness of the self.

Through abundant usage of imagery and allusions, like the lotus, the wheel, the rose, etc., White

constructs a network of mandalic symbols which culminate in Arthur’s mandala or ritualistic or

tantric dance and enable him to realize his true self. And lastly, as Joseph Jones opines, to the

mandala formations in the lives of the characters is added White’s own design regarding the

chapters and narrative style. He uses four chapters with the first and the fourth framing the

50
second and third, and also uses two long flashbacks, twin consciousness, twin characters and

their twin dilemmas to unearth meaning, both in their lives and for the novel and bring the solid

mandala to a culmination.

Works Cited

Albanese, Catherine L. "The Multi-Dimensional Mandala: A Study in the Interiorization of

Sacred Space." Numen April 1977: 1-25.

Ashcroft, Bill. "More Than One Horizon." Patrick White: A Critical Symposium . Ed. R. E.
Shepherd and Kirpal Singh. Adelaide: Flinders University Centre for Reserch in the New
Literatures in English, 1978. 123-134.

Chapman, Edgar L. "The Mandala Design of Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot." Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 21.2 (Summer 1979): 186-202.

Edinger, Edward F. Ego and Archetype. Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1973.

Hansen, Jytte. Mandala. 3 March 2003. 8 March 2012 <http://www.jyh.dk/indengl.htm>.

Jewell, Melinda. "Terpsichorean Moments in Patrick White’s The Solid Mandala and Hal Porter’s
The Tilted Cross." (n.d.).

Johnston, Guillemette. "Archetypal Patterns of Behavior: A Jungian Analysis of the Mandala

Structure in the Dialogues of Jeab-Jacques Rousseau." Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche Fall 2007:
44-68.

Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Richard Winston and Clara
Winston. New York: Vintage, 1963.

—. Psychology and Alchemy. CW, 1968.

Kartapranata, Gunkarta Gunawan. "Borobudur Mandala." 17 December 2009. Wikipedia. 9

March 2012 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Borobudur_Mandala.svg>.

Mandala. 8 March 2012 <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mandala>.

McCulloch, Ann. A Tragic Vision: The Novels of Patrick White . St. Lucia, Queensland:
University of Queensland, 1983.

Monastery, Drepung Loseling. "Mandala sand Painting." Mystical Arts of Tibets. 9 March 2012
<http://www.mysticalartsoftibet.org/Mandala-3.htm#top>.

51
"Navajo Sand Painting." Artsology. 9 March 2012
<http://www.artsology.com/navajo_sand_painting.php>.

Rje, Mkhas Grub. Fundamentals of the Buddhist Tantras. Trans. Ferdinand Lessing and Alex
Wayman. Paris: Mouton, 1968.

Taramgini, Manasa. "The kAlAtman maNDala at Angkor Wat." 8 February 2008.

Wordpress.com. 9 March 2012 <http://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/the-
kalatman-mandala-at-angkor-wat/>.

Walsh, William. Patrick White's Fiction. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1977.

White, Patrick. The Solid Mandala. n.d.

52
 5

The Rediscovery of the Feminine Space in Peter

Goldsworthy's Honk If You are Jesus

Tathagata Das

The idea of space is quite complex and multi-dimensional. The concept of space may be defined

by its dictionary meaning which refers to it as a “continuous expanse in which things exist and

move.” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 1164). Alternatively, it designates

“an empty or potentially empty expanse among things.” (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

8206). Again, F. M. Cornford, in his essay The Invention of Space, argues that boundless and all-

encompassing space was invented in Greece during the fifth century B. C. It developed along

with the development of Greek geometry. Later, during the Middle Ages, the idea of space came

up in different writings and was also mentioned in the Newtonian conception of motion.

(Cornford, 215-235).

It is true that space as a concept occupies an important position within the subject of Geography

and Geographers have also identified several types of spaces. Thus we may find that there can be

such divisions of space as absolute, abstract, social etc. (Encyclopedia of Human Geography,

441-442). But there are still other important types of spaces such as aboriginal space, cultural

space, personal or private space, mental or psychological space and so on. The Australian

novelist Peter Goldsworthy’s novel Honk if You are Jesus which was published in 1992 is a

curious mixture of science fiction, romance and religion. It is, in fact, the only novel of the

author where we find that there is a female first person narrator, Dr. Mara Fox, who is a doctor

in a hospital in Adelaide. She is single, living with her mother and living her life very much

bound by routine work at the hospital. But her uneventful life is disturbed when she gets a call

from her classmate Richard Pfitzer to join the famous Hollis Schultz Medical University in

Queensland’s Gold Coast as a Professor of Reproductive Medicine. There she is also given the

53
freedom to handpick her team and a huge amount is offered to her as her research money as

well. After much deliberation, Dr. Fox flies over to Queensland and finally assumes charge. In

doing so, she, for the first time, dares to move out of her circumscribed existence, both

professionally and personally. She takes a big risk in resigning from a secure job and taking up a

new challenge in unfamiliar surroundings.

At the beginning of Part two of the novel, Mara moves into her “fully furnished” apartment.

(55)She only brings books and dresses from her home in Adelaide to her new living space. Her

working space, the Department of Reproductive Medicine is located on the fifth floor of the

University though in the early stages of her joining she finds almost no teaching responsibility

and her work relating to gynecological matters. She is thus able to explore her working space

thoroughly and assess for herself the nature of the cases which are placed before her

Department. She does not perform abortions here as she did back in the hospital in Adelaide as

abortions are strictly forbidden here.

At this time, she gets to use the instrument for endoscope, made of flexible fibre-optics. Mara

starts to use this instrument on patients as well as herself and soon becomes an expert in using it

for the purpose of extracting the human ovum and also recording the process of ovulation and

fertilization as well. She slowly masters the art of guiding the instrument into her own body and

photographing the process of ovulation and, later, harvesting her own ova. Thus, she is able to

experiment with her own body and witness the interior of her own biological space and a

process which is extremely personal in nature.

Thus Part Two of the novel begins with Dr. Fox being accorded a free access to choose

equipment like a new endoscope which was made available to her immediately on her arrival and

with which she starts to explore the innermost parts of the bodies of others and often her own.

Thus gradually she learns to capture the ovulation process and harvest her own eggs as well. She

assumes control of her own life and is happy about the way things were shaping up. But soon

54
she is introduced to the new Professor of Genetics, William Scanlon who joins the university

from Stanford University. At the very first meeting with Scanlon, Dr. Fox is impressed and

attracted to the man for his ingenuity and simplicity. She finds something school boyish about

his attitude and appearance which appeals to her. This and her knowledge that it was Scanlon

who had been instrumental in resurrecting the extinct dodo doubles her interest in him. It is

finally decided that Scanlon and Mara would work together in trying the same principles on long

dead human beings.

At about this time, Mara meets the famous geneticist William Scanlon who has been working at

Stanford University and had been the mastermind behind the revival of the extinct dodo,

working on a little bit of genetic material. Mara is very surprised to find him in this University in

Australia but soon learns from him of another project that he is interested in-the revival of the

Tasmanian tiger, an animal which was native to the country. Thus Scanlon shares with them this

secret, though inadvertently! During her conversation with Scanlon, Mara feels a bit surprised to

find herself liking him and sharing an emotional space with him. So, she declares her unfamiliar

feelings in the following terms:

I laughed, a little surprised at myself. I couldn’t remember when I had warmed to

someone so quickly. Or warmed to a mind so quickly- a mind that seemed to roam

where it liked, unfettered. (70)

Within a very short time of meeting Scanlon, Mara feels a sort of intimacy with him, with a new

mode of “abbreviated conversation” that is established between the two of them, leading to a

sharing of an altogether new communicative space with which her classmate Pfitzner cannot

catch up. She therefore carries on conversing with Scanlon as with an old friend, creating a

comfortable emotional space with him. At this meeting over lunch, Scanlon and Mara discuss the

possibility of resurrecting human beings from earlier times by using techniques very similar to

that used to bring back the dodos. At length it is decided that Mara and Scanlon will work

55
together on this project. Mara is disturbed to find Scanlon showing interest in her and she, in

turn, finds herself attracted towards him, more than she likes.

But when the time came for her to present a paper before the Research Committee, Mara

is surprised and a little anxious to see Hollis Schultz himself in the audience. She has a definite

feeling that she only wanted Scanlon to appreciate what she was about to show. In a daring and

subtle decision, she shows them her own ovaries and her own process of ovulation of which she

has taken pictures earlier. In fact she thinks that her audience would not have any clue what

really they had been shown. Soon after, she is approached by Hollis Schultz and she learns for

the first time that he was childless and that he and his wife Mary Beth would like to talk with her

about their problem. A little later she meets Scanlon and is surprised when he tells her that he

has seen through her little private joke. He offers Mara the opportunity to see his work in return

and she is very much interested. Thus he tells her that he would be taking off his “intellectual

clothes” and showing her something really special. (83) And keeping his word, he shows Mara a

two week old foetus of a Tasmanian tiger which was growing up inside the pouch of a

Tasmanian Devil. Scanlon later explains to Mara how he has managed to harvest DNA from the

hide of a stuffed Tasmanian Tiger which has become extinct some time ago and inserted this

DNA into the egg produced by a Tasmanian Devil.

But her biggest surprise was still to come. She learns to her surprise that Scanlon spends his

leisure hours fingerprinting the many relics in the Bible Museum of the University and that he

has, after a lot of hard labour, found three fingerprints which match and finally he let her hold a

beaker which contained the actual genes of Christ which he had managed to harvest from an

ancient relic. Naturally, Mara is both incredulous and perplexed but she had to admit that the

very thing was ambitious and “an idea of outrageous hubris”. (140) But at the same time she felt

a kind of inexplicable attraction towards him which ultimately leads her to get involved with him

physically.

56
In the meantime Mary-Beth, Hollis Schultz’s wife is artificially impregnated with the X

chromosome taken from Schultz’s gut cell but when Mara does an ultrasound test on her after

some time, she is very much surprised to find that it is a boy she is carrying whereas she

remembered how Scanlon had extracted the female half of the gene from Schultz’s gut cell. But

soon after her assistant Tad explains to her how Scanlon had played a trick on them all by

transplanting the gene of Jesus that he had managed to extract from the ancient relics. Mara is

confused, she at first tries to figure out how this has occurred but the emotion which

overwhelmed her now was anger:

I walked home through that warm, viscid night feeling as confused as I had ever

felt: half-disbelieving, half-fascinated, but wholly angry. I had permitted Scanlon

to share my bed, I had stood before him, exposed in many more ways than one,

yet he had hidden crucial things from me: had hidden his central purpose, had

hidden, it now seemed, himself from me. (246)

This revelation prompts Mara to take serious exception to Scanlon’s conduct and she deals his

plan a double blow by not only administering Mary-Beth a drug which leads to a miscarriage but

also takes away the remaining relics containing the DNA of Jesus, destroying one but fertilizing

her own ovum with another, thereby becoming herself the new harbinger of the Second Coming,

as it were. Thus, the novel ends with Mara having returned home to her mother in Adelaide, still

unmarried but now pregnant. Therefore, in an essential sense, Mara, who had never felt

interested in men previous to her meeting with Scanlon, rediscovers her own femininity at the

unlikely age of forty eight. Thus the fact that she was going to be a mother significantly alters her

status and in a sense helps her to fulfill her quintessential feminine role. It also means something

else to her- the fact that she, who had been a prude maid all her life but had fallen for a much

younger man, had surrendered herself to him for a certain period of time but had finally

exercised her reason and will power to extricate herself successfully from the relationship. She

57
not only does that, but along with this rediscovery of herself, she, at the same time powerfully

asserts her superiority over Scanlon, the genius from Stanford University. So, in the end, Mara

Fox beats him at his own game by not only thwarting his secret plan, but takes it upon herself to

be a second Mother Mary. Another important aspect to note here is the fact that she as a woman

makes her own decisions, making use of her body as she wants without being dictated to by

anyone or being compelled to succumb to the masculine wishes. Thus, though she has a brief

emotional and sexual liaison with Scanlon, it only, in the final analysis, helps her to reinvent her

feminine self. The final subversion and checkmating of Scanlon’s plan becomes for Mara a

triumph, an achievement in many different ways. So Peter Goldsworthy in this novel tells the

story from the woman’s viewpoint and by showing her progress from someone who was

oblivious of her own quality and potentiality to one who eventually carves out for herself a

destiny that would perhaps have a bearing on the history of mankind. The novel then depicts a

lady doctor’s journey towards self-discovery and her ingenuity to use herself for bringing about a

tremendous change in the society of which she is a member. So, at the end of the novel, Dr.

Mara Fox finds her own feminine space and shapes not only her own destiny but perhaps also

for millions of others.

Works Cited

Allen, R. E. ed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Oxford University Press,

New Delhi, 1990. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Des EspaceAutres. in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite, Trans.

Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, 1986. web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf. Google Web

Search. 1 Aug. 2014.

Goldsworthy, Peter. Honk If You are Jesus. Harper Collins Publishers, Sydney, 1992. Print.

58
 6

Reading HBO’s Game of Thrones: A Politico-historical

Allegory of Climate Change

Abhilash Dey and Indrani Mondal

Perhaps the biggest “punch line” in his series is that the squabbles of summer, the games of

thrones, the clashes of kings, the storms of swords, are all distractions from the immanent and

infinitely ignored threat of the white walkers, who threaten to storm the wall and destroy the

world—i.e., the threat of total environmental apocalypse, personified in the very spirit of eternal

winter. (201)

—Leederman, T.A. “A Thousand Westerosi Plateaus: Wargs, Wolves and Ways

of Being.” Mastering the Game of Thrones: Essays on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice

and Fire. Ed(s). Jes Battis and Susan Johnston. Jefferson: McFarland & Company,

2005: 189-204. Print.

The human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals

some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system. [...] We

then explore recent trends in the evolution of the Anthropocene as humanity proceeds into the

twenty-first century, focusing on the profound changes to our relationship with the rest of the

living world and on early attempts and proposals for managing our relationship with the large

geophysical cycles that drive the Earth’s climate system. (842)

—Steffen, Will, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill. "The

Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives." Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369

(2011): 842-867. Print.

59
No less than 24 per cent of India’s arable land is slowly turning into desert, and a 2-degree

Celsius rise in global average temperature would reduce the country’s food supply by a quarter.

—Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. New

Delhi: Penguin Allen Lane, 2016. Print. 120.

Environmental disaster, meanwhile, threatens all even as it is ignored by most. […] The slogan

“Winter is coming” is meant literally as well as metaphorically: planter forces are moving slowly

but inexorably towards climatic catastrophe as the infighting among kings and queens distracts

them from the bigger picture.

—Carpenter, Charli. “Game of Thrones as Theory: It’s Not as Realist as It

Seems….And That’s Good.” Snapshot. Politics and Society Media, 29 March

2012. Web. 12 August 2017.

Reading HBO’s Game of Thrones: A Politico-historical Allegory of Climate Change

Our paper is a humble attempt at reading the political allegory of Climate Change in

HBO TV show Game of Thrones, adapted for television from George R.R. Martin’s 1996-

published A Song of Ice and Fire series’ first book, A Game of Thrones, by David Benioff and D.B.

Weiss. We seek to read the political history embedded in the TV show that derives its sustenance

from Britain’s War of the Roses and the Hundred Years’ War to begin with. The TV show has

recorded more than 13 million viewers per episode since its fourth season itself. Now, the series

is at its seventh season and still holds an undeniable grasp on its dedicated viewers.

The paper is divided into seven sections including the Conclusion. The first section deals

with a thumbnail introduction to the realm and particulars of Television Studies since this paper

is a venture into the critical world of TV shows with its visual rhetoric that is peculiarly its own.

The second section is devoted to a brief sketch of the TV show spanning six seasons to aid the

readers who are not yet initiated into George R.R. Martin’s medieval fantasy world of Westeros

60
and Essos. Following the paraphrase, the third section concerns itself with a study of HBO’s

Game of Thrones’ plot-arc: how it is influenced by historical events, how it is informed by

alternative political histories from the past and the present. The fourth section is specifically on

Martin’s The Wall, its history and the myth, its historical and contemporary influence across time

and across cultures. The fifth section dwells on the historiography of the Others, the White

Walkers from beyond the Wall of the northern lands of winter. The term paper sees the advent

and the march of the levelling Wights/White Walkers/Others as a parable of climate change,

which forms the body of the sixth section of the term paper. The conclusion brings together all

the myth-making and all the references of the history and contemporary politics towards a

discourse of the Climate Change in the Anthropocene.

Raymond Williams in his seminal 1975-book, Television: Technology and Cultural Form

explores the idea of television and its relationship with the society. Amidst the social institution

and culture he calls television “a cultural form” (7). Williams, in the chapter "The Technology

and the Society" charts the effect of television in nine salient points: it has altered the media of

news and entertainment, has altered our institutions and forms of social relationships, has altered

our basic perception of reality, has altered the scale and form of our societies, has affected the

central processes of family/cultural/social life, has centralised formation of opinions and styles

of behaviour, has brought about a domestic consumer economy but has also emphasised

elements of passivity, cultural and psychological inadequacy making our society complex but

atomised (11-12).

"Television is a multifaceted apparatus," writes Janet Wasko (1). TV is a technological

process, an electronic device, a system of distributing images and sounds. Television as a form of

mass communication did not emerge until the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the technology

saw its development at about 1920s. Schwartz, a biographer of one of the often overlooked

61
inventors in the United States, Philo Farnsworth, writes: “The immediacy of television was the

key” (113).

Janet Wasko further adds that television is not only a technical device, “but also a social,

political, economic, and cultural force”: “Television is an industrial system that produces and

distributes products, as well as (often) promoting other commodities and commerce” (2).

