Untitled

Travel Writing and the Transnational Author
Travel Writing and the

Transnational Author
Sam Knowles
© Sam Knowles 2014
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for Sally Carrie
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Travel Writing and Transnationalism 1

Part I Travelling Out
1 Michael Ondaatje: The ‘Prodigal–Foreigner’,
Reconstruction, and Transnational Boundaries 27
2 Vikram Seth: The Performing Wanderer
and Transnational Disintegration 70
Part II Travelling On
3 Amitav Ghosh: Uncertain Translation
and Transnational Confusion 113
4 Salman Rushdie: Political Dualities and Imperial
Transnationalisms 153
Conclusion: Transnational Literature on the Move 191
Notes 198
Bibliography 219
Index 235
vii
Acknowledgements
My interest in travel writing and transnational literature started with

the germ of an idea about racial identity, reviews, canonisation, and
hierarchy explored in the School of English at the University of Leeds.
My first debt of gratitude, then, is to the person whose initial encour-
agement fuelled my continued interest in such subjects; whose care-
ful supervision was responsible for shaping and editing many of my
better ideas, and quietly downgrading or excising others; and who
continues, to this day, to provide a great deal of intellectual support:
Graham Huggan. The contributions of many others – teachers, peers,
and editors – to the process of refining, shaping, and expressing my
ideas, as well as helping with some of the practicalities of research,
has been invaluable, and I thank them all, profusely: Claire Chambers,
Stephen Clingman, Sam Durrant, Russell Goulbourne, Sorcha Gunne,
Dave Gunning, Nasser Hussain, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Lindsey Moore,
Francis O’Gorman, Abigail Ward, and Tim Youngs. My investment in
the politics and aesthetics of literature, all over the world, owes much to
some inspiring teaching at the beginning of my academic career, from
Tim Cribb, and Ato Quayson. Later on, my work benefitted greatly from
intellectually stimulating interactions with colleagues in lecturing and
teaching at various universities: at the University of Leeds, Genevieve
Chavarria, Alberto Fernández Carbajal, Reshma Jagernath, and John
McLeod; at Newcastle University, James Procter and Neelam Srivastava;
at the University of Lincoln, John Dixon and Phil Langran.
There are many family and friends whose love and encouragement
has enabled the completion of this project, from the beginning of my
postgraduate study onwards. First and foremost among these are mem-
bers of my immediate family: throughout my academic career, Bob,
Sally, and Emily Knowles have given unconditional love and support –
both emotional and, all-too-importantly, financial. Even more signifi-
cantly, they inspired in me the values of fairness and tolerance, and the
healthy scepticism and boundless appetite for the written word that lie
behind my appreciation of literature; for this, I am very grateful. Then
there are friends, almost too numerous to mention: Allan Johnson,
a continuing source of academic and personal inspiration, even from
a distance; another intercontinental traveller, erstwhile housemate
Franki Dean; and Clare Barker, Anthony Carrigan, Niamh Cooney,
viii
Acknowledgements ix
Ian Fawcus, Gearóid Fitzgerald, Hannah Goldthorpe, Caroline Herbert,

Marc Hilliard, Clare Howard, Charlotte Kearns, Simon Lee, Hannah
Mullen, Katy Mullin, Heather O’Malley, Sue Perkins, Laura Scott, and
Agnes Woolley, who provided innumerable instances of encouragement,
hospitality, proof-reading, editorial comments, sharing of unpublished
work, emotional support, and all-important, stress-relieving chats about
anything other than my work.
Finally, my darling Sally Carrie, who has put up with so much and
supported so admirably over the years – particularly in the strenuous
period of revision in which I made the transformation from PhD into
book. She has always lovingly believed in me and my work, even when
I have not, and this has been especially true over the past couple of
years; this book really would not exist without her. ‘Thank you, love’
has always seemed a bit insufficient – but it will, yet again, have to do.
Material from the following chapters appears elsewhere in earlier
forms, and I am grateful to the editors and publishers for their permis-
sion to reprint this here. Chapter 1: ‘Sri Lankan “Gates of Fire”: Michael
Ondaatje’s Transnational Literature, from Running in the Family to
Anil’s Ghost’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 45:3, 2010, 429–41.
Chapter 2: ‘The Performing Wanderer: The Travel Writing of Vikram
Seth’. Studies in Travel Writing, 18:1, 2014, 57–73.
Introduction: Travel Writing
and Transnationalism
I Travel and the Transnational
‘What began it all’, asserts Michael Ondaatje in the opening pages of his
1982 travelogue Running in the Family, ‘was the bright bone of a dream
[he] could hardly hold onto’:
I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were

screaming and barking into the tropical landscape. The noises woke
me. I sat up on the uncomfortable sofa and I was in a jungle, hot,
sweating. Street lights bounced off the snow and into the room
through the hanging vines and ferns. (Ondaatje, 1984 [1982], 21)
Travel is everywhere in this passage, entwined with Ondaatje’s sinuous,

poetic prose: it is there in the idea of physical, geographical travel, seen
in the simultaneous presence of two very different landscapes (Canada
and Sri Lanka), and it is there in the fact that the narrative returns to
the ‘uncomfortable sofa’, yet the author remains travelling among the
‘vines and ferns’, half-way round the world. Light from the street lamps
travels across continents as well as through windows, linking snow and
jungle in Ondaatje’s imagination. Travel is there, most significantly, at
a linguistic level, highlighting the influence of what Hulme and Youngs
have described as the uncertain, ‘broad and ever-shifting genre’ of travel
writing (2002, 10) on the language itself: the dream is both ephemeral,
‘hardly held onto’, and vivid, ‘bright’; the syntax is always travelling,
as the confusion of ‘all of them were screaming’ makes it impossible to
separate out Ondaatje’s father from the mass of dogs.
The presence of travel in Ondaatje’s writing, here – at geopolitical,
semantic, and linguistic levels – underlines one of the principal aims
1
2 Travel Writing and the Transnational Author
of this book: to show the degree to which the experience of travel, and
authors’ own writing about this experience, informs their work as a
whole. While this book opens with an example from Ondaatje’s trave-
logue, in which the influence of travel would be expected to assume a
major role, the literary effects evident in this short excerpt are present
throughout his work – of all genres – and in the work of all four authors
in this book. The principal travelogues of Ondaatje, Vikram Seth (From
Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet, 1983), Amitav Ghosh
(In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale, 1992, and
Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma, 1998a) and Salman Rushdie (The
Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, 1987) have been subject to greater
or lesser degrees of critical attention, but have been largely read as
adjuncts or precursors to the rest of the authors’ respective oeuvres; the
intervention proposed by Travel Writing and the Transnational Author in
this critical discourse is to argue for the reinstatement of these authors’
works of travel writing in semantically and linguistically foundational
positions within their work as a whole.
In this context, the recent monograph Mobility at Large: Globalization,
Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing works towards two critically
important ends: it reasserts the centrality of a consideration of travel to
the study of contemporary literature, via a consideration of the ‘progres-
sive politics of mobility’ (Edwards and Graulund, 2012, 4), while also
re-presenting the travelogues of certain authors – Michael Ondaatje and
Amitav Ghosh among them – for consideration in an academic context.
This latter point is significant not least because the travelogues of such
prominent literary figures are subject to such little critical considera-
tion: each author’s work of travel writing is generally understood in one
of three ways: either it is an example of ‘literary digression’ (Gupta on
Seth, 2005, 96),1 or it is a simple ‘diary of [the author’s] travels’ (Bloom
on Rushdie, 2003, 268), or else the travel-focused elements of the work
are subsumed beneath supposedly more important considerations of a
sort of ‘search[ing] for roots’ poetry or work taking place in ‘the margins
of ethnography and fiction’ (Mukherjee on Ondaatje, 1985, 51; Daniel
and Peck on Ghosh, 1996, 6). Even when the travelogue in question is
the subject of considerable critical enquiry, as is the case for Ondaatje’s
Running in the Family and Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, its impact is read
as falling within a specific dichotomy: either its status as travel writing
is subsumed within a postcolonial reading of the text, or its postcolo-
nial import is overshadowed by a strong focus on travel writing. The
work of Edwards and Graulund in Mobility at Large owes a significant
debt to an essay collection put together by the two authors in 2010,
Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations. This was an important

recognition of the ongoing need to consider the relationship between
travel writing and troubling racial ideas, considered in further detail
below (Introduction, Section II); from this perspective, both Postcolonial
Travel Writing and Mobility at Large are notable successes. Their critical
strengths, however, are also forms of weakness: the very successes of
Edwards and Graulund’s work contribute to the critically received idea
that travel writing – particularly, in their words, ‘experimental’ travel
writing (2010, 1) – is a genre that can be efficiently separated off from
a corpus of more ‘serious’ literature. The intention of this monograph
is to work against this in employing a cross-generic approach to the
study of both travel writing and other forms of literature, particularly
those belonging to a category highlighted by the title of Edwards and
Graulund’s earlier work: postcolonial literature.
My cross-generic study starts by analysing the phenomenon of travel
writing, placing the travelogues of Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie
in their respective contexts, while also preparing for a consideration
of the ‘postcolonial canonicity’ of these four authors. Their work has
become an accepted part of the literary establishment, and analyses
have come to follow certain well-trodden critical paths: Ondaatje is a
‘disciplined and inspired’ author (Kertzer, 2003, 121); Seth is a writer of
‘great tact and poignancy’ (Adams, 2005); Ghosh is an ‘Indian pioneer
of English Literature’ (South Asian Diaspora, 2012); Rushdie’s work has
even ‘spawned a minor academic industry of its own’ (British Council
Literature, 2011); all four authors are embedded at the heart of the
critical establishment. My particular focus is on the travel writing of
these authors, as I want to re-establish the significance of travel writing
within the work of these authors precisely because of the important role
that the authors’ travelogues play within their later work. I explore this
significance through close analysis of their travel writing in conjunc-
tion with their later works of what Stephen Clingman has described as
‘transnational fiction’ (2009) – providing, in the case of each author,
some select examples.2
In performing this binary analysis, my intention is to unify two
fields of critical study. The idea of a postcolonial approach to the study
of travel writing was mooted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as
explained in the next section of the Introduction. In spite of this rea-
sonably substantial critical history, however, travel writing critics have
largely limited their discussions to examples of what has been described
as the travel writing genre, which has had the paradoxically opposing
effects of simultaneously promoting the importance of travel writing
within its own field and diminishing its role within literature more
generally. Studies of global, cosmopolitan, and transnational literatures
have also flourished; the majority of these, however, in the mould of a
relatively recent monograph from Robert Spencer (2011), focus on the
genre of ‘fiction’. Travel Writing and the Transnational Author – with an
equal focus on both halves of the work’s title – is the first monograph to
bring together these two different areas of discourse, in order to unpack
fully the significant role played by the travelogue as a formative influ-
ence on postcolonial authors. Moreover, in focusing first on an author’s
travelogue(s), and then on his transnational fiction, my aim is not to
reaffirm the sort of hierarchy implicitly put forward by the works of
Edwards and Graulund: I wish to give due weight to both species of
literature, acknowledging the network of interdependencies at play in
the travel-inflected works of these authors.
My initial focus on travel writing in this book stems from an aware-
ness of what Debbie Lisle, in her 2006 study The Global Politics of
Contemporary Travel Writing, describes as the ‘political commitments’
expressed by travelogues in their roles ‘as literary representations of
journeys across the globe’ (2006, 1). Lisle’s work is an important conside-
ration of the intersection of the literary form of the travelogue with the
actualities of global politics: her criticism aims to ‘politicise travelogues
by revealing their connection to the “serious” business of world affairs,
and their significance to the study and practice of global politics’ (2006,
1). This makes, however, quite a significant assumption; what in fact is a
travelogue? This consideration is central to a study such as this, and will
meet with several explorations in the course of the monograph; for the
moment, I take Lisle’s definition of them as ‘literary representations’ of
global journeys. Travelogues, in this case, as records of travel among –
and engagement with – other peoples and cultures, are not only valid
literary texts in their own right; they also accrue social and politicised
significance through their depiction of interactions with ‘foreign’ cul-
tures, in ‘foreign’ countries. Furthermore, Lisle goes on to assert the
universality of the form, for ‘not only are different kinds of people now
writing travelogues (including those who were previously colonised),
but the readership is also becoming more global and democratic’
(2006, 20). These are important assertions to make about cross-cultural
interaction – especially so in light of the global political upheaval that
has characterised relations between and within developed and develop-
ing countries throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century,
from the terrorist attacks on United States soil on 11 September 2001 to
the climax of the Tunisian revolution on 14 January 2011.
While I agree with the general thrust of Lisle’s arguments, this book
makes three important interventions: primarily, it addresses the fact that
travelogues, as works that ‘express political commitments’ with respect
to the travelling identities of their authors, are necessarily connected
with the later works of literature produced by these same authors; these
later works, in their structural and thematic dependences on travel,
I describe as ‘transnational’ literature. Also, I look at the contents of a key
phrase in Lisle’s work, contained in parentheses: ‘different kinds of peo-
ple [are] now writing travelogues (including those who were previously
colonised)’. This lack of detailed attention to the importance of the
travel writing of those who come from previously colonised countries
is a significant lacuna in Lisle’s work, and my focus on both the travel
writing and the transnational literature of four such authors is intended
to right this imbalance. And finally, in a synthesis of these two ideas,
I address the extent to which the mixed and ambivalent origins of these
particular authors’ written works call into question their very status as
individuals with ‘previously colonised’ origins – I consider each author’s
whole oeuvre less as a reflection on particular postcolonial or national
experiences than as an interrogation of the relationship between the
idea of travel and the concept of transnational identity.
In any case, the term ‘postcolonial’ has a long and complex academic
history. To take one example, although the earliest dictionary citation
for ‘postcolonial’ is 1987 (Simpson et al. [eds], 2013), Neil Lazarus
asserts that the term has been in use in critical circles since ‘the late
1970s’ (2004, 1). Lazarus proceeds to explain that the ‘simultaneous
emergence’ of the terms ‘colonial discourse theory’ and ‘postcolonial
literary studies’ can, ‘for convenience, [be] link[ed…] to 1978, the date
of publication of Said’s Orientalism’ (2004, 14–15). Edward Said’s land-
mark work of cultural, literary, and political analysis is based on the
principal thesis that ‘Orientalism’ is a ‘collective notion identifying “us”
Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans’ and represents – in the
form of a ‘re-presence, or a representation’ – ‘a certain will or intention to
understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate,
what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world’ (2003
[1978], 7, 21, 12; emphases original).3 Said’s sense of ‘collective notions’
structuring the histories and politics of ‘those’ and ‘us’ triggered a wave
of postcolonial cultural criticism that has lasted over 30 years. Travel
Writing and the Transnational Author is indebted to this idea of ‘postco-
lonialism’, which has been explored by numerous critics over the years:
from articles in the 1980s and early 1990s from Homi Bhabha (1983),
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), and Kwame Anthony Appiah (1991);
to longer works by Padmini Mongia (1996), Leela Gandhi (1998), John

McLeod (2000), Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (2007
[2000]), Robert Young (2003), and Graham Huggan and Ian Law (2009).4
The critical ubiquity of this term, however, must be received with a
certain amount of caution in the context of these particular authors. As
Sangeeta Ray explores in her essay on Michael Ondaatje, quoting from
Anne McClintock’s observations on ‘singular […] postcolonial[ism]’
(McClintock, 1992, 86):
The word [‘postcolonial’] must be used carefully, selectively, and

along with other terms that would enable a more cogent political
critique of the […] imbalances of power that continue to proliferate
in the current geopolitical arena.
[…Ondaatje’s work] illuminates the need to pay close attention to
various postcolonial social locations in order to highlight ‘how the
singular category postcolonial may license too readily a panoptic
tendency to view the globe within generic abstractions voided of
political nuance’. (Ray, 1993, 38, 55)
For Ondaatje, then, and for the other authors on whom I focus in this
book, readings that focus predominantly on ‘the postcolonial’ (a use
of the definite article that Ray asserts ‘legitimizes a singularity, eras-
ing the crucial differences between various countries’ [1993, 38]) risk
undermining the need to pay close attention to ‘various […] social loca-
tions’ (1993, 55) in the course of textual and cultural analysis. While
Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie all remain interested in the effects
of colonialism on travel, a sole focus on this does not fully account for
the political sensibilities of their work, which are shaped as much by
changing patterns of contemporary mobility as by the imperial systems
of the past.
This can be seen in their ambivalent attitudes towards the very adjec-
tive ‘postcolonial’, and its cognates. In a 2001 interview, Ondaatje’s
association of his work with ‘the important things […] in Asian writing’
is counterbalanced by the phrase ‘we in the West’ (Coughlan, 2001); Seth
has asserted that ‘the term [“post-colonial”] is o.k. as far as it goes as an
academic category, but for the person being categorized (i.e. the writer),
it’s best not to concentrate on it’ (HarperCollins Publishers, n.d.); Ghosh
wrote an open letter explaining his rejection of the 2001 Commonwealth
Writers Prize on the grounds that such a title ‘anchors an area of con-
temporary writing […] within a disputed aspect of the past‘ and rates
the author according to the fact that he ‘belong[s] to a region that was
once conquered and ruled by Imperial Britain’ (Ghosh, 2001); and

Rushdie entitled a whole essay, written some years before the works
of fiction and travel writing included in this book, ‘“Commonwealth
Literature” Does Not Exist’ (Rushdie, 1991, 61–70; essay written 1983).
In Travel Writing and the Transnational Author, I posit the use of the word
‘transnational’ to describe these authors; this term not only attempts
to address the power imbalances encoded in the rejected adjectives
‘postcolonial’ and ‘Commonwealth’, but also incorporates the concern
with travel writing that is a key aspect of my work.
Describing these authors as ‘transnational’ emphasises the extent to
which Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie are important in their mem-
bership of Khachig Tölölyan’s ‘exemplary communities of the transna-
tional moment’ (1991, 5). Although Tölölyan, writing over two decades
ago, was speaking from the perspective of a study of ‘diaspora’ – a term
the usefulness of which is interrogated below (Introduction, Section III) –
his assertions about transnationalism are worth acknowledging:
Diasporas are emblems of transnationalism because they embody the

question of borders, which is at the heart of any adequate definition
of the Others of the nation-state. (1991, 6)
The ‘question of borders’ is at the centre both of Tölölyan’s ‘transnational

moment’ and of the travel writing and transnational literature of the
authors in this book. To see how, it is helpful to turn to Ien Ang’s use of
Tölölyan’s concept, describing this ‘moment’ as lending ‘contemporary
currency’ to ideas of diaspora and hybridity through ‘the economic,
political and cultural erosion of the modern nation-state as a result of
postmodern capitalist globalisation’ (Ang, 2003, 143).5 Ondaatje, Seth,
Ghosh, and Rushdie have – through works of travel writing and transna-
tional literature – explored this very process of ‘cultural erosion’. Their
diasporic statuses (now connected with Canada, the United States, and
the United Kingdom) are – as with many former migrants – inflected
by the relationships they maintain with those in their countries of
origin. The ‘transnational moment’ is central to their expression of this
‘erosion’, and to the ways in which their work comes to terms with a
multiplicity of national affiliations. I approach these authors’ various
transnationalisms – personal, textual, geopolitical – through their travel
writing, as this is the most immediate expression of their feelings and
concerns about belonging, movement, and identity, all concepts central
to their literary work. The next section of my introduction places this
approach in the context of recent studies in travel writing.
II An Introduction to Travel Writing Studies
Any academic survey laying the groundwork for a study of Western-

influenced travel writing such as that of Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh, and
Rushdie must bear in mind two significant points. Firstly, travel writing
is neither an exclusively Western nor a particularly new phenomenon.
Secondly, the adjective ‘Western’ – in its inclusion of the silent but
implied opposite, ‘Eastern’, and thereby the centuries of subjugation
and deceit encoded in this spatial opposition of Occident and Orient –
is one loaded with a degree of geopolitical complexity that must be
taken into account in any consideration of what Fredric Jameson once
famously referred to as ‘third-world literature’ (1986).6 This book,
however, is concerned primarily with the stylistic and structural
dependences of certain works of transnational literature – by Ondaatje,
Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie – on these authors’ own travelogues, rather
than their reliance on a particular tradition of writing, either Western
or Eastern. Indeed, the term ‘transnational’ is employed to complicate
such geopolitical binaries as West/East, developed/developing, and
privileged/disadvantaged. I am interested in the ways in which certain
writers have adopted and adapted their own interpretations of the expe-
rience of travel into millennial7 works of literature: my focus is not on
the general history of travel writing, in any of its many geographical
or political manifestations, but on a specific set of stylistic and formal
uses to which certain structures and themes deriving from the experi-
ence of writing travelogues have been put at the turn of the twenty-first
century. Similarly, I do not mean to offer an exhaustive survey of the
hundreds of works written by travellers from countries situated outside
areas of the world conventionally seen as Western.8
Debbie Lisle’s work, introduced above, interrogates the imperialist
roots of Western travel writing, and its participation in ‘the interna-
tional realm’ through a dissemination of ‘the goals of Empire’: ‘stories
of “faraway lands” were crucial in establishing the unequal, unjust and
exploitative relations of colonial rule’ (2006, 1). She states that ‘many
post-colonial scholars have examined the role of travel writing during
Empire’, and positions her own study as a development of this, engaging
with the relationship between ‘contemporary travel writing [and] its
colonial legacy’ (2006, 1). Exploring the link between travel writing
and colonialism was a well-trodden path from the late 1980s to the
early 2000s, with specific monographs such as Patrick Brantlinger’s
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (1988),
Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992), David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of
Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial

Administration (1993), J.M. Blaut’s The Colonizer’s Model of the World:
Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (1993), Tim Youngs’s
Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (1994), and Patrick
Holland and Graham Huggan’s Tourists with Typewriters (1998), as
well as collections of theoretical and historical essays such as Travel
Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (Clark, 1999) and The
Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Hulme and Youngs, 2002). Lisle,
however, is the first critic to draw an explicit comparison between
the differing impacts on world politics of ‘the quasi-fictional genre of
travel writing’ and ‘the policy documents, government press releases,
parliamentary debates and media stories that are usually privileged
in [an international] context’ (2006, 1). She is also particularly adept
at explaining the inter-relation of politics and literature in the arena
of travel writing, explaining that the act of writing about travel itself
‘engenders contemporary power formations that are as unequal, unjust
and exploitative as those forged during Empire’ (2006, 10). In underlin-
ing the perpetuation of these political influences, Lisle is developing
Holland and Huggan’s point that travel writing ‘can be seen – though
not exclusively – as an imperialist discourse through which dominant
cultures (white, male, Euro-American, middle-class) seek to ingratiate
themselves, often at others’ expense’ (Holland and Huggan, 1998, xiii).
This parenthesis – ‘(white, male, Euro-American, middle-class)’ – is an
interesting one, and while the racial awareness that undergirds my work
offers ample opportunity for exploration of two of these terms (‘white-
ness’ and ‘Euro-Americanness’), issues of gender and class, to take the
remaining two adjectives, are less well represented. The fact that all four
authors in this study are male is certainly not unremarkable, not least
because their gender gave them access to certain degrees of privilege at
all-male institutions. Ondaatje was educated at the prestigious Dulwich
College, London; Rushdie attended The Cathedral and John Cannon
School, Mumbai, one of the oldest schools in India, and the exclusive
Rugby School on his arrival in the UK; finally, both Seth and Ghosh
were pupils at The Doon School, Dehradun.9 In my study of their lite-
rary work, however, the issue of gender is one that I prefer to comment
on in the context of particular examples in these authors’ works of
transnational literature, rather than making it a focal point of my inves-
tigations of the authors themselves.10 For example, when Amitav Ghosh
visits the house of a friend in In an Antique Land, and is challenged by
a woman, an episode explored in some detail below (Chapter 3, Section
II.ii), his dismissive treatment of the other says much about both his
reaction to anthropological questions throughout the work and also

his unconscious affirmation of a subject-position – whether that of
the dominant male, or that of the privileged (and similarly dominant)
investigator – that he purports to reject in the course of his interactions
with the Egyptian fellaheen.
The question of class-related privilege is another that is raised by
Holland and Huggan’s aside, and is evident in all four authors. Of par-
ticular note, here, is the existence led by Ondaatje as a boy, which was
sheltered both metaphorically and literally. When he returns to the
family home at the beginning of Running in the Family, the simultaneous
security and lassitude of his situation in ‘the old governor’s home in
Jaffna’ are evident:
Here, in this spacious centre of the labyrinth of 18th-century Dutch

defense I sit on one of the giant sofas, in the noisy solitude of the
afternoon while the rest of the house is asleep. (1984 [1982], 25)
The privilege inherent in this description is clear, from the start, as

we acknowledge that it is only those of the upper-middle and upper
classes in Jaffna who can historically have afforded a ‘spacious centre’.
Although it is important to remain aware of this, however, as the ques-
tion of class-oriented privilege often recurs in considering these authors,
it is more useful to a transnational reading of their literary work to con-
sider the modes and ethics of their respective travelling existences than
to analyse the comfortable surroundings from which they originate.11
Another key aspect of Lisle’s study is her emphasis on the extent to
which travelogues have been largely side-lined by the critical establish-
ment. In spite of the political and symbolic connections outlined by
Lisle, travelogues barely register on the literary radar: their ‘received
status’ is as a ‘minor literary genre’. Lisle details the rise in ‘Trip Lit’
analysis, ‘one of the new and fashionable areas for literary criticism’, but
makes it clear that ‘this “new” area of criticism has, for the most part,
been content to focus on travel writing from the colonial era, which
has left contemporary travel writing relatively free of critical analysis’
(2006, 18–19). From academia (syllabuses, set texts, and almost all levels
of teaching) to popular culture (book clubs and shops), ‘travel writing’
is a genre that is, for the most part, thought of as separate from the
body of ‘fiction’.12 To make a more specific distinction: those who write
books addressing travel-related concerns are either labelled ‘travel writ-
ers’ or ‘authors’: ‘travel writing’ and ‘authorship’ are mutually exclusive.
‘Travel writing’ is either a hobby, or else it is a paid job, often referred to

in its capacity as a branch of that most prosaic of literary occupations:
journalism. Works classed as ‘travel writing’ are always already lesser
than that which is created by an ‘author’: the output of the latter is
seen as fundamentally more creative and imaginative than that of the
‘travel writer’.13
A further inference can be drawn from Lisle’s opening gambit, and
from her entire work: political positions are often always already
implicated in the publication of a travelogue, whether in its aesthetic
or ethical (re)presentation. Joan-Pau Rubiés also emphasises this in his
introduction to ethnographic representations in the genre, describing
a constant ‘political dimension [to] the description of other peoples
in travel writing’ (2002, 255). Moreover, these descriptions have his-
torically often been mediated by those with political agendas of their
own; Rubiés asserts, for example, that ‘in some cases it is possible to
separate the sober description of the sailor from the elaboration of the
professional writer, as when [John] Hawkesworth undertook to “write
up” the official account of [Captain] Cook’s first voyage’, landing on
Tahiti in 1769 (2002, 249).14 The significance of the travelogue, both
in the political arena and in the context of other cultural productions,
undermines the ‘minority’ of the ‘received status’ outlined by Lisle in
her introduction (2006, 1), not only in the literary realm, but within
a global political understanding. Given the acknowledged political
complexities of the travelogue’s origins, it is surprising that Lisle rel-
egates a large swathe of the genre to the status of a textual aside, using
the aforementioned parenthesis: ‘different kinds of people [are] now
writing travelogues (including those who were previously colonised)’.
Although Lisle does not entirely fail to address the travel writing of
authors connected with the idea of being ‘previously colonised’,15 she
makes scant mention when focusing on such writers of the fact that
they have all, effectively, emerged from her earlier parenthesis. In
this book, I reassert the importance of this writing both in the study
of the travel writing genre and in more general terms: to ignore this
most interesting manifestation of travel writing is to license a certain
degree of forgetfulness about the troubled racialising ideas buried
within the concept, and located at the heart of any literature that
addresses ideas of identity, belonging, and what it means to be ‘at
home’. I believe that transnational literature, which addresses these
very topics, is tied up with the travel writing that precedes it in hith-
erto unacknowledged ways.
To reassert the importance of the travelogue, it is essential to study

contemporary travel writing in terms of its production by those authors
who originate in countries which have, in the main, traditionally been
the object of travel – and, thus, of travel writing – rather than the
source of travellers (and writers, and traveller/writers).16 To return to
the work of Holland and Huggan, this concept of ‘countertravel writing’
is a direct subversion of travel writing as an ‘imperialist discourse
through which dominant cultures […] seek to ingratiate themselves,
often at others’ expense’: here, the idea of being ‘at others’ expense’ is
turned on its head by the fact of the authors’ writing from a situation in
which they are themselves ‘other’ (1998, 50, emphasis original). While
Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie share a ‘countertravel’ allegiance,
it is vitally important that their writing not be assigned to the same
category: Ondaatje’s origins in a Dutch–Tamil–Sinhalese–Portuguese
(Ceylonese, now Sri Lankan) family are very different from the familial
connections of Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie to various locations within
the Indian subcontinent itself; equally, Seth’s links to pre-World-War-II
Germany, through his German–Jewish maternal great-aunt, influence
him in a different way from the respective African and South American
backgrounds to the travelogues of Ghosh and Rushdie.
Moving beyond the studies of Lisle, Holland and Huggan, and their
predecessors, Travel Writing and the Transnational Author is an analysis
of the literary and political structures of travel writing as they are mani-
fested in and with respect to transnational literature. The examples of
transnational literature in this work illustrate these influences, display-
ing a debt to the travelogues of their respective authors. Moreover,
this literature engages with the political ideas about travel writing that
earlier critics largely avoid. Lisle shows a perceptiveness in picking up
on the lack of critical attention given to travel writing, and Holland and
Huggan make it clear ‘countertravel’ writing is an important compo-
nent of the genre; I believe, though, it is necessary to take these points
further, analysing to what extent a lack of attention is a direct result
of travel writing’s imperialist influences. This book will not revisit the
roots of travel writing in terms of a direct postcolonial analysis of texts
and situations – quite apart from my decision to move beyond the term
‘postcolonial’, the ground has been covered already, in some detail and
often with great success.17 Emphasising a connection between ‘travel
writing’ and ‘transnational literature’ allows me to offer an analysis of
these writers – all of whom have written travelogues from the sort of
formerly colonised position Lisle downgrades in importance – in broader
terms, eschewing a rigid adherence to the ‘postcolonial’. The next section
of this Introduction proceeds to explore the implications of such a

departure from the ‘postcolonial’, for the study of travel writing and for
an understanding of what makes this literature ‘transnational’.
III Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, or Both?
The aforementioned collection of essays from Edwards and Graulund,

Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations, aims to bridge the gap
between the ideas of ‘travel writing’ and ‘postcolonial literature’. The
editors’ stance on the subject is outlined in the introduction:
In the field of postcolonial studies, travel writing has often been

demonized. Critics have, at times, aligned travel narratives with
other textual practices associated with colonial expansion – mapping,
botany, ethnography, journalism and so on – to suggest that travel
writing disseminated discourses of difference that were then used to
justify colonial projects. (2010, 1)
Edwards and Graulund assert that, contrary to the imperialism-centred

critical studies of Pratt, Spurr, and the like (see above, Section II), their
work is part of a recuperative critical trajectory in the study of travel
writing that focuses more on the imaginative possibilities it reveals
than the colonialist tensions it conceals. They ‘see travel writing as
offering possibilities for exploring transnational movements such as
the Atlantic triangle and the phenomenology of diaspora and other
forms of enforced migration’ (2010, 2).
The problem, here, is one of definitions: the terms segue into one another,
with ‘postcolonial’ giving way to ‘transnational movements’, ‘diaspora’,
and even ‘enforced migration’: there is an implicit equivalence. The terms,
however, refer to very different critical focuses. ‘Postcolonialism’, in one
of John McLeod’s helpful definitions, involves ‘reading texts produced
by writers from countries with a history of colonialism, primarily those
texts concerned with the workings and legacy of colonialism in either the
past or the present’ (2000, 33). A definition offered by Ashcroft, Griffiths,
and Tiffin is even more succinct: postcolonialism ‘deals with the effects of
colonization on cultures and societies’ (2007 [2000], 168). The discipline of
‘postcolonial studies’, then, as Edwards and Graulund indeed make clear
in their opening remarks, depends on a definite awareness of the after-
effects of colonialism. The term ‘diaspora’, however, while it is often rightly
attached to ideas of colonial expansion as an obvious product of such trau-
matic geopolitical movements, carries resonances relating to detachment
and movement resulting from etymological roots in ‘The Dispersion