Television has always been regarded as one of the most potential storytellers of the society, and

Signorelli and Bacue underline the very point saying: “[t]elevision has joined the ranks of

socialization agents in our society and in the world at large” (527).

The epoch of broadcast television that lasted for more than five decades from the mid-

1950s, was also the period when “television studies budded off from an already hybrid

knowledge tree”: writes John Hartley, in the Foreword to his Reading Television. TV was treated as

part of mass society; it was routinely analysed for outcomes that were known in advance to be

negative, to be anti-social, to be apathetic towards the human conditions of the 1960s and 1970s.

But soon Television Studies sprouted, writes John Hartley, “out of existing branches of social

theory, social science, psychology, cultural criticism and other academic disciplines” (xi). Its

immediate purpose was not really to understand but to ‘discipline’ television into the supposedly

orderly context of disciplinary taxonomies of knowledge; “and to discipline unruly TV itself via a

rhetoric of control, prohibition and pejorative labelling” (xi).

In the 90s, figures such as Pierre Bourdieu started to take TV as an influential force

summarily. Television, with the gradual emergence of television studies between 1970s and

1980s, became a phenomenon by itself. As a textual and cultural point of view, television was

being read. This article is an assay at reading HBO’s medieval fantasy drama, Game of Thrones, as a

paradigm in television study where power is exercised and contested. Before we conclude the

section, one feels tempted to quote John Hartley differentiating between the broadcast and post-

broadcast era in television which is “characterized by interactivity, customization, multiple

62
platforms and non-broadcast screen entertainment carried via video, cable, streaming, or archive

systems such as TiVo” (xiv).

Game of Thrones, therefore, happens to be a post-broadcast era TV drama in the heart of

society at large, everyday culture and private lives. With symbols, music, story, consumption and

subjectivity the drama becomes a historiography of public domain of arguments and historical

discussion as a part of the 2010s cyber-culture, identity, control and creativity (Fiske xvii).

II

Game of Thrones is set in the medieval era on the fictional land of Westeros and Essos

(Fig. 1). The major houses involved in this “game” are the Stark, Lannister, Baratheon and

Targaryen and the minor, important but short lived houses are that of Martell, Tyrell, Frey,

Greyjoy and Bolton. The actions of the plot mostly take place at King’s Landing, Winterfell, The

Wall, Braavos, Meereen and Dorne. It is a tale of war for the Iron Throne and an ultimate battle

of the living against the dead (the White-Walkers).

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Fig. 1: The geographical formation of Westeros and Essos. A Wiki of Ice and Fire contributors.

"Westeros." A Wiki of Ice and Fire, 21 April 2015. Web. 10 July 2017.

Lord Eddard Stark, the Warden of the North is compelled to oblige the King and his

friend Robert Baratheon (The Usurper of the Targaryen rule of three centuries). He travels to

the capital with his daughters Arya and Sansa, leaving Winterfell at the command of his eldest

son Robb Stark. But he lands upon a very dangerous murder mystery and gets executed on false

charges of treason. Robert is dead by this time and is succeeded by Joffrey Baratheon

(Lannister). Robb wages a war against the Lannisters, which results in his death at the hands of

the Freys at the Red Wedding. Amidst all this chaos Arya Stark escapes the Capital sworn to

avenge her family.

The second son of Eddard Stark and Catelyn is Brandon Stark, constantly accompanied

by his direwolf, Summer. His dream of being a knight is dashed by the crippling attempt on his

life by Jamie Lannister who pushes him off the tower at Winterfell on Bran discovering the

incestuous tryst of the Lannister siblings. He embraces his new abilities and as Winterfell falls

and his siblings are torn apart, he, now accompanied by Hodor, Osha and the Reed siblings

travel extensively beyond The Wall, until he becomes The Three-Eyed Raven exploring a

number of ciphers in the plot before.

The children born to the Queen Cersei Lannister from her incestuous relationship with

her brother Jamie Lannister, breathes their last one by one. Joffrey, the eldest, is murdered at his

own wedding by the Tyrell matriarch Lady Olenna and the mastermind Lord Petyr Baelish

(Littlefinger). Tommen, the younger, commits suicide after his wife Margaery Tyrell and the

religious dictators of The Faith are murdered by an explosion at The Sept of Baelor plotted by

none other than Cersie! The youngest Myrcella is murdered by Ellaria Sand of Dorne, an act of

revenge for the death of her lover Oberyn Martell, who fought Gregor Clegane (The Mountain)

resulting in a smashed head.

64
 The eldest Baratheon brother Stannis murdered the youngest, Renly, to secure the crown

for himself. But by the end of Season V, he is executed by Brienne of Tarth—sworn protector

Kingsguard of Renly, her act motivated by vengeance. Therefore Cercei lands on the Throne as

the Queen Regent of The Seven Kingdoms.

Meanwhile the North has been captured by The Boltons. Sansa Stark after being almost

held captive at the Capital and then at the Vale finally returns home but at a great cost. She is

married off to the most vicious, misogynist character on the show, Ramsay Snow (the bastard of

Roose Bolton). But she finally manages an escape with the help of Theon Greyjoy and meets up

Jon Snow, “the Stark Bastard”, who has been manning The Wall all this while and uniting the

Wildlings and the men of the Night’s Watch to fend off the White Walkers. In unison with the

army of Vale, he defeats Ramsay at the “Battle of the Bastards” and regains his home, Winterfell.

On the other side of the Narrow Sea, Daenerys Targaryen—the last of her House—

builds up her own army of The Dothraki, The Unsullied and The Second Sons. She is also the

mother of three fully grown dragons—Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion. She was forced to flee

Westeros, lest she might be killed to eliminate her dynasty. By the end of Season VI of the show,

we see her returning to her homeland with a huge army at her back to claim what is hers by

birthright.

III

Westeros is hugely inspired by the socio-political conditions of England between the

period of 1450 and 1485. It goes without saying that The War of the Roses forms the basic

plotline of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. The Yorks and the Lancasters,

with their respective White and Red Rose symbols/sigils, influence HBO’s Game of Thrones in

the opening seasons. England was torn apart with civil war between the two houses until the

ascension of the Tudor Dynasty in 1485.

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 The sought-after Iron Throne in Game of Thrones symbolizes the ultimate dictatorship, the

peak of political command in medieval England. One may pertinently see a reflection of The

Marble Throne of England in the Iron Throne.

Tywin Lannister, father to Cersei, Jaimie and Tyrion Lannister, like Edward I, takes to

violent, unjustified and relentless pursuit of authority. Not unlike Edward I, Tywin is pretty

frustrated with his children. Tyrion Lannister, a mirrored figure of Richard III, is noted for his

physical deformity. George R.R. Martin clearly underlines in an interview:

[h]e wasn’t a hunchback. He didn’t have a twisted arm. But he was that king who

was deposed by Henry VII, so the Tudor historians tried to make him a

physically twisted, deceitful, king-slaying, child-slaying monster, and a lot of what

happened to Richard III is happening to Tyrion. Tyrion is someone who is easily

cast as a villain, the dwarf hated by the gods, so they twist his body into

unfortunate shapes. This is a clear sign of the evil inside him. This was how the

medieval mindset worked. (A, “Real History Behind Game of Thrones”)

Cersei reminds one of Margaret of Anjou, known as the she-wolf for France, who was one of

the strongest queens of England in the 1450s. Cersei’s Walk of Shame from the TV show has an

unmistakably poignant historical precedence. Jane Shore, during the reign of Richard III was

made to walk through the streets of London in a kirtle carrying a taper in her hand. Cersei’s

public shaming was intended to strip her off her royal magnificence/agency either.

Joffrey Baratheon—though fruit of an incest—is a reminder of Richard II, one of the

boy-kings of the time with inefficient political holds on the throne. Richard II’s spiteful and

vengeful manner is portrayed in the fictional character of Joffrey adeptly. Robert Baratheon, his

alleged father, is a reflection of Edward IV. Just like the English king, Baratheon too was noted

for his lechery and drinking, a king who is very efficient with his war-hammer but cannot hold

66
his own kingdom once the war is over. Robert is also known as The Usurper. Just like Edward

IV defeated Henry VI, Robert Baratheon disrupted the rule of the Mad King Aerys Targaryen.

Lord Eddard Stark (Ned Stark) shows a little resemblance to Richard, Duke of York. But

for the most part he is a parallel to William Lord Hastings, who was a great friend of Edward IV.

The fictional character shares quite a same life to that of Hastings—being a loyal friend to the

King but outlives the King and in an attempt to be righteous gets rewarded with decapitation.

Ned Stark’s eldest son Robb Stark is a semi-reflection of Edward IV too. Both the fictional and

the historical character take on the political command at a very young age after the passing away

of their father and also share the same story of marriage—marrying a woman he met while on a

campaign. The difference between these two characters lie in that Edward IV successfully

overthrows Henry VI, but Robb Stark is murdered at the Red Wedding.

The Red Wedding, where Lady Catelyn Stark, her son Robb Stark and his pregnant wife

Talisa and the Stark soldiers are brutally murdered by the Freys, is an amalgamation of

particularly two Scottish historical events. First is the Black Dinner held at the court of King

James II of Scotland. The 16-year-old William Douglas, 6th Earl of Douglas and his younger

brother were invited to the royal dinner and beheaded by the end of the event. Second is the

Massacre of Glencoe, where the guests (the Campbells) murdered the host (the MacDonalds) in

the middle of the night after accepting hospitality from the latter. In the TV show, the order of

events is reversed, where the host (Walder Frey) signals the murdering of the guest (Stark

family).

The Purple Wedding is inspired from the death of Eustace of Blois of the early English

Middle Age. He was heir apparent to the English throne under king Stephen of England. He is

said to have died quite suddenly choking on a lamprey pie. This incident was imitated by Martin

in devising the death of Joffrey at his wedding, where he chokes on a pigeon pie and wine and

67
dies on spot. It was later revealed to be the doing of a poison, cleverly plotted and administered

by Lady Olenna and Littlefinger.

Jon Snow is the “bastard” of Ned Stark. This character portrays the exact kind of

discrimination and hatred an illegitimate child supposedly faced in the Middle Ages. It brings out

the importance of social status in that era.

The character of Sansa Stark is somewhat based on Elizabeth of York. She was almost

traded to form an alliance, a pawn in the political game. Marriage in the medieval ages was a

medium of joining houses.

The Dothraki across the Narrow Sea draw their inspiration from the Mongolian and the

Hunan tribes. There are also traces of influence of the Native American Comanche tribe who

took pride in their appearance, just the Dothraki do (the length of their hair being an indicative

of their victory).

Daenerys Targaryen is a reworking of three historical characters. Henry VII or Henry

Tudor of the War of the Roses deeply shape the persona of Dany. He has spent most of his life

in exile in France, just like Daenerys was forced to flee to Essos to escape capture and death.

Moreover the banners of Henry Tudor bore the sigil of dragon, which is the symbol of the house

Targaryen. Secondly, Alexander the Great from ancient Greek/classical history influences the

extensive conquest of the “Mother of Dragons”. Thirdly, Cleopatra, the strong Egyptian

Empress has a clear resemblance in Dany’s struggle with the consequences and obligations of

power. Her residence as portrayed in the Season V of the HBO TV series is that of a pyramid—

a clear reflection of Egyptian culture.

“The Battle of Blackwater” broadcasted in the penultimate episode of the Season II of

the show is actually inspired by the the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople. The Arabs tried to

blockade the city both by land and sea but were badly defeated when the Byzantine navy used a

68
mysterious substance called “the Greek Fire” quite resonating with the Wild Fire that was used

by the Lannisters to defeat Stannis Baratheon.

“The Red Faith” of the show draws its sustenance from ancient Persian religion

Zoroastrianism. The Red Priest or the Red Priestesses follow the Lord of light, R’hllor, quite

echoing the worship of the God of light, heat and life by Zoroastrians as fire is considered a

medium for spiritual awareness and wisdom.

The Iron Bank of Braavos is the most powerful bank in Westeros. It shares its likeness

with the Medici Bank of Florence, the most powerful institution in the 15th century Europe.

Additionally The High Sparrow from the Faith of The Seven is a recreation of the

Protestant reformation that swept across the sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. From

this line of thought arises the successful animation of the Gunpowder Plot of the early 17th

century in the finale episode of season VI. A group of thirteen Catholics plotted to stage an

explosion of the Houses of Parliament in England to make away with the Protestant king James

I. The explosion orchestrated by Cersie Lannister by Wild Fire at The Sept of Baelor eliminates

the army of The Faith and most of the Tyrells. It is a charismatic representation of alternative

history in HBO’s Game of Thrones.

IV

The Wall in the Game of Thrones series is basically a 100 leagues long and 700 feet high ice

wall built along the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms to bar the wildlings and the

“Others” or the White Walkers. It is made of solid ice, stone and earth, strengthened by charms

and sorcery. Due to lack of men in the Night’s Watch, currently only three out of nineteen

castles overlooking the structure are in use. It was built by Brandon the Builder with the help of

the Children of the Forest, for the purpose of defending The First Men.

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Fig. 2: Wikipedia contributors. "Hadrian's Wall." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The

Free Encyclopedia, 5 Aug. 2017. Web. 1 Aug. 2017.

According to George R. R. Martin, the Hadrian’s Wall, built to prevent the Scots from

entering the Roman kingdom, serves as an inspiration to this fictional wall of ice. It is also

known as the Roman Wall, built as a fortress in the Roman province of Britannia, during the rule

of Emperor Hadrian (Fig. 2). With a length of 73 miles, it was the northern limit of the Roman

Empire, separating out the lands of the northern Ancient Britons, including the Picts. Contrary

to the idea that this wall marks the boundary between England and Scotland, it in fact lies

entirely within England and has never formed the Anglo-British border ("Hadrian's Wall”).

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 Another parallel establishment to The Wall at Westeros is the Antonine Wall— another

Roman construction, spanning for approximately 63 km, built across what is now the Central

Belt of Scotland between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. It is the second of two Great

Walls in Northern Britain—a representation of northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire

(“Antonine Wall”).

One may feel tempted to refer to the historical French allied forces’ Maginot Line in this

context. During the Second World War, France invested eleven years and 450 million US dollars

to secure 450 miles of countryside against the approaching German militarization. But the Nazis

simply went round the wall and invaded the territory on May, 1940. The White Walkers at issue

might well be the Nazis of the show, going around Bran the Builder’s Wall (Dey, “"Reading

HBO’s GOT S07E02”).

Another historical model for The Wall in Westeros might be The Berlin Wall. The end of

WWII decided the division of Germany into four Allied occupation zones, where East Germany

would be ruled by The Soviet while the western part would be dominated by the US, Great

Britain and France. Though the city of Berlin was totally within East Germany, it was to be

divided in the same way—which led to the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 by German

Democratic Republic of East Germany to mark the territorial limits and to keep out the Western

Fascists. The rich capitalist western sector, in sharp contrast to the economically poor socialist

eastern sector, resembles the imperialistic luxurious land south of the Westerosi Wall contrasted

to the socialist rule of Mance Raydar to the North-of-the-Wall. The Berlin Wall served its

purpose until 9 November 1989 when the East German rule announced the permission of its

citizens to cross the border when they wanted. Collaterally in Westeros, Jon Snow convinced the

Crows and the Free-folk to unite and let the latter tread the lands south of the Wall (Simple

History, "The Berlin Wall").

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 The contemporary American political scenario sparks off a similar idea: that of The

Mexican Wall proposed by Donald Trump in his Presidential campaign. The US-Mexico border

is about 3100 km long and traverses different terrains and bio-regions. Trump wants an

“impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful or beautiful” wall at this border (BBC, “Donald Trump’s

Mexico Wall”), to tackle the threat to the National Security by the encroaching of the immigrants

from Mexico without working permit, renegades from Mexican Civil War and remnants of the

Internal Gang wars of Colombian and Mexican Drug Cartels. If The Wall built by Brandon the

Builder is to keep the Others out, a means of check on the National Security of the southern

lands of Westeros, Trump’s Border Wall is no less a replica that evokes contemporaneity in the

work of HBO’s Game of Thrones.

The White Walkers, also known as the Others, are described by Martin as “strange,

beautiful…made of ice, something like that…a different sort of life…inhuman elegant and

dangerous.” Their flesh is as pale as milk and has cold blue eyes that burn like ice or is as bright

as blue stars.

As the legends have it, the White Walkers came from the Lands of Always Winter some

six or eight thousand years ago and brought upon The Long Night over the whole continent.

They are skilled militants wielding thin crystal swords which can cover a metal blade in frost and

shatter a steel blade. They enhance their army by resurrecting dead men or creatures as “wights”.

There are a few elements which can suppress this army: one being weapons made of “Obsidian”

or “Dragonglass” or “frozen fire”, another would be Weapons of “dragonsteel” or “Valyrian

Steel”. In the Battle for the Dawn, the Others were finally defeated by the joint forces of the

First Men and the Children of the Forest. The last heroes of the First Men went on to form the

Night’s Watch, a sort of guard assigned to protect The Wall. The Night’s King, that is the Lord

Commander XIII of the Night’s Watch (Fig. 3) is said to have married the “corpse queen”, a

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White Walker-woman and has reigned for thirteen years. According to the Old Nan, he was “a

warrior who knew no fear and that was the fault in him, for all men must know fear”. He was

defeated by Brandon the Breaker, the King of Winter and Joramun, the King-Beyond-the-Wall.

There is a controversy over the affinity between this Night’s King mentioned in the book

series and The Night King presented in the show. The Night’s King was not the first White

Walker according to A Song of Ice and Fire and did not attain his “status” before the Long Night

was over. But the show confirms that he was the first ever Other and was created by the

Children of the Forest as a means of defence against the attacks of the First Men (Game of

Thrones: season 6, episode “The Door”), which is quite contrary to the book where the Walkers

do not appear until The Long Night during the Age of the Heroes (Screen Prism, "Game of

Thrones' White Walkers”).

Fig. 3: A Wiki of Ice and Fire contributors. "Night King." A Wiki of Ice and Fire, 1 August 2017.

Web. 3 August 2017.

Going by the plot-arc of the show, the ploy of the Children eventually backfired and now

the White Walkers have returned as the doom of both Children of the Forest and men alike. To

quote the creators of Game of Thrones, Weiss and Benioff, “What we are watching is the creation

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of this absolute evil, so the absolute evil is not absolute after all. No one is innocent in this world

and there is just something really beautifully right about the idea that the great nemesis of

mankind was created to protect the Children of the Forest from mankind!” (RNS Entertainment,

"The Complete History of the Night's King”).

Michail Zontos rightly points out the disappearance of the narrative of history of both the

northerners and the Others in his essay, "Dividing Lines: Frederick Jackson Turner’s Western

Frontier and George R.R. Martin’s Northern Wall":

If Native Americans had disappeared from the American master narrative, the

wildling culture had disappeared from the narrative of the maesters. When Osha,

a captured wildling, tries to warn the Starks about the dangers of the North, she

realizes that she is not taken seriously. Maester Luwin reacts to her stories of

children of the forest, giants, magic and white walkers, by saying that “the

wildling woman could give Old Nan lessons in telling tales” (GoT 54 Bran 6:

485). Her stories and beliefs are dismissed as fairytales. (104-105)

No one has been seen taking the imminent threat of the White Walkers existence and march

towards south of the Wall in a serious vein in the beginning seasons. Zontos also looks upon the

merging of Castle Black and those of the Mance Rayder's Free Folk as "assimilation": “The

defeat of the wildling force at Castle Black, and Stannis Baratheon’s decision to allow them to

come across the Wall in order to support the Night’s Watch against the threat of the White

Walkers leads us to the last point to be made here: the question of assimilation” (108).

Jessica Walker, on the other hand, looks upon the return of the Others/wights as “the

inescapable, cyclical return to the traumas of the past” (86) in her article, ““Just songs in the

end”: Historical Discourses in Shakespeare and Martin”: “Though summer may return

temporarily, winter’s return is inevitable; and just as ice keeps objects locked in stasis, the White

Walkers represent a nation unable to move forward permanently from the traumas of the past”

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(84). Beth Kozinsky, in her treatise "“A thousand bloodstained hands”: The Malleability of Flesh

and Identity" aptly writes, while the people of the Seven Kingdoms still perceive injured bodies

as other, the real threat to humanity rests with the White Walkers (181). Kozinsky goes on to

define the thingification of the undead Walkers,

As a mysterious species from the North, the White Walkers function as the

series’ Other, but it is with an army of the human dead that they lead their

assault. The Others and their undead servants threaten not just lives, but the

malleability of identity. For the dead may walk, but they cannot change. (181)

The Night King is known to shape the human corpse into an undead whight without breaking

the malleability of the human cadaver. This moulding raises pertinent questions of identity

indeed. Before we conclude this section, it is noteworthy what Shacklock in ““A reader lives a

thousand lives before he dies”: Transmedia Textuality and the Flows of Adaptation” says:

One of the most obvious points of difference between the novels and the

television series is the renaming of “the Others” to “the White Walkers.” While

this change is undoubtedly pragmatic (it distinguishes them from the villains in

Lost), it points to the synaesthetic nature of adaptive texts. “White Walkers”

suggests a merging of color and movement, a mix of vision and touch that flows

into a single unit. The alliteration of the name enhances this sense of a conjoined

sensation—a white movement and a walking color—creating a smooth “hinge”

between two senses. (269)

The HBO drama did change the Others from Martin’s books to White Walkers which

denotes a conjoined sensation for the visual reception of the watchers: the whiteness, the colour,

the walk. The mentioned synthetic nature of the colour and movement does lend a significant

mixture of optic and tactile sensation to the malleable identity of the White Walkers.

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 VI

On the one hand, The Wall is an exercise in keeping the marginal Others out of/away

from the privileged political ecosystems of Westeros, and secondly, it is also an exercise in

human arrogance that will eventually result in The Age of Anthropocene in which the

destruction of ecosystems is one of the most alarming concerns.

To quote Charli Carpenter, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts:

The slogan “Winter is coming” is meant literally as well as metaphorically:

planetary forces are moving slowly but inexorably toward climatic catastrophe as

the infighting amongst kings and queens distracts them from the bigger picture.

(Carpenter, Charli, “Game of Thrones as Theory”)

This is how Carpenter reads the collective action story of Game of Thrones. The Night’s Watch has

been blaring desperate alarms only to receive indifference from the kings and queens. Although

cooperation is difficult, the wights in the guise of sweeping winter are an undeniable common

threat.

The Northern barbarian hordes are rather open to the onslaught of the wights as they are

on the fringe, the first victims of environmental change/catastrophe since “winter” has already

arrived in Season VII. The free-folks beyond The Wall bring a new dimension of dramatic

political culture to the show. Carpenter further quotes, “The argument seems clear: if existing

governance structures cannot manage emerging global threat, expect them to evolve or fall by

the wayside.” The noble houses of Stark, Baratheon, Lannister, Targaryen are too busy

combating amongst themselves for their right over the Iron Throne, oblivious to their

approaching doom at the hands of the Others. Since they have been long gone for almost 8000

years, people are blinded by denial and disbelief. The contemporary allegory here points to the

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fact that if global warming is our undead zombie in the Anthropocene, are we doing enough to

prevent the extinction of life on earth as we know it?

Both Ice and Fire are two threatening disasters in the Anthropocene: on the one hand, there is a

threat of an ice age, and on the other hand, two degrees of increase in Asian temperature could

wipe out the greenery around the equator in this decade. Already the Northerners are seen

migrating to the south of The Wall and this is the case of climate migration that Dipesh

Chakrabarty talks about in his seminal article “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate

Change”: “[f]or climate change will produce—and has begun to produce—its own cases of

refugees and regime failures.” (13).

Sunita Narain and Anil Agarwal have already published a thought-provoking book in 1991 from

Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of

Environmental Colonialism. We are already in a phase of globalisation and global warming, and

Ulrich Beck calls this age a “risk society” (Chakrabarty 13). Much like in our age of global

warming, the Westerosi subjects are also acting like a geophysical force. To quote Chakrabarty

once again, “[y]ou have to think of the two figures of the human simultaneously: the human-

human and the nonhuman-human” (11). The Westerosi nobles, soldiers, dwarves are all part of

the “human-human” category, even the Northerners, and it appears that the wights are the

“nonhuman-human”. This is where the postcolonial scholar should categorically intervene. Man

used to be an experimenter on a geophysical scale in the 1950s (Chakrabarty 11), which was the

time of the father of fantasy novels: J R R Tolkien, and by the 1990s man turned a geophysical

force himself. In 1996, the first instalment of A Song of Ice and Fire series saw the light of the day.

The Northern Wall that stands erected in the Age of Heroes rather appears to be early modernity

reinforced in the 19th century which saw an aggravating and potential growth in industry, capital

and carbon emissions that heralded in the epoch of global warming in the 1990s—which reads

like the coming of winter and the emergence of White Walkers after thousands of years. The

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Long Night in Westeros may indicate a new geological era that has affinity with our

Anthropocene geological era. Global warming opens up “a new frontier of postcolonial studies”

(8), and Westeros now has the issue of climate migration in the North. The Free-folks from the

north of The Wall are the new subalterns and before long both the migrating Northerners and

the encroaching wights will have their alarming impact on Westerosi socio-political economy. “It

is the question of refugees, asylum seekers, illegal workers” (8): these stateless/new subaltern

Northerners led to the south of the Wall by Jon Snow are the stateless, shelter-seeking migrants

who may be looked upon as the “surplus population” in the politico-economic demography of

the Seven Kingdoms.

Amitav Ghosh in his thought-provoking endeavour, The Great Derangement, writes that one island

in Bangladesh—Bhola Island—“has led to the displacement of more than 500,000 people” (119).

Compared to this alarming demography of climate migration, the force entry of the Free Folks

to the south of the Northern Wall is significantly puny. Then again, there is the question of the

deaths that the White Walkers cause on their march: they relentlessly slaughter people in their

walk, sometimes to repeat iconic ritualistic patterns and sometimes to incorporate more of the

risen undead into their army. If the agents of climate change have been mercilessly taking a toll

on the lives of the living folks of Westeros, Amitav Ghosh reminds his readers of a very curtailed

picture of death toll on account of storm surge induced by climate change in the Bengal Delta

alone: “The 1971 Bhola Cyclone is thought to have killed 3,00,000 people. As recently as 1991, a

cyclone in Bangladesh resulted in 1,38,000 dead, of whom ninety percent were women” (119).

VII

This article provides a few avenues for the illumination on the trope of “uncertain times”. The

gamut of uncertain times points to the fact that we are in Paul Crutzen’s popularized

nomenclature, Anthropocene in the 1980s. It refers to the human impact on the biodiversity of

the planet gradually rolling towards the sixth major extinction, and among other alarming human

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activities, one of those human activity is accelerating and exacerbating global warming by leaps

and bounds.

Our world is at a peculiar tipping point after The Great Acceleration of the 1945 that Bonneuil

and Fressoz talk about. Leonardo DiCaprio in his National Geographic docu-feature, Before the

Flood, made with Fisher Stevens, talks to Dr Piers Sellers, an erstwhile astronaut and present-

director of Earth Sciences Division at NASA/GSFC about a glaring misconception in the global

warming-literacy of the masses that Sellers underlines on the satellite images of the world ocean

streams noting:

The dumping of ice off melting Greenland would stop this conveyor belt, and

the Gulf Stream would slow down, stopping the transport of heat from here to

there. And then Europe would get cold toes because there is a lot of heat

transport from the tropics, across the North Atlantic, which keeps Europe warm.

(DiCaprio, Before the Flood)

Here lies the core of the affiliation between the wights and climate change. Because of the global

warming certain parts of Europe may get colder. The White Walkers are the literal embodiment

of the Winter that is “coming” indeed. This not only points to the dreaded Long

Winter/dreaded Long Night but also to a very real-world scenario of climate change-dynamic in

which global warming cause unprecedented colder climates. This is how the White Walkers

become the manifestation of the real-world climate change that Europe faces because of the ice

melting off Greenland and the arctic.

Climate change also induces the transition of precipitation belts across the globe, and that in a

way means that the tropic regions around the equator, the already warmer lands would see more

and more water-crisis and droughts, which may lead to failed states and civil war. Sellers says,

“There are a lot of papers written in the State Department and elsewhere, how that sustained

drought has helped fuel the conflict of the Syrian civil war, Darfur, Sudan—all these places that

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are short of water, short of food” (DiCaprio, Before the Flood). The Battle for the Wall in Season

IV between the Free Folks and the Night’s Watch was in a way fuelled by a sort of climate

migration—the northerners seek to cross the Wall and come south. Secondly, the onslaught of

the White Walkers could also be seen as a geopolitical crisis-fuelled civil war in the lands of

Westeros, much like the crises in Sudan, Syria and Darfur that Sellers notes.

HBO’s Game of Thrones is a significant visual text of power bound binaries of inside/outside,

human/non-human, men/wights, North of the Wall/South of the Wall, and such divisions only

problematize the political economy and the environment of Westeros all the more. Amitav

Ghosh in his The Great Derangement writes that climate change poses a potent challenge to the

most important political conception of the modern era: “the idea of freedom”:

Only those peoples who had thrown off the shackles of their environment were

thought to be endowed with historical agency; they alone were believed to merit

the attention of historians—other peoples might have had a past but they were

thought to lack history, which realises itself through human agency. (159-160)

If the non-human forces of wights/Others/White Walkers really are the agents of global

warming, as we know it, should they be not categorically identified with the non-humans without

a history? Why is there not a history of the White Walkers? Why have they not been given a

voice to tell their own history? Do their archives have to be overshadowed by the Children of

the Forests, the First Men, the Andals and the pact and treaties between Men and the Children?

Why do they not have any agency? Why are they not given the agency of freedom to choose, to

live, to fight for their own story of origin? Why do they have to be defined by a powerlessness

shadowed by Children of the Forest? Why do they have to attack every thousand years to make a

mark in the history of Westeros? What if Azhor Ahai is only an embodiment of human agency in

the age of high modernism, who wins the Battle for the Dawn only to relegate the wights/the

nonhuman nature to the background in the name of rampant industrial progress?

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The White Walkers, perhaps, are striding, marching towards King’s Landing to take what is

rightfully theirs: the land beyond the Northern Wall, the historical agency, the voice they were

denied for centuries, their freedom. May it be that they demand to merit the attention of the historians

at the Citadel. They have a past, they have a present but they do not have the recognition of

history. They are, much like the nature in the 19th century onwards, denied the (human) agency

to thrive, to be, to live, to write their own destiny. It is difficult to have answers to all these

questions. The unfinished narrations of George R.R. Martin do not give linear answers to these

questions. The questions themselves, in fact, are more important than the answers.

Works Cited

A. "Real History Behind Game of Thrones (Explained by Historians & George R.R. Martin)."

Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 14 July 2016. Web. 10 August 2017.

BBC Staff Reporter. "Donald Trump's Mexico Wall: Who is Going to Pay for It?" BBC

News. BBC, 6 Feb. 2017. Web. 1 August 2017.

Benioff, David, and D. B. Weiss. Game of Thrones. Perf. Emilia Clarke, Peter Dinklage, and

Kit Harington. 73 episodes. HBO. New York, 11 Apr. 2011-ongoing. Television.

Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth,

History and Us. London: Verso Books, 2006. Print.

Carpenter, Charli. “Game of Thrones as Theory: It’s Not as Realist as It Seems....And That’s

Good.” Snapshot. Politics and Society Media, 29 March 2012. Web. 12 August 2017.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change." New

Literary History 43. 1 (2012): 1-18. Project MUSE. Web. 1 August 2017.

Crutzen, Paul et al. "The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives."

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 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 842-867. Print.

Dey, Abhilash, and Saikat Das. "Reading HBO’s GOT S07E02: Stormborn." Laugha Laughi,

25 July 2017. Web. 26 July 2017.

DiCaprio, Leonardo, Fisher Stevens, dir. Before the Flood. Exec. Prod. Martin Scorsese.

National Geographic. New York, 21 Oct. 2016. Documentary.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. New Delhi:

Penguin Allen Lane, 2016. Print.

Hartley, John. Foreword. Reading Television: New Accents. Ed. John Fiske, and John

Hartley. London: Routledge, 2004. PDF file.

Johnston, Susan, and Jes Battis, eds. Mastering the Game of Thrones: Essays on George R.R.

Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2015. PDF file.

Kozinsky, Beth. "“A thousand bloodstained hands”: The Malleability of Flesh and Identity."

Jes Battis and Susan Johnston, 2015. 170-188. PDF file.

Martin, George R.R. A Clash of Kings. London: Voyager Books, 1998. Print.

---, A Dance with Dragons. New York: Bantam Spectra, 2011. Print.

---, A Feast for Crows. New York: Bantam Spectra, 2005. Print.

---, A Game of Thrones. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1996. Print.

---, A Storm of Swords. New York: Bantam Spectra, 2000. Print.

RNS Entertainment. "The Complete History of the Night's King and the White Walkers."

Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 6 June 2016. Web. 7 August 2017.

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ScreenPrism. "Game of Thrones' White Walkers: Who They Are & What They Represent."

Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 29 July 2017. Web. 30 July 2017.

Shacklock, Zoe. ““A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies”: Transmedia Textuality and

the Flows of Adaptation.” Jes Battis and Susan Johnston, 2015. 262-280. PDF file.

Simple History. "The Berlin Wall (1961-1989)." Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 5

Feb. 2017. Web. 15 July 2017.

Walker, Jessica. "“Just songs in the end”: Historical Discourses in Shakespeare and Martin."

Jes Battis and Susan Johnston, 2015. 71-91. PDF file.

Wasko, Janet, ed. A Companion to Television. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. PDF file.

Wikipedia contributors. "Antonine Wall." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The

Free Encyclopedia, 7 Jul. 2017. Web. 14 July 2017.

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The Free Encyclopedia, 5 Aug. 2017. Web. 1 Aug. 2017.

Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Shocken Books,

1975. Print.

Zontos, Michail. "Dividing Lines: Frederick Jackson Turner’s Western Frontier and George

R.R. Martin’s Northern Wall." Jes Battis and Susan Johnston, 2015. 92-112. PDF file.

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 7

The Unseen Hand: Hidden Intervention in Textual Production

Margaret McDonell

Introduction:

Since the introduction of printing in England in the late fifteenth century, book

production in the English-speaking world has developed into a complex cultural, commercial

and industrial process. One powerful but often invisible part of this process is editing, and those

who read a text need to be aware of the mediating role of the editor. Editing is a value-laden

process and the editor can be seen as a cultural gatekeeper. The editor has multiple respon-

sibilities that at times conflict: to the employing publisher, to the manuscript, to the writer

(particularly of autobiographical writing) and to the reader. Editing itself is a process of

negotiation between writer and editor, and the editorial role involves negotiation between these

sometimes competing responsibilities and aims.

Editing takes place early in the production of a book, and can consist of the addition or

deletion of material, emendation, and standardisation and rearrangement of text within a

manuscript. Editing practice has evolved over the centuries and today these changes are often

couched as suggestions to the author, based on the editor’s overall vision for the book, her

knowledge of literary styles, genres and conventions and her (perhaps unconscious) assumptions

and biases. The commercial aspect of book publishing influences not only how a manuscript is

edited, but often which manuscript is edited, how much time is given over to editing, what

readership is assumed, what generic category is chosen, and what marketing or promotional

plans are developed.