[of the] Hellenistic Jews’ (Simpson et al. [eds], 2013). Jana Evans Braziel
and Anita Mannur explain further, in their introduction to this term:
From the Greek term diasperien, from dia-, ‘across’ and -sperien, ‘to sow
or scatter seeds,’ diaspora can perhaps be seen as a naming of the other
which has historically referred to displaced communities of people
who have been dislocated from their native homeland through the
movements of migration, immigration, or exile. (2003, 1)18
While this passage initially implies a degree of coercion enacted on

those being ‘dislocated’, there is a subsequent lack of agency, as ‘com-
munities of people’ undergo the ‘movements of migration, immigra-
tion, or exile’: this definition of diaspora separates the concept from the
‘enforced migration’ of Edwards and Graulund.
There is another adjective, which, though not used by Edwards and
Graulund, has become increasingly associated with the ‘postcolonial’:
‘cosmopolitan’. Use of the term has increased dramatically in recent
years,19 as we enter a phase of history involving coming to terms with
unpleasant histories of inter-cultural difference – from fifty-, sixty-,
and seventy-year anniversaries of the initiation of the Nazi German
Holocaust to the proliferation of Western museums tackling the legacy
of slavery, or the hundredth anniversary apology to the Hawaiian peo-
ple in 1994 to the Australian Government’s 2008 apology to ‘the lost
generations’. It is important to differentiate between the ‘cosmopolitan’
and the ‘transnational’, however: as Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it,
the adjective ‘cosmopolitan’ should be traced back to its literal Greek
meaning; ‘cosmopolitans’ are ‘citizens of the world’ (2005, 213). Yet
the Greek ‘polis’, city-state, was by no means open to everyone: phi-
losophies of gender and race meant that only a small percentage of the
male population were considered to be what in modern terms would
be called ‘citizens’, with political and social autonomy. So, while the
liberal attitude behind such constructions as Appiah’s ‘rooted cosmo-
politanism’ and Homi Bhabha’s ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (2000)
is to be commended, the word often cannot free itself of its classed,
racialised, gendered history. Bhabha unwittingly reveals this, even as
he presents himself as a ‘vernacular cosmopolitan’, by describing his
roots in ‘the Parsi middle classes’ and his tales of a ‘college bedroom,
at Oxford’ (2000, 135, 136). The ‘transnational’, then, indicates a more
fluid attitude to questions of race and class, travel and belonging, home
and away than that indicated by the ‘cosmopolitan’.
The literature analysed in Travel Writing and the Transnational Author

is not only a product of the ‘effects’ that are either implicit or explicit
in the definitions of postcolonialism advanced by McLeod and others,
nor is it solely an exploration of the ‘scattering’ in the idea of diaspora
as put forward by Evans Braziel and Mannur, nor is it just a response
to the cosmopolitan ideas of Appiah and Bhabha. The words ‘only’,
‘solely’, and ‘just’ are chosen with care, as I do not wish to jettison any
of these ideas completely; rather, what is needed is a term offering a new
way of looking at how the complexities, ambiguities, and dichotomies
of the writing and identity of authors are influenced by the experience
of travel. I suggest the ‘transnational’, as a term which, above all, does
not exclude or deny the other categorisations on offer but rather com-
bines and re-presents them. Though ‘transnational’ is used by Edwards
and Graulund, they present it as a synonym for ‘diaspora’ or ‘enforced
migration’; Travel Writing and the Transnational Author puts forward a
different definition, exploring the complexities of the work of Ondaatje,
Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie. While they all engage with certain important
aspects of all these terms, it is only by referring to their status as ‘trans-
national’ that it is possible to explore the various facets of their work.
Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake’s work is a useful corollary to
these ideas, in their setting up of the transnational in opposition to the
postcolonial:
[The] global/local synergy within what we will track as the transna-

tional imaginary enlivens and molests the textures of everyday life
and spaces of subjectivity and reshapes those contemporary struc-
tures of feeling some culture critics […] consecrate as ‘postcolonial’
resistance. (1996, 2, emphasis original)
This willingness to let go of the idea of ‘“postcolonial” resistance’ is sur-

prising, given a later conclusion that ‘international media spectacles […]
and narratives remain linked to uneven centers and structures of
domination [that] it would be misleading to sublimate as “postcolonial”’
(1996, 11). The ‘transnational imaginary’, though, is a useful idea:
What we […] track as the ‘transnational imaginary’ comprises the

as-yet-unfigured horizon of contemporary cultural production by
which national spaces/identities of political allegiance and economic
regulation are being undone and imagined communities of modernity
are being reshaped at the macropolitical (global) and micropolitical
(cultural) levels of everyday existence. (1996, 6, emphasis original)
This development of Benedict Anderson’s pioneering work on ‘imagined

communities’ (1983) locates the transnational both as a reshaping of
the national and as a response to the idea of modernity. Although it is
stylistically limiting – and historically misleading – to classify Ondaatje,
Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie as solely ‘modernist writers’, their literature
certainly articulates the sort of response to the modern world that
Wilson and Dissanayake see in the transnational.
Part of the argument put forward by Wilson and Dissanayake relies on
an acknowledged debt to a work linking concepts of transnationalism
and translation: Homi K. Bhabha’s 1994 essay ‘The Postcolonial and the
Postmodern’. Early in the collection in which this essay is included, The
Location of Culture, Bhabha connects these ideas: in a phrase that itself
echoes Benedict Anderson, the author refers to the ‘transnational and
translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities’ (2004
[1994], 7). It is only in the piece from which Wilson and Dissanayake
quote, however – ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern’ – that Bhabha
dwells on this connection:
Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and trans-

lational. It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial
discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement
[…It] is translational because such spatial histories of displacement
[…] make the question of how culture signifies […] a rather complex
issue. (2004 [1994], 247, emphasis added)
There are two things to note. Firstly, transnationality is inextricably

linked with ‘histories of cultural displacement’; secondly, the connec-
tion between the transnational and the translational is a question of
‘survival’. I believe the idea of the transnational goes beyond this, as is
hinted at by Bhabha himself in a later essay in the collection:
In the transnational world [the community] becomes the border-

problem of the diasporic, the migrant, the refugee. Binary divisions
of social space neglect the profound temporal disjunction – the
translational time and space – through which minority communities
negotiate their collective identifications. (2004 [1994], 330–31)
This negotiation is undertaken by all four authors in this monograph, as

complementary readings of their respective works of travel writing and
transnational literature create a transnational/translational time and
space that is the ultimate cross-cultural development of what Mikhail

Bakhtin described as the ‘chronotope’.20
The authors in this monograph extend Bhabha’s initial definition of
the transnational from one tied to historically specific migration to one
incorporating multiple ambivalences and national affiliations. As trans-
national authors, they are writers of doublings and near-contradictions:
theirs are ‘writing selves’ bound up with the concept of dichotomy, they
are quick to contemplate the idea of being both one thing and another,
and they demonstrate an ability to negotiate the boundary between
different identities, affiliations, or homes. The respective transnational
situations of Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie are expressed not only
in their multivalent identities and histories, but also in certain aspects
of form in their writing: this monograph’s various analyses of transna-
tional textuality demonstrate that the binaries and dichotomies of trans-
nationalism are displayed in the slippages, ellipses, and generic shifts of
their writing; furthermore, this travel-inflected connection of content
and form underlines the importance of an interdisciplinary approach
to my work on the transnational. The concept of transnationalism
is an important interdisciplinary tool in the construction of peaceful
human relationships; Johan Galtung, for example, has described a link
between interdisciplinarity and peace: ‘functionally diverse women and
men suffer over time from multiple forms of discrimination or violence.
Hence the importance of interdisciplinarity’ (2010, n.p.).21 However,
I am aware of the extent to which violent political action is often seen
as transnational: Sri Lanka (Chapter 1), India–China–Tibet (Chapter 2),
Egypt and Burma (Chapter 3), and Central America and Fiji (Chapter 4)
are all areas of the world that have seen – and, in many cases, are still
undergoing – great political disturbance, presenting a wholly different
side to the idea of transnationalism. While an awareness of this fraught
geopolitics is of course necessary in any extended discussion of this kind –
especially one that focuses on the transnational affiliative networks
that lie behind literary works such as these – it is not something on
which Travel Writing and the Transnational Author dwells. The disturbed
regional geopolitics of the various transnational landscapes is more of
a background to my work than a direct focus of it, as much as I remain
aware of – and address, particularly in analysing Anil’s Ghost – the inevi-
table intersections of aesthetics and violence.
Transnational literature offers insights into the contemporary world
of a unique nature: straddling the different fields of literary analysis,
postcolonial studies, travel criticism, and cultural geography (among
many others), a study of transnational literature involves an engagement

with the facts and fictions of many aspects of our global surroundings.
It does this in one respect through a negotiation of the boundary
between fact and fiction. Transnational literature plays with the same
generic confusions as travel writing: it is positioned between the objec-
tive narration of a factual, historical situation – the realities of each
individual transnational experience – and the creativity of fiction,
often involving a heavily subjective element.22 These generic insta-
bilities are worth exploring in this context, and the final section of
the Introduction explores some of the formal methodology behind the
work in Travel Writing and the Transnational Author, before sketching an
overview of the monograph’s structure and subject matter.
IV Transnational Form and Structure
Stephen Clingman, in his analysis of transnational fiction, asserts the

importance of a study of the transnational, stressing the universal
applicability of such literature through his study of a perpetually ‘navi-
gational’ and disrupted ‘transnational space’:
[This is a] significant space for our times, for we are ourselves in tran-
sition, with very few secure coordinates. […] We are in provisional,
transitional space, still trying to work out its protocols. This is why
[transnational] novels speak to us with a degree of urgency. (2009, 26)
This idea of a ‘navigational’, ‘transitional’ state is particularly useful to

keep in mind in the context of Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie,
especially in light of Clingman’s assertion that ‘whether it concerns lan-
guage, fiction, identity, or location, navigation does not mean crossing
or having crossed, but being in the space of crossing’ (2009, 24–25; empha-
sis original). Clingman puts forward several examples of transnational
literary form that support the importance of navigation: starting with
extended reflections on metaphor and metonymy (12 ff.), he looks at
the ‘syntactic progression of linkage and association’ at the level of lines
and paragraphs (37), the ‘unanchor[ing]’ or disruption of time (64), a
writing of ‘spaces and […] gaps’ that is ‘disrupted, gapped, synaptic’ (75,
78), a ‘reordering [of] narrative [that] reveals primarily that sequence is
beyond’ the characters (95), and a series of unmarked narrative transi-
tions that ‘we have to work out, [as] the novel itself becomes a kind
of syntax’ (164); in summary, transnational fiction is ‘a writing whose
every contemplation is the nature of the transitive, of the boundary,
of its protocols and obligations’ (185). Clingman’s early identification

of two aspects of the transnational is the basis of my methodological
approach:
What makes [sic] fiction transnational are questions of form. […] On

one level [this] has to do with recognizable formal characteristics
in the novels: their structures of time and space […] On another
[…] level, we should understand form as what informs these novels
and produces their more visible patterns. (2009, 10–11; emphases
original)
While I utilise historical, geographical, and anthropological perspectives

to study the transnational identities of the authors under consideration,
these are placed in conversation with the specific textualities of the
authors’ literary works: the literature of the four authors is the primary
object of focus in Travel Writing and the Transnational Author. In-depth
critical analyses of the authors’ works of travel writing and transnational
literature trace the emergence of a species of transnational textuality in
the syntactical and narrative forms of their writing that follows the ‘dis-
rupted, gapped, synaptic’ contours of Clingman’s definition. Ellipsis and
fragmentation are of particular significance for Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh,
and Rushdie, as their writing enacts the uncertainties, doublings, and
multiple affiliations of their transnational identities.
In one respect I distance myself from Clingman’s analysis, for his
discussion of form refers specifically to ‘transnational fiction’, through
various analyses of the transnational novel. Though his study covers
the work of W.G. Sebald, a writer whom Clingman admits ‘resisted the
term “novel”’, Clingman refers to the texts on which he focuses almost
exclusively as ‘novels’, and it is clear his term ‘transnational fiction’
constitutes a new way of thinking about the novel form.23 In contrast,
I believe it is necessary, when focusing on the transnational, to look
beyond this generic limitation: indeed, Clingman himself later admits
that the word ‘fiction’ comes from the Latin fingere, ‘to fashion, mould,
imagine, invent’; or, one might say, to form (2009, 188).24 In the cases
of Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie, the works of fiction that are
formed are not always classifiable as novels: Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, for
example, the focus of the second half of Chapter 1, is a prime example
of a text that freely crosses generic boundaries, emphasising the central-
ity of ideas of travel writing, storytelling, and troubled transnational
belonging to what is ostensibly a novel. Ideas about disrupting binaries,
crossing boundaries, and ‘dwelling-in-travel’, central to transnational
literature, depend on the presence of travel within and alongside writing;

to focus solely on the novel is to divorce transnational literature from
the transnational writer – and, crucially, the transnational space – out
of which this literature emerges.25
While I am anxious to steer clear of grand biographical assertions,
it is undeniable that the biographical element of travel writing must
be accounted for, and any analysis of travel writing must tread the
thin line between over-personalising specificity and de-subjectified
vagueness – between stressing the connections linking author and text,
and emphasising the importance of broader ideas about travel. Travel
writing is not solely autobiography; instead, as Paul Theroux puts it in
The Great Railway Bazaar, the genre ‘moves from journalism [through]
fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo [the train Theroux
takes to Osaka, on his own journey through Japan] at autobiography’
(1977 [1975], 332).26 This generic play is a tricky negotiation that leads
to the sort of ‘confusion’ associated with the transnational that is fore-
grounded in Travel Writing and the Transnational Author. Elaborating on
the connection between ‘travel writing’ and ‘transnational literature’
allows me to consider the impact on literary outputs by Ondaatje,
Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie of works of literature from many different
genres, from poetry and fable to novel and autobiography. One way
of reinscribing ‘travel writing’ within more general ideas about ‘litera-
ture’ is to consider the possibility for recuperating travel writing within
‘postcolonial’ authors’ other works. If ‘travel writing’ – with its inevita-
ble imperial taint – is to be taken more seriously within academic and
popular establishments, then it is necessary to consider the networks of
influence that exist between authors’ travel works and their other texts.
I have chosen these authors as the basis for my study of transnationa-
lism for three reasons. Firstly, Ondaatje, Seth, Ghosh, and Rushdie are
exemplary of a class of writers with greater or lesser familial and personal
links to the Indian subcontinent who have developed from a specific
literary background: one that supports, extends, and utilises Western
ideas about writing while at the same time refusing to accept them
implicitly, acknowledging its connections with – and indebtedness to –
transnational origins. Secondly, the ‘sub-oeuvres’ of their travel writing
and their commonly acknowledged ‘fiction’ are of a similarly high
standard. For a study of travel writing’s influences within the work of
particular authors to hold water, it is necessary for there to be no signifi-
cant discrepancy in quality (or form) between the two genres: any critical
neglect of their travel writing should be based on something other
than qualitative deficiencies in the earlier texts. And thirdly, the four
possess an understanding of both Western and non-Western ideas about

belonging, home, and identity that feeds an incredible formal inven-
tiveness, and a delight in playful prose structures: their transnational
literary work is mediated – and enhanced – by a number of different
cultural affiliations, from South Asia to North Africa and beyond. At
the same time, this work relies to an as-yet-unconsidered extent on
individual examples of the authors’ travel writing; each one of the four
chapters of Travel Writing and the Transnational Author – which focus
individually on the work of the four authors – thus begins by focusing
on the relevant author’s travel writing, placing their later work in its
cultural and historical context.
The four author-focused chapters are divided into two sections.
Those authors whose travel writing occupies a position from relatively
early in their novel-writing careers, Ondaatje and Seth, are addressed
in the first section, ‘Travelling Out’ (Ondaatje’s travelogue, Running
in the Family, pre-dates his first publication in the novel genre by
five years; Seth’s From Heaven Lake was released three years before
his debut novel-in-verse, and ten years before his first prose novel).
The second section, ‘Travelling On’, deals with authors – Ghosh and
Rushdie – whose travel writing is located mid-career (Ghosh’s In an
Antique Land and Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile were released six and
twelve years after the publications of the authors’ respective first
novels). This division into two sections, as well as contributing to
the overall narrative sense of the monograph, provide a link between
form and content: the compartmentalised structure is itself a part of
the thesis that the transnationally inflected travel writing of these
authors should be recognised as an integral part of their travelling,
writing lives.
‘Travelling Out’ begins with Ondaatje, focusing on the textual
transnationalism that starts to emerge in the author’s 1982 trave-
logue Running in the Family. Arguing against ethnocentric readings of
Ondaatje’s work – based on his national affiliations with Sri Lanka and
Canada – the chapter presents the author’s writing as a response both
to the transnational space of Sri Lanka and to his own transnational
identity. This is explored further in Anil’s Ghost (2000), which I read
as dependent on Running in the Family in hitherto unacknowledged
ways – and as an engagement both with concepts of reconstruction,
and with Stephen Clingman’s ideas about the transnational boundary.
While Clingman asserts that the boundary is necessarily a fertile site of
transnational fictional production, however, I argue that it is in Ondaatje’s
manipulation, subversion, and violation of this – through a combination
of mythology, formal innovation, and intertextual reference – that his

transnationalism lies. This writing begins in the earlier work, but is
developed and extended in the later novel, so that the two can be
read as a single, coherent literary response to the transnational space
of Sri Lanka. The central concept of Chapter 2, on the other hand, is
the idea of performance, which is explored through ideas of personal
transnationalism: starting, again, with the principal travelogue of the
author under consideration, the chapter details the performative aspects
of Vikram Seth’s self-presentation in From Heaven Lake: Travels through
Sinkiang and Tibet (1993 [1983]). His interactions with the peoples and
landscapes he encounters on the journey detailed in this travel text are
presented as a series of transnational performances, and the chapter
interrogates the success with which he attempts these various identity-
related positions. I extend the idea of an insufficiency into a reading
of another novel published close to the turn of the century, An Equal
Music (1999): this text involves both the geographical transference of
a set of transnational geopolitical relationships (India–China–Tibet to
England–Austria–Italy) and the re-imagining of a performative transna-
tional identity through the fictional character of a travelling musician.
The first chapter of the second section, ‘Travelling On’, revisits the
ideas of Bhabha and Wilson and Dissanayake (see Section III) in ana-
lysing the ideas of translation and geopolitical transnationalism raised
by Amitav Ghosh’s work. Ghosh’s early travelogue, In an Antique Land:
History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale (1992) – while arousing a much
greater degree of critical interest than Seth’s From Heaven Lake, for
example27 – has not been studied as a foundational text for Ghosh,
paving the way for later work such as The Glass Palace (2000). This is
particularly evident in episodes from these texts sharing a confused,
even misleading attitude to ideas of mediation and observation that
are bound up with the idea of linguistic, cultural, and geographical
translation. In exploring these attitudes to translation, the chapter also
analyses the ways in which The Glass Palace can be read as indebted to
another of Ghosh’s travelogues, Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma
(1998a); in all three works, I explore examples of translation that offer
a redemptive, recuperative approach towards a transnational politics of
modernity. In this chapter, I explore a different aspect of the importance
of the travelogue: while in the work of Ondaatje and Seth travel writ-
ing played a significant foundational role, in Ghosh’s case the genre is
turned to at a much later stage with respect to his novel-writing. What
differences are effected by such a position? And is the role of travel in
an author’s career markedly changed by this move? The second chapter
of ‘Travelling On’ focuses on Salman Rushdie, whose travelogue The

Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey details his time in Nicaragua at the
invitation of the ruling Sandinista regime. As with Ghosh’s travel writing,
The Jaguar Smile is located at the heart of Rushdie’s novel-writing career:
Rushdie himself explains, in a Preface to the 1997 edition, that he
‘well remember[s] the shock of emerging, for the first time, from the
(relatively) polite world of literature into the rough-and-tumble of
the political arena’ (1997 [1987], xiii). The political engagement in this
travelogue has been clear throughout Rushdie’s career, but particularly
in a novel published at the turn of the twenty-first century, Fury: A Novel
(2001). Rushdie’s use of the thinly veiled metaphor ‘Lilleput-Blefescu’
to represent contemporary conflict on the Fijian archipelago in Fury
illustrates his intertextual dependence on the political narrative of The
Jaguar Smile, as I explore in parallel critical analyses of episodes from
the texts. Moreover, this reference to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
(1726), an iconic text of early ‘travel writing’, locates Fury as an explicit
response to the fictionalising aspects of the genre.
Fury, the final novel in this monograph, is not only one of the most
significant examples of a postcolonial novel to be drawn from travel
writing, but also marks an important literary turning-point: suffused
with contemporary references to the summer of 2000, Rushdie’s novel
documents the ‘anger […] like a flood’ that was to characterise the suc-
ceeding decade (2001, 5). Why was the end of the 1990s such a signifi-
cant time for all four of these authors, and their transnational fiction?
In my conclusion, I move towards the idea that the turn of the century
precipitated in these authors both a reaching-back for earlier works of
travel writing and a looking-forward towards a time of transnational
popularity for themselves and their work. This brief final chapter asks
to what extent the intersections of travel writing and transnational
literature in the work of these authors affect how postcolonial writing is
read – and what conclusions might thus be drawn about the formation
of a ‘postcolonial canon’.
Part I
Travelling Out
1
Michael Ondaatje: The ‘Prodigal–
Foreigner’, Reconstruction, and
Transnational Boundaries
I Transnational Narration
Unfortunately enough, despite the publication of his recent book,

Running in the Family, a book supposedly devoted to his search for
roots, Ondaatje’s work gives few indications of his Sri Lankan back-
ground. Ondaatje, coming from a Third World country with a colo-
nial past, does not write about his otherness. Nor does he write about
the otherness of the Canadian society for him. (Mukherjee, 1985, 51)
Sarath and Gamini [in Anil’s Ghost] criticize Western journalists for
swooping into Sri Lanka, tossing off some reductive political analysis
and leaving. I don’t see the difference between that and Ondaatje
revisiting his native land, observing victims, avoiding political analysis
and then retreating to Canada. (LeClair, 2000, n.p.)
With these scathing words, Arun Mukherjee and Tom LeClair nail
their critical colours to the mast: Running in the Family, Michael
Ondaatje’s quasi-autobiographical travel narrative about the history of
the Ondaatjes in Sri Lanka, and Anil’s Ghost, his novel set during the
island’s war-ravaged recent past, are both political and ethical disap-
pointments. For these critics, Ondaatje is a Canadian Sri Lankan author,
whose engagement with ‘his native land’ is that of a holidaying foreign
visitor who refuses to get too involved, ‘observing victims, [but] avoid-
ing political analysis’. Although he ‘com[es] from a Third World country
with a colonial past’, they believe he fails to engage with this history, and
Canada is the country to which he ‘retreats’: LeClair’s use of a military
metaphor indicates a certain combativeness, suggesting Ondaatje must
withdraw to Canada after an attack from Sri Lanka. Ondaatje was born in
Sri Lanka, left at age 11, was educated in England, and is now a Canadian
27
citizen – in their opinion, Ondaatje’s writing about Sri Lanka says more
about his adopted ‘Western’ position than the ‘Third World […] colonial
past’ of his Sri Lankan identity. Also, they believe this Sri Lankan history
is inadequately presented; if we accept Benedict Anderson’s assertion
that history is ‘the necessary basis of the national narrative’ (Anderson,
1986, 659), then Ondaatje has relinquished his place in the Sri Lankan
national narrative. The lack of national alignment seen by these critics
is a failure to engage with the history of Sri Lanka: for Mukherjee and
LeClair, Ondaatje is a sell-out.
I believe these criticisms of Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan work are misplaced.
I say misplaced rather than false, as they are certainly valid in terms of
ethno-political accountability: to some extent, Ondaatje fails to deal
with the conflicted politics of Sri Lanka. His prose sometimes verges on
poetic escapism, and a tendency to pepper his work with fragments of
popular song and classical quotations appears at times to be a reluctance
to engage with political reality. In Anil’s Ghost, a fragmented structure
can lend a detached air to passages about the civil war: a government
official is murdered on a train, with no introductory or succeeding com-
mentary (2000, 31–32); there is a stark, unremarked-upon list of victims
of political ‘disappearances’ (2000, 41); and the wife of Anil’s colleague
walks into the novel, only to be removed by unknown hands after three
foreboding pages, and little comment is passed (2000, 172–75). Jon
Kertzer asserts that Anil’s Ghost ‘is not a political novel in the traditional
sense: it offers little political analysis and foresees no political solutions’
(2003, 131), chiming with the analyses of Mukherjee and LeClair; for
these critics, Ondaatje’s elliptical approach indicates an abnegation of
responsibility towards the realities involved.
The flaw in such an analysis lies in the assumption that Ondaatje
must indeed be in harmony with Anderson’s ‘national narrative’: what
the negative reviews of Ondaatje’s work lack is a sense of his positioning
beyond questions of national affiliation. This failure to move beyond
a restrictive sense of nationality chimes with criticism of Ondaatje in
general, which falls into one of two categories: ‘Ondaatje as Canadian
author [of Sri Lankan origin]’, or ‘Ondaatje as Sri Lankan author [now
Canadian citizen]’. There has been much critical study of Ondaatje
as an important Canadian author, winner of the renowned Canadian
Council for the Arts Governor General’s Literary Award a record-
equalling five times (Canada Council for the Arts, 2012), and a staple
subject of established Canadian literary journals. On the other hand,
Mukherjee’s description of Ondaatje’s position within ‘the Canadian
literary scene’ as a ‘South Asian poet’ (1985, 49) has opened up a space
Michael Ondaatje: The ‘Prodigal–Foreigner’ 29
for analyses of Ondaatje and the Sri Lankan ‘homespace’ to which he

‘belong[s]’ (Leon, 2003): he is a Sri Lankan writer who ‘return[s…] to his
original Ceylonese homeland’ (Albertazzi, 1993, 62). Certainly, critics
on both sides of the divide acknowledge various national influences on
Ondaatje, but they do so while underlining a unidirectional movement:
he is either a ‘Sri Lankan–Canadian’, who draws on his Sri Lankan past
in addressing his Canadian present, or he is a ‘Canadian–Sri Lankan’,
applying a knowledge of his Canadian present in writing about his
Sri Lankan past. Thus we have Suwanda Sugunasiri’s 1992 article on
‘Sri Lankan Canadian Poets: The Bourgeoisie that Fled the Revolution’,
which indicates that Ondaatje’s definition as ‘Sri Lankan Canadian’
involves a break from the past, a flight from the revolutionary atmos-
phere of Sri Lanka; or Graciela Martínez-Zalce’s piece, which describes
as ‘Canadian literature’ the work of the ‘Canadian Sri Lankan author
Michael Ondaatje’ (2001, 66). In either case, a single national identity
is uppermost, whether it be ‘Sri Lankan’ or ‘Canadian’, and the second
nationality merely serves to qualify an already-accepted understanding
of Ondaatje’s work.
What interests me, however, is the extent to which Ondaatje’s litera-
ture refutes all such analyses: the form and content of his work chal-
lenge the idea of ‘national belonging’. This aspect of his work resonates
with James Clifford’s assertion that identity is defined by movement
rather than belonging: nationality as such is usurped by the concept
of ‘dwelling-in-travel’ (1997). Mukherjee is one who sticks to her
nationality-centric guns over this, as Ondaatje’s perceived detachment
from national affiliation is seen as wholly reprehensible:
Ondaatje, instead of writing about the reality of Canadian life or

his Sri Lankan past, chooses to write about the ‘tension between
mind and chaos’. […] The metaphysical scarecrow of ‘chaos’ has cut
[Ondaatje] off from his fellow men in the ordinary walks of life […] he
is indulging in a self-willed isolation as well as Romantic posturing.
(1985, 54–55)
I reject Mukherjee’s limited critique: I believe that Ondaatje’s work,

based on ideas of the importance of travel to a sense of self, compli-
cates easy binaries such as ‘Canada–Sri Lanka’ or ‘home–away’, and in
doing so presents itself as transnational literature. This is enacted not
only through the dependence of this writing on ideas of travel and
movement, but also in the forms the narrative takes: fragmentations,
slippages, ellipses, and silences are not indicative of a lack of ethical
responsibility, as suggested above, but intimate a reaction against the

linearity of national affiliations and a declaration of the transnationa-
lism of Ondaatje’s work.
In this chapter, the first in the ‘Travelling Out’ section on authors
whose travelogues occupy a position from relatively early in their novel-
writing careers, I use analyses of Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost
to offer an alternative to reductive, ethnocentric criticisms of Ondaatje’s
work, building on the ideas of transnationalism as wide-ranging, multi-
valent, and ‘new’ that I advanced in my Introduction. In later chapters,
I will look at the extent to which a focus on personal and/or geopolitical
transnationalisms allows a distinction between the travel writing and
transnational literature of these authors, separating out their respective
influences. In Ondaatje’s case, however, my focus on the textual aspects
of transnationalism entails a more contained, even claustrophobic view
of his work: I analyse the transnational textuality of Running in the
Family to a much greater degree than in my later studies of From Heaven
Lake, In an Antique Land, or The Jaguar Smile. Ondaatje’s literature, to a
greater extent than that of Seth, Ghosh, or Rushdie, is an exercise in
transnational writing, in his travelogue as much as in later work.
As a result, I analyse two features of transnational form that emerge
in Ondaatje’s work, and that contribute to his transnationalism in
different – yet related – ways. On the one hand, I put forward the para-
doxical, multivalent idea of the ‘prodigal–foreigner’, which Ondaatje
introduces as a driving principle for his writing through the character of
himself as a returnee to Sri Lanka in Running in the Family, and revisits
through the Sri Lankan–British–North American protagonist of Anil’s
Ghost. The paradoxical idea is suggested by Ondaatje in the earlier text,
and an exchange early in Anil’s Ghost between the title character and a
Sri Lankan she meets calls to mind the same troublesome opposition:
I sit in a house on Buller’s Road [in Colombo]. I am the foreigner.

I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner. (1984 [1982], 79)
‘After fifteen years. The return of the prodigal.’

‘I’m not a prodigal.’ (2000, 10)
If Anil is not a ‘prodigal’, the novel seems to ask, what is she? Numerous
links between Anil and Sri Lanka are displayed throughout, so neither
is she solely a ‘foreigner’; my idea of the ‘prodigal–foreigner’ addresses
her paradoxical attitude towards the island, an ambivalence that is
also clear in the figure of Ondaatje himself. The ‘prodigal–foreigner’
embodies an ambivalent, doubling sense subverting strictly ‘national’
delineations, underlining the transnationality of Ondaatje’s work, and

emphasising the importance of travel to his writing.
The other concept is that of reconstruction, which also involves a
problematic combination of the two poles of ‘home’ and ‘away’. This
concept is more complicated than that of the prodigal–foreigner, as
Ondaatje’s use combines an aesthetic interpretation of the term with a
political one: ‘reconstruction’ is both a representative artistic device –
in Anil’s Ghost, the reconstruction of Sri Lanka’s ‘dissolved’ artworks is
a theme that runs alongside the putting-together of the text itself; in
Running in the Family, others’ memories of Ondaatje family history are
framed together within a personal narrative – and a description of a
physical process, enacted in the wake of literal devastation. While recon-
struction is an important positive formal characteristic of Ondaatje’s
work, then, it also presents an amalgamation of art with suffering; it is
this conflation that leaves Ondaatje open to criticisms of apoliticalism
such as LeClair’s reference to his ‘observing [and] avoiding political
analysis’. In contrast, I believe that the focus on reconstruction as a
formal artistic conceit affirms the author’s commitment to restorative
political processes: rather than stopping short of political engagement
due to an excessive artistic focus, he arrives at a conception of politics
through aesthetics.
The formal structures of reconstruction and the prodigal–foreigner are
central to my project to resituate Ondaatje as a transnational author, for
whom the fictive memoir-like travel work Running in the Family is the
foundation of his presentation of Sri Lanka – and, thus, the basis for
the millennial novel Anil’s Ghost, an influence that reaffirms the impor-
tance of the travelogue–transnationalism link that I advance in the
discussion of Lisle’s ideas in my Introduction. Before addressing a series
of questions about Ondaatje himself, though – his self-identification as
prodigal–foreigner, his envisioning of the transnational Anil, and his
development of this transnational understanding of the personal into
communal ideas of reconstruction – I must address the historical and
imaginative development of the country itself: one reason behind the
transnationalism of Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan work is that the island itself
has long been a transnational space, a fact that predates Ondaatje’s
work by millennia.
II A Short History of Sri Lanka
Historical studies of the body of land lying above the equator and
below the tip of the Indian subcontinent, known at various points in
its history as Ceylon, Tambapanni, Taprobane, Sarandib, and much else,1

are not especially common; the island’s incarnation as the post-
independence nation of Sri Lanka, and the ethno-political struggles
that continue to divide the country, are equally poorly documented.
K.M. de Silva’s A History of Sri Lanka (1981) is still the most recent com-
prehensive historical survey, and his preface asserts that his is the first
such volume since the work of the Irish historian Sir James E. Tennent,
mid-nineteenth-century colonial secretary of Ceylon: ‘remarkable, but
only too true’ (de Silva, 1981, vii). Critics’ coverage of the recent civil
war has been less sparse, yet no more general. Most focus on the ethnic
foundations of the war (see various authors in the next few pages), or on
specific cultural manifestations (Qadri Ismail, 2005, and Minoli Salgado,
2007, take a literature-centred approach to the island’s history); the only
comprehensive historical and cultural overview is Jonathan Spencer’s
collection of essays (1991), over two decades old. This is all the stranger
since the country’s position ‘athwart the main sea-routes of the Indian
Ocean’ (de Silva, 1981, 4) makes it of prime strategic interest, in both
trading and military terms; more so than any other island, Great Britain
not excepted (Tennent, 1859, I, xix). In order to see how this dearth of
material is an indication of Sri Lanka’s transnational position, it is neces-
sary to analyse various impulses both within and outside the country.
I believe that conflicting ethnic and racial ideologies within Sri Lanka
have combined with the imposition of ideas about the island from
abroad to present Sri Lanka as a combination of presence and absence,
information and ignorance, surfeit and lack – dichotomies undermin-
ing singular definitions of Sri Lankan national identity. These binaries
present the island as founded on networks of interrelation and paradox,
giving rise to an aesthetically, historically, and politically transnational
space – it is with these combinations that Ondaatje engages.
The two ethnicities perceived to form the island’s indigenous popu-
lation, Tamil and Sinhalese, dominate academic output on Sri Lanka’s
history of conflict. The title of A. Jeyaratnam Wilson’s work is typical,
yoking the nation with these ethnic groups: The Break-up of Sri Lanka:
The Sinhalese–Tamil Conflict (1988). Jonathan Spencer goes one step
further, defining the country in terms of the ‘central ethnic conflict’
between ‘the rival Sinhala and Tamil communities’ (1991, 8; emphasis
added). Finally, when Stanley Tambiah describes ‘the historical move-
ment of Sinhalese–Tamil relations’ as ‘the Sri Lanka problem’ (1986, ix),
the two ethnicities are lumped together and then, metonymically,
made to stand for the whole country. These presentations collapse
into a Sinhalese–Tamil binary a complex set of relationships that in
fact involves far more parties: the Sri Lankan population, as Spencer
later admits himself, is composed of ‘Sinhala […] Sri Lankan Tamil […]
Indian Tamil, and […] Muslim’ ethnicities (1991, 14). Ignoring this diver-
sity, prevailing criticism on Sri Lanka presents the country as synonymous
with two of the many ethnicities it contains, enacting a metonymy
whereby the Tamils and Sinhalese represent the entirety of the island.
Quite apart from the damaging ethnic implications of this generalis-
ing away of diversity, however, there is a historical reason to refute such
metonymy: in de Silva’s account of Sri Lankan ‘prehistory’, he states
that Tamils and Sinhalese were both immigrants to the country, arriving
only around 500 years before the start of the Common Era (1981, 13).
Although the two ethnicities are nowadays seen as coterminous with
ideas of Sri Lankan indigeneity, the Tamil/Sinhalese focus is an example
of a situation in which Sri Lanka is viewed in terms of ‘Other’ countries
and peoples. This means that when de Silva praises the chronological
depth of Tennent’s study by referring to his predecessor’s ‘history of the
island from its legendary beginnings to the author’s own day, a span
of over 2,000 years’ (1981, vii), he is perpetuating this Tamil/Sinhalese
originary myth: for de Silva, Sri Lankan national history begins, and the
country is established, with the arrival in 500 BCE of the Sinhalese and
Tamil peoples. While Tamils and Sinhalese are presented as conflicting
national ethnicities that arise from within Sri Lanka, they are in fact
arrivals from abroad: the ideological and political constitution of the
country through this binary of nationalisms paradoxically reveals a
transnationalism that is at odds with the idea of nationalism itself.
Another sign of this paradox is that the perceived size and shape of
Sri Lanka has fluctuated over the course of history. These changes are
picked up on by Ondaatje:
On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. […] The result
of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant.
The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations – by Ptolemy,
Mercator, François Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt – growing from
mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle,
and then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India.
(1984 [1982], 63)
These proper names are, in all but one case, those of European travellers
from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, all part of
imperial projects to colonise the countries with which they came into
contact.2 Ondaatje’s language is intriguing, as imperialism ‘seem[s]’ to
become ‘translation’: in other words, to render them comprehensible for

a European public, ‘foreign’ spaces underwent a process of ‘translation’.3
The multiple, transnational allegiances of Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan work
thus underline my assertion that Homi Bhabha’s ideas about the
‘transnational’ and the ‘translational’ (Introduction, Section III) are
too historically and culturally circumscribed: the specific histories that
contribute to the shaping of Sri Lanka over time involve the travelling
identities of European visitors to the island, as well as those of the
inhabitants of the island. Moreover, in another observation put forward
in Stephen Clingman’s insightful work, the verb ‘translate’ derives from
the Latin transferro, ‘to move across’, and has its Greek counterpart in
the root of the word ‘metaphor’ (2009, 12): European travellers were
engaged in a process of making a metaphor out of Sri Lanka; the island’s
development is one of transnational metaphor-making, in opposition
to the idea of a rooted, physical nationality. The country is imagined
from abroad, and these imaginings shape the outline of the island itself,
both within and outside Sri Lanka: Ondaatje presents these ‘shapings’
in both texts, as the ‘false maps’ of Running in the Family are followed
by a series of ‘versions of the island’ hanging ‘down the hall […] map to
map’ in the Archaeological Offices in Colombo, in Anil’s Ghost (2000,
39, 146; see below, Section IV.iv). For Ondaatje, this puts in a different
light the country’s transnational paradox, seen earlier in the presenta-
tion of plural Sri Lankan ethnicities: Sri Lanka is a fruitful space of mul-
tiple reshapings, a continually revisited and reimagined island, a living,
organic ‘amoeba’ of a geographical space – yet it has also been fashioned
as a profoundly empty site, seen by European travellers as more suited
to navigation than residence, a beautiful yet inanimate trinket dangling
from ‘the ear of India’.
Ondaatje’s catalogue of European understandings of Sri Lanka focuses
on the second half of this paradox, and the European idea of Sri Lanka
as objectified rock rather than productive space. This is seen in the
fact that all the cited representations of Sri Lanka involve a degree of
distance and imperfection: the country is construed through ‘sightings
[and] glances’ from offshore trading vessels, and projections of Sri Lanka
are no more than ‘the theories of sextant’, as European cartographers are
unwilling to actually set foot on the island. Ludowyk, a historian of the
island’s period of European occupation, emphasises Sri Lanka’s position
in the European consciousness by the end of the eighteenth century:
The importance of Ceylon to the British in 1795 was, naturally, very

much subservient to their stake in India. (1966, 18)
The assertion here is that it is self-evident – ‘natural’ – that power in

Sri Lanka is concomitant with power on the subcontinent. When viewed
from a distance, and seen on a world map drawn from a European
perspective,4 it is inevitable that a piece of land the size of Sri Lanka will
be subsumed into a larger consideration of ‘British India’.
Yet this incorporation into the Indian subcontinent ignores some-
thing Ondaatje has in mind throughout his work: the first half of
Sri Lanka’s transnational paradox. To return to the history of the
island, de Silva quotes Faxian,5 a fifth-century CE Chinese traveller,
saying that Sri Lanka ‘originally had no human inhabitants, but was
occupied only by spirits and nāgas with which merchants of vari-
ous countries carried on a trade’ (de Silva, 1981, 6).6 De Silva admits
that modern knowledge of the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Sri Lanka ‘is
almost as hazy as this, even if we no longer believe in “spirits and
nāgas”’, and continues by making some hesitant remarks about the
likely occupants of the island, known as ‘Balangoda man’.7 He fails
to emphasise the crucial point of Faxian’s analysis, though, which is
that the island’s inhabitants must not only have been a physical pres-
ence, but a geo-political one: they were able to ‘carr[y] on a trade’ with
‘various countries’. Well before any sort of subcontinental influence –
whether through an Indo-Aryan, Sinhalese, or Tamil influx – the indi-
genous people of the island had established themselves in a network
of trade.8
This, then, is the transnational paradox of Sri Lanka: it has at one
and the same time been positioned as a node in a cross-Oceanic net-
work of trade and culture, and also been seen from outside as a shifting
shape on a definitively European map. It is this paradox that Ondaatje
addresses through his writing on the island, work that undercuts the
straightforward national ideas on which criticism of his work has
been founded. His presentation of the island through the gaze of the
prodigal–foreigner – along with his debt to both ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’
cultural sources9 – situates his work as inherently paradoxical, and
by definition transnational: the two parts of the term ‘prodigal–
foreigner’ combine, undercutting the idea of national affiliation and
complicating understandings of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’. Furthermore, the
author’s focus on ideas of ‘reconstruction’ – a term with various politi-
cal, historical, and aesthetic connotations in the context of national
identity – develops further the paradoxes of transnationality at work in
the history of the country, its ‘spirits and nāgas’, and its European map-
pings. It is in these areas, as a result, that I focus my study of Ondaatje’s
Sri Lankan work.
III Running in the Family
i A ‘Running’ Narrative
Running in the Family, though difficult to categorise generically, is at
root a travel memoir; as such, it is essentially two things. Firstly, it is
a memoir detailing the history of the Ondaatje family in the country
of Michael’s birth, Ceylon. Though the island changed its name to Sri
Lanka in 1972, Ondaatje uses the ‘colonial’ name Ceylon throughout
the text, in a species of linguistic nostalgia rooting his narrative firmly
in his family’s past. This has been noted by critics: the use of the name
‘emphasizes that Ondaatje’s present journey is meant to be a return to
the past’ because ‘Ceylon [is] the name that marked his family’s life
on the island’ (Kamboureli, 1988, 91) and he intends ‘to “journey back”
to the land as it was known in the time of his father, thereby invoking a
peculiarly dramatic familial and cultural milieu’ (Matthews, 2000, 368).
Ondaatje’s nostalgia is similar to that of Vikram Seth, who describes a
tendency to ‘wander around the world merely accumulating material
for future nostalgias’ (1983, 35; see Chapter 2, Section I). Where Seth’s
plural nostalgias are hypothetical and deferred, Ondaatje’s nostalgia
remains an ever-present feature of his writing about Ceylon/Sri Lanka;
yet while in Seth’s work nostalgia is an acknowledged narrative subject,
Ondaatje’s nostalgia is never directly referred to. Seth uses ‘nostalgia’ as
a theoretical, almost neutral construct, but for Ondaatje nostalgia is a
lived, often painful experience.
The memoir side of Ondaatje’s nostalgic travelogue mixes first- and
third-person narrative voices to describe the lives and loves of his
parents’ – and, later, grandparents’ – generation, and in particular his
father, Mervyn Ondaatje:
[I want to] know [Mervyn] from these stray actions I am told about
by those who loved him. And yet, he is still one of those books we
long to read whose pages remain uncut. (1984 [1982], 200)
This description of his father as a composite of the stories and half-

stories of others stands for the work as a whole, as Michael’s depiction of
the lives of the Ondaatjes in Ceylon is based on the accounts of others:
he left the island soon after his parents divorced when he was 11, and
Running in the Family is filled with the recollections of others rather
than his own memories. Gaps in intimate knowledge – signalled as the
author has to be ‘told’ about ‘stray actions’ – are inextricably linked
with failures in the reading process: in one sense, Running in the Family
is a book that the author himself ‘long[s] to read [but] whose pages
remain uncut’; the process of writing his own history is, for Ondaatje,
inherently flawed.
The second major narrative thread of Running in the Family provides
the framework for these stories, in a contemporary account of Michael’s
first visits to the island for a quarter of a century, in 1978 and 1980.10
In these sections, a more direct connection between narrator and reader
is generated through an almost exclusive use of the first person, as
Michael – and, later, his wife and children – travels the country meeting
relatives and friends of the Ondaatjes. The work is no mere study of one
family’s history in Sri Lanka, recounted as an objective biography: in
being placed alongside the contemporary narrative of Michael’s journey
through the country, the family history assumes attributes of a personal
quest. Nor, given the proximity of the Ondaatje family history, is the
text solely the personal account of a former inhabitant’s revisiting of Sri
Lanka, narrated in the first-person narrative of memoir. Running in the
Family is a scrambled, transnational composite of the two: an intimate,
first-person account, and an objective, third-person one. It is both a
‘travel narrative written by an incoming foreigner’ and a ‘family biogra-
phy written by a native son’.
The contemporary narrative thread assumes two functions: these
journeys are both the lens through which the author views the subject
of his family history and subject of the text itself. Ondaatje indicates
this in the acknowledgements, which refer to Running in the Family
as a ‘composite of two return journeys to Sri Lanka’, making refer-
ence to its status as contemporary travel journal rather than historical
memoir. In doing so, the author privileges geography over history:
it is not necessarily the time in his family’s company that has led to the
publication of this book, but the travel between countries of Ondaatje
himself. The phrase ‘return journeys to Sri Lanka’ also indicates there
are three important aspects of Ondaatje’s travel: Sri Lanka, the explicit
destination; Canada, which the description ‘return journeys’ fixes as
both starting and finishing point of these trips; and the geographical
movement between the two. Ondaatje’s position with respect to Sri
Lanka, then, is an important part of the work: Running in the Family
is a transnational work of literature in that it invokes a mediated rela-
tionship between countries, but also because it embraces the journey
between the two as part of that relationship – and part of the process of
literary production itself.
Many critics have offered analyses of Running in the Family. In the
decade or so after publication, studies focused predominantly on the text
itself: Mukherjee’s analysis was published in the same year as the

collection Spider Blues, which contains pieces on Running in the Family by
Linda Hutcheon and others (1985); these were followed by Kamboureli’s
study of the book’s formal and generic slippages (1988), Sangeeta Ray’s
analysis of the relationship between Sri Lanka and Canada in the text
(1993), and Graham Huggan’s focus on exoticism and ethnicity (1996).
Furthermore, at the turn of the century, interest in the work resurfaced,
with Matthews (2000), Silva (2002), and Leon (2003) all offering rein-
terpretations. These studies, incisive though many are, do not generally
place Running in the Family within a wider context of Sri Lankan (trans)
nationalism, nor do they focus on the centrality of the work within
Ondaatje’s oeuvre. In contrast, I argue that Running in the Family should
be viewed as a vital part of Ondaatje’s work, rather than as an interest-
ing contribution in a tangential vein. In this respect, I concur with
Kamboureli’s conclusion that ‘Running in the Family is only the preface
to Ondaatje’s autobiography’ (1988, 90), but would go further than this
and assert that Running in the Family is only the preface to Ondaatje’s
autobiography, and he has written the following chapters of this auto-
biography in successive literary works.
Running in the Family was published in 1982, after fifteen years in
which Ondaatje established himself as ‘a poet, a critic, an editor, a nov-
elist, a screenplay writer, and a film director […an artist who] cannot be
narrowly categorized’ (Matthews, 2000, 356). Matthews highlights the
‘performative quality of [Ondaatje’s] works’ in this period:11 this is
traceable through the 1970 book/screenplay The Collected Works of
Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems, ‘the movie I [Ondaatje] couldn’t
afford to shoot, in the form of a book’; the 1974 documentary film
The Clinton Special; and the 1976 poetical historical novel Coming
through Slaughter.12 Running in the Family is a culmination of this ‘per-
formativity’, and is also the beginning of the second half of Ondaatje’s
career, in which he began to focus more on full-length works than
poetry. Though Ondaatje did release poetry collections after 1982,
several of these consisted of repackaged earlier poetry; in terms of
full-length works, Running in the Family is followed by his five big
novels – In the Skin of a Lion (1987), The English Patient (1992), Anil’s
Ghost (2000), Divisadero (2007), and The Cat’s Table (2011) – which
represent a considerable step away from the mixed genres and styles
of Coming through Slaughter, his only pre-1982 novel-length work.
Running in the Family represents a generic crossing-point in Ondaatje’s
writing career, placing it at a crucial position in the development of
his literature.
In defining this pivotal work as a ‘memoir’, Matthews cites the 1977

assertions of Marcus Billson, who ‘identifie[d] context as the defining
characteristic of memoir’:
For Billson, the narrative ‘I’ […] assum[es] that ‘man’s ontology
derives from his historical context’. […] Billson assumes that those
segments of the memoirist’s life ‘important to his identity as a social
being’ will be those of ‘extraordinary interest and importance’ – ‘an
exile, an imprisonment, the course of a career, participating in war,
in politics, in an artistic coterie’. […] Billson relegates the person’s
more immediate context – the family – to the margins. (2000, 357)
Matthews positions her study of Running in the Family in opposition

to this: ‘Ondaatje’s title […] suggest[s] that it is this personally specific
context [the family] that provides the most important ground for self-
identification’ (2000, 358). This is true with regard to the title, certainly,
but not when one considers the text in the context of Ondaatje’s work
as a whole. In focusing on the ‘personally specific context’ of the work,
Matthews plays down the significance of the travelogue at this point in
Ondaatje’s career: his visits to the island are themselves of ‘extraordi-
nary interest and importance’, both because of the political history of
the country and the long period of largely self-imposed ‘exile […over]
the course of a career’. The text is of central personal significance for
Ondaatje due to his renewed engagement with the country of Sri Lanka,
as well as being a pivotal switch in generic focus: this juxtaposition
of cultural influence and literary form marks Running in the Family as
the first example of Ondaatje’s transnational literature, establishing
Ondaatje as a transnational author.
This juxtaposition between culture and textual object is seen in the
very title of the work, which both encompasses and moves beyond a
solely genealogical meaning. The phrase is first alluded to as Ondaatje
prepares to leave Canada for Sri Lanka:
…in the midst of the farewell party in my growing wildness […]

I knew I was already running. (1984 [1982], 22)
The last line echoes the work’s title: in converting the passive gerund
of the phrase ‘running in the family’ into the active ‘I was already
running’, Ondaatje turns the idea on its head, exhorting readers to
reconsider the implications of the titular verb. He is no longer simply
talking about genetic inheritance – saying that a particular trait ‘run[s]
in the family’ – but stating that this ‘running’ is an action performed,

and moreover one performed by the author himself. Moreover, as well
as being a literary device for ‘establish[ing] autobiographic connec-
tions’, the adaptation of the phrase has implications for the narrative,
as there are two prepositions commonly associated with the concept of
‘running’: ‘towards’ and ‘away from’. As neither is specified, it is left to
the reader to wonder whether the title refers to a confrontation with
biographical material or an escape from family history: Running in the
Family is as much text of biographical avoidance as memoir seeking
familial connections.
ii The Prodigal–Foreigner
This binary of simultaneous movement towards and away is central to
the text’s structure, clear in the first motif I use to explore Ondaatje’s
transnationalism, the ‘prodigal–foreigner’:
I sit in a house on Buller’s Road. I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal

who hates the foreigner. (1984 [1982], 79)
Ondaatje’s juxtaposition of incompatible terms is central: ‘prodigal’,

referring obliquely to the parable of the ‘prodigal son’, who returns
to his homeland and is welcomed with open arms; and ‘foreigner’,
an explicit reference to a non-Sri Lankan outsider. Sangeeta Ray refers
to ‘the paradoxical status of the prodigal foreigner that is never quite
resolved’, and the ‘opposition of prodigal/foreigner’ that is ‘held in
productive tension throughout the text’ (1993, 39, 40). The last sen-
tence reveals the extent to which Ray sees Running in the Family as a
balanced text, in which ‘productive’ binaries are artfully manipulated
by Ondaatje: he is distanced from the ‘opposition of prodigal/foreigner’,
and can hold it out for the reader ‘in productive tension’. I believe,
though, that it may be profitable to read this binary as expressing
inherent confusion in the author, rather than being a calculated literary
device. The prominence of the concept of travel in Ondaatje’s thought
and work means the ‘opposition of prodigal/foreigner’ is intrinsic to
Ondaatje’s literature, rather than a measured artistic device created by
the author himself. To detach the structure ‘prodigal […] foreigner’ from
its foundations in transnational authorship is to misunderstand both
text and author.
Before I continue, it is useful to consider what ‘prodigal’ and
‘foreigner’ actually mean. ‘Foreign’ comes from a family of words (along
with ‘forcatch’, ‘forprise’, and the more common ‘forfeit’) adopted
from Old French, in which ‘for-’ means ‘outside’ or ‘out’: ‘foreign’ can
be translated as ‘outside’. This simple etymological root lies behind a
complex ideological web explored by Bonnie Honig: ‘foreignness [is…]
a device that gives shape to or threatens existing political communi-
ties by marking negatively what “we” are not’, yet also ‘operat[es] in a
less conventionally familiar way, with a seldom-noted positive content
and effect’ (2001, 3). The idea of ‘foreigner’ is thus one of ambivalence,
even before it is yoked to a term with very different connections to the
idea of ‘outside’, the ‘prodigal’. In the context of returning to a home
from ‘outside’, ‘prodigal’ refers to the parable of the Prodigal Son, from
Luke’s Gospel in the Christian New Testament. The story describes a
son who leaves home financed by his father, fritters away his fortune in
‘foreign’ lands, and returns in disgrace, only to be received with open
arms. So there are two further meanings buried in this word ‘prodigal’:
firstly, it refers to one who is recklessly profligate in spending what is
given to him or her – the original meaning of the word ‘prodigal’. It also
implies a reconciliation between returnee and father-figure. In Michael
Ondaatje’s case, however, there is no father-figure to return to. Mervyn
is long dead; Running in the Family is, in a way, the author’s attempt to
piece together the life of this man whom he, Michael, never really knew,
through the recollections of relatives: Michael’s role is that of prodigal–
foreign interpreter, struggling to assimilate something he can never
fully know. Michael’s brother Christopher has described the text as ‘a
love letter to the father [Michael] never knew’ (C. Ondaatje, 1992, 38).
The pronouncement ‘I am the foreigner […and] the prodigal who
hates the foreigner’ marks the beginning of a turbulent sequence in
which Ondaatje struggles to come to terms with what it means to be
both one entity (foreigner) and the other (prodigal); and, moreover,
an other who hates the first. His status as prodigal returnee is quickly
undermined:
We are back [in] Colombo, in the hottest month of the year. It is

delicious heat. Sweat runs […] down a body as if a giant egg has been
broken onto our shoulders. (1984 [1982], 79)
To begin with, Ondaatje and his immediate family, ‘[w]e’, are natives of
the city, welcoming them ‘within [its] heat’; their belonging is empha-
sised by the adjective ‘delicious’, presenting the heat as welcome and
familiar. Then, however, the author places this ‘we’ at a remove from
both the heat and those around them, grinding against the positive,
‘delicious’ imagery of those who belong in the city with the unsettling
image of an egg broken over a human body. Disgusted by the clamminess

of his own sweat, Ondaatje is a foreigner once more, distanced from the
pleasing experience of welcome heat. Also, in attaching to perspiration
the qualities of a broken egg, Ondaatje’s language brings something
foreign and unwanted to the surface of a body. In covering a human
form in mucus – normally confined to the interior of eggs, sacs, or
bodies – the text plays with the binary of inside and outside, position-
ing Ondaatje as simultaneously comfortable and unsettled: he is both
at home and a foreigner.13 Over the next pages, the imagery flickers
between these two alternatives, as the affiliations of foreigner and
foreigner-hating-prodigal jostle for linguistic position.
The sparse, near-oxymoronic phrasing here – combining ideas of heat
and cool, taste and disgust – indicates the extent to which the form of
Ondaatje’s prose relies on his poetic career, in its ellipses, avoidances,
and metaphors.14 There are resonances of the opening juxtaposition of
life and death in Eliot’s The Waste Land: ‘April is the cruellest month,
breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land’ (2001 [1922], ll. 1–2). This link is
strengthened when Ondaatje explains the ‘hottest month’ in Colombo
is, in fact, April, when families travel up-country to escape the heat.
Eliot’s combination of fertility and aridity is in evidence:
The most comfortable hours are from 4 A.M. until about nine […]
Most of the events in the erotic literature of Asia […] must take place
in the mountains, for sex is almost impossible in Colombo […] very
few have been conceived during this month for the last hundred
years. (1984 [1982], 79)
Here Ondaatje dwells on the physicality of reproduction, while simul-

taneously emphasising its absence: sex is ‘almost impossible’. This is
strange in a book that is ostensibly a study of the kinship arising from
sexual relations, but is typical of Running in the Family. Sex is referred to
only elliptically, a phenomenon most noticeable in the central sexual
relationship of the work, between Michael’s parents: their courtship
takes place outside the text, as Mervyn simply announces the fact of
his engagement (1984 [1982], 33); when they do get married, the wed-
ding itself is confined to a single page that, rather than describe the
ceremony, refers to a peripheral event in the run-up to the celebrations
(1984 [1982], 36); and the honeymoon, traditionally a period of sexual
freedom, is itself completely unmentioned in the section with that title,
which consists entirely of fragmentary sentences describing a range of
events taking place at the time, from the local tennis championships
to international conflict (1984 [1982], 37–38). The combination of an

intensive focus on the bonds of the family with a reluctance to address
the subject of physical generation again underlines a paradoxical atmos-
phere of biographical avoidance in this biographical work.
In the immediate aftermath of his introduction of the prodigal–
foreigner, Ondaatje neglects the first half of the construction, as he
struggles to come to terms both with the idea of the foreigner and with,
more significantly, the presence of foreignness close at hand:
Heat disgraces foreigners. Yesterday, on the road […] we passed New

Year’s festivities […] But my kids, as we drove towards lowland heat,
growing belligerent and yelling at each other to shut up, shut up,
shut up. (1984 [1982], 80)
The form of the passage shimmers: the parataxis of the first two sen-
tences sets up an implicit parallel between the ‘foreigners’ whom heat
disgraces and the ‘we’ driving from Kandy to Colombo, as Ondaatje
appears to implicate himself in this disgrace; then, though, there is a
similar silent movement to ‘my kids’, as the author removes himself
from the picture. He is uncertain of his own positioning with respect
to this foreign intrusion onto an unwilling landscape. This sentiment
continues in the pages that follow, in a different incarnation:
[Foreigners] overpowered the land obsessive for […] the smell of

cinnamon. Becoming wealthy with spices. […] This island was a
paradise to be sacked. (1984 [1982], 80–81)
There is a parallel here between those ‘foreigners […] wealthy with

spices’, of European origin, who ‘sacked’ a Sri Lankan ‘paradise’, and
those Canadian foreigners who are driven through the country in cars,
‘belligerent[ly]’ complaining about the heat. What is more, Ondaatje
knows this: his children are foreign; he has thus brought a foreign pres-
ence into the island; and he is no longer sure of the extent to which
foreignness is a damaging part of his own self, that of the prodigal–
foreigner. His uncertainty over the ethics of foreigners’ entering the
country continues, as he asserts that an ancestor of his, William Charles
Ondaatje, knew of a large number of poisons that were easily acces-
sible to those on the island, and yet not one of these was used against
the invaders. A significant clue to this reluctance to repel intruders is
seen in the fact that this is the same man, the Director of the Botanical
Gardens, who had introduced the olive to the country (1984 [1982], 67).
William’s trading history thus positions him – and, by implication, his

contemporary descendant – as something of an apologist for foreign-
ness, one who welcomes both those who bring olives and those drawn
by ‘the smell of cinnamon’.
The other half of Ondaatje’s self-description reappears in the only
section title of Running in the Family to refer to the author himself,
‘THE PRODIGAL’ (1984 [1982], 131–62). This section contains a greater
focus on Michael than the rest of the work, with chapters providing
his self-presentations as foreigner, writer, child, Sri Lankan, and biog-
rapher. The eight chapters describe: Michael’s contemporary arrival in
Sri Lanka; an episode in which he tapes the sounds of Sri Lankan night
and replays them on his return to the Canadian winter; an account of
an episode from Michael’s childhood, related at a family dinner; a safari
with his children, in which he describes the antics of a val oora, a wild
boar; a nostalgic piece on the last estate on which he and his siblings
lived as a family; a long chapter about the alcoholic adventures of his
train-obsessed father; a visit made with his sister Gillian to a contem-
porary of their father’s, a diplomat who remembers Mervyn Ondaatje
as the man who ‘“got us into all that trouble!”’ (1984 [1982], 156);
and a short scene in which his aunt shows Michael a photograph of
his parents acting up for the camera, an image reproduced at the start
of the following section. The difficult and confusing affiliations of the
prodigal–foreigner are explored not only thematically but formally
here: the shifting viewpoint and structural uncertainties encapsulate
what it means to Ondaatje to be a prodigal–foreigner, a description that
builds ironically on the section title. I thus focus on several episodes
from ‘THE PRODIGAL’ in my concluding exploration of the idea of the
‘prodigal–foreigner’.
‘THE PRODIGAL’, like all seven sections of Running in the Family,
begins with a reproduction of a photograph, presumably from Ondaatje’s
private collection – there is no attribution for any image used. Tucked
against a rock face on the right of the frame is a steam-train, immedi-
ately connecting the image with the antics of the author’s father in the
longest chapter in this section. Possessing a free train pass as a member
of the Ceylon Light Infantry, his father would regularly stop trains on
a whim in an alcoholic haze, firmly believing that he was entitled to
preferential treatment. As the author places the photograph under the
section title, however, and proceeds to describe his own contemporary
return to Sri Lanka, it is clear that it is not just his father’s Sri Lankan
travels to which Ondaatje is referring: the author has his own ‘prodigal’
self in mind. This prompts another look at the photograph: what is
represented? The deliberately poor quality of the resolution and contrast

of the black-and-white pictures used in Running in the Family mean a
clear interpretation of their subjects is often difficult, but it is clear, for
the most part, that they are family photographs: they depict Mervyn
and Doris Ondaatje and their children, both separately and together.
Even in the seemingly impersonal picture of a Colombo street scene,
several people stare directly at the camera, as if the photographer were a
familiar figure. In the case of the ‘PRODIGAL’ image, however, the
subject is no particular person or people; indeed, the positioning of the
train in the margin of the picture, fore-grounded but semi-obscured
against a cliff, means that, at first glance, this appears to be a photo-
graph solely of the Sri Lankan landscape.
I focus on this picture at some length because it enacts the transna-
tionality of Ondaatje’s work in two important ways. Firstly, it combines
‘prodigality’ with ‘foreignness’: the memories of his father conjured
by the train, coupled with the title the author gives to this section,
emphasises Ondaatje’s status as a prodigal, one who returns home and
is reconciled with a father; equally, the wide-angle view of the expanse
of Sri Lankan landscape labels this as a view from the ‘foreign’ outside.
This latter phenomenon is an example of what Edward Bruner and
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, tourism scholars and anthropologists,
have described as a ‘tourist discourse […in which] landscape is staged
from a distance’ (1994, 440). The second signal of transnationality – and
an underlining of the importance of this section to the work as a whole –
lies in my reference to the photographs Ondaatje uses throughout
Running in the Family: using this image in a position predominantly
occupied by family portraits lends, by association, the same status to
the subject of the prodigal – and the prodigal–foreigner – as that of the
friends and family in the snapshots used elsewhere in the work.
This transnationality of ‘THE PRODIGAL’ extends into the textual
form of the individual chapters in the section, starting with the dis-
jointed opening of the first:
I arrived in a plane but love the harbour. Dusk. And the turning on
of electricity in ships, portholes of moon, the blue glide of a tug, the
harbour road and its ship chandlers, soap makers, ice on bicycles,
the hidden anonymous barber shops behind the pink dirt walls of
Reclamation Street. (1984 [1982], 133)
The sinuous shift in tenses in the first sentence leads into a single-word
description of the setting, as if the bare noun ‘Dusk’ were sufficient
explanation: a tendency towards fragmentation performs the transitions