In addition to the context in which the manuscript is edited, and the basis on which an

editor makes her decisions, editorial decision making can influence the reading of a text by the

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material the editor chooses to place around it. This material can include introductions;

forewords; prefaces; epigraphs; titles and subtitles; notes about the editing process and collabo-

rations and on language, spelling or pronunciation; appendices; genealogies; maps, photographs

and other illustrations; epilogues; time lines; references of many kinds; and blurbs (publishers’

jacket copy). These meta-texts Gerard Genette calls peritext; they are ‘liminal devices and

conventions [...] that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and

reader [.... and] are part of a book’s private and public history’ (in Genette, back cover blurb).

Further, the blurb argues, ‘the special pragmatic status of [peritext] requires a carefully calibrated

analysis of [its] illocutionary force’ (ibid). It is because these peritexts are, for the most part,

chosen and inserted by the editor that they are of interest here.

This paper will consider, first, what editing is, and then examine the implications around

the assumption of a potential readership, the ‘imagined’ reader’. Third, it will outline two of the

roles of the editor, as ‘ideal reader’ of the manuscript and ‘gatekeeper’ of the language, and

discuss ways these roles can influence a text. Examples will be given from various sources

including my experience of editing Indigenous Australian women’s life writing; these examples

have, I believe, relevance for other cross-cultural situations.

Definitions:

The term ‘editing’ covers a multitude of tasks; these can include the commissioning of

manuscripts, substantive and copy editing of manuscripts, and project management. This paper

deals with the second and third of these tasks: substantive or structural editing, which considers

the overall structure of a text, and copy editing, sometimes seen as less influential (and certainly

less glamorous), which focuses on the details of grammar, punctuation, spelling and consistency

of style.

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 Other, seemingly minor, areas in which an editor may be involved include the choice of

title, the genre that will classify the book for marketing and archival purposes, and the writing of

the blurb and copy for marketing purposes. All these areas - choice of title, genre categorisation

and blurbs - have the capacity to influence reader expectation and hence reception of the book.

How editors view what they do is instructive, and will give an indication of the attitudes

that editors bring to their work. Definitions by editors range from the mundane: ‘the art and

craft of shaping and refining a manuscript into a publishable book’ (Sharpe and Gunther 1) to

the constructive: assisting ‘the author to realize the author’s intention’ (Sale 263, emphasis in

original) - more useful because it emphasises the centrality of the writer and puts to one side the

editor as employee, of writer or of publishing house. Nonetheless, it is also constructive to

consider even the seemingly mundane references to a manuscript as ‘shaped’ and ‘refined’ in the

editing process. Wendy Wolf states that her editorial role: ‘isn’t to correct [the author’s] words, but

to alert the author to the impact of his or her phrases: “This is how I read this sentence; this is

what it says to me. Is this what you want it to say?’” (Wolf 239, emphasis in original). Thus, the

editor provides feedback to the writer and acts as a sounding board, in some senses giving the

writer a responsive reader to write to. Even at this stage of the production process, feedback has

the capacity to influence and subtly change aspects of the manuscript in such areas as the

inclusion of further explanatory material, the deletion of material judged to be repetitious or

irrelevant, or the standardisation of elements such as spelling and dialogue.

A popular definition among editors in Australia is the oft-quoted remark attributed to

Beatrice Davis that editing is ‘invisible mending’ (Foley) - a phrase which could be read as

concealing the editor’s intervention while at the same time judging the writer’s work as flawed

prior to the editing process. However, this is too simplistic a reading: an editor’s work should not

intrude or make its presence discernible; the editor’s role is in assisting - not usurping - the

author. The editor’s work should complement that of the author. Nonetheless, despite

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invisibility, the unseen editor has mediated the text in some way, and that invisibility ensures that

most readers will never know of the mediation. In many cases this may not matter; however, for

a serious reader the editorial intervention could be crucial to a clearer understanding and

appreciation of the text.

The thinking behind editorial decision making is influenced by many factors, not all of

them stylistic or aesthetic. For example, additional material may be suggested to explain things

that may not be familiar to the majority of readers, to expand on an interesting or exciting

anecdote, or to make a short manuscript longer for purely commercial reasons (there is a belief

that readers will expect to pay less for a slim book, although the cost of its production may be

little different to that of a larger book). Deletions may be suggested because the text is thought

to be repetitive, uninteresting, irrelevant or, again, for practical reasons of the size of the

completed book. Consequently, in making decisions, the editor is thinking not only of the writer,

her agenda, the manuscript and the reader, but also of the publisher and the book seller.

In the study of a book, there are two distinct elements under review: the physical object

that is the book, and the text that is contained within that book. In studying the text we cannot

ignore the influence of the physical manifestations of the book that contains it, the weight and

smell of the paper, the white space around the text, the colour and layout of the cover. However,

this paper is focused on the influence wrought by the editor, and the decisions made by cover

designers, page designer and typesetters - though important - are beyond its scope.

To return to editing, I will now consider the imagined reader for whom the editor is

making suggestions and carrying out changes. This task of imagining a reader, and the editorial

roles of ideal reader and gatekeeper, are interrelated and mutually dependent.

Imagining a reader:

Because a manuscript is not edited in a vacuum it is necessary for the editor to imagine a

reader. We write to communicate, so most writers will have imagined a reader as they wrote.

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Here, once again, Faith Sale’s comment about the writer’s intention is important: the writer has

some agenda for her manuscript and the editor needs to be aware of and in sympathy with that

agenda. The initial choice of this ‘imagined reader’ can influence later decisions the editor will

make, because an important consideration in editing is how much (if at all) to change the text to

make it appealing or palatable to a specific readership.

Choice of reader by, initially, the writer and, later, the editor, will depend on the writer’s

purpose for her writing. Where author and editor have different agendas very different readings

of the same text may result. Such was the case with The History of Mary Prince. Gillian Whitlock

examines in depth the different readings an editor can produce from a text, using as an example

The History of Mary Prince, the life story of a freed slave, and the two very different readings

produced by editors Thomas Pringle in the original 1831 edition, and Moira Ferguson in the

1987 reprint (Whitlock 8-35). Pringle, as a leading figure in the Anti-Slavery Society, was keen to

produce a text which would advance the cause of the Society (15-17), while Ferguson was eager

to produce a feminist reading of Mary Prince’s life (29-35). Mary Prince herself stated that her

intention in dictating her story was ‘to let English people know the truth’ (in Whitlock 12). This

case provides a practical example of the issues around authorial intention and the author’s

ownership of her story when her editor has a specific agenda. Through readings glossed by

particular ideological theories, or cultural misunderstandings, the author’s intention may be

inadvertently subverted.

It can be argued that it is the reader who apportions meaning to the text. However, it

cannot be denied that an author will have some intention in the writing of the text, and the

editor will also have intention in the editing of that text. Ideally, those intentions will coincide.

Sale is conscious of this need for a shared intention when she writes ‘I would be interested in

publishing ... [a] writer, presuming my reading of her manuscript does not go against her vision

of it’ (Sale 273). Alison Ravenscroft points out that ‘[w]ithin western book culture, a text

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generally is written for a relatively abstract community: a readership, if not a market’

(Ravenscroft 262). She contrasts this with the readership imagined by a particular author whose

life story Ravenscroft had edited. This other readership is that of the writer’s community: ‘based

largely in the face-to-face, in corporeality, and shared life’’ (263), whereas the relationship with

the more abstract readership described above ‘[is] carried by extended communication

technologies such as print [...] rather than by embodied communal relations’ (263). It is

important for the editor to be aware of this distinction, and ensure that she and the writer have a

shared vision that is inclusive of a range of possible readers.

There are particular dangers for editorial intervention in different genres, for example

when the manuscript involved is life writing. Many life writers have a very definite agenda, and

production of a record of their lives can be seen as a political act. Life writing is more than

autobiography, it is rescued history and a statement of identity. Jackie Huggins argues that, for

Australian Aboriginal people, ‘[w]riting is a political act [...]’ (in Ferrier 142) while Melissa

Lucashenko states: ‘[a]rt attempts to change things and enters the realm of politics almost by

definition’ (Lucashenko 10). In the editing of life writing the editor would need some sympathy

for the writer’s agenda, as well as some understanding of the context within which the writer is

penning her works.

Mary Prince was clear about her reasons for telling her story; so too are most Australian

Indigenous life writers. They state that they have written for their families and to educate and

inform the wider, white community. Of the thirty plus examples of Indigenous Australian

women’s life writing published before 2003, many writers are quite explicit about their

intentions. Rita Huggins (Huggins and Huggins 1) and Eileen Morgan (Morgan xvii) write of

leaving a legacy for their children; Ruth Hegarty (Hegarty 3-4, 141) and Doris Kartinyeri

(Kartinyeri ix, 113, 137) want to make a record of their own lives and those of the other children

institutionalised with them; while Mamie Kennedy (Kennedy 1), Connie Nungulla McDonald

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(McDonald xi), Delia Walker (Walker, Acknowledgement np) and Ruby Langford Ginibi

(Langford Ginibi 269) express hopes that their writing will lead to greater understanding between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

These statements by writers make clear their agendas and perceived readerships. Because

negotiations involved in the writer-editor relationship remain hidden, it is impossible for the

reader to know to what extent editorial decision making has advanced or hindered the writer’s

purpose. Mary Prince’s original editor had a dual agenda, encompassing Prince’s desire to expose

the English readers’ to ‘the truth’, but primarily using her story as ammunition in the anti-slavery

debate. What Prince felt about this we will never know.

Jennifer Jones has explored the influence of ideologically driven editorial intervention in

an examination of two manuscripts: Margaret Tucker’s 1977 life writing, If Everyone Cared, and

Monica Clare’s 1978 semi-autobiographical novel, Karobran. Jones’ explorations reveal, in If

Everyone Cared, the extent of editorial intervention in the distancing of Tucker from the Com-

munist Party of Australia, despite her long and intense involvement with the Party (Jones,

‘Communist’ 136-38). Similarly, editorial decisions made in the editing of Karobran ‘to limit overt

sentimentality [...] resulted] in the deletion of references to Aboriginal spirituality, which in turn

hinder[ed] the development of a symbolic dimension in the novel’ (Jones ‘Yesterday’ 131). Both

these manuscripts were edited by amateur editors, friends of the respective writers, Tucker’s by a

member of ‘a religious organisation [with an anti-communist stance] called Moral Re-Armament’

(‘Communist’, 134), and Clare’s (after her death) by a fellow member of the Federal Council for

the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (‘Yesterday’ 130). Jones’ work, which

included a careful study of manuscripts and interviews with friends and colleagues of the

authors, clearly ‘reveals the influence of a conventionally invisible editorial process’ (‘Communist’

135) in both these texts.

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 Ideally, the editor will be aware of and sympathetic to the writer’s agenda in choosing the

imagined reader, and that agenda will fit within the commercial ambitions of the publishing

house. Nonetheless, it can be seen that there is a great deal of potential for unseen editorial

intervention that can strongly influence the text. Whatever the editor’s implicit or explicit agenda,

her choice of imagined reader will affect her own reading of the text and the decisions she makes

about it.

Editor as ideal reader:

The editor will be one of the first readers of the manuscript and could be considered the

‘ideal reader’ (Small 186) because she will be reading with a constructively critical eye. This first

read is crucial because the editor’s first response to the manuscript will colour the decisions she

will make. Editors describe this first reading variously: ‘What I try to be for an author is the

smartest, most sympathetic reader of the manuscript [...]’ (Sale 269) and a ‘[the first read is] a

responsive read’ (Abbey in Watson 297). Sale adds, ‘in my role of the author’s best reader, I will

express my reaction to the [...] book and ask, "Is this the way you want your readers to feel?’"

(269). Leslie Sharpe and Irene Gunther point out an important practical purpose for this editorial

read: to determine the level of editing the manuscript may require and thus determine how much

work needs to be done (103)| - that is, how much time and money is required to be spent.

Another purpose of this first reading is to find within the manuscript enough to enable the editor

to enthuse her colleagues - especially those in marketing - in editorial meetings so that the

manuscript is accepted for publication.

As well as being considered an ideal reader, the editor could also be considered a

universal reader, standing in for a range of possible imagined readers and giving feedback from

their points of view. Nonetheless, the editor cannot anticipate every possible reading. In the

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same way that the creation of a text is the product of a particular time and place, so too is the

editing of the text, the book that contains the text, and the way in which the text is read.

In the position of ideal reader the editor’s presence and responses have the ability to

influence the text. The processes of responding to the writer may trigger further reflection,

resulting in more material or changes to existing material. During the editing of Ruth Hegarty’s

life story. Is That You, Ruthie?, my editorial questions to the author prompted her memory and

she consulted her mother and friends who had been incarcerated as children in the same

institution. This resulted in additional material of several thousand words, and the deletion of an

anecdote concerning one woman who found its telling too painful and requested its removal.

Another example of a writer’s response to the editor occurs in Stephen Muecke’s Introduction to

Gularabulu by Paddy Roe, where Muecke’s role undergoes a transformation from that of

individual editor. In his Introduction he states:

As a white person, I represented for Paddy Roe a kind of generalised

representative of white Australia. Accordingly I came to influence the texts to the

extent that Paddy Roe addresses the ‘White Reader’ as some points; he constructs

scenes and characters in ways that show he is aware of European representations

of scenes and characters (in Roe v).

Here again, the editor is in a position to influence the text in ways that remain invisible

outside the editor-writer relationship. As in the choice of imagined reader, the editor needs an

awareness of the writer’s purpose, and the time to develop that awareness.

Editor as gatekeeper:

The editor may also take on the role of gatekeeper of the language, deciding what will

and will not be allowed. This concept is a general perception of editorial work but is an elitist

position that assumes an omniscient editor and one immutable English, a position based on class

and privilege. There is no one English; there are multiple Englishes, most of them mutually

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comprehensible, and each with a flavour of the culture from which it has evolved. For, while

English emerged from a particular culture, it has taken root in many diverse cultures, such as

those of India and Australia.

An editor who attempts to defend an absolute ‘correct’ version of English is attempting

to defend the indefensible. Language belongs to those who use it: it is a means of

communication and all users make choices about whom they wish to communicate with, and

how. The editor’s choices - and the writer’s - are constrained by institutional considerations and

reader expectations. In a sense, when published, the writer’s words are broadcast, and need to

communicate to a wide range of people; this is where the choice of an imagined reader is so

important. It is not possible to make every text equally accessible to every possible reader, but in

moving from a ‘narrow cast’ event where a story is told ‘face to face, in corporeality’

(Ravenscroft 263) to a particular group of listeners who are present and visible and whose

reactions and responses can be gauged, to the dissemination of a story in a book, where the

readers and their responses are unknown, the mode of communication must adapt. The fine line

between stretching the reader and enriching the language with new expressions on one hand, and

communicating in ways that are unreadable or unacceptable on the other, is one of the editor’s

dilemmas. Parallel to this is the cultural issue of privileging certain forms of communication and

denigrating others. When dealing with this dilemma the editor is, in effect, negotiating with the

reader to find a common ground, and balancing her multiple responsibilities to publisher, writer

and reader.

This is not to deny that knowledge of formal language usage is important: the more

modes of English one has at one’s disposal, the more easily one will negotiate the world.

Knowing which modes are acceptable in certain contexts and marginalising in others, and

familiarity with the conventions of language, written and spoken, will afford a writer greater

facility in manipulating and distorting those conventions, hence providing her with more tools in

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her quest to communicate stories and ideas. The editor can play a crucial role here, by

emphasising (as both Sale and Wolfe do above) the possible effect of a particular phrase or

passage, and suggesting alternative when the writer’s purpose is not being achieved. Despite the

possibility of this positive educational role, editorial decisions about inclusion and exclusion of

material may be based on the editor’s preferences and biases rather than on the effectiveness of

the writer’s communication.

Leaving aside rules about what is grammatically right or wrong, the editor needs to use a

finely tuned ear to hear language that is vibrant, alive and communicative - within the constraints

of the negotiation between editor and reader. A writer may alienate a reader by her use of

language but, if she does, it must be consciously, not through lack of experience or unfamiliarity

with the language. Here the editor’s role is to ensure that the writer is aware of the effect of her

writing and, sometimes, to steer the writer within the boundaries of what is acceptable practice

for the publishing house. The possibilities for heavy-handed editorial intervention are obvious.

As well as a defender of ‘proper’ grammar, the editor is seen as a protector of English

spelling, despite its chaos and illogic. An alternate or ‘wrong’ spelling may be chosen by a writer

for political reasons, or to enhance the writer’s capacity to express herself; the editor needs to

respect such authorial decisions. This is another area where, in negotiating multiple

responsibilities, editorial decision making is invisible and can potentially reshape a manuscript.

The writer’s choices about grammar, spelling, and syntax are all part of her individual

voice, that quality of writing which the editor is at pains to preserve. The gatekeeping role can

work in two ways: in an exclusive way by the editor’s refusal to admit new or irregular words, or

in an inclusive way by admitting new additions to the vocabulary, enriching the language and

rooting it in a particular time and place. Such inclusions by an editor may have further

implications: the words may later be included in dictionaries, giving them a status that had not

previously possessed. On the other hand, inclusion or addition of material by an editor can cast

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the writer’s words in a different light, as is dramatically illustrated by the example of the

(unnamed) editor of the story of Englishwoman Eliza Frazer’s capture by and subsequent rescue

from a group of Aboriginal people in north eastern Australia during the nineteenth century.