and ellipses of a transnational identity at a syntactic level. This is fol-
lowed by a final sentence without a main verb, through which effect
Ondaatje’s writing seems to be unmoored, emphasising the importance
of ideas of travel and movement in his work. The final lines of the
chapter re-emphasise this:
I love it here […] the lovely swallowing of thick night air as it carves
around my brain, blunt, cleaning itself with nothing but this ano-
nymity, with the magic words. Harbour. Lost ship. Chandler. Estuary.
(1984 [1982], 134, emphasis original)
The breathless, asyndetic rush of these lines places this erratically

punctuated passage at the intersection of prose and poetry: the formal
fragmentations of this admixture underline a textual transnationality
that pertains throughout Ondaatje’s work.
The form of this section alters in a later episode, narrated by a
character within the narrative. At a family dinner, Michael’s sister
Gillian brings up the subject of an early episode that turns the focus
of the hitherto biographical, outward-looking narrative onto Michael
himself:
Gillian begins to describe to everyone […] how I used to be bathed

when I was five. She had heard the story in detail from Yasmine
Gooneratne […].
The first school I went to was a girls’ school […] which accepted
young boys […]. The nurse or ayah in charge of our cleanliness was a
small, muscular and vicious woman named Maratina. […] The bath-
room was a sparse empty stone room […]. We were marched in by
Maratina and ordered to strip. She collected our clothes, threw them
out of the room, and locked the door. (1984 [1982], 137–38)
This episode is significant for three reasons. Firstly, there is a chain

of interpretation: the story is transferred from Maratina – Yasmine is
absent from the locked room – to Yasmine; from Yasmine to Gillian;
from Gillian to the dinner guests; and finally to the reader, by Michael.
The account is buried in a matryoshka of translations, rendering it
of dubious authenticity, a feeling heightened by the second reason:
Michael cannot remember this. While the others laugh with Gillian,
he ‘wonder[s] why this was never to be traumatically remembered’,
as it is the kind of event that ‘should have surfaced as the first chapter
of an anguished autobiographical novel’ (1984 [1982], 138). His gentle
self-mockery – implying the text is less ‘anguished’ for this absence, and
thus less worthy of the telling – takes on ironic overtones in the third
reason: this is the sole example of an episode from his childhood.
This central episode in the pivotal ‘THE PRODIGAL’ section affirms
the confusion inherent in the form and content of this memoir-that-is-
not-remembered, this biography-of-biographical-avoidance, this trans-
national text of the prodigal–foreigner. Throughout, we are presented
with the ‘ellipses of Ondaatje’s self, the gaps in his perceptions and in
our perceptions of him’ (Kamboureli, 1988, 81). These ellipses were
flagged at the very start:
‘I saw in this island fowls as big as our country geese having

two heads . . . and other things which I will not here
write of.’
Oderic, (Franciscan Friar, 14th century) (1984 [1982], 9)
Ondaatje, positioning his text within the ellipsis of the lines from
Oderic, assumes the fragmented, oblique style of the monk: he does so
in order to effect what the Franciscan was unwilling – or unable – to do,
and ‘write of’ the country. This intent is signalled in the first words to
follow this epigraph, a prefatory, italicised section somewhat detached
from the main text:15
Drought since December.
[…] During a fever […] his nightmare is that thorn trees in the garden
send their hard roots underground towards the house climbing through
windows so they can drink sweat off his body […].
He snaps on the electricity just before daybreak. For twenty five years
he has not lived in the country, though up to the age of eleven he slept in
rooms like this. (1984 [1982], 17; emphases original)
The disjunctions and minimal punctuation of ‘towards the house climb-

ing through windows so they can drink sweat off his body’ foreground the
work’s transnational textuality, emphasising the mixed belonging and
alienation in the next paragraph: Ondaatje is a foreigner, absent for
twenty-five years, yet also a native of the island. Also, we see a split
between author and narrator for the first and only time: this is the sole
third-person view of Ondaatje. Finally, the section concludes with the
work’s only reference to its own existence: ‘Half a page–and the morn-
ing is already ancient.’ This meta-textuality gestures towards a concept
I explore below, as the putting-together of fragmented identities in a
travel-inflected, transnational existence links with the reconstructive

processes of the text itself.
iii Reconstruction
Interrelated concepts of creation and destruction are central to Ondaatje’s
writing, as they underscore the tangled narratives of human love at the
centre of much of his work. There is the construction worker hanging
from the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto and the dynamiter working in
tunnels under Lake Ontario, whose relationships with various women
form the narrative of In the Skin of a Lion (1987); or there is the delicate
bomb defusing work of Kip the sapper, whose interactions with both
people and explosives are detailed in The English Patient (1992); or the
renovation work carried out on a church belfry in a pivotal scene in
Divisadero (2007), in which a roofer’s position mirrors the suspense felt
as his lover approaches from a distance with news he will never hear.
These examples of construction and destruction are manifested on three
formal levels: in the aesthetic nuts and bolts of the narrative, its tech-
niques of language, ellipsis, and fragmented style; in a literal – physical –
pause, suspension, or moment of breathlessness, detailed in the work;
and in a narrative theme, revolving around the constructive and/or the
destructive, that drives the novel as a whole. The combination of the
concepts of creation and destruction knits these levels together, linking
the thematic forms of each novel with its inherent structures of feeling.
This admixture of a detailed precision and an ambivalent creativity/
destructivity is referred to by Jon Kertzer as one on which Ondaatje’s
work particularly focuses:
An intimate familiarity [is] derived from the wisdom and expertise

cultivated in sciences like anthropology and archaeology in Anil’s
Ghost; or cartography, geology, and geography in The English Patient;
or engineering in In the Skin of a Lion. These disciplines are wonderful
[to Ondaatje] because they are at once disciplined and inspired. […]
They require a ‘sweet touch’ as well as a nimble brain. (2003, 121)16
The discipline that combines mental and physical expertise in Ondaatje’s

Sri Lankan work is that of reconstruction. In Anil’s Ghost, there is the
physical reconstruction of the landscape, after the civil war; the rebuild-
ing of a dead man’s face, through the medium of clay sculpted on a
replica skull; and the metaphorical process of identity-related recon-
struction wherein the protagonist, another prodigal–foreigner, restores
her relationship with the island. These various reconstructions are
not uncomplicated, however: in the case of the sculpting of a human

face, the protagonist realises that the artist, who had his wife abducted
during the Sri Lankan war and has not found her in three years, has
used the sculpting of a skeleton’s features to display ‘“what he wants of
the dead”’ – he has given it the peacefulness that his missing wife lacked
(2000, 184). This raises problems that haunt Ondaatje throughout his
work, and particularly in the two works on which I focus: at what
point does reconstruction move into creative fiction? Is it possible to
reconstruct – re-create – too much? In Running in the Family, for exam-
ple, to what extent does the author’s piecing-together of the narrative
of his family constitute a misleading form of anti-history?
The two narrative threads of Running in the Family – the story of
Ondaatje’s family history, and the narrative of his re-engagement with
the island – both entail a species of reconstruction, as the author sets
out to reconstruct the history that he left behind on his departure
from the country, while at the same time renegotiating the Sri Lankan
aspects of his identity. This reconstruction is thus a personal, political
process; and yet it is also an aesthetic one, for the reconstructed space
of Sri Lanka is mirrored in the singular structure of Ondaatje’s prose:
the author’s writing displays fragmented formal elements that work
together to build a picture of the country, and place it as a space that is
undergoing reconstruction significantly before the time of Anil’s Ghost.
The transnationality of the work, to reiterate Clingman’s definition of
the literary transnational (see my Introduction, Section IV), is both a
question of its form as that which informs its existence and its form in
terms of the appearance of the text itself; I focus on the second of these
forms in concluding my discussion of Running in the Family.
The dovetailing of different formal levels is evident throughout
Ondaatje’s ‘memoir’. The following example is reproduced in its entirety –
the opening sentence fragment and ellipsis are original – from the begin-
ning of a chapter:
To jungles and gravestones. . . . Reading torn 100-year-old newspaper

clippings that come apart in your hands like wet sand, information
tough as plastic dolls. […] Have seen the outline of a large fish […],
been where nobody wears socks, where you wash your feet before
you go to bed, where I watch my sister who […] reminds me of my
father, mother and brother. (1984 [1982], 69)
The title of the sub-section, ‘MONSOON NOTEBOOK (i)’, indicates Ondaatje’s

attitude towards its form: the fragmentary nature of these lines, which – as
in so many cases in this work – move with the rhythm of the poetry
with which he began his career, indicates that these are meant as jot-
tings made in situ, in Sri Lanka. The fragmentary atmosphere of a
notebook of loosely connected findings is generated by Ondaatje’s
shimmering use of verb tenses: he shifts from the bare participle ‘read-
ing’, without a subject except for the non-specific ‘in your hands’; then
there is the present perfect of ‘have seen the outline […], been where
nobody wears socks, where you wash your feet’, a verb form that crum-
bles into nothingness at each comma; until finally, when the subject
appears, we have arrived in the simple present, with ‘I watch my sister’.
This is a passage not of complete sentences, but of clauses and phrases:
it is founded on thoughts and feelings that twist and turn, pulling the
language with them.
It is not merely the overall form of the passage that indicates its
transnationality: there are repeated linguistic disruptions of the
straightforward ideas of national affiliation and linguistic identity that
structure a conventional work of travel writing or biography. These are
found in various forms: the absence of persons for the verbs, and the
resultant uncertainty of action and attribution, and thus of identity;
the elision of time with space, in the ‘100-year-old newspaper clip-
pings that come apart in your hands like wet sand’ and the follow-
ing image that verges on a non sequitur in its metaphorical opacity,
‘information tough as plastic dolls’; the familial uncertainty of the
author himself, who admits to confusing his siblings and parents of
both genders, undermining the stability of the traditional family unit
on which straightforward ideas of ‘the nation’ are founded; and the
broad semantic sweep of the initial sentence fragment, which draws
an unsettling connection between the natural settings of ‘jungles’ and
humanly manufactured ‘gravestones’.
Moreover, the very formation of the chapter signals its identity as
both reconstruction and marker of transnationality, for it is anything
but an in situ field journal. While a reader is invited to believe that these
shifting verbs indicate an impromptu notation of ideas, as the chapter
progresses it becomes clear that these linguistic fragments have been
artfully rebuilt at a later date. The concluding paragraph, for example,
appears to place the author at a significant remove, both spatially and
temporally: ‘I witnessed everything. One morning I would wake and
just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses’
(1984 [1982], 70–71). Several transnational formal features defined by
Clingman are in evidence: the passage enacts a disruption of time both
through its use of verb tenses and via a synaptic, ‘gapped’ quality; there
are unmarked transitions that disrupt the progress of the narrative; and
the dropping of prepositions and punctuation challenges a reader to
effect a reassembly of the fragmented passage in order to understand
what is going on, as – to paraphrase Clingman – the text itself becomes
a kind of syntax. The particular features of Ondaatje’s style label the
written text itself as a reconstruction: the gaps and ellipses of his text,
from the missing chunks of sentences to the lack of conjunctions
throughout, signal the attempts of the author to navigate the transna-
tionality of his material.
One scene amongst the fragments of the ‘NOTEBOOK’ chapter features
an encounter between the author and a man lying in the road, in a
rain-drenched night when the Ondaatjes are driving back, without
headlights, from a party. Not only does this provide several examples
of transnational formal techniques, but the atmosphere of breathless
suspense also provides an uncomfortable foreshadowing of a parallel,
far more serious episode in Anil’s Ghost:
After the party the thunderstorm […] and the ghosts of steam cruis-
ing disorganized off the tarmac roads, and the man sleeping on the
street who objected when I woke him each of us talking different
languages, me miming a car coming round the corner and hitting
him and he, drunk, perversely making me perform this action for him
again and again, and I got back into the car fully wet once more and
again dry in five miles. (1984 [1982], 70)
Here are the shimmering verb tenses that characterise Ondaatje’s prose:
while the sentence never actually moves out of the past tense, the
gerunds ‘cruising […] sleeping […] miming […] hitting […] making’
leave a reader uncertain as to the exact temporal location of this epi-
sode, lending a sense of the mythical or legendary. This is enhanced
by the lyricism of the passage, and the way in which the lack of either
punctuation or conjunctions reads not as manic hurriedness but rhyth-
mic, enjambed poetry: ‘we were dry just from the midnight heat inside
the vehicle and the ghosts of steam cruising disorganized off the tarmac
roads’.
This episode, complete with its linguistic uncertainty, thematic
suspense, and generic fluidity, is central to an understanding of the
transnational status of Running in the Family. This centrality has chilling
echoes in Ondaatje’s later Sri Lankan work, with which I continue my
study of his transnational literature. Stepping from his car into the driv-
ing rain to remonstrate with the man in the road, Ondaatje is not used
to this climate, nor to people who behave like this; yet it is also true
that he has – at least in part – been accepted by this Sri Lankan man,
with whom he repeatedly performs a choreographed performance, ‘me
miming a car coming round the corner and hitting him and he, drunk,
perversely making me perform this action for him again and again’.
Ondaatje is a transnational figure, occupying a liminal position in a
transnational space: he is the prodigal–foreigner, neither accepted nor
rejected, neither entirely ‘at home’ nor totally ‘alien’. Situated between
identities, cultures, and languages, he is the prodigal who translates the
Sri Lankan experience for his readers, and yet also the foreigner who
has to resort to mime in order to perform this translation. His transla-
tion can only be at best a reconstruction, a back-and-forth transnational
interpretation of the country: Ondaatje hovers on the edges of his own
‘memoir’, leaving the reader uncertain as to the exact positioning of
either author or text.
IV Anil’s Ghost
i Transnational Belonging
The transnational nature of Ondaatje’s writing about Sri Lanka, encom-
passing both the importance of the prodigal–foreigner and a developed
idea of reconstruction, is clear not only in the travelogue Running in the
Family, but in the novel that marked the author’s imaginative return
to the island nearly two decades later, Anil’s Ghost. In light of my argu-
ments about the transnational in Running in the Family, I use the second
half of this chapter to show how Ondaatje presents these works as a
unified response to questions about both himself and Sri Lanka. The
dependence of Anil’s Ghost on the travelogue highlights the important
role of travel writing within such a transnational engagement. I explore
how Anil’s visit to Sri Lanka in Anil’s Ghost – dependent on a passport
with the ‘light-blue UN bar’ of an international observer (2000, 9)17 –
intersects with Ondaatje’s earlier presence on the island in Running in
the Family. These parallel sets of observations about – and investigations
into – the country demonstrate the emergence of a particular literary
form, expressed via multivalent, transnational relationships between
author, texts, and characters.
Furthermore, I also highlight Ondaatje’s focus on the idea of the
boundary. Initially, I agree with Clingman’s emphasis on the extent to
which the work of multiply located authors such as Ondaatje speaks
to Clifford’s ‘traveling cultures’, a concept in which ‘the nature of the
boundary, even the imagined boundary, becomes something much less
than solid or impermeable, but equally […] intriguingly problematic’
(Clingman, 2009, 4), meaning that ‘one reason [literary works] become
transnational is because of their concern with the nature of the boundary’
(2009, 21): like Clingman, I often focus on ‘the transitive boundary that
explains the movement from [national] to [transnational]’ (2009, 24).
In studying Ondaatje’s concern with the idea of the boundary, however,
I go beyond Clingman, and focus on the manipulations of this concept:
it is not so much Ondaatje’s use of the fluid, transnational idea of the
boundary that fascinates me, but the extent to which he subverts and
re-presents this. By reading various scenes involving the reimagina-
tion of boundary spaces, the reinvoking of mythical constructs, and
intertextual references within the author’s work, I consider the ways in
which Anil’s Ghost does not simply dramatise the divisions of national
relationships in wartime, but offers a transnational re-evaluation of the
politics of the island.
Written in 2000, after years of civil war in Sri Lanka, Anil’s Ghost
features the forensic pathologist Anil Tissera, sent by the United Nations
to investigate suspected human rights abuses on the island in a time of
uneasy truce18 somewhere between ‘the mid-1980s [and] the early 1990s’
(2000, vii).19 Anil’s presence is deeply resented by the government,
which has only agreed to her presence ‘to placate trading partners in
the West’ and as the ‘gesture of an offer’ (2000, 16): her visit is couched
in ambivalent political language, whereby her status as scientific autho-
rity is always-already undermined by her role as political pawn. These
machinations surround the conflict between two of many Sri Lankan
identities (see above, Section II): the Tamils and the Sinhalese. Tensions
between the ethnicities simmered from the 1950s to 1970s: anti-
government resentment due to Sinhala political dominance joined an
antipathy towards the Tamils arising from supposedly more favourable
pre-independence treatment by the British; these differences were exac-
erbated by Sinhalese–Buddhist/Tamil–Hindu divisions. The Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam, colloquially known as the ‘Tamil Tigers’, rose to
prominence – ‘Eelam’ is the longed-for separate Tamil Sri Lankan state. In
1983, after both Tamil and Sinhalese assassinations, the Tigers declared
the start of the ‘First Eelam War’, which lasted – through periods of
truce, insurgence, and counter-insurgence – for twenty-six years: on the
death of the Tigers’ commander, Velupillai Prabhakaran, in May 2009,
the government declared all ‘rebel’ land captured, and the war ‘over’.20
Into this real-life situation, less than ten years into the war, arrives the
fictional Anil Tissera. A forensic anthropologist in ‘the West’, Anil does
not expect to be chosen for an investigation in Sri Lanka: although
she was born on the island, she now travels with a British passport
(2000, 10). There are parallels between author and creation: Anil, like
Ondaatje, was born in Sri Lanka and moved away as a child (Anil in
her teens, Ondaatje at eleven); she was educated in the UK and North
America (though Anil’s ties are to the US, not Canada); and she returns
after a long time abroad (fifteen years to Ondaatje’s twenty-four). Anil,
while not a direct re-creation of Ondaatje, is in some ways a gesture
towards the figure of the author.
This gesture is reinforced in several links between Running in the
Family and Anil’s Ghost, not least in the ‘prodigal–foreigner’ echoes.
The later text’s primary reference to the ‘prodigal’ comes as Anil is met
at the airport by a loquacious driver sent by the authorities:
‘How long has it been? You were born here, no?’

‘Fifteen years.’
‘You still speak Sinhala?’
‘A little. Look, do you mind if I don’t talk […] I’m jet-lagged. I just
want to look. Maybe drink some toddy […]’
‘Toddy! […] First thing after fifteen years. The return of the prodigal.’
‘I’m not a prodigal.’ (2000, 9–10)
Anil forecloses conversation, rejecting both his attempts to commu-

nicate in the language of her childhood and the very idea of commu-
nicating at all. Any potential dialogue between native and foreigner
is thus closed off by the protagonist herself – ironically, one who has
been sent to encourage official openness from the government. Also,
while Ondaatje was ‘the prodigal who hates the foreigner’, Anil is the
Sri-Lankan-born foreigner who hates the idea of being a prodigal: the
author’s creation of Anil is an attempt to work out the uneasy relation-
ship between the ‘foreign’ and the ‘prodigal’ on which his Sri Lankan
work turns. Anil’s Ghost is thus a mirror of Running in the Family in two
senses: it is based on the earlier work, containing reflections on and
copies of the travelogue; also, it is an inversion of the earlier text: while
Running in the Family focuses on the positive, proliferating nature of
familial connections on the island, Anil’s Ghost deals with the failure
to preserve these links. The destination Anil gives the driver is a rented
house – on arriving in Sri Lanka she does not rely on the hospitality of
friends or family, and denies any such relationship:
‘You have friends here, no?’

‘Not really.’
Anil was glad to be alone. There was a scattering of relatives in Colombo,
but she had not […] let them know she was returning. (2000, 10)
Ondaatje’s insertion of a lacuna into the narrative provides a textual

emphasis of Anil’s rejection of familial or friendly connections: she
refuses a connection with the island, just as she rejected any sugges-
tion that her return was that of a ‘prodigal’. This ambivalent sense of
national affiliation is a form of Clifford’s ‘dwelling-in-travel’, further
underlining the fact that transnationality can be profound detachment
as well as important interconnection. The prodigal–foreigners Anil and
her creator are opposite sides of the same transnational coin.
Strangely, analyses of the later novel have not been so keen to draw
links between creator and protagonist: the concept of Anil’s Ghost
as a narrative or semantic development of Running in the Family has
not, on the whole, been addressed. Victoria Burrows, for instance, in
her discussion of Anil’s Ghost, refers to Ondaatje’s ‘personal ties to
Sri Lanka – evoked so captivatingly in Running in the Family’ (2008,
165), yet this is her only reference to the earlier work; Antoinette
Burton makes only a passing geographical comment, stating that ‘the
story [of Anil’s Ghost] takes place in contemporary Sri Lanka: up until
now, a site Ondaatje has used in his memoir Running in the Family and
his poetry, but not his fiction’ (2003, 40); and Gillian Roberts draws
connections between the ‘prodigality’ of Ondaatje in his memoir
and Anil in the later novel, stating that their positions are ‘align[ed]’
(2007, 964), yet this is the only reference she makes to Running in
the Family. These critics are inclined to dismiss the idea of a con-
nection between the two texts, preferring to explain away any inter-
textual similarities as the result of ‘personal ties’ or single instances
of ‘align[ment]’. Chelva Kanaganayakam is the only critic to make a
significant connection:
Anil’s Ghost invites attention to its political engagement. It is, at

some level, a rewriting of Running in the Family. The time period is
approximately the same, and here again is an exiled subject who is
returning to the home country after fifteen years. (2006, 20)
Although there are indeed parallels between author and character,

Kanaganayakam’s analysis is somewhat flawed: the time Ondaatje
spends in Sri Lanka in Running in the Family is spread over two years,
and two separate trips, while Anil’s visit is a seven-week project; also,
Ondaatje’s ‘exile’ is nearly a decade longer than Anil’s. The assertion
that this is ‘a rewriting of Running in the Family’, however, is interesting,
for it underlines the importance of setting in Ondaatje’s work. While
analyses such as LeClair’s criticise Anil’s Ghost for its observational
tendencies, its anti-national detachment, and its avoidance of political

engagement, I agree with Kanaganayakam: the novel does indeed
‘[invite] attention to its political engagement’, both in the politically
conscious character of Anil and through the multiple connections
between Ondaatje’s Sri Lankan works.
Other debts to Running in the Family surface throughout Anil’s Ghost,
not least in the centrality of travel to the text – and the fact that one
narrative strand focuses on the ways in which Anil both does and does
not belong to the country to which she has travelled. Moreover, we
are less able to define Anil’s connections with the island, the more her
place in the narrative is shaped and reshaped by others: the driver who
calls her ‘the prodigal’ is only the first character in the narrative to place
Anil in a position of surveillance. Rendering her always fluid, constantly
travelling, there is an anxiety to situate Anil in one location, and in a
single identity: an early example comes when her investigative partner,
Sarath Diyasena, greets her with a booming ‘“So – you are the swimmer!”’
when they first meet, locking her into an identity gained via a one-off
athletic achievement as a teenager on the island. Anil’s reply, in grimly
adapting a well-worn phrase, links her struggle to avoid an ossification
of identity with the political history of the country they investigate:
‘Mr Diyasena . . . let’s not mention swimming again, okay? A lot of blood
under the bridge since then’ (2000, 16).
The same goes for the text’s formal indebtedness to travel, for it is hea-
vily dependent on the transnational form of Running in the Family. In the
same way as the travelogue presented an intermingling of time-frames,
with Ondaatje family stories interwoven with an account of Michael’s
visit to the island, Anil’s Ghost gives us the often-traumatic story of
Anil’s American past – love affair with a married man; (possibly sexual)
relationship with a female colleague, Leaf; Leaf’s battle with cancer;
Anil’s violent rejection of her male lover – entwined with the investiga-
tive actions of her Sri Lankan present, as she and Sarath uncover the
story of a killing they suspect was politically sanctioned. Moreover,
episodes from Anil’s history assume similar positions to several traumatic
Sri Lankan episodes: interleaved with the main narrative, alongside Anil’s
American past, there are scenes from recent Sri Lankan history, from the
murder of a ‘government official’ on a train (2000, 31, emphasis original)
to a chapter that starts with a list of ‘disappeared’ individuals encoun-
tered by Anil in the offices of the Civil Rights Movement (2000, 41).
There are also the disturbing experiences of other characters, such as
the story of Sirissa, wife of forensic artist Ananda: Sirissa appears for a
single, short chapter, witnesses sets of heads on stakes – signs of political

killings – and disappears herself (2000, 172–75).21 As with earlier trau-
mas, Sirissa’s story is presented in italics, yet by the end of the novel a
similar scene is given in Roman type, when one character sees the man-
gled corpse of his brother, victim of the novel’s final political killing
(2000, 288–90). In this transnational narrative, forms of representation
blur, as narrative strands merge, judgement is withheld or distorted, and
it becomes increasingly difficult to read the text.
Ondaatje’s imaginative engagement with Sri Lanka, in spite of his
prolonged physical absence from the island, places his Sri Lankan
work as a central part of the author’s artistic endeavour, and as a
valuable contribution to contemporary questions of troubled nation-
ality and transnational affiliation. In Running in the Family and Anil’s
Ghost, Michael Ondaatje has written two examples of transnational
literature that, in engaging with both his own cultural origins and
his feelings of alienation, allow a reader to understand the rest of
his writing in a different light – as deeply indebted to the formative
experiences of travel, foreignness, and exile that structured his own
youth. In the remainder of this chapter, I situate my reading of Anil’s
Ghost in the light of the transnational implications opened up by
Running in the Family, and analyse the later work as an example of
transnational political engagement that informs an understanding
both of Michael Ondaatje and of the act of literary creation in a mod-
ern, travel-oriented world.
ii Investigations
Emily S. Davis’s article on Anil’s Ghost describes it as detective fiction:
she locates the novel in two ways, both ‘in relation […] to scholar-
ship on the histories of crime fiction’ and with respect to the idea of
‘post-colonial detectives’, ‘marginalized […] sympathetic characters’
advanced by, among other critics, Ed Christian (Davis, 2009, 16; citing
Christian, 2001, 2). While she acknowledges Ondaatje’s adherence to
a ‘metafictional, or metaphysical tradition’ that ‘challenges […] the
idea that a [lone] detective can uncover the truth about crime […] by
using five central characters rather than a single questing detective’,
Anil’s Ghost remains a ‘hard-boiled’ novel in the ‘tradition of detective
fiction embodied by earlier figures such as [Dashiell] Hammett and
[Raymond] Chandler’ (2009, 18, 19).22 In referencing the creators of the
classic protagonists of American detective fiction Sam Spade and Philip
Marlowe, Davis locates Anil firmly within a recognisable ‘questing’,
detective tradition.23 While I agree with Davis’s point about whether it

is ‘possible or even desirable to represent questions of postcolonial vio-
lence and resistance to it’ (2009, 23), her analysis hides a transnational
complexity to the proliferating, discordant voices of the text’s various
investigations.
Anil’s story begins before her arrival on Sri Lanka; an untitled, itali-
cised opening, starting in medias res, mirrors the opening of Running in
the Family (see above, Section III.ii):
When the team reached the site at five-thirty in the morning […] family
members would be waiting for them. And they would be present all day
[...] This vigil for the dead, for these half-revealed forms.
[…] There was always the fear, double-edged, that it was their son in
the pit, or that it was not their son – which meant there would be further
searching. (2000, 5; emphases original)
Through textual devices like the first paragraph’s concluding sentence

fragment, Ondaatje presents a mix of emotions; uppermost among
these are the simultaneous poignancy and hopelessness inherent in
the graveside watch of these people, who both acknowledge the need
to mourn their dead and refuse to accept that their loved ones were in
fact victims. This is reflected in the language of the passage, as it is not
just the bones sticking up through the soil that are ‘half-revealed forms’:
the soil-covered skeletons serve as a metaphor for the lies and cover-ups
that surround the political killings of wartime.
Though this opening foreshadows Anil’s uncovering of ‘half-revealed’
Sri Lankan truths, however, it in fact describes the exhumation of vic-
tims of political killings in Guatemala. As Victoria Burrows asserts, it is
necessary to emphasise this:
It is important both for the narrative structure and the politics of

Anil’s Ghost that this witnessing of postcolonial trauma with which
the novel opens is not located in Sri Lanka […it] is the result of a dif-
ferent form of Western intrusion into the politics and governance of
[a] developing country. (2008, 169)
The ‘witnessing of postcolonial trauma’ is a necessary aspect of Anil’s

Ghost, locating Anil as more than a dispassionate observer of the hor-
rors of the war; it also enables us to move beyond LeClair’s assertion of
a ‘reductive political analysis’ in Ondaatje, and understand the novel
as politically engaged. I believe, however, that Burrows does not go far
enough, for there is something more significant to the novel’s structure

and politics than this reminder of a postcolonial influence from another
‘Third World’ location. By introducing the novel using an unlabelled,
unmarked passage, Ondaatje strips the text of signposts, unsettling
his readers in an echo of the uncertainty surrounding both the bod-
ies exhumed from Guatemalan graves and the Sri Lankan skeletons to
come. It is not differences between Latin American and Asian sites of
‘Western intrusion’ on which Ondaatje encourages us to focus, but grim
correspondences between these situations of political trauma, neither of
which comes with a satisfactory explanation attached. Faced with this
tableau of traumatic witness, the protagonist’s objective reasoning fails,
and she is left with a bare emotional response going beyond language:
‘there are no words Anil knows that can describe, even for just herself, the
woman’s face. But the grief of love in that shoulder she will not forget, still
remembers’ (2000, 6).
This passage sets the scene for what follows, as the novel is set up as
a paradoxically simultaneous investigation into trauma and muteness
in the face of it. This is true for Anil’s work in Sri Lanka, for which
she is paired with an archaeologist in Colombo, the aforementioned
Sarath Diyasena (2000, 16). This assigning of an archaeological partner
is interesting: the process of recovering evidence from bodies buried
during war is closer to geological excavation than forensic science.
Yet this investigation is hampered – silenced – by the government, as
the skeletons on which they work are found to have been discovered
in a government-protected zone, for which they will need a permit to
conduct further research. The skeletons were originally supposed to be
mostly sixth century, recovered with some contemporaneous fossilized
wood pots, yet Anil discovers a bone fragment from a later date amongst
the remains Sarath has brought from the site: it is the provenance of
this particular skeleton, its bones ‘still held together by dried ligaments,
partially burned’, on which their investigation – and the novel as a
whole – is based (2000, 20, 50).
The skeleton is one of four, which Anil and Sarath name ‘TINKER,
TAILOR, SOLDIER, SAILOR’ – the last of these is the one they suspect
was buried more recently than the others (2000, 51). Davis asserts that
this labelling ‘overtly frames [the] investigation within the epistemo-
logical parameters of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ (2009, 19).
In linking Anil’s Ghost with this famous spy novel, Davis aligns herself
with Antoinette Burton, who also describes ‘an evocation of the […]
1975 John Le Carré thriller’ (2003, 44). This easy correspondence with
Le Carré, however, glosses over the fact that the primary reference
is to a nursery rhyme; this is the verse to which both Le Carré and

Ondaatje refer:
Tinker,
Tailor,
Soldier,
Sailor,
Rich man,
Poor man,
Beggarman,
Thief. (Opie and Opie [eds], 1951, 404)
To focus on Le Carré is to ignore this original context. Firstly, in a rhyme

about occupations, ‘sailor’ is the only role not rooted in a location
or region.24 Sailors are roving, transnational; in the words of Joseph
Conrad, sailor, migrant, and author, ‘their home is always with them –
the ship; and so is their country – the sea’ (1995 [1899/1902], 33).25 The
crucial skeleton is given a name linking this body with that of another
transitive, shifting figure: Anil herself. Secondly, foregrounding a later
investigation into the social origins of the skeleton, the lines focus on
social standing: the dictionary gives the earliest citation as William
Congreve’s 1695 play about romance and social mobility, Love for Love
(Opie and Opie [eds], 1951, 405). Finally, the rhyme, in a subsequent
incarnation, deals with marriage: Norman Douglas quotes the lines as
‘Lady, lady on the sea-shore,/She has children one to four,/The eldest
one is twenty-four,/Then she shall marry a tinker, tailor. . .’ (in Opie and
Opie [eds], 1951, 404).
This leads into another point: Anil has already been linked with the
names. Earlier, flashbacks explore Anil’s former relationship with a man
called Cullis. As he reveals the unusual middle name ‘Biggles’, we learn
that this affair – so far seen out of context – is illicit:
‘I never wanted to marry a Biggles. I always wanted to marry a tinker.

I love that word. . . .’
‘Tinkers don’t have wives. Not if they are true tinkers.’
‘You’ve got a wife, don’t you?’
*
(2000, 37)
Here, at a moment of heightened tension, the name ‘TINKER’ first

appears: this label is emphasised verbally through three iterations in
quick succession, and structurally by the line break and asterisk that
indicate a cut in conversation. Wendy Knepper is the only critic to
make the tinker–TINKER link, yet she does so simply by referring, in
parentheses, to Anil’s use of the name as a ‘rather dark undercurrent’
(2006, 49),26 a slight assertion that does not do justice to the currents
of influence and intratextuality27 that flow through Ondaatje’s work.
A focus on the importance of the labels given to the skeletons empha-
sises the multiple intratextualities of Anil’s Ghost. It also underlines the
extent to which Anil is a part of the investigations at the heart of this
narrative: not only are Anil and the skeletons intertwined at a textual
level, but the supposed investigator is herself under investigation. The
questions of the airport driver can be read as the initial steps in an
investigation of Anil, which continues when she first visits the Kynsey
Road Hospital:
‘You are Anil Tissera, no?’

‘That’s right.’
‘You won the scholarship to America.’
[…] The foreign celebrity was being pursued. (2000, 25)
Echoing the description of her as ‘prodigal’, it is someone else who

declares who Anil is, with an interrogation that is more of a declara-
tion than a sign of uncertainty – ‘no’, in this instance, is to be read as
‘this is surely the case’. The verb ‘pursue’ has two functions, as Anil
describes both the unwelcome attentions of Sri Lankans who see her as
‘the scholar who went to America’, and also the atmosphere of pursuit
pervading the book.
It is in this two-way process of investigation that I locate the trans-
nationality of Anil’s Ghost. In the novel’s charged political atmosphere,
the investigations of Anil and Sarath are matched, and dominated, by a
government watch over them. The main narrative follows the discovery
of Sailor’s manner of death (he was the victim of a political killing:
2000, 65), his age (approximately twenty-eight: 2000, 95), his location
(in the general vicinity of Ratnapura, a major city in the Sri Lankan
province of Sabaragamuwa: 2000, 152), initial hypotheses about his
occupation (he worked with his arms stretched out, reaching up, and
yet was also static and sedentary: 2000, 177–78), and final conclusions
about his identity (‘he was Ruwan Kumara and he had been a toddy
tapper […and then] worked in the local mine’ [2000, 269]). During the
investigation they enlist the services of an artist, Ananda, who uses
Sailor’s skull as a base for a sculpture of his facial features. Inexorably
the government closes in: ultimately Sailor is stolen, Sarath is executed,

and Anil flees Sri Lanka; all investigations are closed. Anil learns, finally,
that she has been under observation since she arrived:
‘Everyone pays attention. […] People knew you were in Colombo the
moment you got here.’ (2000, 281)
Anil’s surveillance moves her from an investigative position into a

situation where she is the object of an investigation. This emphasis on
ambivalence goes against the mono-cultural readings of Le Clair and
others: the text does not describe a straightforward, uni-directional
investigation, with the expected East/West power imbalance between a
government under suspicion and an observing international body; the
novel is not a mono-cultural, West-to-East, investigative detective story,
precisely because Anil herself is being investigated.28
iii The Boundary

In exploring the transnationality of Anil’s Ghost, I bring into focus the
idea of the boundary. As mentioned above (Section IV.i.), the concept
of the boundary is an essential part of Stephen Clingman’s study of
how fiction ‘becomes transnational’, and yet my analyses extend and
move beyond this point: it is not simply my contention that a focus
on (or preoccupation with) the idea of the boundary – in its transitive,
often impermeable, never fixed state – is necessarily transnational, but
that Ondaatje’s fascination with the spaces and pathways that delimit
and encapsulate boundaries leads him to disrupt and manipulate these
zones in ways that are often as surprising as they are transnational.
The first manipulation is early in Anil and Sarath’s investigation, in
an episode that is heavily formally reliant on Running in the Family. On
a drive to Colombo, they pass a truck, headlights on, with the driver
lying on the tarmac in front of it. Sarath reassures Anil: ‘“This is how
they sometimes sleep, take a short rest. Simply stop in the wrong lane,
leave the lights on, and stretch out on the road for half an hour or so”’
(2000, 109). Anil’s curiosity is satisfied, and they continue, only for
her to realise – further down the road – there had been something odd
about the situation,29 and insist they return:
They reached the truck in twenty minutes. The man by the truck
was alive but couldn’t move. […] Someone had hammered a bridge
nail into his left palm and another into his right, crucifying him to
the tarmac. […] As Sarath and Anil approached him a terrified look
appeared on his face. As if they were coming back to kill him or tor-
ture him further. (2000, 111)
This prone figure is an intertextual descendant of the sleeping man

Ondaatje encounters in the rain in Running in the Family (see Section
III.iii). The mythical atmosphere set up by the linguistic fluidity of the
earlier encounter – ‘cruising […] sleeping […] miming […] hitting’ – is
brought into harsh relief at this sign of extreme violence. The author
is thus a forerunner of the two approaching the crucified man: the first
encounter places Ondaatje between languages, searching for mean-
ing in a transnational situation; Anil and Sarath are caught between a
representation as rescuers and the man’s belief that they are returning
torturers.
Here Anil comes into direct and shocking contact with the reality
of conflict: she is forced beyond her forensic studies, and into the liv-
ing pathology of war. Ondaatje shows a movement into awareness for
Anil, whom Sarath initially derided as one who would ‘slip in, make a
discovery and leave […] like one of those journalists who file reports
about flies and scabs while staying at the Galle Face Hotel’ (2000, 44):
here, confronted with a living, tortured body, she is a different type of
witness to ‘discovery’. This shift in positioning for Anil signals this is a
particularly powerful scene, even before the shock generated when the
protagonist – and then the reader – realises the immobility of the man is
inflicted rather than voluntary, or the initially fearful reaction the man
has to his rescuers, as he believes them to be returning to further dam-
age his body. Ondaatje’s literary representation of a horror of war invites
simultaneous, competing emotional responses: a reader is presented
with a scene of trauma that is a clear-cut fictional creation, and one that
can be appreciated as such; equally, though, the author is describing an
event which could plausibly have occurred during the war.30 It is thus
a strange juxtaposition of two distinct conceptions of trauma; as Susan
Sontag puts it, while ‘no moral charge attaches to the representation of
[fictional] cruelties […] there is shame as well as shock in looking at the
close-up of a real horror’ (2004, 37). Ondaatje’s fiction here not only
tests the boundaries of the national in times of conflict, but the bounda-
ries of what can be appreciated as fiction by his readership.
The torture of the truck driver – a man named Gunesena – represents
a violation of the idea of the road: commonly viewed as the connective
tissue of a country, linking and communicating between locations, a
road is a line drawn between two points, or a boundary between two
areas. Ondaatje’s writing, in contrast, locates the road itself as a site of
conflict, a location of warfare.31 By literally pinning Gunesena’s body

to the road, Ondaatje violates the idea of an accepted boundary line
between territories, and makes this boundary the very site of conflict. In
doing so, Ondaatje is no longer simply engaging with the nationalisms
of war, but the transnationalisms wherein accepted norms, boundaries,
and relationships are subverted by different ways of understanding
changing identities and attitudes towards home and belonging. In vio-
lating the accepted idea of the road as a boundary or connection, and
in doing so through the eyes of Anil – one who enters the arena of war
from a position of foreignness – Ondaatje’s text presents Sri Lanka itself
as a violated space.
This sense of violation is emphasised in an innovative use of
Christian iconography. The Christian Messiah’s sacrificial death on
a cross, pointed towards the sky, is translated into a brutal torture,
wherein the victim is stretched flat on the road. Gunesena’s body is
anchored to the road, symbol of both the mobile violences of war and
his own day-to-day travel. Kertzer focuses his analysis of the novel on
this episode, ‘one of the most horrific images in […] Anil’s Ghost’, that
‘summons one of European culture’s most revered symbols, but leaves
the reader baffled as to its significance in a land where Christianity is
superseded by older myths’ (2003, 116). This is true, to some extent –
the phrase ‘crucifying him to the tarmac’, using a verb from the
Latin ‘to fasten to a cross’, evokes in the Western reader of Kertzer’s
imagination a powerful connection with the tortured body of the
Christian Crucifixion: this reader is ‘baffled’ by the extent to which ‘a
symbol […is] cast […] adrift from its conventional moorings’ (2003,
117). Crucially, however, Kertzer assumes a Western viewer, whose
confusion arises from a Western semiotic system; the layers of mean-
ing inherent in this pattern do not necessarily have an anchorage in
the figure of a Sri Lankan truck driver. From Ondaatje’s perspective,
as a writer who both literally and in his writing navigates between
this island and the rest of the world, this ‘undermining’ of myth
assumes a new form. In opposition to the tacitly colonizing responses
of such critics as Kertzer who read this as a borrowing of Christian
imagery, I believe Ondaatje’s placing of this symbol – affixed to the
surface of the road that carries soldiers and armaments – asserts
the importance of casting adrift and repositioning ‘conventional’
Western symbols.
A similar adaptation of Western iconography occurs in another
boundary region: the hospital. Positioned between life and death, dedi-
cated to the promotion of health yet filled with illness, the hospital is
a place of liminality. Ondaatje builds on this with another narrative

voice; Gamini, Sarath’s brother, is a doctor who works in a wartime
field hospital:
The wards were always in turmoil […] The only silent place was
Rheumatology, where a man slowly and quietly turned a giant wheel
to exercise his shoulders and arms […], and where a solitary woman
sat with her arthritic hand in a basin of warm wax. In the corridors,
the walls mildewed with dampness, men would be rolling giant
cylinders of oxygen noisily off the carts. Oxygen was the essential
river, hissed into neonatal wards. (2000, 239)
This environment is more akin to that of a description of the Hell of

medieval European thought than a scene in a working hospital: the gen-
eral turmoil establishes an idea of disorder in opposition to a hospital’s
standard aura of sobriety, the ‘basin of warm wax’ and ‘mildewed […]
dampness’ set a tone of insanitariness and ill health, and the corri-
dors fill with unpredictable movement and sound.32 While oxygen is
‘essential’, it is still a ‘river’ with a life of its own, ‘hiss[ing]’ insidiously
into the wards like a serpent: the unsettling atmosphere continues in
the flexibility of the language, as the participle ‘hissed’ signals either
an absent pronoun ‘it’ or a missing auxiliary ‘being’, and the precise
meaning of the verb is left open. Most significant is the man turning a
giant wheel, invoking both Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a
hill for eternity, and Ixion, bound to a fiery wheel, both mythological
kings who violated Greek laws of ‘ζενία’, or ‘guest friendship’: through
these classical undertones, the man symbolizes a fundamental lack of
hospitality in this hospital.33
These scenes of ambivalence, in which sites such as the road and
hospital are reconfigured to accommodate both positive and negative
impulses, and mythic and religious iconographies are manipulated and
subverted, place Ondaatje’s writing as transnational. This interpreta-
tion of Ondaatje’s vocabulary of myth invites us beyond the sort of
straightforward reading of religion in the novel advanced by Marlene
Goldman’s study of ‘the complex relationship between [Buddhist]
religion, politics, and violence in Sri Lanka’ (2004, n.p.). Certainly, the
novel closes with an ostensible glorification of religion, in the recon-
struction of a dynamited statue of the Buddha. The author emphasises,
however, that this ‘was broken stone. It was not a human life. This
was for once not a political act or an act perpetrated by one belief
against another’ (2000, 300). The sculptor, Ananda – once a forensic
artist – focuses on the redemptive qualities of sculpture in opposition

to religion and war:
As an artificer […] he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But

he knew if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon.
The war around him was all to do with demons, spectres of retalia-
tion. (2000, 304)
Ananda distances himself from religion: though he works on a religious

statue, he knows any deviation from the secular leads to the ‘demons’ of
conflict. Here, as in the hospital and road scenes, Ondaatje uses mythical
and religious references not to emphasise their importance, but to under-
cut received ideas on organized religion and/or identity, underlining the
transnationality of his travel-related, Sri Lankan writing.
iv Mapping Textual Travels

Having followed the central characters along some of the narrative
strands of Anil’s Ghost, I close my discussion of the novel by returning
to the idea of Sri Lanka, and the island’s mapping. The following carries
resonances of the mappings in Running in the Family:
The National Atlas of Sri Lanka has seventy-three versions of the

island – each template revealing only one aspect, one obsession.34 (2000,
39, emphasis original)
This passage recalls the reference to maps in Running in the Family,

though in the travelogue the different ‘versions of the island’, from
European ships’ ‘theories of sextant’, were ‘false maps’.35 By drawing a
comparison between these mappings of Sri Lanka, Ondaatje questions
the relative truths of the National Atlas portraits in their bewildering,
‘obsess[ive]’ proliferation: this intertextuality establishes the idea that
nothing can be relied upon; no one position is fixed and unimpeach-
able. Cartography and conflict are entwined, supporting Sarath’s
description of a war subverting expected binaries: ‘Every side was killing
and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war’ (2000, 17,
emphasis original). This uncertainty pertains throughout the novel,
especially in a discussion of Gamini and Sarath’s fraught relationship
that unites ideas of conflict and malleable identity:
Where did the secret war begin between him and his brother? It had
begun with the desire to be the other. (2000, 221)
The first word cements the comparison between the brothers’ ‘secret
war’ and the situation in Sri Lanka: it is not a case of when this conflict
began, but where, moving from the expected temporal description to a
spatial one, and placing physical location and geographical mapping
at the centre of questions of personal conflict. Then, however, with the
marker ‘it had begun’, the narrative slides from space into time; the
author elides spatial and temporal distinctions in a section of prose that
is typical of his multivalent, transnational writing.
This transnationality is increasingly evident as the novel concludes,
particularly in the aftermath of Anil’s separation from her lover Cullis.
Earlier in the work, we read of the protagonist lashing out at Cullis
during an argument and stabbing him with a knife (2000, 100). Then,
later, we are presented with the end of this scene, when Anil walks out
on Cullis, leaving ‘nothing of herself for him to hold on to. Just the
blood as black as her hair, the room as shadowed as her skin’ (2000,
264). Again, we are presented with a fragmented, incomplete narra-
tive; set up by the earlier scene, the fluid and verb-less language of
the final description enables a reading of the paradoxical Anil, who is
both absent, having ‘left nothing of herself’, and eternally present, in
a room ‘as shadowed as her skin’. Subsequently we learn that she has
left Cullis for good, her departure making an abrupt incision into his
thoughts:
Then he would be off scouring the wetlands again. How to make a

book, Anil. You asked me How, you asked What’s the most important
thing you need? Anil, I’ll tell you. . . .
But she was on the night bus […] her eyes inches away from the
window […]. Oh, he knew that look in her, realigning herself after
a fight. But this was to be the last time. No second chances. (2000,
264, emphasis original)
The asyndetic structure is exacerbated by a flickering narrative voice,

with a third-person description of Cullis ‘off scouring the wetlands’,
and a second-person account of what ‘you asked me’, with no punc-
tuation separating Anil’s words from Cullis’s. Uncertainties do not end
with Cullis’s narrative: even moving into Anil’s voice the ghost of Cullis
glimmers – ‘Oh, he knew that look’ – before Anil stamps him out, with
a staccato ‘But this was to be the last time. No second chances.’
Anil passes the ultimate judgement, and does so on someone about to
tell her how to write a book. Ondaatje has reached the conclusion of his
transnational literature about Sri Lanka, and it comes as his protagonist
rejects authorial control, refusing to consider how to ‘make a book’.

As the text leaves her she mouths a song, speaking the words to herself:
Oh, the trees grow high in New York State,

They shine like gold in autumn–
Never had the blues whence I came,

But in New York State I caught ‘em.
[Anil] said the lines in a whisper, head down, to her own chest.
Autumn. Caught ‘em. How the rhyme snuggled into its partner.
(2000, 266)
While the novel continues – with the investigation’s end, Sarath’s

death, and Anil’s flight – it is with this rhyme, half-sung by a
Sri Lankan–American in America, but remembered in the context of her
time in Sri Lanka, that Anil’s Ghost begins to conclude. Founded on the
formal principles of disjuncture, crossing, and ellipsis of Running in the
Family, Anil’s Ghost is a troubled narrative about what it means to be
simultaneously anchored to and distant from a space: whether it be a
prodigal–foreigner like Ondaatje or Anil, or the narrator of Anil’s blues,
who is anchored in New York state yet remains aware of a place ‘whence
[s/he] came’.
The Sri Lanka of Ondaatje’s literature is a location that adds grim
weight to Homi K. Bhabha’s idea (see my Introduction, Section III) of
culture as a strategy of survival, both transnational and translational. In
Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje’s creation and manipulation of sites of boundary
and ambivalence – on the road, at the hospital, in the hotel room –
presents the proximity of the transnational and the translational in a
new light, through his use of the structures and symbols of transna-
tional literature. The formal qualities of his transnational work are first
displayed in Running in the Family, and honed in Anil’s Ghost, not only
in the episodes with direct echoes of the earlier text, but in the pas-
sages which adopt – and adapt – Western cultural icons. A decade on
from the novel’s publication, we must read Ondaatje’s work as a trans-
national approach to questions of division, boundary, belonging, and
integration that challenges us to consider the specific complexities of Sri
Lankan culture and politics as well as wider questions about belonging,
identity, and location.
These concerns continue into my next chapter, in which I analyse
the transnationalism of Vikram Seth. Building on my work here, my
argument develops from a focus on the specifically textual form of
transnationalism I see in Ondaatje to a set of much more personal,

identity-related ideas. We certainly see more of Seth in his travelogue
than we do of Ondaatje in his: from the outset, From Heaven Lake:
Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet is concerned with questions of per-
formance and display that place Seth’s transnational self at the heart
of the work. This centrality informs the transnationalism of his later,
millennial novel, An Equal Music, in which the idea of performance is
paramount: representations of music are undercut by a destabilising
jumping between nationalities, personal affiliations, and (dis)abilities.
As with Ondaatje, we have an author, and a set of characters, struggling
with the very real difficulties of transnational belonging.
2
Vikram Seth: The Performing
Wanderer and Transnational
Disintegration
I Performance and Travel
If there were a prize for the most engaging and unexpected travel
book of the year Vikram Seth should get it. (Keay, 1983)
Enormously enjoyable . . . elegantly written. (Radford, 1983)
In this chapter, my study of the various aspects of Vikram Seth’s trans-

national form, and the relationship between his travel writing and
transnational literature, starts with a focus on the ways in which the
author presents himself and his surroundings in the 1983 travelogue
From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet. I take as a starting
point the above descriptions of this work as ‘engaging’ and ‘enjoy-
able’, literally attached – in the form of cover copy – to the text: it is
the performative, entertaining qualities of Seth’s work that interest me
in particular. In a change from my approach at the beginning of my
analysis of Ondaatje, I do not necessarily disagree with these criticisms:
it is clear that the reading pleasure generated by the literariness of this
‘elegantly written’ travelogue and the engaging self-presentation of the
author are central to the text’s critical reception. The same issues as were
raised in the previous chapter – the concept of transnational textuality;
a concern with the relationship between transnational identity and
transnational writing, mediated by a focus on transnational geography;
the importance of a consideration of the geopolitical relations between
countries – will all recur throughout my analysis in this chapter, but in
a different form, as my focus will be on Seth’s travel, his writing, and
his identity, all as various species of performance.
The central idea of performance, which I argue dominates both Seth’s
life and his writing, may manifest itself in transnational linguistic play,
70
Vikram Seth: The Performing Wanderer 71
or as the performance of a variety of national or political identities, or

even through a literal performance involving elements of individual
physical or vocal expression. This proliferation of performances shows
Seth grappling with what Marvin A. Carlson, a critic and historian of
the concept, refers to as the ‘essential contestedness of performance’
(2004 [1996], 2); while, for example, the critics Mary S. Strine, Beverley
Whitaker Long, and Mary Frances Hopkins describe performance as a
concept involving participants who ‘do not expect to defeat or silence
opposing positions, but rather through continuing dialogue to attain a
sharper articulation of all positions’ (1990, 183), in Seth’s case perfor-
mance is a tool, through the use of which he is able to manipulate the
opposing ideological positions he encounters in the course of his travel.
In the second of two chapters on early-career travel writing, I trace the
ways in which Seth’s travelogue itself exposes the limitations of the con-
cept of performance, and move towards the conclusion that his travel
writing gestures towards the inherent instability of artistic and literary
performance – this is particularly evident in the text I analyse alongside
From Heaven Lake, An Equal Music, in which the foundational status of
Seth’s travel writing within his oeuvre is reflected through the millen-
nial novel’s focus on periods both of physical incapacitation and of
musical performance. Moreover, the concept of performance is not only
addressed as a recurring theme in the subject matter of From Heaven
Lake: I also emphasise the extent to which performance is an inte-
gral part of the book’s structure, enabling Seth’s journey – the central
subject of the text – to take place. My belief in the centrality of Seth’s
travel writing to his transnational work as a whole thus stems from
my reading of From Heaven Lake as an extended example of authorial
performance: the travelogue is a significant literary engagement with the
countries through which he travels, and thus a formative component of
the development of Seth’s later written work.
The economist Amartya Sen has written extensively on the subject
of India, Indianness, and the relationship between India and other
countries. His observations on the links between India and China have
enabled me to think with greater clarity about both the ‘Indianness’ of
Vikram Seth and the dependencies of his later transnational literature
on the India–China–Tibet setting of his travelogue; as Sen explains,
there were numerous cultural connections – often mediated via the
shared religion of Buddhism – between the two countries, from the
realms of science and mathematics ‘to the broader field of culture[:]
the consequences of Buddhist connections on China and India were […]
extensive’ (2005, 180). These cultural bridges, on which Seth reflects at
the end of From Heaven Lake (see below, Section II.iii), lay the foundations
for the intertwined narratives of music and travel in An Equal Music (1999):
the uncertainties of travelling identities and relationships are explored
through the imposition of a transnational framework onto a wholly
European context, as the novel ranges geographically between London,
Vienna, and Venice across a period of twenty years. Although this focus
contrasts sharply with the India–China–Tibet setting of From Heaven
Lake, Seth transfers his geographical perspective while maintaining
his concentration on questions of belonging and performance, as well
as providing several intertextual links between the works’ respective
protagonists.
In the second half of the chapter, I thus analyse the extent to which
the content and form of the millennial work of fiction An Equal Music
develop out of From Heaven Lake in hitherto unacknowledged ways. In
terms of content, there is a preoccupation with ideas of travel, move-
ment, and freedom in the later work that is laid out in the travelogue;
also, as I will establish, not only does From Heaven Lake focus on the
subject of travel and its facilitation, but the work is itself enabled by
this very idea. Furthermore, formal similarities between his works show
the persistence of a fluid and travel-oriented transnational form: both
An Equal Music and its predecessor feature the use of particular devices
to indicate space, silence, and generic or temporal shifts, from ellipses
and white space to formal structures connected with both prose and
poetry. Finally, there are comparisons at the level of specific episodes: as
with the parallel crucifixion episodes in Ondaatje’s work (see Chapter 1,
Sections III.iii and IV.iii), there are comparable tableaux in Seth’s writ-
ing that establish connections between the texts, as he links the factual
experiences and thoughts of his travelling self with those of his later
fictional narrator. Focusing on these connections enables me to assert
that – for all that critics have presented him as a writer able to ‘move
fluidly between genres’ and geographical locations (Jaggi, 2009, 21) –
Seth is preoccupied with certain figures and themes. I explore the ways
in which An Equal Music – a narrative that focuses on the travels and
relationships of a particular exponent of the concept of performance, a
professional musician – is indebted to Seth’s work of travel writing both
in terms of a continuation of ideas about travel and also via similarities
in narrative structure. The purpose of this chapter as a whole, bring-
ing together the two texts, is to interrogate Seth’s particular brand of
transnationalism – which shares certain similarities with the transnation-
alism of Ondaatje, but also displays significant differences – by means
of: a focus on the relationship between his travelogue and a later novel,
as an example of his other work; an interrogation of the transnational

performances that have structured the author’s identity and written
work, throughout his career; and analyses of the various features of
textual form that signal these connections and dependencies.
The effects of travel on Seth – and, by extension, the influence of
his own travel writing on the work he has written since – are by no
means well documented: while Roopali Gupta, for example, asserts
that From Heaven Lake ‘was greatly responsible for giving Seth the con-
fidence to think of himself as a writer’ (2005, 4), the foundational role
played by the travelogue in Seth’s literary development is glossed over
in studies of the author’s work, in which From Heaven Lake is relegated
to a marginal position.1 Gupta’s study itself provides an example, as
the travelogue is discussed in a chapter the title of which, ‘Literary
Digressions’, indicates the perceived tangential status of From Heaven
Lake, along with the similarly relegated collection Three Chinese Poets
(1993),2 the set of animal fables Beastly Tales from Here and There (1991),
and the libretto Arion and the Dolphin (1994).3 This cursory treatment
of From Heaven Lake is central to my argument about the importance of
Seth’s travelogue, and Gupta is by no means exceptional: excluding bio-
graphical works, the few existing studies of Seth’s entire oeuvre rarely
focus on his travelogue. Apart from Gupta’s brief analysis, there are just
two significant critical treatments of From Heaven Lake: a single essay
in an anthology on Seth’s work, Nandini Chandra’s ‘A Different Gaze:
Vikram Seth’s Journey through Mainland China’ (2004), and two short
references in Seemita Mohanty’s monograph on Seth (2007a, 1, 229).
Rita Joshi’s article on Seth’s work, while it begins with the promisingly
expansive rhetorical questions ‘how Indian is Vikram Seth? How cos-
mopolitan is he? Where are his roots?’, contains only a single passing
reference to ‘From Heaven’s Lake (1993) [sic]’ among limited analyses
such as ‘diasporic concerns are an important feature of contemporary
Indian writing in English’ (2008, 47, 48).
Going against the grain of this criticism, which places From Heaven
Lake firmly in the margins of Seth’s oeuvre, I view his travel writing as
of great importance to an understanding of his work as a whole, for two
reasons: first, there is Seth’s personal history of travel; second, there is
the extent to which the author engages both with his surroundings
and with the very idea of travel itself. Seth’s early history carries inter-
esting echoes of Ondaatje’s development, as they both travelled from
the Indian subcontinent to continue their education in England, and
then moved on to North America; there, however, the similarity ends.
Seth, after completing his education – begun in India, and continued
in England – by enrolling on an economics PhD at Stanford University,

California, travelled to undertake fieldwork as a student at Nanking
University, collecting data ‘on village economies in China’ (Guneratne,
2000, 339). In the summer of his second year in Nanking, Seth travelled
to his parents’ house in Delhi, via Western China, Tibet, and Nepal:
this journey is the subject of From Heaven Lake. Seth is thus a foreigner4
several times over: not only is he in China as a representative of an
American university, he was a foreigner in that very country to start
with, having arrived from England; he was, moreover, a foreigner in
England, coming from Delhi. This set of matryoshka-like nested identi-
ties is called into question by the author himself:
What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I […] seem […]
to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future
nostalgias. (1983, 35)
Compare Ondaatje’s description of his own travel, evoking a compara-

ble sense of loss:
…in the midst of the farewell party in my growing wildness […]

I knew I was already running. (1984 [1982], 22)
I have already dwelt on the semantic and genealogical implications

encoded in these lines (Chapter 1, Section III.i) – I simply wish to
observe here that both Ondaatje and Seth show ambivalence towards
the idea of travel that simultaneously embraces movement away from a
place or concept and an engagement with this abandoned ideal.
This ambivalent attitude towards travel is unsurprising in Seth, an
author of numerous personal ironies – in his life and writing. It is clear
from his history that wide-ranging travel is important to him, yet he
also stresses the importance of returning to a fixed point of origin, or
‘coming home’ (1983, 33); despite winning numerous prizes aimed at
‘Commonwealth’ writers, he refuses to be constrained by terms such
as ‘postcolonial’;5 and he asserts his fundamental ‘Indian-ness’, yet
makes his home in many different cultures and with diverse languages.6
He is, by his own assertion, a transnational writer, of ambivalences,
near-contradictions, and doublings: his is a ‘writing self’ bound up
with the concept of dialectal pairings, he is quick to contemplate the
idea of being both one thing and also another, and he demonstrates
an ability to negotiate the boundary between different affiliations and
homes. This is expressed not only in the dualities of his identity and
history – away/home, national/multinational, postcolonial and yet not –

but also in written dualities of form: the fluidities and dichotomies of
transnationalism are displayed in the slippages, ellipses, and generic
shifts of his writing.
How does Seth’s transnationalism differ from that of Ondaatje? One
answer lies in the preoccupations of each with certain verbal forms.
In the case of Ondaatje, it was the construction ‘prodigal…foreigner’,
a figure – whether that of Ondaatje himself, or his protagonist – con-
stantly shuttling between two identities. For Seth, the verbal figure that
forms the cornerstone of From Heaven Lake, and establishes his attitude
towards travel and belonging, is the ‘wanderer’, a role embodying a
freedom of movement. In the first section of this chapter, I focus on
an episode central to the development of the narrative, in which Seth
aligns himself with the idea of the ‘wanderer’. His performance of
‘Awara hoon’, a cornerstone of Indian – and, indeed, pan-Asian – pop
culture, not only endears him to the film-loving Chinese locals but
opens bureaucratic doors, facilitating his ‘wandering’ in more ways than
one. Most significant is the literal translation, a declaration echoing
throughout the work: ‘I am a wanderer’. This ‘wanderer’ experiences a
simultaneous freedom of movement and curtailing of travel, enabling
Seth to consider a paradox at the heart of his work. This paradox – one
entertained by Ondaatje, but only fully expressed by Seth – lies in the
fact that the condition of traveller, travel writer, or ‘wanderer’ sparks
feelings of multiple ‘rootedness’, in several places at once, at the same
time as it necessitates an awareness of the individual’s ultimate ‘root-
lessness’, belonging to no place at all. Travel itself is seen in two very dif-
ferent lights: it is a positive, enabling feature of life, promoting multiple
connections with various locations and peoples, yet it is also ultimately
unsatisfactory, a process by which no real resolution is achieved, and
carries the uncertainties of impermanence and a fundamental lack of
belonging.
Seth thus takes the binary theme running through Ondaatje’s transna-
tional literature, and develops it outwards. In Ondaatje’s work, ‘rootedness’
develops in one of two locations: there are the realms of the ‘foreigner’
and the ‘prodigal’, and he draws on the troubled negotiation of the
space between the two. Seth, though, performs an opening-up of these
axes of transnational belonging: not only does the subject of From
Heaven Lake enable him to address more wide-ranging relationships
than Ondaatje does, but Seth maps these onto the European sub-
jects of An Equal Music – in studying this transformation in the later
novel I use the work of Étienne Balibar as a critical lens to posit both
‘a transnationalised Europe’ and ‘a Europeanised transnationalism’.