The other area in which the gatekeeping role is exercised concerns what is ‘good’ writing

or a ‘good’ book. In making judgements about the value of a particular piece of writing it is

important to consider its purpose. Some writers are more concerned with the content of their

text than with (possibly eurocentric) notions of ‘good’ writing; the standards or criteria that are

often applied have developed over centuries in particular environments and may serve the

dominant culture. They can be used as a means of exclusion. As gatekeeper the editor is making

constant judgements about what will be allowed to pass, and her decisions should be tempered

by the need to help the writer achieve her intention.

Peritexts:

Although visible in a way that much editorial intervention is not, peritext has

considerable influence on a way a book is read. Generally not the work of the putative author, it

has many forms and serves many functions, yet is often overlooked. It can be seen as a form of

editorial arrogance with the assumption by the editor of the first word and the last, or conversely

as the visible mark of collaboration on the page, especially when it concerns the process by

which the text came to be written. This meta-writing is important not only because it can subvert

and deconstruct notions of authorship and unmask both editor and the collaborative process.

To examine the potential of peritexts to influence the writer’s text it is useful to consider

first why it is included. It can privilege or authorise a text or its author; it may explain matters

that are considered unclear; put the writing into a political, geographical, temporal or social

context; or attempt to give the writing or the author some authority or credibility. However,

peritext can also disempower the author and is often a site of anxiety for both writer and

collaborator where unease and disquiet are revealed and played out. It reflects the cultural

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politics that shaped the book, and the anxieties and preoccupations of the collaborator over time.

Because most peritext is chosen by the editor, and most is not written by the putative author of

the book, a consideration of its role and influence is important. The main reasons for peritext are

to provide explanation (such as glossaries and maps), endorsement (such as forewords or

prefaces by famous people), verification (such as certificates, licences, bills of sale),

acknowledgement of collaboration (in notes, acknowledgements and prefaces) and authorisation

(such as the writer’s biographical details).

In the context of explanatory annotation Philip Gaskell states: ‘linguistic usage and local

reference which will be plain to a reader of a particular nationality, age, education, and social

class will be obscure to one of a different background; and it is obviously impossible to give an

explanation sufficient for one that is not too much or too little for the other’ (Gaskell 7). It is

often for reasons of ‘linguistic usage and local reference’ that an editor will want to include

explanatory material, such as glossaries of non-standard English. Gaskell assumes that the

editor/annotator will understand the usages and references, and so be in a position to offer

explanations to the less well-informed. In a situation where the author, editor and reader share

similar backgrounds and education this may be so but where they do not this all-knowing

editor/annotator can make dangerous and erroneous assumptions that may subvert the author’s

intentions. Jackie Huggins, discussing the problems faced by Australian Indigenous writers, has

pointed out the dangers of the ‘general white audience [who] can’t read or hear a lot [of what

writers are communicating] so the white [...] editor is in the situation of trying to [...] interpret it’

(in Ferrier 142-43].

Even the seemingly innocuous inclusion of a glossary can be problematic. On the one

hand the glossary can enable those unfamiliar with regional or colloquial words, or words from

different languages, to understand their meaning. On the other, the glossing of words makes

them exotic and ‘other’. There are other ways of dealing with unusual or non-standard English

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words; for example, the author could be asked to put them in a context that would elucidate

their meaning. The manuscript of Hegarty’s Is That You, Ruthie? contained the word ‘guindian’. I

could not find its meaning and realised that neither would most readers. After we discussed the

issue the author added the words ‘a clever man’, so that the sentence read: ‘Her brother Willie

was a Guindian man, a "clever man’" (6). Some other words were dealt with by adding- an

explanation in brackets, for example ‘she called me Munya (first grandchild)’ (6). Both ‘guindian’

and ‘munya’ are from the Gunggari, the author’s mother’s traditional language.

Some texts contain a foreword, a short quote on the cover, or other introductory

material written by a famous or respected person, as a way of endorsing the book, the writer, or

both. Some examples among Australian Indigenous women’s life writing includes the four-page

Preface written by noted Australian poet, Les Murray, for the second edition of Simon’s Through

My Eyes. Both Eileen Morgan’s The Calling of the Spirits and Connie Nungulla McDonald’s When

You Grow Up contain forewords by religious officials who commend the books to readers. In the

former, the Reverend Gail Tabor also provides authorisation for the writer when she states ‘[a]s

an elder of her people [Morgan] is well qualified to tell us her story’ and she is ‘a living parable of

Aboriginal culture’ (E. Morgan, viii).

Verification of the facts of the text and authentication of its author are sometimes dual

purposes of peritext. For example, slave narratives from North America contain peritext, such as

bills of sale, to ‘prove’ the authenticity of the narrative subject (Whitlock 13). In some Australian

Indigenous women’s life writing material such as licences of exemption, permits to visit

Aboriginal missions, and application forms for permission to marry are included; for example, in

Hegarty a Certificate of Exemption and a Permit form are included (facing p. 60), as are officials

letters concerning the young Ruthie’s employment (108, 111, 123-24).

There is extensive peritext in Australian Indigenous women’s life writing that

acknowledges, explains, and comments on the various collaborative efforts that brought the

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book to publication. Often the collaborators are friends or colleagues of the writer with no

specific experience or training in the roles they take on (such as interviewing, recording and

transcribing of oral history, ghost or collaborative writing, research, and dealing with publishers

and funding bodies), and are prompted by friendship or a desire to see the writer’s story achieve

publication. Many of these collaborators carry out aspects of editing, and are making countless

decisions that will influence the finished text.

In its acknowledgement of collaboration role the choice and type of peritext can also be

revealing of the collaborative process. Peritext can, for example, describe the process by which

the book came to be written. Some examples, written by collaborators include the ‘Note’ by

Memmott and Horsman, editors of Elsie Roughsey’s An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the

New, and part of the introduction by co-writer Jill Finnane in Connie Nungulla McDonald’s

When You Grow Up (the first part written by McDonald). This peritext takes many forms and is of

varying length; Memmott and Horsman’s ‘Note’ runs to two pages; researcher and co-writer

Terry Fox’s Preface to Eileen Morgan’s The Calling of the Spirits runs to almost four pages, while

Finnane’s contribution runs to one page. Co-writer Tina Coutts contributes three and a half

pages of Foreword to Delia Walker’s You and Me. The extent of the marginalia in Through My Eyes

is detailed below. All of this peritext, with the exception of Memmott and Horsman’s ‘Note’,

appears before the author’s text. While the positioning of such peritext before the main text is a

matter of convention it could be argued that its position can colour the reader’s perception of

the text; an alternative argument is that the placement of such peritext after the text gives the

collaborator the last word. The effect that this material has on a reader is impossible to gauge; it

is not possible to deduce how many readers include it in their reading of the book, although its

presence and sheer bulk will have some influence on the way the reader approaches the text.

Whitlock notes that peritext is used often when the author is ‘other: not male, not white,

is working class or from a different culture to the dominant one’ (Whitlock 21). She cites as

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examples black women’s autobiographic writing, such as that of Mary Prince. In the case of

Australian Indigenous women’s life writing the quantity of peritext has changed over time. Early

texts such as Karobran were ‘framed by a publisher’s note, foreword, acknowledgements, preface

and introduction’ (Jones ‘Yesterday’ 130), the second edition of Ella Simon’s Through My Eyes

(1987, originally published 1978) contains a plethora of marginalia about the writing of the book.

A foreword by noted Australian poet, Les Murray was included in the second edition, where the

peritext runs to 26 pages in a book of 187 pages; this could also be interpreted as a struggle to

authorise the writer.

However, its effect may be the reverse of what the editor intends. Shari Benstock

remarks that peritext ‘of all kinds reflect[s] on the text, engage[s] in dialogue with it, perform[s]

an interpretive and critical act on it and break down the semblance of a carefully controlled

textual voice’ (in Whitlock 21-22). Whitlock goes further, highlighting the fact that ‘[the]

proliferation [of peritext] means that the challenge to the narrator’s authority is re-enacted in

every reading’ (21). Therefore, in choosing to include peritext, the editor can elicit a specific

reading or cast a specific light on the text that follows, influencing the reader in multiple ways.

Conclusion:

It can be seen from the brief, summary above that there is ample opportunity for

editorial practice to influence a text, mostly in ways that are invisible to the reader. It can also be

seen that the decisions made by an editor are influenced by many factors: commercial, practical,

aesthetic, cultural and personal - the editor’s own biases, preferences and assumptions. For some

books, a close reading of the peritext will alert readers to aspects of this intervention.

Nonetheless, for most books, much of it will remain hidden, and the possibility of such

intervention must be considered when a text is studied.

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References

Clare, Monica. Karobran: The Story of an Aboriginal Girl. Sydney NSW: Alternative

Publishing Co-operative, 1978.

Ferrier, Carole. ‘Questions of Collaboration: An Interview with Jackie Huggins and

Isabel Tarrago.’ Hecate 16.1-2 (1990): 140-47.

Foley, Bernadette. ‘Beatrice Davis Fellowship Lecture’, Queensland Writers Centre, 10

November 1997.

Frazer, Eliza. Narrative of the Capture, Sufferings, And Miraculous Escape of Mrs. Eliza Fraser.

New York: Charles & Webb, 1837.

Gaskell, Philip. ‘Introduction.’ From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method. Ed. Philip

Gaskell. Oxford UK: Clarendon Press, 1978. 1-10.

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1997. (Originally published as Seuils, Paris: Editions du Seuil,

France, 1987.)

Grossman, Michele. "Bad Aboriginal Writing." Meanjin 60.1 (2001): 152-65.

Hegarty, Ruth. Is That You, Ruthie? St Lucia Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1999.

Huggins, Rita, and Jackie Huggins. Auntie Rita. Canberra ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press,

1996.

Jones, Jennifer. "The Black Communist: The Contested Memory of Margaret Tucker.’

Hecate 26.2 (2000): 135-45.

—. ‘Yesterday’s Words: The Editing of Monica Clare’s "Karobran".’ Journal of Australian

Studies 64 (2000): 128-34.

Kartinyeri, Doris. Kick the Tin. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2000.

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 Kennedy, Marnie. Born a Half-Caste. Canberra ACT: Australian Institute of Aboriginal

Studies, 1985.

Langford Ginibi, Ruby. Don’t Take Your Love to Town. Ed. Susan Hampton. Ringwood

Vic: Penguin Books, 1988.

Lucashenko, Melissa. ‘Whose Keeper? Political Engagement, Social Responsibility and

the Artist.’ QWC News. September (1999): 10-11.

McDonald, Connie Nungulla with Jill Finnane. When You Grow Up. Broome WA:

Magabala Books, 1996.

McDonell, Margaret. ‘The Invisible Hand: Cross-cultural Influence on Editorial Practice.’

MPhil thesis, University of Queensland, Australia, 2004.

Morgan, Eileen. The Calling of the Spirits. Ed. Terry Fox. Canberra ACT: Aboriginal

Studies Press, 1994.

Ravenscroft, Alison. "Strange and Sanguine Relations: Aboriginal Writing and Western

Book Culture." Meridian 16.2 (1997): 261-69.

Roe, Paddy. Gularabulu: Stories from the Western Kimberley. Fremantle WA: Fremantle Arts

Centre Press, 1983.

Roughsey, Elsie (Labumore). An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New. Ed. Paul

Memmott and Robyn Horsman. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, 1984.

Sale, Faith. ‘Editing Fiction as an Act of Love.’ Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to

Know About What Editors Do. Ed. Gerald Gross. New York: Grove Press, 1993. 267-79.

Sharpe, Leslie T., and Irene Gunther. Editing Fact and Fiction: A Concise Guide to Book

Editing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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 Simon, Ella. Through My Eyes. Ed. Anne Ruprecht. 1st ed. Adelaide, South Australia:

Rigby, 1978. 2nd ed. Blackburn, Vic: Collins Dove, 1987.

Small, Ian. "The Editor as Annotator as Ideal Reader." The Theory and Practice of Text

Editing. Eds. Ian Small and Marcus Walsh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 186-

209.

Tucker, Margaret. If Everyone Cared. 1st edn. Sydney, NSW: Ure Smith, 1977.

Walker, Delia. Me and You: The Life of Delia Walker as Told to Tina Coutts. Canberra ACT:

Aboriginal Studies Press, 1989.

Watson, Christine. ‘"My Own Eyes Witness": Australian Aboriginal Women’s

Autobiographical Narratives.’ PhD thesis. University of Queensland, Australia, 2001.

Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London: Cassell,

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Wolf, Wendy. "Editing Nonfiction: The Question of ‘Political Correctness’." Editors on

Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do. Ed. Gerald Gross. New York: Grove

Press, 1993. 230-42.

(* From “The Unseen Hand: Hidden Intervention in Textual Production,” by Margaret Mcdonnell, in
Bandyopadhyay, Deb Narayan; Banerjee, Shibnath & Chakrabarti, Santosh (Eds.), “Australian Studies:
Themes and Issues” Volume II, pg. 57-62, 2007, Burdwan: Centre for Australian Studies. Copyright 2007 by
Centre for Australian Studies.

Reprinted with permission.)

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 8

The American Dream of The Godfather: The Life and Times

of Don Vito Corleone

Aparajita Mukherjee

My paper endeavours to explore Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather as an embodiment of the

“American Dream”. The opportunity of a better and richer life, good education and a way to

climb up the social ladder are all implicitly, and at times, explicitly embedded in the novel. But it

is not just limited to achieving the Dream. The novel tells the story of a family, or more

specifically a particular character, who not only fulfills his American Dream but goes above and

beyond it. I have in my paper attempted to pinpoint the issues which make The Godfather a

perfect example of both the realization of the American Dream and a deviation from it.

The concept of the American Dream is part and parcel of the national ideal of the United States

of America where every individual is considered to be free, free to enjoy the opportunities that

lead to one’s success and prosperity, a way to lead a better, richer and fuller life. The phrase

“American Dream” was coined by American historian James Truslow Adams in 1931 in his

book The Epic of America, in which he defines America as “the land of promise” (214). In his

Epilogue he further describes it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer

and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement"(404)

irrespective of their social class or circumstances of birth. It is not only a dream of economic

prosperity but also one of “social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to

attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for

what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position" (404).

The notion of the American Dream is embedded in the United States’ Declaration of

Independence according to which all human beings are born equal and that everyone is

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“endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights" among which are "Life, Liberty and

the pursuit of Happiness." However the concept of the American Dream has changed over time

and it has now become a widespread term to describe the American way of life. There is no

universally accepted definition of the term since it is always subjective, differing from person to

person. For some, the American Dream is related to becoming wealthy and the ability to achieve

everything through hard work, while for others it is more than mere materialism. It is, for them,

the dream of living a simple, happy and fulfilling life. Another aspect of the American Dream is

the idea that people of different nationalities, class, caste, race, culture, religion, beliefs etc. can

be fused together into a new nation without losing their diverse cultures; the idea of America as a

“melting pot” and a “mosaic culture” where everyone can live together peacefully. As Adams

further states in The Epic of America:

The American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores

in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that

has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a

dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman,

unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older

civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of

classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. (405)

In fact, the American Dream is also the dream of the immigrants to move to and settle down in

America in the hope of beginning a better life for them as well as their children. The immigration

to the New World can be traced back to the 19th century when many well-educated Germans fled

the failed 1848-revolution. They welcomed the political freedom in the New World, and the lack

of a hierarchical or aristocratic society that earlier determined the limit for individual aspirations.

One of them explained:

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 The German emigrant comes into a country free from the despotism, privileged

orders and monopolies, intolerable taxes, and constraints in matters of belief and

conscience. Everyone can travel and settle wherever he pleases. No passport is

demanded, no police mingles in his affairs or hinders his movements ... Fidelity

and merit are the only sources of honor here. The rich stand on the same footing

as the poor; the scholar is not a mug above the most humble mechanics; no

German ought to be ashamed to pursue any occupation ... [In America] wealth

and possession of real estate confer not the least political right on its owner

above what the poorest citizen has. Nor are there nobility, privileged orders, or

standing armies to weaken the physical and moral power of the people, nor are

there swarms of public functionaries to devour in idleness credit for. Above all,

there are no princes and corrupt courts representing the so-called divine 'right of

birth.' In such a country the talents, energy and perseverance of a person ... have

far greater opportunity to display than in monarchies. (Bogen 7)

The discovery of gold in California, popularly known as the Gold Rush, in 1849 also saw an

upsurge of hundred thousand men seeking to make their fortune overnight—and a few did make

it.

In Mario Puzo’s popular novel The Godfather one can find the portrayal of the American Dream,

and essentially, the American culture. The idea of a stable home, the notion of a well-knit family,

and the allure of success form an integral part of that culture. But when that ideal is threatened

they look for saviors, even those who work outside the fringe of the law. In Puzo’s novel, it is

the ‘Godfather’ who is the savior and the scythe, the jury and the executioner. Christian K.

Messenger, in his 2002 book The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became “Our

Gang” aptly declares:

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 American economic and family culture constantly seeks narratives and heroes to

regulate and explain our national life. The culture is constantly engaged in

discourses about home, family, money, greed, and security and does not only

search for reinforcement and insight through the extreme violence and sensation

of mob narrative but also in other more benign and constrained forms. Vito and

Michael Corleone are not the only fantasy figures who embody American hopes

and economic dreams. (13)

The novel opens with a trial in New York Criminal Court where an Italian immigrant Amerigo

Bonasera is awaiting justice for his daughter who has been brutally assaulted by two American

young men. But he is denied that justice and the judge sets the boys free considering one of them

is the son of a powerful politician. All his years in America, Amerigo Bonasera had believed in

the law and order of the country and he had prospered thereby. But seeing that law and order

“...have made fools of us”, he declares to his wife “For justice we must go on our knees to Don

Corleone” (Puzo 8). The next few pages talk about people, both rich and poor— a famous film-

star and a baker— who are in need of help and they believe that there is only one man in

America who can help them, make their problems disappear – “The Godfather. Don Corleone”,

thereby creating a suspense and raising questions such as who this man really is? Why do people

refer to him as “The Godfather”? How did such a man come about? What did he do to earn

such respect? And most importantly, how exactly does he solve those problems?

As the story progresses we gradually come to know that the “Godfather” is actually an Italian

immigrant by the name of Vito Corleone who came to America at a very young age and went on

to became the head of the Corleone crime family – the most powerful Mafia family, in New

York City. As psychoanalyst Dr. David Abrahamsen opines in the San Francisco Examiner and

Chronicle (18 November, 1975) “The American dream is, in part, responsible for a great deal of

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crime and violence because people feel that the country owes them not only a living but a good

living”.

The ascent of the Corleone family is the case in point. The origin and transition of Vito Corleone

to Don Corleone and finally to the “Godfather” is gradually unravelled. He is depicted as an

ambitious Sicilian immigrant who moves to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and builds a

Mafia empire. His business might be founded on gambling, bootlegging, and corruption, but he

is by no means an immoral man. He is known to follow his own strict moral code and believes in

unwavering loyalty towards whom he considers friends and, above all, family. At the same time,

it is the traditionalist in him who demands respect from all, even his closest friends who address

him as "Godfather" or "Don Corleone" rather than "Vito". In flashback, we come to know that

Vito was born in the small town of Corleone, Sicily, on December 7, 1891. After the death of his

father and brother at the hands of the local Mafia boss, Don Ciccio, for refusing to pay tribute,

Vito’s mother sacrifices her own life to help Vito escape. He is then smuggled away, fleeing from

Sicily to seek refuge in America on a cargo ship full of immigrants.

Vito is later adopted by another immigrant family, the Abbandando family in Little Italy on the

Lower East Side and he befriends their son, Genco, who is no less than a brother to him. Vito

initially begins making an honest living at the Abbandando family's grocery store on Ninth

Avenue, but is gradually thrust into criminality and then resorts to unfair means for self-defence.

He shoots Don Fanucci, an extortionist and the local neighbourhood so-called patron, and then

establishing his own control over the neighbourhood, though more fair than Fanucci ever was.

As a young man, Vito starts an olive oil importing business with his friend Genco, which

eventually becomes a legal front for his growing organized crime syndicate. Nevertheless, his

business becomes highly successful and grows to become the largest olive oil importing

company in the nation. Between olive oil importing business and his illegal operations, Vito

becomes a very wealthy man. In the mid-1920s, he returns to Sicily for the first time since fleeing

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as a child and avenges his family by killing the Mafia Don who had murdered his family. By the

early 1930s, Vito Corleone has already established the Corleone crime family based on his illegal

operations. It is soon believed to be the most powerful crime family in the nation. In fact, the

very beginning of this powerful tale of brute force, crime and grit is marked by a quotation by

Balzac: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime”.

The notion of the American Dream is that the American socio-politico economic system makes

success possible for every individual; the ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity, a life of

personal happiness and material comfort as traditionally sought and held to be available to every

individual in the U.S. Vito Corleone’s life is very similar to that of achieving the American

Dream. He entered America as a poor but ambitious Sicilian who had nothing. Then with the

help of a few friends he started his business and became extremely successful through hard

work. He started his family, educated his children and achieved success, perhaps more than he

himself had hoped for. The story of the Godfather, Vito Corleone, is a story about how a poor

immigrant realizes the American Dream by hard work, discipline and devotion to the family. He

was quick to realise that in America, money, power and respect are closely related. Success

through wealth and power has been implemented as one of the primary goals in American

culture and as part of American Dream. But can his success really be called that of fulfilling the

Dream? He killed people, founded his business on gambling, bootlegging and union corruption,

and gradually went on to become the most feared mafia crime boss in New York. He became

the justice system in his own right. When America fails to uphold its professed aims of equality

and freedom, it is the “Godfather” who delivers his own kind of justice.

Moreover Vito Corleone is not just a successful businessman, a simple Sicilian who turned the

dream into reality but becomes one who surpasses the Dream. He is so powerful that there is

nothing he cannot or will not do for his loved ones. He has no qualms about threatening people

or killing a few to get what he wants or simply to establish his reign. He is presented in the novel

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as someone who can even scare death, as one of his friends on the verge of death will cry out,

“Godfather, Godfather... save me from death... stay here with me and help me meet death.

Perhaps if He sees you near me He will be frightened and leave me in peace” (Puzo 46- 47).

Don Corleone has a strange moral code and strict principles by which he leads his whole life, as

is evident from his refusal to take any part in the narcotics business even with the prospect of

earning enormous monetary profit. But that does not prevent his very name from striking mortal

fear in the hearts of his enemies. The world that Don Corleone created for himself and his

children in his way to become a Mafia lord would, however, ultimately consume them. He never

wanted his children to be a part of his business but in spite of all his power he could not prevent

them. When Michael Corleone takes over the family business and becomes the new Don, he

surpasses even his father in his ruthlessness. With the rise to power, one is acutely aware of

Michael’s simultaneous transformation into a vengeful murderer. He kills his own sister’s

husband to avenge the murder of his brother because there is no scope for forgiveness in the

dangerous world where he lives. The Corleone family might go from being penniless to one of

the most prosperous and influential families in the nation over two generations, but that

prosperity comes at the cost of sacrificing family members, friends, and individual moral values.

As Tom Hagen puts it, “Michael could have forgiven it, but people never forgive themselves and

so they would always be dangerous” (447).

Even those who initially disregard the power of the Don, soon realizes the force they are dealing

with. As Jack Woltz, the most powerful movie magnate in Hollywood, will realise “That despite

all his wealth, despite all his contacts with the President of the United States, despite all his

claims of friendship with the director of FBI, an obscure importer of Italian olive oil would have

him killed” (69). It is noteworthy that Jack Woltz himself, is another product of the American

Dream and a corrupt one at that:

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 At ten years of age Woltz had hustled empty beer kegs and pushcarts on the East

side. At twenty he helped his father sweat garment workers. At thirty he had left

New York and moved West, invested in the nickelodeon, and pioneered motion

pictures. At forty-eight he had been the most powerful movie magnate in

Hollywood. [...] Now at the age of sixty he collected old master paintings, was a

member of the President’s Advisory Committee, and had set up a multimillion-

dollar foundation in his name to promote art in motion pictures. His daughter

had married an English lord, his son an Italian princess. (55)

Tom Hagen is another character in this novel whose rise to power is similar to the rags-to-riches

stories associated with the American Dream. Tom was the son of a drunkard father and a blind

mother. At twelve years of age he found himself an orphan, roaming the streets with an eye

infection. It was Don Corleone who gave him a shelter, a family and paid for his education. He

went to law school, became a lawyer and joined the Corleone family business. From being an

outsider he went on to become the “consigliori” or counsellor to the Don himself, his right-hand

man. If he stayed loyal to the Don, he would become rich, wield power and earn respect. Even if

he were to die, his wife and children would be taken care of. In other words, in Tom Hagen’s

eyes Don Corleone himself is his American Dream, who saved his life, gave him the opportunity

to make the best of himself and secured a much better life for his family than he had ever hoped

for. Thus, as Messenger describes:

The Corleones, the violent, immoral, misogynist Corleones, were a proto-family

for our time, the tightly knit unit, the family that murdered together stayed

together. The Godfather posited a truly complete American fantasy, that of New

World mobility and power within an Old World identity. Here was an American

melodrama that took root in the national imagination as it did on the charts. The

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 Corleone family takeover was both psychic and economic in the American

culture. They had in fundamental ways become us. They were “Our Gang.” (4)

The novel also brings forth the question of how credible and realistic the American Dream really

is. Does it really offer equal opportunities to everyone alike? Vito Corleone was forced into

crime to save his own life and Tom Hagen would have died wandering the streets without the

help of the Corleone family. For Amerigo Bonasera, the American Dream has been the most

fulfilling. He says, “I raised my daughter in the American fashion. I believe in America. America

has made my fortune” (28). But when the boys, who sent his daughter to hospital, is set free with

just a warning, his trust in America shatters and his dream turns into a nightmare. It is then that

he turns to Don Corleone for proper justice. When the Don asks him to forget, forgive and be

happy with the justice that America has given him, Bonasera emphatically declares “No. They

gave the youths justice. They did not give me justice” (30). What is considered to be justice for

one, is injustice to the other. Dream for one, nightmare for another.

For the Americans, the American Dream is probably more about spiritual happiness than

material possession. It is the belief among the majority that working hard is perhaps the most

fundamental aspect for getting ahead. However, for an increasing minority, hard work and

determination do not always guarantee success. Achieving the Dream through fair means often

becomes increasingly difficult and sometimes without progress. There is an ever increasing

pessimism regarding the professed equal opportunities among the working class to be able to

turn the Dream into a reality. This is the case in this novel as well. Vito Corleone’s life is almost

an inversion of what is called the American Dream. He achieved success but at what cost? The

American Dream is the slogan of America to present itself as the land of opportunities, which it

truly is for some, but for others it is not as picture-perfect as it is generally believed. There are

still some who believe that there is no “American Dream” anymore. As J.G. Ballard, in an

interview in Metaphors (No.7) in 1983, declares:

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 The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer

supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It

supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination,

Watergate, Vietnam.

However, “The constants firmly mixed in The Godfather continue to enthrall: America.

Citizenship. Family. Ethnicity. Identity. Business. Reason. Murder” (Larke-Walsh 7).

Works Cited

Adams, James Truslow. The Epic of America. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931.

Print.

Bogen, F. W. The German in America. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1851. Print.

Kamp, David. "Rethinking the American Dream." Vanity Fair: Vanities, April 2009. Web. 1

December 2017.

Larke-Walsh, George S. Screening the Mafia: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Mobsters from

“The Godfather” to “The Sopranos”. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc.,

Publishers, 2010. Print.

Messenger, Chris. The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became “Our

Gang”. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002. Print.

Michels, Eva. "What is the American Dream?" America Day Dreamer, n.d. Web. 28

November 2017.

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Puzo, Mario. The Godfather. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1976. Print.

Swann, Travis. "The Godfather: Cultural Value." The Corsair, 2 May 2012. Web. 1

December 2017.

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 9

On Remakes and Translations: a Study of the Tangle between

Hindi Films and Popular Culture with Special Reference to
Paheli

Ipsita Sengupta

In the Beginning: on Mass Culture and Popular Culture

How to differentiate between mass culture and popular culture? Is there even a difference?

Theodor W. Adorno famously suggested that mass media reserves the right to dizzying

reductions, monolithic aggression and false representation; entitled producers of mass culture

propagated through mass media seek to convert the audience into complicit addicts of

stereotypes of their invention and infliction, stereotypes that further entrench the status quo, its

alarming innocence and embedded inequities/exclusions.1 Such an understanding of mass media

and mass culture axiomatises the existence of popular culture as the binaristic counter – that

ecology of culture authentic and organic, created cultivated remade and preserved in

collaboration, by the people across generations.

Given our 2017 spatial-temporal locations, is it possible to charter and preserve the afore-

mentioned alterative territories for mass culture and popular culture, positing them thereby as

binaries piously inoculated and invisibilised from each other? The plurality of “locations”

unfortunately embeds a hunger for unitaries in the contemporary glocal2 context; competing

media houses clone programmes of entertainment and spectacles of outrage, with variations

limited to titles or the time-slot. Their charter regarding the media non-people or non-news, to

1Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. California: Stanford
University Press, 2002. 94-136. Print.
Also, Adorno, Theodor W. “How to look at Television.” The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 8.3 (1954): 213-35.
Print.
2 The term “glocal” is a portmanteau of “global” and “local,” suggesting the necessary nexus between the twinned

spatial qualifiers in a late capitalist world. The term “glocalization” was first used by Roland Robertson in his
analysis of this nexus.
Qtd. in Zygmunt Bauman, “After the Nation State-What?” Globalization: The Reader. Eds. John Beynon and David
Dunkerley. London: The Athlone Press, 2000. 250-260. Print.

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be exiled always from visibility, seems uncannily identical. Media-houses and film studios,

keepers of the trans-habit3 post colonies, remain as invested in their lust for cosmetic variations

as in the death of alternatives. The lucrative, increasingly sanitized domain of art and culture

which they endorse and define, must whet both the hungers, however divergent on surface.

According to this diktat, the mass-culture avatar of art and representation must dis(re)member its

roots and forget to disturb or question, beyond the ascribed chore of entertaining or creating

clique-capital for the creative, complicit. In such a matrix, the global invades, translates and

curates the local as its tender totem;4 mass culture cannibalizes, and finally masquerades as

popular culture. A lethally potent illustration of this phenomenon in the South Asian context

could be the tangle of the Hindi film industry – a classic instance of Adorno-ian mass culture

spawned by a miniscule capital-hoarding elite, and made an addiction for a South Asian, even

global audience spread across linguistic, religious, caste and colour divides – with locally

circulated narratives emplaced in popular culture across diverse spatial and temporal frames.

“Entanglement” spells a post-structural spin on the convention of the abyss between binaries; it

invokes a flow to and fro between counter-categories thus twinned. What happens when a

mainstream Hindi film adapts popular regional folktales for its screenplay? What does that

entanglement entail – collusion or colonization? Does the film with a mass outreach loom as the

3“Trans-habit”, a term used by Ranjan Ghosh in Thnking Literature across Continents, refers to the liminal habit of
crossing over or exceeding various shadowlines that partition disciplines and territories.
See Ghosh, Ranjan and J. Hillis Miller. Introduction. Thinking Literature across Continents. Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2016. 3. Print.
Ironically, mass media with its boundary-bending clout in making and unmaking opinion across issues ranging from
economics, election, nation, the transnational, artistic and protestant politics to farmhouse or filmy parties,
increasingly claim ownership of the “trans-habit” today. The claim represents a neo-colonial lust to travesty the
possibility of alterities and conversations with various others braided with the term, for mass media including
mainstream Hindi films tend to tether the “trans-habit” to stereotypes.
4 For colonial possibilities of the import and translation of elements exotic and outsourced from colonies, see Leask,

Nigel. Introduction. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991. 1-12. Print.
Also see Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi. “Of colonies, cannibals and vernaculars.” Post-Colonial Translation:
Theory and Practice. Ed. Bassnett and Trivedi. London: Routledge, 1999. 1-18. Print.
Such colonial appropriations and transplantations remain as resonant in the neo-colonial marketing of brands and
totems as ethnic orientalia, robbed of context and consumed as kitsch. Neo-colonial appropriations could range
from the chhau masks of Purulia martial dance, sold as interior decoration for tour-savvy urban consumers, to the
use of Kashmiri musical instruments rabab and santoor in the number “Haminasto” from Fitoor (2016), a film which
otherwise curates Kashmir as passive colonial picturesque.

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singular template from mass culture ready to cannibalize all other locally circulated and hitherto

popular translations/interpretations? Could Bhansali’s ghoomar-ghooming, uber-Rajputani

Padmavati5 exile from public memory the outlier Sinhali princess and protagonist of Malik

Muhammad Jayasi’s Sufi romance Padmavat (1540)? Yet Padmavat remains the ur-text for the folk

tale variously re-created in anuvad6 since the seventeenth century by courtly bards of Rajasthan,

political agent of the English East India Company Colonel James Tod, and Syed Alawol and

Abanindranath Tagore, Bengali storymakers from the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries

respectively.

Bhansali’s Padmavati, re-baptized Padmavat on the Censor Board’s counsel, first awaited release in

India amidst huge furor and has since been released, received as a vapid subscriber of

stereotypes. We could, however, kindle our quest on the web between Hindi films and local

folktales with a focus on Paheli (2005), another film exorbitantly budgeted, set in exotic, a

temporal Rajasthan and based on a popular folk-tale re-told through plural media in multiple

spaces and tenses across the subcontinent. The film was produced by Red Chillies

Entertainment, co-owned by Shahrukh Khan and Gauri Khan. In this paper, I aim to explore the

web between multiple renditions of the folktale that inspired Paheli, across geographies and

mediums, popular culture and mass culture. I shall also explore the politics in the transformation

of the text as it dispersed from popular culture to mass culture. Folklores, almost by definition,

inhabit a fluid geography of origins and travel; they move, disperse, are trans-created and trans-

habituated across maps and borders. Sources I have explored for this paper, too, are as eclectic,

composed in Hindi and English, ranging from the internet and cinema to short stories and plays

5 As I write the paper, the film is yet to be released and has irked violent protests and fatwas from outrage-vendors
baying for an unrepresentable, uni-dimensional Padmavati the pure; impressions about Bhansali’s Padmavati and
Alauddin Khilji, have been gathered from the trailer and the ghoomar song released online.
And as the paper is about to be published online in Lyceum, Bhansali’s Padmavati has finally secured an audience as
Padmavat, though its shrill binaries seem far removed from Jayasi’s layered allegory.
6“Anuvad” etymologically signifies “saying after”. The word plays on an underlying temporal metaphor – to say

after, to repeat – unlike its English/Latin equivalent “translation” which embeds a spatial dimension, the
etymological signification of “translation” being “to carry across”. “Anuvad” is less anxious about fidelity to the
original than “translation”; it invites re-interpretation, even re-creation of originals in the process of re-telling,
according the anuvadak greater agency as translator/storyteller.

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based on folklore. A brief look at some of the narratives that preceded and inspired Paheli would

unfold the subversive trans-habits and palimpsests that imprint tales emergent from popular

culture.