The differences in transnationalism between Ondaatje and Seth are
not simply restricted to their subjects, but lie in their attitudes towards
transnational identities and literatures. As I discuss From Heaven Lake
and An Equal Music, I am aware of the extent to which transnationalism,
for Seth, involves an appreciation of a multiplicity of perspective, rather
than a duality: though binaries do exist, they are sources of unease and
discord, and he can only find a paradoxical form of resolution in the
irresolutions of constant travel.
II From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet
i The ‘Wanderer’ and the ‘Foreign Friend’

The importance of the idea of the performative to From Heaven Lake is
clear from the outset: the text charts the difficulties of travel in China,
and presents the central narrative journey as a performance enabling
Seth to circumvent restrictions put in place by the authorities. At the
start of the text, Seth has travelled to Turfan, in northern Sinkiang, on
his way to Tian Chi (Heaven Lake), on a tour of China organised by
Nanjing University for a group of its foreign students (1983, 4). This
marks a commitment to travelling en masse that does not sit easily with
the author: as the text opens, he explains that he is close to rejecting
the claustrophobic atmosphere of group travel. He feels limited in two
respects, restrained both by a discipline imposed on the participants
that means everyone in the group must stick rigidly to a schedule and
by the Chinese authorities’ inherent suspicion of foreign travellers: what
is shown to a group of tourists in a given location is only that which
the guide is prepared to show to you (1983, 5). Reacting against these
frustrations, the text sees Seth strike out on his own across China, free-
ing him from the collective commitments of group travel and enabling
him to perform a circumvention of Chinese bureaucratic restrictions
on foreign travel. This individualistic, unfettered approach to travel
predominates, as Seth presents what he describes in the Foreword to the
second edition as an account of what he ‘saw, thought and felt’ (1993
[1983], vii), as opposed to the narrative offered by Chinese officialdom
in which foreigners’ knowledge of a place is restricted to an appreciation
of those landmarks it has been decided they shall see.
This idea of travel as both a circumvention and a formation of autho-
rial individuality is present throughout From Heaven Lake, and is stated
most clearly in the first of many performances in the text: Seth’s singing
of ‘Awara hoon’, ‘I am a wanderer’. This performance is foundational in
several ways, as the circumstances, subject, and consequences of the

song are all central to the text. At a concert thrown for the students
in Turfan, after the main programme, the audience is required to put
on a show for their hosts, and the pieces they present are tied by Seth
to national stereotypes. The description of a Japanese student play-
ing the flute is understated, and not worthy of further comment; this
foreshadows Seth’s description of an unassuming, earnest Japanese
music student in An Equal Music (1999, 20). The Italians who perform
next are boisterous and emotional in a way that the author presents as
stereotypically Mediterranean, singing loud revolutionary and feminist
songs; Seth is drawn, later in the work, to a group of ‘young […] very
lively’ Italian tourists, fascinated to the point of seeming drugged, and
tails off in an ellipsis: he is ‘intoxicated by the sound of their names –
Addilio, Ettore, Gigi, Emilio, Marina, Igea . . .’ (1983, 128). The next
nationality is English, and not only is the character likened to a P.G.
Wodehouse figure, a caricature of Englishness, but his performance is
nationally inflected: John Moffett, an Englishman ‘like Bertie Wooster’,
sings a British folk-song (1983, 11). Given this tone of stereotype, it is
no surprise that Seth, for his performance, sings an Indian song. The
significance, however, extends beyond an awareness of the national
provenance of the piece:
There is no real choice. It will have to be the theme-song from Awara

(The Wanderer), [an] Indian movie […] astonishingly popular in
China. (1983, 11)
Seth’s description of the song ‘Awara hoon’ (‘I am a wanderer’) as ‘aston-

ishingly popular’ is evident from its appearances later in the text: he is
asked for a repeat performance in the Turfan market square the next day
(1983, 18), and it resurfaces later in the work, when he is asked to sing
a song at a picnic and presents a rendition of the old favourite (1983,
128). This international popularity of Raj Kapoor’s 1951 work, listed in
Time magazine’s 100 Greatest Films (Digital Spy, 2012), is no creation
of Seth’s: the positioning of Awara as a cultural artefact does indeed
extend far beyond the bounds of 1950s India, both geographically and
temporally.7
Neelam Srivastava, in her study of Seth’s work, has analysed ‘Awara
hoon’ as a motif in From Heaven Lake: ‘throughout the book Seth plays
the role of “Awara”, constructing an Indian diasporic persona for
himself’ (2008, 160). The idea of an ‘Indian diasporic’ identity cer-
tainly addresses one side of the author’s performance, connecting his
presentation of the song with a specific nationality – albeit a transplanted

one – in the same way as the author does with the Japanese, the Italians,
and the English. To reapply the insights of Stephen Clingman’s work,
though, I believe the category ‘transnational’ is more appropriate, as
it acknowledges both the existence of a transplanted sense of national
belonging and the importance of the term that the song introduces:
Seth takes on the title, ‘I am a wanderer’, as a label of both Indian-ness
and rootlessness, ‘play[ing] the role of “Awara”’ in terms of its national,
cultural origins in a movie song as well as its semantic application to
his geopolitical status. Moreover, to extend Srivastava’s argument, the
song ‘Awara hoon’ is central to the story Seth tells, quite apart from
the fact that it recurs as a narrative motif throughout the text. Here the
‘wandering’ subject matter of the song and its consequences for the
wider narrative merge: the author’s performance leads directly to his
being able to continue his journey through China and Tibet, into areas
for which expensive travel permits, completed and signed by the Public
Security Bureau, are usually required. The day after Seth’s performance
of ‘Awara hoon’, he visits the local police station to apply for a travel
permit, discovers that one of the officers had been in the audience
the night before, and the resulting discussion of Indian cinema leads
to Seth striking up a friendship and securing an official endorsement
(1983, 14). The song ‘Awara hoon’ is thus not simply a cultural intertext
in From Heaven Lake, doing metaphorical work for Seth’s transnational
character: it is a structurally integral part of the travelogue, enabling the
very journey that is described.
One aspect of the term ‘wanderer’ that it is important to emphasise
here, entwined with the idea of performing a role separate from one’s
own identity, is the fact that it is an essentially ambivalent construc-
tion. This ambivalence is positioned at the heart of Seth’s work, as the
central persona in From Heaven Lake is both a multiply rooted figure –
possessing numerous personal and national affiliations – and an essen-
tially rootless one. This is seen in the use of ‘Awara’, which is both an
expression of rootless perambulation – ‘No family, no world have I/And
nobody’s love . . .’ – and a reference to a film with definite Indian origins.
By extension, the text itself is a negotiation of this binary. On the one
hand, travel is presented as a positive, enabling feature of life, as when
the truck driver Sui, who transports Seth for much of his journey from
Sinkiang to Tibet, explains to the author that he cannot imagine a life
other than his, one of travel: as a result of his lack of qualifications and
opportunities, Sui has no access to higher pay or other – non-travelling –
employment (1983, 75). On the other hand, Seth’s journey is an
inconvenience to be overcome, for the author’s self-confessed purpose

is not to travel in Tibet, but just to pass through it: ‘simply “coming
home”’ to Delhi, as he writes to his parents, ‘“by a more interesting
route”’ (1983, 33). Travel, here, is a means to an end, and the places Seth
encounters are points of ‘interest’ for him among the stepping-stones of
his route ‘home’: travel carries with it the uncertainties attendant on a
sustained state of impermanence.
This ambivalent attitude towards travel is exemplified in another
linguistic construction: ‘foreign friend’. The phrase is first used in the
section of the narrative before Seth has left the group, as the tour guide,
Abdurrahman, leads the students to a location where people sit buried
up to the neck in sand as an apparent cure for various illnesses:
‘Why not go and have a picture of yourself taken sitting with them?
Many of our foreign friends do.’
The status of a ‘foreign friend’ or ‘foreign guest’ in China is an inter-

esting if unnatural one. (1983, 9)
The construction ‘foreign friend’ is key to the ambivalent, doubling

nature of Seth’s work, in several ways. Firstly, as with the dichotomous
construction ‘prodigal–foreigner’, ‘foreign friend’ is an epithet that
shuttles between two ideas, of alienation and fellowship, exclusion
and inclusion.8 The adjective ‘foreign’ holds the figure at bay, yet this
is followed by the ultimate description of acceptance and attraction,
‘friend’. In spite of this, the dichotomy of ‘foreign friend’ collapses on
interrogation, becoming shorthand for ‘foreigner’: euphemistically, the
alien, distanced, unwelcome ‘foreigner’ – derived from the idea of being
‘outside’ something (Chapter 1, Section III.ii) – is attached to the close,
comforting ‘friend’, to produce a concept that is more diplomatic con-
trivance than expression of solidarity. The ‘foreign friend’ is the textual
realisation of an idea brought up by my reading of travel writing and
transnational literature: the often confusing and always paradoxical
binaries of the transnational are acknowledged in this translation of
Seth’s from the Chinese original.
Moreover, the importance of this phrase, and the gloss ‘foreign guest’,
is emphasised by the text’s structure: the gap between the reported
speech of Abdurrahman and the explanation – one of numerous autho-
rial commentaries on dialogue in the text – is the first such space in the
book, introducing a pause in the narrative. Roberta Rubenstein asserts
that ‘a significant narrative pause [is] produced by the white space of a
chapter break’, making an important point about the link between form
and content (1998, 158). While Seth’s ‘white space’ is not a chapter
break, it performs the same function: another critic of narrative form,
Catherine Kohler Riessman, argues that a pause ‘suggest[s] a transi-
tion in thought process’ (1993, 42). Seth’s narrative pause – after nine
pages, the first white space in an unbroken succession of paragraphs –
foregrounds the phrase ‘foreign friend or foreign guest’, an important
textual marker of Seth’s status as both valued recipient of Chinese
hospitality and marked outsider. Clive Barnett, discussing the idea of
‘hospitality’, asserts that the ‘ethical relation’ demanded by the concept
‘affirms an absolute and inviolable responsibility for the Other’, linking
inclusive ‘accommodation, generosity or solidarity’ with exclusive ‘cultural
othering’ (2005, 8): the phrase ‘foreign friend’ shows From Heaven Lake
presenting the very ambivalence suggested by Barnett at a textual level.9
As the work progresses, the pauses, ellipses, and miscommunications of
this performative text are tied to the ‘interesting if unnatural’ identity of
its author, and Seth’s attempts to come to terms with his status in China
as a ‘foreign friend’ are played out in both subject matter and textual
form of the travelogue.
After Seth has highlighted the ambiguity of ‘foreign friend’ – through
an awareness of the dichotomies of the construction and the calculated
use of a narrative break – he transfers this onto the term ‘foreigner’:
the Chinese government ‘treats the foreigner as one would a valuable
panda given to fits of mischief’ (1983, 9). ‘Foreigner’ is thus short-hand
for both ‘foreign friend’ and ‘foreign guest’, and all combine regard
with suspicion: the foreigner is to be indulged, pandered to – given the
animal simile, the homonymic pun hangs in the air without being
spelt out – but not trusted. In foregrounding this position, Seth infuses
the ‘outside’ figure of the foreigner with ambiguity, opposing concepts
of ‘waiguoren (out-land persons)’ and ‘Mid-land’, the Chinese word for
their country, an indication of their national ‘assumption of centrality’.
In exploring this relativity, he turns to his own poetry:
‘Papa, an Outlandman!’ the toddler shrieks […]

‘Look, look, a Midlandman,’ I smile and say
(In Midlandspeech). The toddler starts to cry. (1983, 9–10)
With this early example of a particular Chinese reaction to foreignness –

in particular, a foreignness that can appreciate its own ‘otherness’ to the
Chinese – Seth sets up a negative view of the xenophobia and insularity
of certain Chinese people.10 The incredulous reaction of an imagined
child does metonymic work for realities in the country as a whole, and
Seth goes on to assert that it is only one’s closest friends – so a signifi-
cant minority – who are able to acknowledge that Mid-land could be
seen to be Out-land by Outlanders (1983, 10).
The generic form adopted is also significant: like Ondaatje, Seth inter-
weaves his prose with poetry to provide particular emotional emphases
(see Chapter 1, Section III.ii, especially n. 14). While at times Seth includes
the poetry of others – as in quoting a poem written in chalk on the walls
of a burnt-out temple he visits (1983, 61) – he often uses his own poetry,
without introductory preamble. His ‘Outlandman’ poem, for example,
while situated in the context of a discussion of foreignness, follows on
from his prose with no indication of the switch: he describes people pass-
ing a foreigner, stopping to ‘gape at dress and feature’, and ‘children [who]
yell, “Waiguoren! waiguoren!”’ (1983, 9), and then immediately moves into
poetry. In presenting this generic switch without acknowledging that a
change is taking place, Seth confers an implicit authority on his poetry,
implying both that the relevance of this shift is self-explanatory, and also
that he is familiar enough with the situation to be able to express himself
in what has been described as ‘the intimacy of poetry’ (Riccio, 1980, title).
The performances of From Heaven Lake consist not only of Seth’s many
presentations during the course of the journey, but also of the expressive
vehicles he uses in order to record these in the travelogue: as is clear in
his later use of other textual forms, a meta-narrative about travel is con-
structed from his unmarked generic switches in self-expression.
ii Confident Belonging
After the two constructions of the ‘wanderer’ and the ‘foreign friend’
have set up the idea of paradox and the importance of the dialectic, the
narrative falls into two sections. First, there are a series of confident, self-
aware performances from Seth that reveal a particular attitude towards
China and towards the Chinese people. In the second half of the
work, however, following an uncomfortable moment of self-realisation
for the author, the reader is presented with a very different kind of
performance, and an alternative perspective on the countries through
which he travels. These two views combine to form the ambivalent
and uncertain attitude towards travel that Seth presents in his work as
a whole, and that is evident both in From Heaven Lake and in the later
work of transnational literature, An Equal Music.
Seth’s confident self-presentations continue once his ‘Awara hoon’
performance has gained him access to restricted Chinese territory,
enabling his journey overland to Delhi. Before he can leave China
through Tibet, however, he must travel back from Turfan to collect his
passport from Nanjing, and then on to Beijing to get a visa for Nepal.
In Nanjing, having had a haircut and bought new spectacles, Seth goes
to meet friends at the exclusive Shuang Men Lou Hotel; his penchant
for Chinese clothes, coupled with his locally sourced accessories, leads
to this exchange with hotel security:
‘Stop, comrade. […] What unit are you from? You can’t go in there.’ […]
I am pleased that with my loss of hair and gain of spectacles I do not
now appear too emphatically un-Chinese. If I need to stress my for-
eignness I will fiddle with the knobs on my digital watch. (1983, 34)
Seth’s performance is clear in several ways, here. In terms of the subject

matter, he assumes a dual presentation, positioning himself in the
interstices between two cultures. He shows his pleasure in assimilating
himself into Chinese culture, yet reminds a reader of his positioning
outside this realm: while he welcomes the haircut and spectacles that ena-
ble him to pass as Chinese,11 he reserves the right to retain something –
here, his digital watch – that will enable him to positively ‘stress [his]
foreignness’. This doubling, seesawing between a need to blend in with
the locals and a desire to emphasise one’s difference from them, con-
tinues throughout the text, and is reflected in his various, often highly
contradictory performances.
The transnational features of this writing are also revealed in the pas-
sage at a structural level, as the language itself performs acts of doubling
and slippage typical of Seth’s work. The author’s explanation of his reac-
tion to the guard starts with the unsettling pair of words ‘loss–gain’:
while the two are ostensibly semantic opposites, Seth uses them here to
refer to the same condition of newness, collapsing an accepted polarity and
unsettling a reader’s expectations. The description then moves into the
syntactically tortured sentiment ‘I am pleased […] I do not now appear
too emphatically un-Chinese’, a phrase which combines positive asser-
tion (‘I am pleased…’) with denial (‘I do not…’), and ends in a confusing
double negative (‘not […] too […] un-Chinese’): this conclusion, ironically
enough, is far from ‘emphatically’ presented. Using unsettled syntax, Seth
draws attention to the ambiguity of his prose in this passage, a quality
emphasised by the unfamiliar compound adjective ‘un-Chinese’, which
the dictionary describes as one of the ‘less usual or permanent of [the
negative] adjectival forms’ to use the prefix ‘un-’ (Simpson et al. [eds],
2013). On a structural level, as well as in his subject, Seth is fundamentally
unsure about his relation to the two poles of ‘foreigner’ and ‘Chinese’,
an uncertainty that is at the heart of his writing.
These uncertain attitudes towards the local and the foreign are
reflected in Seth’s confident performances during the first stage of his
journey. When he returns to west China and secures a lift on into Tibet,
he goes to buy warm clothing for the journey, whereupon an important
performance takes place. He is told he can only purchase the tracksuit
he wants using cotton coupons, which he does not have, and his pro-
testations are initially in vain:
‘I’m leaving for Lhasa today. It’s . . .’

‘Yes, yes,’ she says, cutting me short. ‘[…] But regulations are regu-
lations.’ (1983, 52–3)
Seth explains that this word is fundamental to an understanding of

China; an interjection, later in the text, sees him sighing ‘guiding shi
guiding [‘regulations are regulations’] – ah, how often I have heard this
phrase’ (1983, 5, 78). Seth’s response here is intriguing, however:
I try another tactic: fight regulation with regulation. There are so

many […:] no one can […] know them all. […] ‘You must know […]
foreigners do not require cotton coupons.’ (1983, 53)
While the reader learns that Seth does in fact have experience of this,
having bought a jacket previously, without coupons, in Beijing, this
is not the point: what matters is that Seth puts on a performance – of
‘foreigner occupying the moral high ground’ – in order to mislead the
assistant. His second sentence illustrates the fact that his decision to
‘fight regulation with regulation’ involves a performance, beyond the
basic performativity of presenting a textual representation of verbal
and lived experience: the assertion ‘no one can possibly know them all’
implies that there is room for him to invent a regulation and use it to
his own advantage.
This exchange is revealing with regard to Seth’s attitude towards the
Chinese, as he believes his audience to be susceptible to trickery. Seth
draws her into a game whereby he plays off the Chinese emphasis on
regulations against their respect for foreigners. This ludic atmosphere is
emphasised when he uses the language of chess to describe his verbal
moves, having explained that he has previous experience of this ‘regula-
tion’ in Beijing:
‘What is valid in the capital must be true in a small unimportant

town like Liuyuan.’ (RxR ch!)
‘Oh.’ A crack in the defence. (1983, 53)
His sly jibe at the perceived worth of the geographically marginal

town of Liuyuan is marked by a chess notation: a situation of control
is played out in Seth’s head, as he uses a rook, ‘R’, to put his opponent
in ‘ch[eck]!’ Seth then meets the ‘defence’ offered by the assistant –
another reference to regulations – by ‘bring[ing] another piece into
play’, calling on a higher authority, and asking to see the manager of
the shop. The assistant says her superior is at lunch; Seth asserts that
this will give the manager time to hear his complaint; she capitulates:
‘No, no,’ she says, conceding defeat. ‘Wait here. I’ll […] get him.’
(BxQ; resigns.) (1983, 53)
Again, the language of chess is in evidence: her ‘conce[ssion of] defeat’ is

marked by another notation. These parentheses display the metaphori-
cal attacking pieces of Seth’s strident foreignness, as he overwhelms the
assistant by manipulating his status as ‘foreign friend’.
The performances of foreignness continue in the next chapter, when
the truck carrying Seth arrives, late at night, in the town of Germu.
This arrival is too late, as Seth thinks, to report to the local police, as all
travelling foreigners must; this failure to register his arrival is a mistake,
and he is subsequently dragged from his bed for questioning by an
irritable officer, with the now-familiar reference to the author’s failure
to acknowledge that ‘regulations are regulations’. The police officer
noticeably softens, however, when a portrait of the Seth family falls out
of the author’s passport during this interrogation. The official line of
questioning disappears, to be replaced by a focus on the length of time
that Seth has been separated from his loved ones:
‘Have you been away long?’

‘It’s been three years since […] I was home.’ I wonder about him.
Sometimes Chinese officials in outlying provinces are away from
their families for longer. (1983, 79)
The success in placating this official is brought about by a combination

of Seth’s foreignness (markers of which include the Indian passport
that is the source of this photo, and the nationally inflected clothing
worn by the family members in the photograph) and an implicit appeal
to an experience shared by interviewer and interviewee. While kindness to
foreigners is one feature of China on which Seth focuses, throughout,
the most important point to be drawn from this episode is the extent to
which the author manipulates another’s feelings. Instead of answering
the official’s question – ‘have you been away long?’ – straightforwardly,

Seth appends the phrase ‘since […] I was home’: stressing the psycho-
logical impact of this separation by using the emotive word ‘home’, the
author plays on a suspected condition of exile shared with the official,
and presents this manipulation as the means of ensuring his onward
journey. This pretended sadness about a state of exile highlights the
performative nature of Seth’s attitude to others, and the confidence of
his early performances in the text.12
This confidence is followed by a change in the form of the work,
as Seth moves from narrative prose to diary form. This generic shift –
marked by the space of a chapter break – not only flags up the transna-
tional nature of Seth’s writing, but it signals the start of a breakdown
in authorial self that takes place over the second half of the travelogue.
At the end of one chapter, Seth worries that his journey will put Sui in
an awkward position, and the following chapter starts in a diary form,
signalled by the first of several italicised date stamps:
From time to time I am concerned that this trip will get Sui into some
sort of trouble. […But] I realise that […] there is nothing unusual
about my […] travel other than […] that I am not Chinese.
————
9 ————
Southern Qinghai:
the cold plateau
10th August I wake up a little after light […and] look
up and down the empty road. There are no houses, no
people. (1983, 88–89)
Seth moves from a degree of self-importance about his journey, which is

noteworthy enough for him to think others might get into trouble for
helping him, to a realisation that his travels are not particularly impor-
tant. This marks the start of a gradual breakdown in authorial self, as
Seth struggles to come to terms with the fact that he is not in control
of his own travel.
The move to diary form – while maintaining the first-person perspec-
tive of From Heaven Lake – leads to more of a focus on the immediate,
present-tense details of Seth’s experiences: the general temporal scope of
‘from time to time’ gives way to a specific reference to dawn breaking.

This is partly brought about by the shift in genre, as the narrative moves
from distanced, narrative prose to the personal form of the diary: just as
the lines of poetry earlier in the text were a sign of increased ‘intimacy’
(see above), the diary form signals a move into the realm of the personal
and intimate.13 Also, as with the shift between prose and poetry, there
is no indication that such a change is about to take place: the decision
to move into diary form is taken silently, and exists simply in the space
of the chapter break. This introduces an opacity to Seth’s writing, as he
conceals the reasoning behind this change. Furthermore, the ‘transition
in thought process’ suggested by this narrative break (Kohler Riessman,
1993, 42) is triggered by Seth’s realisation that ‘there is nothing unusual
about [his…] travel’, which leaves him ‘look[ing] up and down [an]
empty road’. The knowledge that his travel in China is unexceptional is
the cause both of a structural shift in Seth’s writing and of an unmoor-
ing of identity, a sense that he is alone in a world of ‘no houses, no
people’: this lack of structure is reflected in the form of the text. This is
the beginning of an identity split – and proliferation in textual generic
signals – that dominates the concluding passages of the work.
iii Disintegrations: Textual and Personal

The fracture in Seth’s authorship in the diary section coincides with
three sources of suffering for the narrator: impassable terrain in which
the truck, on several occasions, gets stuck; a severe headache, which Sui
attributes to the altitude of their journey; and the discomfort caused
by Seth’s reading of the work of another transnational author, V.S.
Naipaul. The book Seth is reading is India: A Wounded Civilization, a
book that leaves him upset by what Naipaul has to say about India,
but which he describes as better than a hundred books of ‘calmer but
less insightful analysis’ (1983, 92). Seth is unsettled by Naipaul, who
has been described as an ‘East Indian West Indian […] pulled out of his
own society […] a deracinated colonial’ (French, 2008, 138), and whose
words exemplify the distanced comment seen in Seth’s work: Naipaul,
as Seth does, passes judgement on a country (in Naipaul’s case, India)
from the point of view of one not directly involved with its people, but
merely travelling through it.
Seth links Naipaul’s distant judgement with his own other discom-
forts, introducing all three in the same section of the narrative:
[The] plateau is a squelchy mass of mud. […] The truck does not
move forward. […]
There is nothing to do but sit and read […] Naipaul’s book […]
putting it down every few minutes to nurse my headache. I can’t
help feeling distressed by [the book]. (1983, 90–2)
The physical discomforts of headache and stalled journey are here con-
nected to the mental discomfort in reading Naipaul’s assessment of India,
with the confluence of the three indicating the extent to which the
immediacy of experience is central to Seth’s performances. More import-
antly, it signals a shift in attitude towards his surroundings: up until this
point, Seth is in charge of his performances and manipulations of others;
here, his surroundings – mud, book, headache – exert control over him.
The combination leads to a breakdown in his role as critical, observing
reader, and then a complete disintegration in mental capacity:
Finally the effort of reading becomes too painful. Then the effort of
thinking becomes too painful. (1983, 92)
The almost exact verbal repetitions echo the dull monotony of his
headache and the truck’s immobilisation, as the textual form presents
the effects of this environment on Seth.
The final occasion on which the truck is immobilised sees Seth leave
the truck and Sui, in acrimonious circumstances. Sui decides to stop and
fish on the last leg of the trip, despite being warned by a Tibetan local
that, as the stream is swollen by rain, there will be no fish, yet it will
take Sui hours to realise this; when these predictions are fulfilled, Sui’s
frustration at returning empty-handed causes him to drive recklessly
and get the wheels stuck in the waterlogged soil (1983, 108). Initial
attempts to dig the truck out are in vain, but Sui perseveres, and is still
at it the next day. He responds irritably to Seth’s reluctance to help, and
the author snaps back. Finally, Seth suggests cycling the last kilometres
into Lhasa:
‘Don’t be childish’ […]. ‘[Cycling’s] a ridiculous idea.’

[…] ‘And what do you think is a sensible idea?’ I shout. ‘Sitting
here with you catching fish?’
‘Did you have to bring that up?’ […]
‘Look . . .’ I begin, but stop in sudden dismay. I have, I realise, made
a most gratuitously cruel remark. (1983, 111)
This marks a fissure in Seth’s identity, as he is no longer able to pretend

he is in full control of his thoughts or actions: there is a separation,
caused in part by the journey’s discomforts, between the identity the

author wants to present and that which he puts forward. Whereas
before he could perform a desired role, adjusting it as necessary – wearing
local clothing in order to pass as Chinese, but ‘stress[ing his] foreign-
ness [by] fiddl[ing] with the knobs on [his] digital watch’ – here things
are different. The performance is fractured, and there is a fundamental
separation between Seth’s identity as he envisages it and actual events.
Here Seth, no longer master of his own performativity, enters Lhasa,
and moves into a different stage of the journey, marked by changes to
content and form. There is, first, an increase in the effects of his envi-
ronment on him, when he goes to a bookshop to buy a map:
Between ‘literature’ and ‘technology’ [there] is an altar to Mao […]

As I stare at this shrine […I] almost collapse […The] assistants are
alarmed at [this] overpowering spiritual revelation. (1983, 134)
We see the next stage in the undermining of Seth’s confident, consi-

dered performance, as he is overcome by this sign of political obeisance.
While the author tries to explain away the episode as he comments
that he has over-exerted himself, and drunk too much alcohol (1983,
134), the real reason for his physical reaction is contained in the word-
ing of the passage: he is overcome ‘as [he] stare[s] at this shrine’. It is
his viewing of this object that has precipitated Seth’s collapse, rather
than any physiological condition: his performance disintegrates, and
there is a separation between the identity that Seth performs and that
which he presents. This separation occurs as a result of the position-
ing of the shrine, ‘between “literature” and “technology”’: not only is
Seth affected by this worshipful treatment of a political figure, and this
old-fashioned collocation of religion and politics, but he is disturbed
by Mao’s location between bastions of cultural authority. ‘Literature’
and ‘technology’ are important touchstones for Seth, a writer and a
student of economic progress: he sees the shrine, in this location, as
an unthinkable reverence of a figure who led the Chinese Cultural
Revolution that undercut such ideas, advocating a ‘transform[ation
of] education, literature, art, and all other parts of the superstructure
that do not correspond to the socialist economic base’.14 Moreover,
the location of this episode in a bookshop is important, as nowhere
in the main text does Seth acknowledge the existence of From Heaven
Lake as a book. Seth reads voraciously, from the work of Naipaul to the
writings of Confucius and the classics of Chinese literature, the Lao
Tzu and the Chuang Tzu (1983, 33), yet despite the presence of many
other books on his journey, the fact that From Heaven Lake is itself a
text is never mentioned. Locating Seth’s physical reaction to the Mao
shrine – central to the process of undermining his performances here –
in a bookshop reminds the reader of the specific literary existence of
From Heaven Lake, as a performative engagement with the countries
through which Seth travels.
Seth’s performance is further undermined in the next chapter, as he
visits the Potala; the temple’s emblematic status is such that not only
does it often act as the first staging-post for a traveller’s experience of
Lhasa,15 but it does figurative work as a symbol of Tibet itself. Seth is
surrounded by a horde of people visiting this iconic building:
I […] am propelled forward […] by the large crowd – and from then
until I am squeezed out at the exit, I have little control over my
movements. (1983, 136)
As Seth is ‘propelled’ with ‘little control over [his] movements’ he cedes

authority to his surroundings: the Potala itself is, in effect, in charge
of Seth’s journey through its spaces. In one hall, there is an altar to a
Buddha, a shrine possessing an ‘indescribable sense of peace’:
Before him offerings are placed: […] incense sticks, plastic gladioli,
a sheet of red cloth […] toffees, oranges […] a portrait of the Dalai
Lama, a ceramic dog, a little grain. (1983, 137)
The language is overwhelming: the second clause is a hopelessly over-

weighted, asyndetic list, drawing the reader into a suffocating experi-
ence. At the end of this experience, which he describes as ‘fervid and
overwhelming’, he is ‘extruded into the sunlit exit [and] find[s him]
self trembling’; while he has implied it is the altitude that renders him
‘dizzy again’, the effects of this experience are apparent from his reac-
tion, as he is left both ‘exalt[ed]’ and ‘disturb[ed]’ (1983, 137). Travel is
a profoundly troubling experience, one of physical and mental discom-
bobulation: as much as Seth purports to be a confident, self-possessed
traveller, this narratorial façade is repeatedly undercut by his actual
experiences.
The confusion and disturbance of this episode, demonstrated textually
through linguistic profusion, is one to which I return when I look at
physical incapacitation in An Equal Music. In From Heaven Lake, ambiva-
lences surface throughout Seth’s time in Lhasa, as when he attaches
himself to a tour of a temple in which accoutrements of and references
to the Dalai Lama are scattered throughout, with no sense of a coherent

narrative or order:
Some [objects…] are beautiful in themselves, but as we hurry through

rooms (‘This is where the Dalai Lama met high officials’ […] ‘This is
his bathroom’; ‘This is his record player’) my mind finds it difficult to
react to the clutter of incompatible stimuli. It is like being force-fed
onions with condensed milk. (1983, 140–1)
The parenthetical list is inserted without warning, requiring the reader

to make the leap between Seth’s narration and the speech of the guide.
Such slippages and silences are, as we have seen, a feature of Seth’s writing,
underlining the fragmentation at the root of his identity: they present
a transnational text always under construction. This fragmentation is a
textual presentation of the ‘incompatible stimuli’ that he describes, and
his use of jarring metaphorical language to make his point is emotion-
ally effective, as his reader is confronted with the disturbing, evocative
image of ‘being force-fed onions with condensed milk’.
Another example of Seth’s generic shifts, with echoes of his earlier
diary, comes at the end of his stay in Lhasa. The episode foreshadows
the account of another traveller, Pico Iyer, who also witnessed this cere-
mony, the ‘last word in picturesque exoticism’ (Iyer, 1988, 81). Opening
in medias res, the chapter gives few clues to Seth’s destination, simply
stating that he rises early, dresses warmly, and takes a torch with him
(1983, 147). No information is provided about the coming scene, other
than that Seth is to witness a ceremony near to a local monastery, and
that he can see the preparations from a distance – taking place on the
rock of a mountain – but has been told not to venture too close, for fear
of offending those taking part: the narrative conceals what is to happen.
Seth checks his watch on arrival, the focus of the rite is revealed, and
the textual form changes:
As it becomes lighter I see that there are human corpses lying on the
rock, stripped and held in place by the head, while the lower torso,
beginning from the legs, is hacked or cut up.
8.10. The men resume their work. […]
8.20. The men have got to the upper body, and are working with
a will. (1983, 147–8)
From here, the steps of the ritual – wherein bodies are chopped up,
mixed with meal, and fed to the eagles – are marked using time stamps.
Chopping the chapter into sections, Seth represents textually the

dismembered corpses spread on the rock. His final reaction is, again,
physical; while he explains this as a consequence of sitting in one posi-
tion for a long time, it is clear from the admission that he would rather
not face visiting a monastery after this experience that the ritual effects
a further breakdown in the performances of travel.
Along with these disjointed, disrupted passages, there are signs Seth is
moving towards a new idea of the significance of travel and travelling
identities: it is with this resolution that he ends the work, with a series
of conclusions foreshadowing those of An Equal Music. En route from
Lhasa to Nepal, Seth pauses at a confluence of eight waterfalls. After
quoting Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ – ‘A land of streams! some, like a
downward smoke,/Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go’ – Seth
muses on the idea of water, drawing on sources from Lao Tzu to Genesis.
Then he reaches the climax of the chapter:
I will during my life be certain to drink some molecules of the water

passing this moment through the waterfall I see. Not only its image
will become a part of me; and its particles will become a part not
merely of me but of everyone in the world. The […] substances […]
that flow – air, water – are communal even within our lives. (1983, 166)
The first sentence, with its disrupted order of nouns and verbs, conveys
linguistically both the insufficiency of Seth’s travelling performances
in From Heaven Lake and the tumult of cascading waterfalls. This
continues: the next clause is not actually a coherent sentence, as the
introductory ‘not only’ leaves the reader waiting for a ‘…but…’ that fails
to appear; then ‘a part not merely of me’ echoes the syntax of ‘not […]
too […] un-Chinese’ (see above, Section II.ii). Gradually, the passage
gains coherence, just as Seth acknowledges the potential of water mole-
cules to unite and ‘flow […] communal[ly…] within our lives’.
This atmosphere, discussing the uniting of erstwhile individual frag-
mentation, pervades the work’s closing pages, as Seth’s performances
reach a conclusion. Finally, flying from Nepal to India, he reconsiders
the India–China relationship: he asserts not only that the countries
have had virtually no contact in the course of history, but also that this
state of affairs is likely to continue (1983, 177–78). This is, in fact, inac-
curate: Amartya Sen explains that there was much reciprocal scholarly
traffic in the first millennium CE. ‘Many Chinese scholars […] visited
India in the first millennium to study Buddhism and other subjects […
while] hundreds of Indian scholars went to China and worked there
between the first century and the eleventh’ (2005, 161). Seth, ignoring
travelling scholars such as Faxian, Xuanzang, and Yi Jing on the one
hand, and Gautama Siddhaˉrtha, Dharmaraksa, and Kaˉ śyapa Maˉtanga
on the other, restricts his view to the second millennium. This limited
focus lends a sombre tone to his conclusion, as he decides the best that
can be hoped for is a ‘respectful patience on either side’, rather than any
degree of amicability (1983, 178).
Alongside this gloom, though, there is an element of positivity.
Relaxing in his airline seat, ‘sipping tomato juice and adjusting [his]
watch to New Delhi time’, Seth explains that his whole experience
in Tibet and China begins to assume the qualities of a dream. This is
reflected in his writing. In attempting to reassure himself that his jour-
ney did in fact take place, he condenses geographical relationships into
a recitation of a spell-like ‘incantation’ of place-names; transnational
geography is realised – and expressed – through language:
Liuyuan, Dunhuang, Nanhu … – the images regain substance – …