Peeling the Layers of an Onion: Past Lives of Paheli in Print and Popular Culture

According to the maker of Paheli, Amol Palekar, the film is based on a folktale rooted in

Rajasthan. The tale features in the collection of fabulous folklore compiled by the Rupayan

Sansthan archivists of village Borunda in the Jodhpur district of Rajasthan.7 Iconic Rajasthan-

based author Vijaydan Detha retold the narrative in his short story “Dohri Joon” (“Double

Life”) published in the early 1970s; Detha hailed from Borunda and belonged to a family of

traditional chroniclers. “Dohri Joon” was trans-created in Hindi as the twin tales “Uljhan” and

“Duvidha”.8

Based on the storyline of “Duvidha”, Mani Kaul made his film of the same name in 1973. Kaul’s

Duvidha seeks to re-create and preserve popular culture on film; he weaves Detha’s story with

haunting stills of local scapes, voiceover narrative and an aural scape composed by Rajasthani

folk musicians Ramjan Hammu, Latif and Saki Khan. With its silences, austere sets and lack of

final solution, Duvidha seeks no part in the mass culture industry, nor did it remotely have a mass

outreach. In 2005 we have the youngest re-make of the old story in Paheli, with its resplendent

sets and feel-good resolution. And this represents only the North Indian bit of the story. At least

in terms of plot, Girish Karnad’s play Naga-Mandala9 seems an anuvad of “Duvidha”. Karnad

insists that the plot was inspired by local, Kannad folktales:10

Naga-Mandala is based on two oral tales I heard from A.K. Ramanujan. These tales are narrated

by women – normally the older women in the family – while children are being fed in the

evenings in the kitchen or being put to bed. The other adults present on these occasions are also

women.
7Rao, J. S. “Cinema: Old gold, new setting.”thehindu.com. The Hindu,28 June 2005. Web. 21 Oct. 2017.
8 Detha, Vijaydan. Lajbanti. Trans. Kailash Kabir. New Delhi: Vakdevi Pocket Books, 2001. Print.
9 Karnad, Girish. “Naga-mandala.”Three Plays. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 19-66. Print.
10 Karnad Introduction Three Plays16.

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Paheli thus rests on multiple narrations. Metaphorically, too, the element of narrativisation (and

dispersal across multiple media) is visibilised and narrativity personified in most adaptations of

this folk-tale. For example, twin kathputlis (wooden puppets used as narrators and characters in

Rajasthani puppet-dance) narrate the story as sutradhars and engage with the bhut – ghost and

etymologically, “the past” – in Palekar’s film. At one point in the film, he even whisks them away

with him to his beloved Lachhi’s house, his action metonymic of the shadow and shadow-

narrative wanting to take control of the story. The kath-putlis’ role as disseminators in Paheli

correspond to that of the story in Naga-Mandala. In Naga-Mandala, the story is cast as a girl who

wears the song in the narrative as her sari. Stories, as temple-flames in the play argue, must be

told and thus allowed to disperse in order to be re-told. Not only do they otherwise become

sterile, but they could also devise strange means of punishment. An old woman in Naga-mandala

in possession of the story neither tells the story, nor sings the song. The tale in arrest grows

desperate to flee. She escapes from the woman the moment she opens her mouth and steps out

of the house, taking the form of a young girl. The old woman sights her flight and suspects the

husband of having committed adultery, thus rousing a row in the house. Either one uses

language and other media to make a story, or to wound and militate against magic, i.e. the

architecture of alternative possibilities. Later in the prologue, the story refuses to narrate herself

to the lamps since they cannot re-disperse her and relents only when the playwright within the

play promises to stage the story for others on listening to her. In dispersion and translations,

then, does a folk-tale etch routes and re-births. The tale is metonymic of the bahurupi (shape-

shifting) ghost in “Duvidha” and Paheli. Like the ghostly Kishenlal, it too remains fluid, shifts

shapes with spatial-temporal shifts and shifts in audiences, and yet refuses to douse the

questions, dilemma and desire that quicken it.

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Of Ghosts and/or Cores:

Despite the re-makes, I wish to trace a non-negotiable core that kindles the popular folk-

narrative/s preceding Paheli, even if it be that of a no-bodied ghost. Let us then briefly explore

issues that inhabit and unsettle the core.

Hurtspace vs. Heartspace:

The narrative meditates on the dilemma in choosing between communal currencies of survival

and clout, such as money and unthinking obedience as upheld by the female protagonist’s legal

husband and her mercenary father-in-law, and the alternative currency of love/eros that involves

rites of excess and lonely intrusions of the non-rational. The story gives disproportionate

importance to love, even if it ends with the loss of the lover in Detha and Kaul’s “Duvidha”.

The name “Kishenlal” given to the husband in Palekar’s Paheli invokes the devious divinity

Krishna whose name etymologically denotes “one who attracts”; Krishna, indulgently called

Kishenlal, had played debonair heart-throb to his adorers, male and female, at Vrindavan. The

ghost, and not the profit-obsessed husband, does justice to the name. Yet the ghost is but a

shadow and constitutes a shadow-narrative that must be exorcised in the end, at least in the

popular culture variant of the story. He impersonates the non-articulate, defeated desire of

alternative possibilities lurking in all women who remain trapped in the mercenary equations of a

patriarchal setup. And the shy female protagonist chooses him over the husband who had left

her for a lucrative business venture, knowing that the tryst must be short-lived, till the moment

the husband returns in his righteousness.

Feminism in folklore:

The only other indispensable trope of the story seems to be recognition of a woman’s right to

choose the partner she wants to love and live with over social grids of ethics and propriety, even

if the narrative unfolds in hinterlands of the subcontinent where the female supposedly remains

invisibilised behind the veil and speaks with a voice unheard. The female protagonist accepts the

map of longings/heartspace when it comes her way, choosing betrayal over allegiance to a

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husband who has estranged and exiled himself from his newly-wedded wife for profit in trade.

Can this folktale in its various versions, then, be seen as a counter-narrative to pre-scripted

patriarchal myths?

Locating Lachhi/Rani in other Traditions:

In the introduction to his play Girish Karnad observes:11

These tales (i.e. the folk narrative/s that inspired Naga-mandala), though directed

at the children, often serve as a parallel system of communication among the

women of the family. They also express a distinctly woman’s understanding of

the reality around her, a lived counterpoint to the patriarchal structures of

classical texts and institutions [my parentheses].

This cycle of tales and performances – including “Duvidha” the story and the movie, as well as

Paheli and Naga-mandala – could be seen as alternative framings of the test of fire set to verify the

satitva12 of Sita in Ramayana. In a shift from the omniscient narration of epics fixated with the

crises of epic, and inevitably male, heroes, folk narratives often adopt the perspective of the

woman being judged and tested for her chastity and worth, and there is a concurrent shift in

paradigm. The crisis for the woman in these tales is not the test of fire prescribed by a surveillant

society, but the opportunity to choose between becoming sat (true) and sati, the latter having

come to connote a sacralised cutie conditioned to equate truth with sexual, nay marital, chastity.

In an adaptation of the fire-test, Rani of Naga-mandala puts her hand into a cobra’s ant-hill, but

her lover being the cobra, the test turns benign. In Vijaydan Detha and Mani Kaul’s trans-

creations, the female protagonist lives with the tragedy of losing her lover and resigns herself to

the role of the mother-in-law appeasing, docile housewife once her ‘true’ husband returns with

his craft of heartbreak and certitude. She had earlier refused to identify the husband when he

first returned and the village was faced with a doppelganger.

11Karnad Introduction Three Plays 17.

12Etymologically, “satitva” renders truth and greatness in a woman; the word has come to denote marital chastity
for the female, apparently her only route and testament for truth and greatness in South Asian patriarchy.

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Apparently the most revolutionary take is that of Paheli, where the causes of feminism and

fantasy unite and the woman can afford to become both chaste and true, sati and sat, when her

lover the ghost returns to possess the body of the husband. Kishenlal at the end of Paheli is no

extramarital sin to be expunged but the transformed spouse and alchemic hybrid dreamt by all

women, where the conflicts between desire and dictates dissolve in an alchemy of the

heartthrob-morphed-to-forever-adorer-and-spouse. Paheli ends on a note of unapologetic fantasy

not indulged in any of the popular culture variants of the narrative. Why this shift? Is it

symptomatic of the many ways in which Paheli is an uneasy hybrid, much like the two-in-one

Kishenlal too good to be true?

To Make or Re-Make, that is the Question: Story and the Film, and an other film:

Vijaydan Detha’s “Duvidha” does not share the optimism of the ending of Paheli. In his starker

story, the female protagonist is left to cope with her nothingness, freshly fearing for her new-

born daughter who would have to survive such losses in a society where every woman is readied

for unspeakable sacrifices. She thus remains a woman contained by her circumstances though

she had dared to choose: she must at last succumb to the role of the sati. She cannot confide to

her husband or the in-laws that she had accepted a lover knowing him to be not her husband,

something Lachhi musters the courage to confess in the movie. The possibility of dohri

joon/schizophrenia facing every woman who attempts to script an autonomous bildungsroman

for herself looms large in “Duvidha”, a possibility exiled from screen-space in Paheli.

The screen-space of Paheli, though, seems home and healing space to feminisms and female

conditions not foregrounded in Detha’s “Duvidha”. The opening song “Minnat kare” enacts the

cosy intimacy and playfulness which webs the female matrix when protected from the male gaze

and its fatwas. In mulling over names for their yet-to-be born daughter, the lovers perform the

priority of individual identity for a woman over her relationshipal status. The role played by Juhi

Chowla as Lachhi’s sister-in-law is non-existent in the short story and represents a woman’s

desolation within patriarchy, even as she plays the pliant conformist.

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Paheli thus resolves that woman should have the right to choose and live by that choice. What it

douses in the process is the dilemma indispensable to the folk-narrative, as to how to decide

between what is right and wrong or true and false when binaries tend to blur. What should the

bride or the ghost in love have done when the newly-wedded husband chose to leave her for

more lucrative trade, leaving no doubts around his ruthless lack of dilemma? Paheli salves the

angst of such existential dilemmas with its feel-good ending where the ghost and the husband are

but one, with binaries rendered irrelevant and the partition between alternative choices dissolved.

Paheli retains the form of Detha’s “Duvidha” but sanitises out of it the duvidha i.e. unresolved

split inflicted on various margins in a subcontinental patriarchy. Such was not the case with an

other, earlier adaptation of Detha’s story on screen. The 1973 film had been made on a low

budget by a filmmaker turned producer who wanted to trans-create the stark story on screen.

Mani Kaul’s Duvidha was an austere production with amateurs on and behind the screen. It

experimented with medium and storytelling, creating a fusion of film and still frames, few

dialogues, local folk music and voiceover narrative as oral storytelling. Kaul images a popular

culture narrative on screen; his Duvidha retains the earthiness, layers and silences of Detha’s

story. Duvidha then shares a genre very different from the resplendent palette, pomp and

loquacious love of Paheli. Kaul’s female protagonist cannot come up with an answer when

women demand to know which of the two rivals is her true husband. “If men had asked thus of

me, I would have managed a “yes” or “no”, but what can I answer when women speak so?” she

responds.13 The film highlights the lucre-lust of the older merchant and father of the groom

when the ghost impersonating his son is allowed to stay in the house, on the bargain that he

yields five guineas per day to his father. The camera focuses on the sethji’s pocket, as he counts

and puts away the guineas each morning. Later the voiceover narrative observes the poor

villagers’ relish for the prospect of playing judge and witness at the sethji’s trial over choosing

13Duvidha. Dir. Mani Kaul. Perf. Ravi Menon, and Raisa Padmasee. Mani Kaul,1973. Film.

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between two sons, one of whom is the imposter. Kaul’s Duvidha highlights and politicizes the

layers to the weave of kinship, love, loyalty and neighborhood in a feudal patriarchy driven by

economic inequity to begin with.

Both producer-actor Shahrukh Khan and director Amol Palekar promoted their film Paheli as

entirely removed from Kaul’s Duvidha. This, despite the quest for re-makes of the bahurupi

folktale which reinvents itself across spaces and tenses. While Shahrukh Khan confessed in one

interview that he “had seen Mani Kaul’s ‘Duvidha’ and liked the thought behind it”,14 elsewhere

he categorically stated: “Paheli is definitely based on Vijaydan Detha’s award winning novella

‘Duvidha,’ but it’s certainly not a remake of Mani Kaul’s film Duvidha which was incidentally based

on the same story” (emphasis added).15 Amol Palekar maintains in almost all interviews that

Mani Kaul and he are directors as antipodal as could possibly be and the two films have nothing

to do with each other. Both acknowledge Detha’s “Duvidha” as the original text, yet seek a

cautious distance from the earlier film. Why this anxiety of influence? Is it the mere angst for

originality of representation in a medium? Or the compulsion to create a mass culture template

bordering on fairytale for a folktale, the template that must exorcise alternative, unsettling

representations of a popular culture narrative on celluloid?

The Uneasy Hybrid

In a post-colonial, post-centric milieu, hybrids are in season. Director Amol Palekar too

celebrates the season when he claims that the most exciting part of Paheli is the “Amol Palekar-

Shahrukh Khan synthesis”.16 Does he then promote Paheli as a hybrid of parallel and mainstream

cinema? The collaboration constitutes a departure from Palekar’s earlier trajectory. Before the

making of Anahaat (2003), his Marathi and Hindi films were mostly socially motivated

14Khan,Shahrukh. Interview by Subhash K Jha. “‘Paheli’ is a whim of mine, says Shah Rukh.” hindustantimes.com.
Hindustan Times, 20 May 2005. Web. 22 Oct. 2017.
15Khan,Shahrukh. Interview by Shaheen Raj. “SRK’s new obsession.” deccanherald.com. Deccan Herald,19 June 2005.
Web. 22 Oct. 2017.
16Palekar,Amol. Interview by Harsh Kabra. “The lone ranger’s star trek.” thehindubusinessline.com.The Hindu Business
Line, 3 June 2005. Web. 12 Oct. 2017.

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documentaries made on shoe-string budgets, e.g. Dhyaas Parva (1996) based on Raghunath

Karve’s life. Since Anahaat there has been a shift in his position, which becomes stark in Paheli.

Before discussing the shift, let us look at his erstwhile ideology as reflected in an excerpt from an

interview on the making of his films:17

I am fascinated by the marginalized people, the forces that drive them, and where

they derive the strength to stand against society for their beliefs and

convictions…

You are talking of the simultaneous release hype of mainstream cinema. Mainstream

cinema works on different kind of insecurity. Such multiple releases are done because

you don’t know whether the film is going to bomb or not. I am not worried about

that. (2) (emphasis added)

Anaahat was his first film with an upcoming star – Sonali Bendre – in cast. Paheli uses Bollywood

gloss lavishly. Not only did Palekar and producer SRK deck up the film with Tanishq jewellery –

just as Bhansali did in Padmavat – it oozes the extravaganza of a Bollywood fanfare. There are

many firsts for the director in this movie. It has a mega star cast, both in the main roles as well as

in the special appearances of SRK’s then two most special friends, Amitabh Bachchan and Juhi

Chawla. M.M. Kreem composed the music. The budget far exceeded that of any other Palekar

movie. Indeed SRK, inspired by his zeal to do ‘different’ movies, volunteered to produce the

film when he was offered the role. This led to Rajasthani havelis being simulated on huge sets in

Mumbai as well as special effects and sync sound – cutting-edge technologies both, given the

year of release – 2005. SRK’s preferred team of cinematographers and editors had to be roped

in, instead of Palekar’s regular band. The difference so installed exuded in the lavish look of

Paheli, to begin with.

17Palekar, Amol. Interview by Nitya Ramanan. “Actor by Accident, Director by Choice.” indiacurrents.com. India

Currents, 12 Feb. 2003. Web. 12 Oct. 2017.

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If star-cast, colourfully choreographed songs and a huge budget do not in themselves constitute

deep departures from the director’s previous style and stance, then there is the international

release of the film to compensate, along with sanitized packaging of a GI-tagged18 fairytale locale

meant to entice the global audience. Brilliant colours define the garish costumes and settings of

Paheli. The camel race, puppet dance and idyllic village and villagers feature as regular showpieces

of exotic India. And the touristy film morphs into jubilant promo-ad for Rajasthan.

Decontextualised, the ghost does not seem to differ from the hovering lover SRK plays in his

signature nomadic role which travels from one film to another beginning with DDLJ; he no

longer remains metonymic of the possibilities absented from a feudal marriage. Magic in the

folktale is a register for alternative possibilities and protest, as well as for excesses and the

enchantment associated with the erotic. In the film, interpretation of magical/fantastic elements

never exceeds the orbit of special effects in a timidly timeless locale. Scenes meant to be comic

or entertaining, like the camel race or Bhoja’s confusion, are reduced to kitsch. Other than the

ghost, male characters including Bhoja the postman and Kishenlal’s father are cast as caricatures

of the inane, rustic. The popular culture narrative loses its edge, dream and despair in the

translation to its mass culture masala Bollywood avatar.

Paheli flopped at the Indian box-office. Clichés of portable, picture-postcard India with its

politically vapid ghosts and magic might not have gone down well with the desi audience.

Portable, since Amol Palekar gave interviews on reaching out to wider audiences with this film.

Paheli was well received at the UK, USA and the UAE and nominated as India’s entry in the

foreign films category at the 2005 Oscars. With its feel-good fantasy, the film was touted as a

glocal product.

And yet, not all hybrids come off well, even in the post-colonial tense with its avowed taste for

positions betwixt and between. Paheli – the much-hyped hyphen between the local and global,

18GI, abbreviation for geographical indication, refers to a sign used to authenticate products originating from a
specific geographical location. The tag is glocal in a tour-savvy, late capitalist grid and plays on the global consumer’s
touring lust for the local authentic and the semiotics of belonging.

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Hindi feature films mainstream and parallel, popular culture and mass culture, between Shahrukh

Khan as film producer and icon of mass culture translated into the popular culture ghost – could

be read as an imperial translation/colonization of “Duvidha” into song-and-dance orientalia

characteristic of Bollywood routines. It robs the popular culture narrative of its regret, and

questions. Paheli, etymologically a riddle, leaves us with a Sphinx puzzle around hyphens/hybrids

in our hyphenated age. Can the hyphen between mass culture and popular culture be preserved

in a niche of co-habitation, even entanglement? Or must the many versions of a popular culture

narrative collapse into the fiercely singular, globally marketable mass culture kitsch, just as Malik

Muhammad Jayasi’s Khalji, the quester in thrall to his quest, seems to have been detraced from

Bhansali’s depiction of the archetypal Islamic invader – as narcissist, devour-delighting carnivore

– for an allegedly Hindu, utterly excusionary imaginary.

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 Works Cited:

Adorno, Theodor W. “How to look at Television.” The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 8.3

(1954): 213-35. Print.

Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi. “Of colonies, cannibals and vernaculars.” Post-Colonial

Translation: Theory and Practice. Ed. Bassnett and Trivedi. London: Routledge, 1999. 1-18. Print.

Bauman, Zygmunt. “After the Nation State-What?” Globalization: The Reader. Ed. John Beynon

and David Dunkerley. London: The Athlone Press, 2000. 250-260. Print.

Detha, Vijaydan. Lajbanti. Trans. Kailash Kabir. New Delhi: Vakdevi Pocket Books, 2001. Print.

Duvidha. Dir. Mani Kaul. Perf. Ravi Menon, and Raisa Padmasee. Mani Kaul,1973. Film.

Ghosh, Ranjan and J. Hillis Miller. Thinking Literature across Continents. Durham & London: Duke

University Press, 2016. Print.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass

Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed.

Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. California: Stanford University Press, 2002. 94-136. Print.

Karnad, Girish. “Naga-mandala.” Three Plays. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.19-66. Print.

Khan, Shahrukh. Interview by Subhash K Jha. “‘Paheli’ is a whim of mine, says Shah Rukh.”

hindustantimes.com. Hindustan Times, 20 May 2005. Web. 22 Oct. 2017.

Khan, Shahrukh. Interview by Shaheen Raj. “SRK’s new obsession.” deccanherald.com. Deccan

Herald,19 June 2005. Web. 22 Oct. 2017.

Leask, Nigel. Introduction. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991. 1-12. Print.

Padmavat. Dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Perf. Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh, and Shahid

Kapoor. Viacom 18 Motion Pictures, and Bhansali Productions, 2018. Film.

Paheli. Dir. Amol Palekar. Perf. ShahRukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee, Juhi Chawla, and Amitav

Bachchan. Red Chillies Entertainment, 2005. Film.

127
Palekar, Amol. Interview by Harsh Kabra. “The lone ranger’s star trek.”

thehindubusinessline.com.The Hindu Business Line, 3 June 2005. Web. 12 Oct. 2017.

Palekar, Amol. Interview by Nitya Ramanan. “Actor by Accident, Director by Choice.”

indiacurrents.com.India Currents, 12 Feb. 2003. Web. 12 Oct. 2017.

Rao, J. S. “Cinema: Old gold, new setting.” thehindu.com. The Hindu,28 June 2005. Web. 21 Oct.

2017.

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 11

Modernity, Nationalism and Culture: Cultural Transition

/Tension and ‘Naga’ Cultural Reality

Lalan Kishore Singh

Nationalism is a modern western phenomenon, originating in the mid-seventeenth and

eighteenth century throughout Europe. Its modernity stems from its strategy to circumscribe

communities, cultures and ethnicities, within homogeneous categories, by obliterating historical

identifications, and replacing them with a new nationally ‘constructed identity. While such a

project/politics of assimilation into homogeneous formations was less fortuitous in the western

context, its journey to the east, through a history of nationalist expansion through colonialism

meant the imposition of homogeneity over large geographical spaces that constituted of

ethnicities and cultures which were heterogeneous and plural. The expansionist politics of

colonial nationalism was further complicated by the competing western nationalist interests in

the east, especially, India, which reached its traumatic zenith during the two World Wars. The

World Wars, largely a conflict between western nationalistic interests, transformed the very plural

nature of colonized spaces. In the context of India, the assertion of a sense of Indian nationalism

against a British nationalism necessitated the invention of nationalist geographical boundaries

and the marginalization of distinct plural ethnic and cultural identities, in the interest of a

composite, homogeneous nationalist identity to challenge British nationalism. As Eric

Hobsbawm asserts, in his The Nation as Invented Tradition, ideas like ‘nation’, ‘nationalism’, the

nation-state, national symbol and history, “rest on exercises in social engineering which are often

deliberate and always innovative”. (Hobsbawm, 76) In this sense, Indian nationalism was not

simply imitative of the western notions of nationalism, but, more importantly, this homogeneity

was achieved, by a violent and traumatic process of transition where ethnic communities and

local cultures, through the overriding influence of modernity, were made to erase customs and

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tradition so as to ‘modernize’. Colonialism, through its project of promotion of western scientific

understanding of the world, and the projection of the ‘superior’ west as against the ‘barbaric’

other, had through its history, largely eroded local cultures of its customs and traditions. This

situation and the transition to a nationalist culture, was further aggravated by the Wars, especially

the Second World War.

In the Indian context, the North East, has been, since the Second World War and the

subsequent formation of the Indian Nation-State, an ideological battleground for this conflict

between nationalism, the emergent modernity and the local ethnic cultures, which found

themselves at a crossroad between the traditional perception of the world based on local

customs and the sweep of nationalism and modernity. The Indian experience of the World War

II was largely felt in the ‘Naga’ society, which since then, have struggled with an understanding

of the idea of Indian nationalism and its own identity within such a formation. In this regard,

Abraham Lotha’s The Hornbill Spirit: Nagas Living Their Nationalism, is an important intervention

from within the culture, in terms of an understanding of the ‘Naga’ society. The mission of the

book, as stated by the author, poignantly highlights the tension that the conflict between

nationalism and ethnicity orders the ‘Naga’ reality. He states that the work is,

about Nagas’ involvement in an ongoing struggle to affirm their lives as a free

nation, ….It is about peoples’ attempt to understand one another, and, at times,

about resistance to understanding, misunderstanding and refusal to understand.

(Lotha, 3-4)

The term ‘Naga’, in dominant nationalistic discourse, has indeed been, misunderstood,

‘normalized’ and homogenized to represent a collection of heterogeneous tribes, which though

similar in appearance, differ in terms of language and customs. The ‘Nagas’ are an ethnic group

of tribes, who, “migrated from Mongolia, and then through southwestern China and Myanmar”

to the geographical region which now constitutes India and Myanmar. As a group and its sub-

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groups, it is constitutive, according to Lotha, of sixty eight different tribes, in both India and

Myanmar. On the Indian side, there are, according to him, fourteen major Naga tribes. The

major Naga groups on the Indian side are the Angami, Ao, Chakhesang, Chang, Konyak,

Khiamniungan, Lotha, Phom, Pochury, Rengma, Sumi, Sangtam, Yimchungru and Zeliang

(Lotha, 7-11). The significant point to note in the data provided by him, however, is the politics

of amalgamation and exclusion in the process of classification of the Naga identity. As he points

out, “the exact number of Naga groups has not been ascertained. For one reason, historical

forces such as colonization have affected the naming and classifying of the different groups.”

(Lotha, 6) Furthermore, the tension in the transition, through coercion, Lotha hints, to an Indian

nationalism is palpable when he states that, “Naga nationalists have argued that the difference

among the Nagas and Indians and other ethnic groups in the country are from time

immemorial”, (Lotha, 228), implying that British colonialism, and the subsequent Indian

nationalism, has been instrumental in erasing a unique Naga culture.

If Lotha grapples with the politics of representation, Temsula Ao, a very distinguished voice

from within Naga society, meditates on what it means to be a Naga in the midst of the transition

to modernity. In her work, On Being a Naga, Ao states that, in the present age, “it is a complex

fate being a Naga...it is a double-edged sword” because the complexity lies “not only in the way

outsiders view us but also in the way we see ourselves”. (Ao, 1) This is an important articulation

of both how, perceptions of the culture from the exterior has been circulated in order to

marginalize it, and how, in turn, this has affected the manner in which Naga society has modified

itself, by erasing aspects of its unique culture, in order to wrestle with the ‘Other’. Temsula Ao

articulates this sense of marginalization, as a child growing up in another cultural space, through

a comment on the practise of ‘dog-eating’ amongst Nagas,

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 I often recollect an ultimate insult hurled at us…, ‘You dog-eating Nagas’. (kukur

Khuwa noga). After this onslaught on our very being, which was thus typified as

savage and therefore inferior, we would cringe at the insult and withdraw. (Ao, 1)

While such comments caused her pain in her childhood, she implies, it was only later in life that

she came around to acknowledging that the practise of eating dog meat, was not, according to

her culture, savage, but because of the belief “that it has great healing and rejuvenating

properties”. (Ao, 1) Similar was the case with the practise of ‘head-hunting’, a practise that has

always been employed by the dominant ideological formations, colonial or nationalistic, to

represent the Nagas as barbaric. Head-hunting, according to Ao, was reflective, in ancient Naga

society, of the of sovereignty over territory, amongst the tribes in their intermittent conflicts and

were governed by “well-articulated code that governed this practise in the contexts where they

were living at that stage of Naga history” (Ao, 3-4) But as a child, “growing up in an alien

environment”, she was always perceived as inferior because of her culture and customs, and the

symbols of her customs were employed to show her as barbaric. “Such attitudes persisted against

us as a people and we were always viewed with suspicion and often even antagonism by the

outsiders because our way of life was indeed different.” (Ao, 1-2) That sense of “Othering”

persists, according to her even to the present day:

In our own times too, we have experienced ostracism because of our food

preferences in cities like Delhi….Also our reputation as ‘naked’ people followed

us everywhere and the relative poverty of our village existence and ignorance

about the outside world only confirmed their view about us. (Ao, 2)

Such a perception about Naga culture, according to her, was “based on merely the apparent and

the perceived. What the biased eyes failed to recognize was the fact that these so-perceived

primitive, barbaric and backward people have had a long tradition of well-governed lives”. (Ao,

2)

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The anguish and frustration that echoes through Temsula Ao’s narrative expresses the tension

that the decolonization of India and the subsequent national ideology entailed for marginalized

communities, as they were coerced into surrendering the certain reality to a way of life that

sought to exert its hegemony over them. Before colonization and the subsequent amalgamation

into the Indian nation, The Nagas, were, according to her, ‘self-reliant’ people, dependant largely

on natural resources, and had its own traditions of tribal art which largely reflected itself in the

weaving of colourful clothes, in its “fashioning of utility and other household items like utensils”

and other items of daily use that reflected and blended with their way of life and the identity of

the various Naga tribes. Before the advent of Christianity, The Naga tribes had a belief-system

which was largely blended with nature and the different seasons of the year. Nature was

worshipped as benevolent and life sustaining. The advent of Christianity and colonial modernity

transformed the very nature of Naga existence -- “Being a Naga then in the way we thought of

ourselves, was held out to be negative” -- and from this juncture itself, the transformation of

Naga society commenced through a new religion and modern western knowledge -- “At this

stage of our history, being a Naga became an apologetic acknowledgement of a seemingly

inferior individual”. (Ao, 2-4)

The marginalization of Naga society, its stereotyping as barbaric, inferior and savage began,

according to Ao, with the advent of British colonialism and Christianity into the Naga cultural

and geographical space. While the British policy of isolating and restricting access to the rest of

its Indian colonial territory to the hills fostered the perception that the Nagas were primitive,

Christianity “sowed the seeds of doubt in our minds about our own intrinsic worth”. (Ao,4) The

mental and spiritual violence that sought to transform the enclosed reality of Naga existence, was

further complicated with the advent of the Indian nationalism. If British colonialism and

Christianity, in its engagement to Naga culture, narrativized them as barbaric and inferior, Indian

nationalism, by not recognising the unique nature of its culture, and by fostering the colonial

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perceptions about the society, further marginalized these tribes. Modernity and scientific

knowledge aggravated and destroyed Naga identity and culture, but not without violence.

Interrogating the nature of Naga identity in contemporary times, Temsula Ao asks,

What does it mean to be a Naga? Is the word Naga merely a political blanket

term to designate the countless tribes living in a more or less contiguous territory

of the country? What is the ‘commonness’ shared by these tribes that they have

been bunched under this umbrella term? Is it a common language? NO, because

there is no common Naga language. There are as many Naga languages as there

are tribes and the countless numbers of dialects within a tribe. Then is it a

common culture? If so, what is it? Can we specify it? Can we retrieve it and is it

desirable to do so? (Ao, 6-7)

The questions that Ao poses are significant and reflective of the how the nature of Naga cultural

reality has been moderated and articulated by the dominant historical ideologies, and how the

politics of nationalism has not recognized its uniqueness. Both colonialism and the subsequent

nationalism employed the term ‘Naga’ as a political term to homogenize what was essentially a

diverse cultural space, with different languages and different customs. Temsula Ao asserts the

need for Naga society to “look inwards -- into our past, in the villages among the folk” where

some remnants of the culture still survives, yet unadulterated by modernity, as the urban spaces

have become. In conclusion, it is imperative to understand not only history, not only as it is

articulated, but also discover the absences and gaps which such articulations enclose. An

understanding of Naga culture and customs, through these two texts, which are important

articulations, from within the cultural space, is reflective of the desire to comprehend the unique

nature of Naga reality.

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 Works Cited:

Ao, Temsula. On Being a Naga: Essays, Heritage Publishing House, Dimapur: Nagaland, 2014.

Print.

Hobsbawm, Eric. (ed) The Nation as Invented Tradition, in Hutchinson, John & Smith,

Anthony D., (ed), Nationalism, Oxford Reader, OUP, Oxford, New York, 1994. Print.

Lotha, Abraham. The Hornbill Spirit: Nagas Living Their Nationalism, Heritage Publishing House,

Dimapur: Nagaland, 2016. Print.

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 12

Our Contributors

Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay is Vice Chancellor of Bankura University, Bankura, West

Bengal, India.

Sourav Banerjee is Assistant Professor and Head, Department of English, at Mahitosh Nandy
Mahavidyalaya, Hooghly.

Late Professor Bruce Bennett was Professor, Department of English, ADFA, University of
New South Wales, Australia.

Sarbojit Biswas is Associate Professor of English at Bankura University, Bankura, West Bengal,
India.

Tathagata Das did his schooling from South Point High School, Kolkata and graduation from
St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. After finishing his M.A. from the University of Calcutta, he
obtained his M.Phil. Degree from Jadavpur University. After working at Kalinagar
Mahavidyalaya from July 2003 to May, 2010, he joined Bhangar Mahavidyalaya as an Assistant
Professor in June 2010. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Burdwan University on Australian
Literature. He has participated in and presented papers in a number of National and
International Seminars and has published papers on Australian Fiction and Poetry, Indian
English Drama and Fiction etc. in a number of reputed International and National journals.

Abhilash Dey and Indrani Mondal:

Abhilash Dey is a postgraduate Gold Medallist from The University of Burdwan. After
the completion of his M.Phil. on urban sexuality on Sarnath Banerjee's select graphic novels, he
has embarked on a Ph.D. on Indian Dalit graphic narratives at the same university. He is an
Assistant Professor at Memari College and a guest faculty at Burdwan MUC Women's College.
His research interests include Film Theory, Dalit Studies, Literature and Environment, Comics
Studies and Postcolonialism.

Indrani Mondal has graduated from Durgapur Carmel Convent and from Durgapur
Govt. College. She has completed her M.A. in English and Culture Studies this year from The
University of Burdwan. Her research interests include Television Studies, Popular Culture,
Animal Humanities, Environmentalism and Feminisms.

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Margaret McDonell has been a freelance editor and indexer for the last twenty years working in
a variety of organisations including government departments, educational institutions and
publishing houses. She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland, under the
supervision of Gillian Whitlock. Her research focuses on issues of cross-cultural writing and
editing. In 2005, McDonell held an Asialink residency working with Penguin India.

Aparajita Mukherjee completed her post-graduation from The University of Burdwan after
which she proceeded to complete her M.Phil. on the study of 'Female Gothic' in select novels.
Currently she is pursuing her Ph.D. from the same university on the Hermeneutics of Spatial
Infrastructure in select Victorian novels. Prior to her appointment as an Assistant Professor at
Patrasayer Mahavidyalaya, she was a lecturer at St. Xavier’s College, Burdwan. Her research
interests include Gothic literature, Feminism, Eco criticism, Diaspora and Culture Studies.

Ipsita Sengupta, Assistant Professor in English at Bankura University, stood first in first class
in her B.A. at Presidency College and in M.A. and M.Phil. at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU),
New Delhi. She is a PhD candidate at JNU, researching her doctoral thesis titled “Angst of
Forging Australianness: a Study of Australian Responses to India between 1890- 1950 with
Special Reference to Alfred Deakin and Mollie Skinner”. A recipient of the Australia-India
Council Fellowship in the 2009 round and the UGC-awarded Junior Research Fellowship, her
research interests include Australian-India connections, comparative literature, dialogue and
translations between spaces and cultures and South Asia studies.

Ipsita has contributed a number of book chapters and research papers in peer-reviewed
international and national journals such as Southerly, Antipodes, Indian Journal of Australian
Studies etc. Her chapter “Entangled: Deakin in India” features in Australia’s Asia (2012), an
highly-acclaimed, interdisciplinary meditation on the subject published from the University of
Western Australia Press; she has also contributed to the critical anthology from Palgrave
Macmillan (Switzerland) titled Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing (2017).

Email id.: ipsita444@gmail.com

Lalan Kishore Singh is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of English, Gauhati University. His
area of interest is War literature, Historiography and North East Indian Narratives.

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