Germu, Naqu, Lhasa […]. But alongside these names there are [per-
sonal names] – Quzha, Sui, Norbu – that mean even more to me.
(1983, 177)
Not only does Seth trace the process of realisation involved in reading
this very text, but he also engages with the transnationalism of his
material through the very textuality of his writing. This is seen, firstly,
in the asyndetic listing of names: the rhythmic drone, matching the
hum of the border-crossing aircraft in which he sits, emphasises
the significance of travel in this work, linking the geographical with
the textual. Also, as in Ondaatje’s work, ellipses are used to indicate the
fragmentation of the travelling authorial self, the crossing of linguis-
tic and national borders, and the paradoxical introduction of silence
and space into language, in what Kamboureli describes as the ‘ellipses
of [authorial] self’ (see Chapter 1, Section III.ii). Finally, a remark is
inserted between these ellipses: ‘the images regain substance’. This both
inserts a commentary on Seth’s thought processes at this point and
underlines the extent to which images are strengthened in his writing
through language.
The positive attitude, here, located in Seth’s memory of personal
names over and above those of towns, tempers his pessimistic final
pronouncements. For his reference to ‘a respectful patience […the]
best that can be hoped for’ precedes a conclusion that emphasises
the development of an alternative transnationalism, over and against

geopolitical wrangling:
To learn about another […] culture is to enrich one’s life, […] to feel
more at home in the world, and indirectly to add to [a] reservoir of
individual goodwill. (1983, 178)
This politically recuperative transnationalism is supported with a final

metaphor that carries on the theme of water from Seth’s earlier visit to
the waterfalls: the tumult of the transnational coheres into the smooth,
unruffled calm of a ‘reservoir’ of good feeling.
In the unification of three concepts central both to this text and to
the authorial persona of its author – identity, textuality, and geography –
the paradoxical nature of Seth’s travel writing, foundational to his work
as a whole (Gupta, Shankar Jha), is revealed: the travelogue is both a
demonstration of the unifying power of transnational geographical and
personal connections, and an acknowledgement of the limitations of
such relationships. At the same time as he displays the extent to which
he knows that his surroundings will become ‘part not merely of me but
of everyone in the world’, he demonstrates an awareness, underlined
through the use of paralleled syntactical structures, of the extent to which
his own involvement in such transnational camaraderie is just another
performance, a case of being ‘not […] too emphatically un-Chinese’.
Indeed, the verbal echoes between these two phrases underline the
extent to which Seth’s entire journey has been structured through
performances of various kinds – performances that support Carlson’s
emphasis on the ‘contested’ nature of the idea (see this chapter, Section I ).
Moreover, the textual and narrative fragmentations evident in the
author’s work – evident in both From Heaven Lake and, in the second
half of this chapter, An Equal Music – indicate the instability of all artistic
performance for Seth, particularly in conjunction with ideas of travel,
movement, and belonging.
III An Equal Music
i Transnational Europe
In the second half of this chapter, I study the novel An Equal Music
(1999) through the twin lenses of performance and disintegration that
were established in my study of From Heaven Lake, as I show the reliance
of the later work of literature on the travelogue and shed more light on
Seth’s literary and personal transnationalism. In An Equal Music, Seth
transfers the transnational model of From Heaven Lake onto a European
setting, and, in so doing, makes significant points in two directions. On
the one hand, he illustrates the extent to which transnationalism func-
tions in several situations across the world, in various manifestations:
broadening the scope of his literary endeavour beyond the binaries of
foreigner/local or India/China held up for consideration in From Heaven
Lake, Seth reflects on a situation, Europe, where he is himself – as an
Indian writer – permanently ‘foreign’, and yet also in which he has, for
many years, considered himself ‘at home’. Also, while testing the idea
of transnationalism in a European situation, he examines the ways in
which the idea of ‘Europe’ is complicated by ideas of travel and trans-
nationalism. An Equal Music is thus both a specifically European novel,
asking questions of the travelling identities of its protagonists in their
European settings, and a transnational novel, with formal, textual, and
thematic features that pertain throughout each of Seth’s literary works.
This dichotomy is on display in a description of the inspiration for
An Equal Music. A contemporary interview explains how he ‘came up
with the idea’ for the novel ‘whilst walking across London’s Hyde Park[,]
where he saw a man staring intensely into the water’:
I began to wonder who he was, what his profession was, what his
nationality was and why he was looking at the water with such dark
thoughts. (BBC Entertainment, 1999)
Seth moves straight to an interrogation of three determining factors

in the man’s identity. The first two questions are answered by the
novel Seth proceeds to write, which focuses on a professional musician
named Michael; the question of the man’s nationality, though, hangs
in the air. While Seth does not refer to skin colour, it is significant that
he is drawn to the concept of the man’s nationality: the very act of
considering nationality labels the man a ‘foreign’ ‘other’. This raciali-
sation at the centre of a very English tableau indicates how far the
novel that grew from this London moment is based on transnational
foundations.
In my dual view of Seth’s writing – seeing it in terms of both ‘a
transnationalised Europe’ and ‘a Europeanised transnationalism’ – I am
indebted to the work of Étienne Balibar. In Balibar’s analyses of the
ideological construction of Europe he makes several interesting points
about the exclusions inherent in European identities. In one recent
work, Balibar starts with a provocative thesis about how ‘Europe’ should
be understood:
There are many cases where the line of demarcation between nationals
and foreigners, ‘us’ and ‘them’, does not appear in a ‘natural’ way
and therefore constitutes a political issue. This is in particular the
case in all postcolonial situations and states. But Europe as such is
postcolonial. (2004 [2001], 24, emphasis original)
An Equal Music is demonstrably not set in a ‘postcolonial situation’ –

indeed, much critical reception of the novel was marked by a ‘frustra-
tion with its subject matter (Western classical music), setting (London),
and characters (English)’ (Bushnell, 2009, 332). However, Balibar’s later
assertions, building on his ‘us’/‘them’ dialectic, are particularly relevant:
No European ‘identity’ can be opposed to others in the world because

there exist no absolute border lines between the historical and cul-
tural territory of Europe and the surrounding spaces. There exist no
absolute border lines because Europe as such is a ‘border line’. […]
Europe is a borderland rather than an entity that ‘has’ borders. (2004
[2001], 219–20; emphases original)
The idea that ‘Europe is a borderland’ resonates strongly with my read-

ing of An Equal Music, as I read Seth’s mapping of an Asian framework
onto a European setting. The novel has been criticised for the lack of
ethnic-minority faces in its picture of London,16 but this misses an
important point: Seth’s primary focus is on ideas of boundaries, borders,
and crossings that are as pertinent to constructions of ‘Europe’ as con-
siderations of race or racial origins.
I do not wish to suggest, though, that An Equal Music is solely a post-
colonial novel, nor do I wish to present the characters as projections of
a postcolonial self. Admittedly, Bushnell’s dismissals of the characters as
‘English’ and the scene as ‘London’ are too limited: while the protago-
nists are English, they have romantic, familial, professional relationships
with French, American, Austrian, and Swedish characters; moreover, as
peripatetic musicians, they perform in various international locations.
Nevertheless, the novel is told from an English viewpoint, as the nar-
rative stretches between the ‘black water’ of Hyde Park (1999, 1) and
the ‘darkness of the [same] park’, a year later (1999, 484). Rather than
suggest a strong element of postcoloniality, then, I intend to establish
the structural dependences of An Equal Music on From Heaven Lake, and
thus explore the transnational features of Seth’s writing. Though I do

not believe it necessary to posit a hypothesis such as Bushnell’s, that
An Equal Music ‘expand[s] the category of literary postcoloniality […]
mount[ing] a critique of imperial power’ (2009, 333), it is clear Seth’s
use of similar linguistic and formal structures in travelogue and novel
signals the foundational status of From Heaven Lake in Seth’s work.17
This dependence on the earlier work manifests in various ways. Most
obviously, there is the novel’s focus on travel: the protagonist and nar-
rator, Michael Holme, is a professional violinist, who spends much of
his time travelling in the UK and abroad. Also, the concept of personal
geography is important: Michael studied in Vienna and settled in
London, both a far cry from his hometown of Rochdale, ‘in clear reach
of the moors’ (1999, 4). Vienna is especially significant as it was here
he fell in love with another music student, Julia, but suffered a mental
breakdown and fled the city, leaving behind both his studies and his
relationship. This back-story haunts Michael:
Love or no love, I could not continue in [Vienna]. I stumbled, my

mind jammed […]. I told her I was going, and went. For two months
I could do nothing, not even write to her. […] The smog dispersed but
too late. Where are you now, Julia, and am I not forgiven? (1999, 5–6)
The fragmented language – incompletions, short sentences, missing

pronouns and verbs – signals Michael’s distress, and marks the transna-
tionalism of a novel that focuses on his personal ‘smog’. It also under-
lines the importance of geography: Michael re-encounters Julia, but she
has moved on, travelling to Boston with her American husband; both
figuratively and geographically she has gone further than Michael, and
‘has a life beyond [him]’ (1999, 215). Another narrative strand concerns
Michael’s relationship – travelling, performing – with the string quartet
in which he is the second violinist, the Maggiore, the relationships in
which constitute an ‘odd quadripartite marriage’ (1999, 17). This ‘mar-
riage’ is named after a church in Venice, on the island of San Giorgio
Maggiore, which holds a particular significance for the first violinist,
Piers: Piers founded the Quartet, on this spot, when visiting the city
with his violinist then-boyfriend, Alex. Piers’s feelings of loss at the
end of his relationship with Alex, and the subsequent connections –
often tempestuous – with other boyfriends and other second violinists,
provide the background for Michael’s time with the quartet, the other
two members of which are the viola-playing Helen, Piers’s sister, and
their friend Billy, a cellist. This background rears its head when the
Maggiore visit Venice, a location that, for Michael and two other members,
holds ‘no history’ (1999, 357), but which for Piers is a constant reminder
of his time with Alex.
These two narrative strands, intertwined with ideas about love and
loss, belonging and location, converge in a story that has implications
for Michael’s relationships with all four musicians. When Michael
re-encounters Julia – fittingly, in a novel based on ideas of travel, on
passing London buses – he is unaware she has suffered what she later
explains is an auto-immune ear disease (1999, 192) causing a physi-
cal disintegration in her hearing. Julia, a promising solo and chamber
music pianist as a student, now performs less and less, and has trans-
ferred her focus in life from her music to her responsibilities towards her
husband and son, James and Luke. Although Julia and Michael rekindle
their love affair, it is suffused with a considerable amount of guilt for
her, that the narrative shows Michael failing to understand; it is here
that we learn of the extent to which Julia has left Michael behind:
[ Julia] inhabits dual worlds, which chafe each other. She has a life
beyond me. (1999, 214–15)
The word ‘chafe’ indicates that these ‘dual worlds’ exist in tension for
Julia, and while Michael does acknowledge that they cannot go out in
public together, for fear that the adulterous pair will be seen together,
the main obstacle he sees to their striking up where they left off in
Vienna is Julia’s deafness. The text explores the fundamental, painful
difference between Julia’s knowledge that she – with the familial con-
nections she has made since Vienna – will never pursue a long-term
liaison with Michael, and his belief that their romance can be resur-
rected. The ‘dual worlds’ thus have little to do with Julia’s hearing, and
she ultimately finds it too difficult to keep them apart – especially once
she has, for her last public ensemble performance, been booked to join
the Maggiore in concert, in Vienna.
For all that this performance should be a strain on Julia, it is Michael
who falls apart, in a second Viennese mental disintegration. Though
Julia agrees to stay with the Maggiore – no longer as a performer, but
as Michael’s partner – for their final European concerts, in Venice, her
decision is not joyful, but troubled. Michael’s response, however, is
celebratory, raising a toast:
To her? To us? To the spirit of fugitive love? Whatever it is I mean,

she nods as if to say she understands. (1999, 301)
While Michael believes Julia has understood him, the novel underlines
his repeated failures to comprehend her situation. This is encapsulated
in the phrase ‘the spirit of fugitive love’, which Michael believes reaches
towards an ideal of pursued and recaptured romance; for Julia, however,
this love is ‘fugitive’ in the sense of the dictionary definition of ‘apt or
tending to flee […] given to, or in the act of, running away’ (Simpson
et al. [eds], 2013).
Julia’s sense of the ‘fugitive’ is clear in her description of the affair as
a seedy kind of ‘subterfuge’ (1999, 354, 360). She resolves to return to
London – a fugitive once more, though now moving away from Michael –
and communicates this, by fax, to her husband, ‘dearest Jimbo’ (1999,
373). Michael reads the fax, in which she expresses her love for both
James and the ‘Benetton bear’, their son Luke, and it leaves the narrator
feeling unwell, ‘like a thief who has entered a house to find in it goods
stolen from his own’ (1999, 375). He expresses his misery by not only
biting her in a rage of bitterness, but taunting her about her words:
‘Poor Jimbo: I wonder what he’ll make of [the marks] when he meets
you at Heathrow. Do you think he’ll bring the Benetton bear […]?’
My tongue is as brutal as my teeth. She […] cries out […] cover[ing]
her face with her hands and her hair. (1999, 376)
Julia’s reaction is fundamentally different from Michael’s: whereas he

performs an act of jealous marking, creating bruises that will be notice-
able for days, she shuts him out of her life. Julia’s deafness means she
cannot ‘hear’ people if she cannot see their mouths, and her response
to the double violence of his mouth is to make him invisible. While
Michael’s possessive jealousy cannot cope with ‘dual worlds’, Julia
knows that, to survive, she must silence one: Michael’s divided, dou-
bling, confused self returns as the focal point of a narrative that is
steeped in the back-and-forth shuttling of transnationalism.
The transnationalism of this text, which is reinforced at moments
of heightened emotion – as in the dual interpretations of ‘fugitive’, or
Julia’s final decision to leave Michael and silence one of her ‘worlds’ –
underpins my reading of An Equal Music in the rest of the chapter, as
I approach the novel in two ways. Firstly, I tackle Seth’s thematic fas-
cination with ideas of proliferating travel, movement, and geography:
not only are the border-crossing, transnational travels of the characters
foregrounded, but the very idea of travel is constant throughout. This
focus on travel often leads to proliferation, excess, and dissatisfaction,
as An Equal Music is a text about both travel and an excess of it. Then,
on an entirely different level, I focus on the novel’s fascination with the

‘fugue’, a musical term possessing strong connections with the ‘fugitive’:
the etymology of the word ‘fugue’ indicates a double meaning underlying
Seth’s treatments both of travel and of music. The musical ‘fugue’ is cen-
tral both to the story of Michael’s initial successes in his relationships –
with the members of the Maggiore, and with Julia – but also to the dis-
integrations in identity that increase as the novel progresses. In the final
section of the chapter, I focus on the transnational linguistic form in
which these disintegrations are presented, bringing together macro- and
micro-level analyses to emphasise the clear reliance of An Equal Music
on Seth’s earlier work.
ii Physical Travel
The names of people and places, and ideas of location and belonging,
repeatedly reinforce the novel’s transnationalism, as Michael visits the
touchstones of geographical locations: London, where he now lives;
Vienna, where he spent his student days; Venice, where he once longed
to go with Julia; Rochdale, in the countryside of his childhood. The
reverence conferred on these names raises the words themselves beyond
the level of geographical labels, and they start to carry metonymic
weight, as if the names themselves are able to convey memories and
experiences. This starts at the beginning of the novel, before the events
of the narrative begin, as Michael looks out from his eighth-floor flat
across the city:
London unsettles me […] it is not Vienna. It is not Venice. It is not,

for that matter, my hometown in the North [of England]. (1999, 4)
The short clauses at the start of the second paragraph, almost ungram-
matical in their concision, set up a stripped-down, elliptical structure
conveying great emotional weight: the statements that London is ‘not
Vienna […] not Venice’ are not simply truisms, but anguished yearnings
for what is represented by the words ‘Vienna’ and ‘Venice’ for Michael.18
From the outset of An Equal Music, then, there are two observations to
be made. Primarily, references to geographical locations are imbued
not only with the histories and memories attached to those places, but
with an acknowledgement of the insufficiencies and silences inherent
in tracing the relationships between such locations. Furthermore, the
locations around which the novel is constructed are involved in a trou-
bling temporal confusion: we are unsure in which direction Michael is
looking, here, unsettling his narrative from the very beginning.
This is more than just a case of what Mala Pandurang describes as

Seth’s ‘nostalgic sentimentality’ (2004, 178), which implies a distanced,
objective act of reaching into the past. Pandurang’s reading of Seth’s
work presents it as a superficial, ‘sentimental’ treatment of the author’s
material: his ability to shift genres and manipulate forms verges on a sort
of flirtatious charm, using his literary skill to evoke an almost cloying
atmosphere of nostalgia. As we have seen in From Heaven Lake, however,
Seth’s attitude to the past is not untroubled, and the aimless tone of his
assertion that he simply ‘wander[s] around the world […] accumulat-
ing material for future nostalgias’ (see this chapter, Section I) belies
the control over his material implied by Pandurang. In An Equal Music,
Seth’s narrative establishes a network of thought, travel, and language
that goes beyond a reading of his text as simply visiting geographi-
cal points, and creates a sense of his work as moving back-and-forth
between them, and even encompassing them. In the early stages of the
novel, a reader’s awareness of this is reinforced as Seth invites a consi-
deration of the importance of the concept of travel. As well as the more
obvious references to Michael’s travelling lifestyle, there are more subtle
indicators; when the narrator’s post arrives one morning, for example,
it is littered with markers of travel:
A phone bill, a postcard from one of the students I give lessons to, a
travel brochure, a letter.
[…] The bill goes into the guilt pile […]. The brochure goes into
the waste-paper basket. I […] take the letter back to bed. (1999, 18)
Travel is present, here, both in the explicit form of the brochure, and
in the implications – of foreign travel, holiday greetings, and being
somewhere at a remove from the recipient – behind the postcard. It
is significant, however, that the brochure is instantly discarded and
the postcard is ignored, not mentioned further: the transnationalism
of Seth’s writing incorporates both a celebration of the importance of
travel and a rejection of this same ideal.
This duality is further explored, linguistically, in the surname Seth
gives to Michael, as a preoccupation with the idea of belonging is
encoded in his very identity:
I have my […] tab-key out, but I hear the click of the unlocking glass
door [from the porter] even before I pass it over the sensor.
‘Thank you, Rob.’
‘Not at all, Mr Holme.’ (1999, 30)
Michael’s senses of self and place are intimately linked, and the name/
belonging pairing – ‘Ho[l]me’ – resonates throughout the text. Jamie
Owen Daniel, studying the German-born, American-naturalised, Jewish
intellectual Theodor Adorno, describes how Adorno, who emigrated
from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, ‘understood the exile’s tendency to
make a home in language’ (1992, 33). Michael, in self-imposed exile
from his family in Rochdale, attempts to construct a home in numerous
ways – through music, language, love – and these attempts are signalled
from the beginning through his surname.19 Paradoxically, Michael’s
‘ho[l]mely’ name represents both his having found a ‘home’ of sorts in
his work, and his ultimately unsuccessful search for a sense of belong-
ing. Michael Holme experiences the concurrent freedom and curtailing
of travel – rootedness and rootlessness – felt by the wanderer, and the
novel takes after From Heaven Lake in its dual perspective on travel as
both positive and enabling, and uncertain and unsettling. This duality –
inherent in Michael’s name, but expressed throughout the novel – is at
the heart of Seth’s transnationalism.
Michael’s ties to London are explored when he speaks to Julia for the
first time in a decade. After the episode in which they cross paths on
separate, passing buses, he fails to track her down; it is only when she
turns up by chance at a Maggiore concert that a link is re-established,
which leads ultimately to the rekindling of their love affair. This
begins with a meeting in the apparently neutral venue of the Wallace
Collection, a gallery and museum:
‘The first time you went to an art gallery in Vienna it was with me
[…] it’s […] appropriate that I [am] your guide here […].’
‘Except that Vienna is your city, and London is mine.’
‘Since when has London been your city?’ […]
‘It’s not really […] but I’m getting naturalised.’ (1999, 125)
Julia’s surprise at this possessive assertion is based on her knowl-

edge of him; Michael freely admits a link with the north of England
when he says that he ‘love[s] the light near Blackstone Edge’, looking
out across the moors (1999, 85). There is a further reading of this
exchange, however, which highlights the fact that Michael is ‘not
really’ connected with London: there is nothing truly ‘natural’ about
‘getting naturalised’, here; the narrative implies that he is left with-
out any sort of connection. The negative, unsettling aspects of travel
are brought to the fore, as the rootless side to Michael’s character is
emphasised.
These unsettling qualities of travel are reinforced by a character who

appears briefly a third of the way through the novel. A particular piece
of music in the Maggiore repertoire requires Helen to play a modified
viola, to which end she and Michael visit an instrument maker, Eric
Sanderson. Once there, Michael asks Sanderson to look at his own
violin, as he has been having tuning problems. Sanderson ascertains
that Michael has been travelling abroad, over long distances, and has a
particularly emotional reaction:
‘People travel too much nowadays […]. If they were made of wood
they’d think twice about it.’ (1999, 165)
Michael does not think twice about this ‘excessive’ travel: as a profes-
sional musician, he makes his money from touring the world. Here,
however, we see another perspective on travel, this most central of
concepts. There is an emotional investment in Sanderson’s words, as
his comment on the sensitivity of wooden instruments to changes in
location, temperature, and pressure is more than a surreal comparison
of people and objects: it is an interrogation of the need for humanity
to travel, and thus a questioning of one of the central concepts in the
novel.
When Michael learns that Julia is to join the Maggiore in a per-
formance in Vienna, his reaction is mixed. While he is excited to be
spending time in this romantically significant location, he is aware that
something about their travel is oppressive and unsettling; this sense
of oppressiveness is seen in the pages before they leave, when Michael
visits Piers at home, in his basement flat, below – literally, lower than –
a travel agent (1999, 251). Travel is an idea that physically, claustropho-
bically dominates the characters. This unease continues in Vienna, as
the English and Austrian capitals begin to collapse into a single entity:
Could London […] have restored what we lost in Vienna? Can

Vienna restore what we have lost in London? (1999, 281)
There is a lot of metonymic silence, here: the months of their reunion,

in which both had to acknowledge that they had spent fifteen years
apart, are compressed into the single word ‘London’. Then, in contrast
to Michael’s earlier assertion that London ‘is not Vienna’, he can no
longer distinguish the two: he presents them as if they were interchange-
able. The transposing of meaning implied here is emphasised by a chi-
astic sentence structure, showing that Michael is unable to differentiate
between Julia’s ‘dual worlds’: he repeats verbs, mirrors locations, and

copies the format of the first question. This linguistic confusion leads
to a conviction of impending doom that is borne out in what follows:
this is the beginning of a mental disintegration that dominates the last
third of the novel.
iii Musical Fugue

These disintegrations can be explored in the multiplicities and repe-
titions of the early stages of the novel, which are built round a parti-
cular linguistic structure: in this section I return to the start of the
novel in order to bring together the ideas of travel traced in the pre-
ceding section with the theme of music that is so central to this novel
and its transnationalism. The ‘fugue’, as I explained in referring to its
close etymological cousin ‘fugitive’ in my introduction to the novel,
has ambivalent, troubling implications for Michael as a transnational
character, who grows uncertain as to whether the ‘fugues’ of musical
performance – and of his life – are positive and celebratory, or negative
and destructive.
A central narrative strand, with implications both for Michael’s rela-
tionship with Julia and for his ultimate mental disintegration, is the
Maggiore’s performance of Bach’s ‘Art of Fugue’, a piece of ‘strange, tan-
gled, unearthly beauty’ (1999, 77). Bach’s work is based on the principle
of a ‘fugue’: ‘the point of fugue is that the v[oices] enter successively in
imitation of each other, the [first voice] entering with a short melody
or phrase known as the Subject’ (Kennedy [ed.], 2013, ‘fugue’; emphasis
original). Already, this description hints at a relationship between travel
and music, through a link connecting various levels of movement, both
symbolic and literal: there is the movement in the mind of the listener
to a piece of music, as the musical subject develops over time; there is
the path drawn on a page in the notation of a piece of music, a static
representation for the performer to follow in the style of a metaphorical
map; and there is the actual physical movement of an individual. While
the three are not interchangeable, as they involve different modes of
travel, Seth’s work involves an exploration of all three, as he meditates
on the purposes of music, travel, and life; moreover, the transnational
qualities of his writing emerge in the relationships between these dispa-
rate but interrelated sorts of travel.
The significance of the term ‘fugue’ emerges with a further definition:
fugue ‘designate[d] a piece of music based on canonic imitation (i.e.
one voice “chasing” another – the Latin fuga is related to both fugere:
“to flee” and fugare: “to chase”)’ (Macy [ed.], 2013, ‘fugue’). The binary
‘chasing/fleeing’ contained within the etymology of ‘fugue’ – and the

positives and negatives attendant upon the two aspects – is central
to the novel. On the one hand, the text contains references to fugue
that propel the protagonist forward: in the first concert in the novel,
at London’s Wigmore Hall, Michael and the Maggiore perform a pro-
gramme of pieces by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, each containing
a fugal movement (1999, 73); and they are offered a contract to record
the whole of Bach’s ‘Art of Fugue’, a mammoth undertaking that runs
throughout the novel. However, several examples of fugue work in
another direction, as Michael struggles to come to terms with his past.
One narrative strand sees Michael trying to come to terms with the
illness that has destroyed Julia’s hearing, with consequences for her
musical performance; he struggles to understand both her condition
and her ability to cope:
How can she handle it […]? Why did she not share it with me? How
can she bear to play music, or to think of music at all? (1999, 189)
Michael repeatedly reaches for comprehension, as if Julia’s condition is

something that directly affects him, rather than another’s affliction.20
The frantic movement in this passage, jumping from one staccato sen-
tence to the next via near-identical verbal constructions, encapsulates
the ‘fleeing’ idea of a fugue, in which the subject is forever out of reach.
The centrality of Bach’s ‘Art of Fugue’ to the narrative is cemented
during the time in Venice, when Julia gives Michael the present of a
locally handmade music manuscript book:
On the first few pages […] she has copied out from my score the first
eighty or so bars […] of the ‘Art of Fugue’.
Not one note has been crossed or whited out […]. It must have
cost her hours […] yet the pages look fluid, unlaboured. (1999, 371)
The concept of fugue is thus entwined with their relationship, as

Michael comes to associate the Bach piece not only with his colleagues,
with whom he plays the piece, but also with Julia. Moreover, Seth
highlights the act of textual creation in which he is himself engaged:
focusing on the care with which Julia transcribes the music, Seth draws
our attention to the efforts he has gone to in order to present this novel
as ‘fluid, unlaboured’. This links transnational form with content: the
writing itself is fluid, matching the flow of pen across page and melodic
lines across music with the travels of the characters.
Seth portrays this simultaneous fluidity and disintegration using

transnational linguistic elements indicating his dependence on From
Heaven Lake. I will focus on some of these in my final section on An
Equal Music, but here I limit my discussion to thematic, linguistic,
and structural uses of ‘fugue’. Thematically, early references to fugue
establish it as a central subject in An Equal Music. Moreover, the linguis-
tic ambivalence of the word, incorporating a chasing/fleeing binary,
generates an unsettled tone that persists throughout the text. Finally,
thematic and linguistic concepts are united in an idea that emerges
towards the end of the novel, after Michael has returned to London,
without Julia. When Helen proposes a concert programme with the-
matic links to the ‘Art of Fugue’ throughout, Piers’s answer stands as a
response to the work of literature in which the suggestion is made:
‘Couldn’t we perhaps play the first half of the “Art of Fugue”, and
then […] Mozart and Beethoven [fugal] arrangements?[…]’
‘Yes,’ groans Piers, ‘why don’t we build our whole life around fugal
programmes?’ (1999, 399)
Piers’s answer serves as a comment on Seth’s novel as a whole: An

Equal Music, with its focus on travel and on the ambivalence of the
fugue, is itself the story of a ‘whole life’ that is ‘buil[t…] around fugal
programmes’. The ‘Art of Fugue’ is a fitting description of Seth’s work,
a written tribute to a beloved world of music that, as he confesses in an
Author’s Note, ‘to [him] is dearer even than speech’ (1999, 486).
Though Michael is devastated by the end of their relationship – his
second loss of Julia – he continues playing with the Maggiore. When
he learns Julia is to perform the ‘Art of Fugue’ in public, however, he
breaks down, and can no longer play the piece – even to himself, alone
(1999, 438). The memories of their relationship conjured in Michael by
Julia’s decision to perform the piece render him unable to play it: it is
as if ‘The Art of Fugue’ has been removed from his thoughts. He enacts
this self-same erasure himself, causing a literal disintegration in the one
tangible connection he has with Julia, the manuscript book, after he has
woken one night to get a drink of water:
By my bed lies the book […]. With water on my fingers I move along
my part. Page after page I hear my smudging notes. The staff dis-
solves, the heads and stalks blur into mire […] As if in worn-down
Braille my fingers touch my name, that once you wrote; and look,
I cannot read it any more. (1999, 442)
There is a simultaneous creation and destruction in this synaesthesia:

at the same time as Michael is able to ‘hear [the] notes’ of the piece, he
eradicates them forever, ‘blur[ring them] into mire’. This is the para-
dox of the fugue in this novel, which is travelling and lively, yet also
destructive and ungraspable. Moreover, it is not just the musical piece
that Michael erases in this act, but his very self: it is his own name, ‘that
once [Julia] wrote’, that he ‘cannot read […] any more’; Michael has left
himself without a ‘Ho[l]me’.
His reaction to Julia’s decision to play the Bach adds to various
pressures that cause Michael’s collapse; these disintegrations in his
character – and their thematic reliance on From Heaven Lake – are the
focus of the final section of this chapter. They culminate, however, in
a passage underlining again how the text is founded on the idea of
‘fugue’. Michael’s inability to play the Bach leads him to resign from the
Quartet, and as he leaves the others for the last time, the conversation
exists only as unattributed, reported speech:
They will all miss me. […] Round and round we talk, but nothing
moves. […]
Tell them I’m ill […] It’s fugue I suffer from. (1999, 443, emphasis added)
The style of the rest of An Equal Music is similarly detached, elliptical,

and poetic: Michael views his own life from a distance, and it seems
to him he has become a fugal subject to be forever ‘chased’ through
life. While interactions with other people remain to drive him on, they
possess a futile impetus: travel has run its course in the novel, and all
Michael can do is continue ‘round and round’, like an aimless conver-
sation. ‘It’s fugue [he] suffer[s] from’, and the structure of the narrative
mirrors this, ‘suffer[ing] from’ fugue itself.
iv Linguistic Disintegration
Seth uses various linguistic techniques to present this musical disin-
tegration and attendant crisis in Michael’s identity. A series of mental
collapses are presented in the novel, and a debt to the transnational
language of From Heaven Lake is clear throughout, starting with a child-
hood memory. Michael describes a game of hide-and-seek, in which
he hides in an old refrigerator but is unable to open it from the inside;
finally rescued, he is inconsolable:
I was in a state of suffocated terror, screaming […] but almost incapa-

ble of speech. For months […] I had nightmares about the incident
and would wake up in a sweat, inarticulate with claustrophobia and

panic. (1999, 81)
This foregrounds episodes of mental disintegration to come in the

novel, later scenes of ‘claustrophobia and panic’ that echo the ‘fervid
and overwhelming’ Potala scene in which the author also suffered a
claustrophobic lack of control.21 Seth’s reactions to his Tibetan sur-
roundings inform Michael’s experiences, thus establishing the novel as
built on the foundations of the travelogue and setting up a transnational
lens through which to view European events. This fresh perspective
prefigures the various postcolonial treatments of Europe (see this chapter,
Section III.i) that emerged in the decade following the publication of
An Equal Music.22
The episode has clear links with Michael’s breakdown as a student.
The reasons for this breakdown are never clear, but a partial explana-
tion comes shortly after the fridge memory. Michael, a star pupil, felt
increasingly suffocated, and under immense pressure:
It was as if one of the potential diamonds on [Carl’s] crown was […]

carbon, convertible to its ideal form only under intense and continu-
ous pressure. He applied it, and I crumbled. (1999, 104)
The significance of this episode lies in its clipped, elliptical ending:

how was pressure applied? How did he ‘crumble’? Explanations do not
follow, but the theme of disintegration returns later, when Michael
is out shopping with Julia. The day is overcast and drizzling, and the
atmosphere is close and oppressive, lending a sense of foreboding to
their time together. This climaxes as Michael feels dizzy in the basement
of a department store:
‘I’m feeling a bit strange, Julia […] dizzy.’

‘I’m sure you are. You’ve never liked shopping for clothes.’
‘No, Julia, really.’
I do feel uneasy, oppressed, dizzy: the bright lights, the large num-
ber of people […], the heat, the colours […] I feel as if I am in two
worlds. (1999, 229)
Michael’s jerky description – ‘uneasy, oppressed, dizzy: the bright

lights, the large number of people […], the heat, the colours’ – conveys
through breathless language the overwhelming effect of this environ-
ment. The episode synthesises two Lhasa experiences: Seth’s ‘fervid and
overwhelming’ time in the Potala (1983, 137) and the listing from the
temple visit when Seth ‘finds it difficult to react to the clutter of incom-
patible stimuli’ (1983, 141).
Just as Seth himself reacted uneasily to situations in Tibetan religious
locations, Michael is incapacitated in that Western-twentieth-century
place of worship, the department store. Gail McDonald, in her study
of the great American department stores of the early twentieth century,
describes the construction of these buildings along the lines of the
French model using a phrase coined by Émile Zola: department stores
‘were, in Zola’s often repeated formulation, “cathédrales de commerce
moderne”’ (McDonald, 2002, 232). It is in the basement of one of these
‘cathedrals of modern commerce’ that Michael has his own ‘fervid and
overwhelming’ experience, emphasising the impact of Seth’s travel
writing on his later work. The hallmarks of sensory overload are again
present, along with a distaste for crowds: in Seth’s account of the Potala,
the ‘mass of people […] reached a pitch of religious enthusiasm […]
both exalting and disturbing’ (1983, 136); in the department store, ‘the
large number of people’ contributes to Michael’s feelings of oppression
and dizziness.
These feelings are explored in further links with From Heaven Lake:
formal slippages at moments of heightened emotion lend Seth’s prose a
rhythmic, poetic cadence, in the sort of generic shift seen in his use of
poetry in the travelogue.23 One example occurs when Michael reveals
the secret of Julia’s deafness to Piers, after which betrayal of trust, she
cuts off all contact. After some days, Michael gets an invitation, triggering
a linguistic crisis:
Need I be bound and lashed for what I’ve done? I don’t know James,
yet they all send their best. What then have I to say?
All of them: man, wife, child, dog. From my high lair I view the
world. I will say yes, of course; and try to feign, as best I can, the calm
I do not feel. (1999, 267)
The last lines fall easily within the compass of an iambic pentameter,
the alternating stresses and the pauses of punctuation from ‘I will say
yes’ onwards generating a poetic lilt. While scanning the preceding
lines as verse is more problematic, the only significant difficulty comes
in these sentences: ‘What then have I to say? All of them: man, wife,
child, dog. From my high lair I view the world.’ If a poetic line-break
is inserted between ‘wife’ and ‘child’ – a significant position, given
Michael’s antipathy towards Julia’s home life – these become two
lines of pentameter, giving the whole introverted passage the air of a

Shakespeare soliloquy.
Linguistic disintegrations come to a head in Michael’s second
Viennese mental collapse, a decade after his first. The Maggiore perform
Schubert’s Trout Quintet with Julia on piano, and Michael becomes
detached from the playing experience:
Our sounds are all one, as are the faces [in the audience…] My ears
cut out on me, I cannot hear, but I know these agile fingers have
possession of the piece. (1999, 307)
The piece passes in this state of detachment. As Michael’s attention

wanders round the hall, the floor appears to become tarmac: ‘black
ebony, white ivory; it is a carpark covered with snow, melting into the
Serpentine’ (1999, 308). These fragmented associations link the Vienna
Musikverein in which they perform with both the Rochdale location of
his childhood home – now a car park – and the lake which forms part
of his adult life in Hyde Park.
It is this significant location to which the narrative finally returns, after
Michael and Julia’s time in Venice, her departure from him and decision
to play the Bach ‘Art of Fugue’, and his resignation from the Maggiore,
‘suffer[ing] from fugue’. At the end of the novel, after a period of reflec-
tion on Michael’s part, he returns to London. Going to hear Julia perform
the ‘Art of Fugue’, he reaches a conclusion about music, life, and love:
Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. […] It is enough, it is to be

blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music –
not too much, or the soul could not sustain it – from time to time.
(1999, 484)
Clipped, brief clauses give way to the verbal sweep of the final sentence,
and Seth reworks the concept of excess into ‘Michael’s healthy accept-
ance of the symbolic order’ (Tiwari, 2005, 57). Musical performance,
like the travelling performances of From Heaven Lake, is a balancing act:
too much, and the soul cannot sustain it. Seth’s transnational literature,
then, involves not only the performance of different identities, the
‘foreign friend’, the chasing and fleeing of fugue, the uncertainties of
belonging and naming, and the fragmentation of language and identity:
it is a carefully judged mix of these. Just as Eric Sanderson cautioned
against ‘too much’ travel, Michael observes one must not have ‘too
much’ of ‘such music’.
The centrality of Seth’s travel writing to his later transnational literature

thus emerges through a reliance on the idea of performance, a concept
that is as integral to the structure of From Heaven Lake as it is to the
subject and form of An Equal Music. The formal similarities between the
works are also clear, in the use of space, silence, generic and temporal
shifts, ellipses, and white space in both texts, and the parallel episodes
of mental disintegration. Throughout, Seth’s transnationalism tests the
limits of travel and travelling identities, but does so always within cer-
tain boundaries. In my next chapter, as I study the transnational writing
of Amitav Ghosh, it is these limits I seek to question. Here, I broaden
the geographical scope of my work, for, as will become clear, Ghosh’s
geopolitical transnationalism extends beyond both the back-and-forth
shuttling of Ondaatje’s oeuvre and the regional focus – whether the
countries of China/Tibet/India, or the cities of London/Vienna/Venice –
evident in Seth’s work.
Part II
Travelling On
3
Amitav Ghosh: Uncertain
Translation and Transnational
Confusion
I ‘Cultural Translation’
Far from being a transparent reflection of how other people live […]
ethnographic writing translates, selects, and fashions its subjects. […]
In an Antique Land grapples with related questions surrounding the
role of the ethnographer as translator. (Chambers, 2006, 5)
In a piece on Amitav Ghosh’s 1992 travelogue, In an Antique Land: History

in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale, Claire Chambers foregrounds an idea on
which I draw throughout this chapter: translation. Ghosh ‘challenges
the claims to definitiveness of academic discourses’, confronting ‘the
many different types of translation that the ethnographer has to tackle
in attempting to explain another culture’; the author thus challenges
the 1980s and 1990s claims of ‘New Anthropologists’, who showed a
‘curious disregard of anthropologies emanating from the third world’
(Chambers, 2006, 2, 3). Chambers aligns In an Antique Land with the
mid-1980s anthropological work on translation of Talal Asad and John
Dixon, who described ‘a prevailing trend for the language of dominated
cultures to accommodate to the demands and concepts of the dominat-
ing culture’: translation ‘tends only to remake non-Western languages,
while powerful European languages remain virtually untouched by
their encounter with other languages and concepts’ (1985, 171). My
argument in this chapter, developing the ideas of Chambers, entails
three points. First, Ghosh is fascinated with the idea and practice of
translation to a degree that suggests he has a great deal invested in the
concept, beyond the basic impulse to understand the other culture
in which he has immersed himself. Then, in an intervention depart-
ing from Chambers’s analysis, I believe Ghosh’s fixation on the idea
113
of translation is not only a sign of the author’s involvement with his

subjects of study but also of a certain affiliation with the Eurocentric
‘West’ from which he has travelled. The idea of translation – linguistic,
and cultural – is thus a deeply troubling one for Ghosh: thinking about
it involves considering the extent to which he is himself implicated in
the ‘facilitating bond between colonialism and anthropology’ that has
been ‘written out of most ethnographic texts’ (Chambers, 2006, 15).1
Finally, this focus on translation is at the heart of his fascination with
the transnational geographies of the Indian Ocean region: In an Antique
Land foregrounds a particular set of India–Egypt Arabian Sea relation-
ships, which lay the textual groundwork for the shuttlings back and
forth across the Bay of Bengal in The Glass Palace.
The linguistic, cultural, and geographical connotations of the word
‘translate’, ‘to bear across’ (see my discussion of ‘transferro’ and
Clingman’s work: Chapter 1, Section II), however, mean that the very
fact of Ghosh’s identity as ‘one who has been translated’ makes the
enterprise of translation – translating a different culture, or translating
from another language – inherently problematic. In an Antique Land
brings this to the foreground, focusing on both the apparent impos-
sibility of translation and the results of mis-translation. Further, such
problematising goes unacknowledged if we read Ghosh as straightfor-
wardly opposed to the ‘concealed relations of dominance’ in ‘Western’
anthropology, without picking up on the several ways in which he is
himself implicated in such relationships: the label ‘transnational’ blurs
distinctions between his ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ influences, as much
as it reinforces his debt to both. The difficulties of Ghosh’s entangle-
ment in these various connections return my argument to Bhabha’s
words on ‘culture as […] both transnational and translational’ (see my
Introduction, Section III). As I explore, Ghosh’s work, like the writing
of Ondaatje and Seth, complicates a link between transnationalism,
translation, and historically specific migration: the ‘contemporary […]
discourses’ of these authors are manifestly not ‘rooted in specific [spatial]
histories of cultural displacement’ (Bhabha, 2004 [1994], 247). On the
contrary, the multiply translated texts of Ghosh’s travelogue and his
later work signal a transnationalism that both goes beyond specific
cultural histories of displacement and marks an uneasy relationship
with the languages and cultures of the author’s several translations. In
this chapter, I analyse In an Antique Land with this in mind, focusing on
scenes in which there is a slippage between Ghosh’s self-presentation
and the narrative he wants to put forward. I thus emphasise the involve-
ment of Ghosh himself in the events he is presenting, underlining his
Amitav Ghosh: Uncertain Translation 115
presence in In an Antique Land – the subject of a large part of the text

is the time he spent on postgraduate anthropological fieldwork in two
Egyptian villages. Then, in the second half of the chapter, I look at
passages from The Glass Palace – underlining Ghosh’s transnationalism –
through the lenses of three different kinds of translation: historical
translation, involving the author’s use and adaptation of historical
events; intertextual translation, in which Ghosh employs a scene from
another of his travel works; and finally, linguistic translation, as Ghosh
presents several Burmese concepts in the fabric of an English-language
novel. The rest of this section is a short introduction to the two works,
in the context of Ghosh’s career and as they fit into the structure of this
monograph.
The atmosphere of admixture that surrounds Ghosh’s writing, bring-
ing together In an Antique Land and The Glass Palace, is described by
John C. Hawley as follows:
[In an Antique Land] is not recognisable as a novel, nor is it simply an

historical investigation: it is a new genre, something that blends an
anthropological record with a travelogue, a diary, and perhaps some
imagined sections. (2005, 89)
Hawley’s analysis primarily deals with a confusion of genres, previ-

ously mentioned in my discussion of generic slippage in Ondaatje’s
‘MONSOON NOTEBOOK’ (Chapter 1, Section III.iii) and Seth’s move to
diary form (Chapter 2, Section II.ii). In the cases of Ondaatje and Seth,
the overarching structures of the early texts were recognisably those
of travelogues, and the later novels displayed a definite separation
from the authors’ earlier work. Although one of the main points of my
argument has been to emphasise the extent to which the later texts
are dependent on the travelogues, the travel writing of earlier chapters
was located at a significant remove from later work: this is true both in
terms of genre, as the authors moved from autobiographical narrative to
works of fiction, and chronologically, as the authors’ early-1980s
travelogues predate their millennial novels by 18 and 16 years, respec-
tively. This is not the case with Ghosh, to the same extent – hence my
decision to start a new section in the second half of the monograph:
‘Travelling On’.
Generically speaking, the works in this chapter cannot be so easily
separated as those of Ondaatje or Seth: while In an Antique Land styles
itself as academic research, supported by a meticulous appendix of
historical and linguistic notes, it also involves the construction of the
fictional narrative of a slave from a few manuscript references found by

Ghosh as a 22-year-old postgraduate student of anthropology at Oxford
University. The slave is mentioned only in passing in a couple of letters
between twelfth-century merchants, yet grows into a central character
in a fictional narrative on the subject of medieval Indian Ocean traders.
This is in spite of Ghosh’s admission that the slave’s initial role on
‘the stage of […] history’ was ‘more [that of ] a prompter’s whisper
than a […] face in the cast’ (1992, 13). It is Ghosh’s development of
footnoted references that gives the slave a narrative, and even leads
him to a name: from the original spelling ‘B-M-H’, Ghosh follows a
series of linguistic, cultural, and religious leads until he decides that
‘the Slave’s name was probably “Bomma”’ (1992, 250, emphasis added).2
Equally, while The Glass Palace is ostensibly a novel, with an epic geo-
graphical and chronological sweep that led one reviewer to refer to it
as ‘a Doctor Zhivago for the Far East’ (Urquhart, 2000), Ghosh attaches
‘Author’s Notes’ to the work detailing his zeal for historical accuracy:
he describes a ‘near-obsessive urge to render the backgrounds of [his]
characters’ lives as closely as [he] could’ (2000, 549). There is also the
question of career chronology: temporally speaking, the separation
of the two works in this chapter is less distinct than in either of my
first two chapters. Although the publication of The Glass Palace was
virtually contemporaneous with the releases of both Anil’s Ghost and
An Equal Music, at the end of the twentieth century, there is a marked
difference in the publication dates of the authors’ earlier works: In an
Antique Land (1992) was published approximately a decade later than
both Running in the Family and From Heaven Lake (1982 and 1983,
respectively). This has two repercussions. Firstly, and more obviously,
the time lapse between the two pieces by Ghosh – eight years – is much
less than in the work of either Ondaatje or Seth. The second point
relates to the travelogues’ publication environments: Running in the
Family and From Heaven Lake emerged at a time when travel writing
was still associated with the ‘traditional’, observational, largely celebra-
tory work of Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and The
Mosquito Coast (1981) and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977); In an
Antique Land, however, was released at the same time as critical works
that began to call into question the very enterprise of travel itself, such
as Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes and James Clifford’s ‘Travelling
Cultures’ (both 1992).3
The action of In an Antique Land begins at the start of Ghosh’s career
as writer and researcher. After completing his schooling at the Doon
School and his undergraduate and Master’s education at St. Stephen’s
College, Delhi, Ghosh won a scholarship for further study (Mondal,

2008, xvii–xviii):
I went to the University [in Delhi] to do a masters degree, and some-

how I ended up with a scholarship to go to England, which was
wonderful because mainly I just wanted to travel. So that’s how it
happened. It was just a set of accidents really. (Zanganeh, 2011, n.p.)
In a further similarity with Seth and his early history of travel for its
own sake – ‘merely accumulating material for future nostalgias’ (see
Chapter 2, Section I) – Ghosh asserts that the thrill of journeying to
England was more important to him than his continuing education,
the success of which was largely incidental: ‘mainly [he] just wanted to
travel’. The main narrative of In an Antique Land thus begins in a library
at Oxford in 1978, where Ghosh discovers the manuscript containing
references to ‘Bomma’, and a sense of being swept along by a series of
happy accidents is underlined in the text:
Within a few months [of discovering the manuscript] I was in

Tunisia, learning Arabic. […] The next year, 1980, I was in Egypt,
installed in a village called Lat·aîfa.4 (1992, 19)
This beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s means that the initial
subject of Ghosh’s work is contemporaneous with Ondaatje’s trips to
Sri Lanka (1978 and 1980) and Seth’s journey from Turfan to Delhi
(1981). Although Ghosh’s narrative of travel begins at roughly the same
time as Ondaatje’s and Seth’s, however, the text goes on to describe a
second visit to Lataifa – and the nearby village of Nashâwy – in 1988,
a trip to Mangalore in 1990 to discover more about ‘Bomma’, and a final
visit to Egypt just before the outbreak of war in the Gulf.5 In an Antique
Land is less a turning point in the author’s career – like Running in the
Family or From Heaven Lake – than the chronicle of an investigation
covering over a decade of Ghosh’s life.6
It is the link between this and his later work that especially interests
me, as I trace the influence of In an Antique Land on a novel written
at a similar time to Anil’s Ghost and An Equal Music: The Glass Palace.
I focus on this in particular because it marks a shift towards historical
fiction from Ghosh that extends well into the twenty-first century.
While he has always had an interest in employing historical research in
the service of fiction,7 The Glass Palace is the first Ghosh novel to be set
almost entirely in the past, and cover a wide historical and geographical
sweep. This tendency has led, in recent years, to a projected trilogy of

novels – starting with Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011) –
in which Ghosh returns to the Indian Ocean region explored in the
historical sections of In an Antique Land (see below, Conclusion). The
historical background to The Glass Palace is markedly different from
both medieval and contemporary settings of In an Antique Land: the
novel opens with the 1885 flight of the Burmese royal family from
Mandalay, and the majority of the narrative stretches from this point
until a mountain crossing, mirroring this initial exodus, made by those
fleeing the Japanese bombing of Rangoon in 1942; only the final section
(2001, 475–547) focuses on the investigations of a descendant of these
characters in the mid-1990s, who uncovers events in the aftermath of
World War II, including the reappearance of a character presumed dead.
However, the same questions and uncertainties about translation – of
individuals, and languages – are raised in both travelogue and novel.
In uniting these texts, I wish to examine Ghosh’s relationship with his
surroundings, his studied distancing from them, and the often highly
politicised way in which he ‘translates’ between cultures.
II In an Antique Land
i Ghosh’s ‘Network of Foxholes’

Describing the narrative convolutions of In an Antique Land, Mondal
cites Ghosh’s description of the work as a ‘network of foxholes’ (2008,
74; quoting Ghosh, 1992, 16). While I agree, I am reluctant to concede
Mondal’s subsequent structural definition, as he asserts there are ‘three
timelines in the text, not two as is often supposed – the medieval one,
Ghosh’s visit in 1980, and Ghosh’s visit in 1988’ (2008, 83). I feel this
small extension is insufficient: Ghosh’s trip to Mangalore in 1990 and
a final visit to Nashawy that year undermine Mondal’s tripartite struc-
ture. Moreover, these layers break down further: the ‘medieval’ thread
of the narrative actually includes a potted history of Cairo, including
the Victorian history of the Geniza, the depository wherein are found
the manuscripts in which ‘Bomma’ and his master, Ben Yiju, appear.
Similarly, the ‘Mangalore’ section concludes with a digression on the
subject of Vasco de Gama and the downfall of a cooperative culture
of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Indian Ocean trading, as Ghosh
laments that the remains of the civilisation that brought Ben Yiju to
Mangalore have been ‘devoured by [an] unquenchable, demonic thirst
that has raged ever since’ in this area of the world (1992, 288).8 It seems
more useful to avoid numbering the layers of textuality altogether,
given the extent to which the many-layered ‘uses of History’ (1992, 270;
capital original) play a significant role in Ghosh’s own thoughts.
What Mondal’s analysis does, though, is draw attention to the several
narrative layers in the text, and it is on these layers – and, in particular,
on examples of (mis-)translation – that I focus, as Ghosh presents a nar-
rative that is never entirely what it seems. Here I return to Clingman’s
ideas about transnational literature’s ‘recognizable formal characteristics’
(see my Introduction, Section IV), as I note that Ghosh employs struc-
tural features of ellipsis, silence, and miscommunication to present the
transnational qualities of his work. Using these structural features, the
author paradoxically performs two opposing feats: firstly, he asserts
the transnationalism of his writing, through his use of literary tech-
niques also displayed in Ondaatje’s allusive and fragmentary beginning
to Running in the Family (see my Introduction, Section I), or in Seth’s
presentation of physical incapacitation in both From Heaven Lake and
An Equal Music (Chapter 2, Sections II.iii and III.iv). Also, however, the
text’s slippages mean that Ghosh contradicts and undermines his own
narrative. This two-sided process surfaces in instances such as in his use
of the discourses of anthropology to manipulate his presentation of his
human subjects of study, or in his arranging of historical material in
order to mislead readers of his work.
Ghosh’s time in Egypt is presented in episodic fashion: there is not
so much a sustained linear narrative as a succession of vignettes, inters-
persed with elements of his historical research into the life of a medieval
slave, the ‘Slave of MS H.6’. However, this history is just as artfully
arranged as any fictional narrative. When Ghosh describes his initial
encounters with the Slave, in two letters published in 1942 and 1973, he
uses elaborate metaphorical language to present a chronological feature
of the Slave’s appearances:
In the thirty-one years that have passed […] the Slave has slipped
backwards in time, like an awkward package on a conveyor belt. He
is nine years younger. (1992, 17)
Describing the Slave as ‘an awkward package on a conveyor belt’ sets

up several features of Ghosh’s work. It is clear from the disjointed
chronology of the Slave’s early appearances that ideas of fragmenta-
tion and slippage will be central to the text’s narrative structure: shifts
between narrative time-frames and slippages and silences in the account
of Ghosh’s time in Egypt will often place In an Antique Land as itself
‘an awkward package on a conveyor belt’. Also, Ghosh’s use of this
metaphor, in which the progress of a human story is presented in the

language of a commercial production line, postal delivery, or airport
luggage service, makes it clear Ghosh is an author willing to fictionalise
historical narratives. Moreover, we must keep in mind the obvious point
that the Slave, as a historical individual, has not in fact travelled in time,
but only appears younger from a modern perspective, owing to the
order in which the mentions of the Slave occur in the twentieth cen-
tury: the narrative displays a bias towards the present that at times risks
distorting perceptions of the past.
If the Ben Yiju/‘Bomma’ sections feature a somewhat liberal attitude
to history, the passages concerning the time Ghosh spent in Egypt call
into question another academic aspect of In an Antique Land: the status
of the travelogue as a work of anthropology. As part of Ghosh’s anthro-
pological studies at Oxford, he travels to Egypt, where he conducts
research into – and records – the customs and beliefs of the villagers
( fellaheen). Although the notes he takes are used in his doctoral thesis,
and many explanations are attached to In an Antique Land in an extensive
‘Notes’ section (1992, 355–93), they are absent from the main body of
this text: what we are presented with instead is a first-person account of
Ghosh’s time in Egypt, entwined with the medieval history of ‘Bomma’.
The reason given by Ghosh for this entanglement is remarkably vague:
I knew nothing then [when I arrived in Egypt] about the Slave of

MS H.6 except that he had given me a right to be there, a sense of
entitlement. (1992, 19)
From the start of the work, then, the author implies an atmosphere
of non-involvement. Moreover, the connection between the narrative
strands is never explored, leaving a significant part of the text – a full
explanation of Ghosh’s presence in Egypt – significantly absent, and a
reader unsure as to the intentions behind his research in Lataifa and
Nashawy. The text is thus already a translation of sorts: it presents
Ghosh’s time in Egypt as if it were causally connected with the story
of ‘the Slave of MS H.6’, ‘translating’ – ‘moving across’ – the contem-
porary account into a position in which it is justified by the historical
narrative.
Moreover, this sense of narrative ‘translation’ is strengthened by
Ghosh’s attitude towards his anthropological subjects. Time in Lataifa
and Nashawy is narrated in a series of episodes that show a mixture
of interest in and detachment from those around him: I structure my
analysis around several of these ambivalent episodes, in which Ghosh’s

self-presentation as inquisitive, interested observer is complicated by
feelings of superiority. This simultaneous involvement and detachment
is summarised by Dean MacCannell:
[In many] inter-ethnic interactions, whites appear to have mastered

several interactional forms which permit them to operate as inter-
actants while also seeming to be detached from the situation, to be
both an I or a you and a he at the same time; to operate within the
situation and as its external judge. (1992, 124; emphases original)
Racially, Ghosh is demonstrably not one of MacCannell’s ‘whites’.

MacCannell’s pronoun discussion, however, refers to the assertion of
a ‘grammatical secret of power in discourse’, in the movement of ‘the
speaking subject […] into the position of he without seeming to leave
the position of I or you’. This is a movement that Ghosh – with his
educational background in MacCannell’s ‘middle-class Anglo American’
establishment – does indeed make in this travelogue.
Further complications are introduced by Ghosh’s training as an
anthropologist. The term ‘anthropology’ has always been contested, but
that was especially the case over the 10- to 12-year period of research
and writing behind this work. In this decade, Lamont Lindstrom and
Geoffrey M. White noted that ‘the rise of culture as an idiom of poli-
tics has unsettled the normal work of anthropology’ (1995, 202). The
release of Ghosh’s work also coincided with a significant contribution
to anthropological ideas from James Clifford. Though not himself an
anthropologist, Clifford published his theory of ‘travelling cultures’
to bring to critical attention the fact that anthropology had, thus far,
‘privileged relations of dwelling over relations of travel’ (1992, 99).9
Clifford’s ideas chime with Ghosh’s description of the men of the village
as part of an extensive history of travel, following in the footsteps of
well-travelled ancestors and taking on jobs as itinerant workers working
in the Gulf, or Libya, travelling to Saudi Arabia on the Hajj, or going
to the Yemen with the Egyptian army: some men had ‘passports so
thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas’ (1992, 173–74).
Indeed, Clifford is attracted to this passage: having read it in an essay by
Ghosh of 1986, Clifford quoted it in the 1991 essay ‘The Transit Lounge
of Culture’. The ideas of Lindstrom and White and Clifford feed into
Arjun Appadurai’s insight about one of the ‘brute facts about the world
of the twentieth century’: there has been a ‘changing social, territorial,
and cultural reproduction of group identity’ (1996, 48). Ghosh’s travel

work exemplifies Appadurai’s bold statements about anthropology:
A central challenge for current anthropology is to study the cosmopoli-

tan (Rabinow 1986) cultural forms of the contemporary world without
logically or chronologically presupposing […] the authority of the
Western experience […] It seems impossible to study these new cosmo-
politanisms fruitfully without analyzing the transnational cultural flows
within which they thrive, compete, and feed off one another. (1996, 49)
There are fundamental difficulties here: to associate a single manifesta-

tion of the ‘cosmopolitan’ (Rabinow) with many ‘transnational cultural
flows’ verges on a generalisation occluding divisions of class and gen-
der.10 Nevertheless, Appadurai’s challenge chimes with Ghosh’s work.11
Appadurai’s thoughts are particularly apposite, as he is talking about
both anthropology and literature: he states ‘we are in a strong position
to move to an anthropology of representation that would profit immensely
from […] recent discoveries about the politics and poetics of “writing
culture”’ (1996, 58; emphasis added).
The work of Lindstrom and White, Clifford, and Appadurai all follow
on from a revisionist period in cultural anthropology, the genealogy
of which can be traced through Steven Webster’s analysis of the 1960s
work of Clifford Geertz:
Geertz […] focused upon what he called […] anthropological irony,

a peculiar species of good faith between ethnographer and inform-
ant which verged on bad faith, and thereby constituted, strangely
enough, what he suggested was the basis of authenticity in ethnog-
raphy. Geertz reasoned that there was always some form of reciprocal
pretence between anthropologist and host reflecting their situational
agreement to welcome one another into their respective cultures
regardless of the few realistic grounds for such participation. (1982, 92)
It is this ‘anthropological irony’ on which I focus in Ghosh’s work, which

sees the author demonstrate a ‘peculiar species of good faith between
ethnographer and informant which verge[s] on bad faith’. The paradox
in which ‘authenticity’ emerges from a ‘pretence’ on the part of both
anthropologist and subject is raised by Ghosh’s writing, in which a reader
is repeatedly unsettled by the author’s position with respect to the fel-
laheen. Webster’s description of ‘few realistic grounds’ for inter-cultural
‘participation’ is called into question in one climax of Ghosh’s interac-
tions with the fellaheen when the author asserts the presence of a ‘perfect’
understanding between him and his interlocutor. As I intend to show,

this ‘understanding’ is flawed in ways the author is unable to appreciate.
Whilst I will bear these comments in mind, it must be remembered that
Geertz’s work is inevitably dated. The passage to which Webster refers was
written in 1968, a year that saw more rapid social change than most: in
Geertz’s United States, this ranged from civil rights protests to the assassi-
nations of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy (Kurlansky, 2003);
in Ghosh’s country of birth, the ‘Indian Civil Rights Act’ was passed, in
which one contemporary historian asserts ‘Congress faced a number of
the problems involved in the relationship between the various Indian
tribes and the federal constitutional system’ (Burnett, 1972, 557); and
in Egypt 1968 was the year in which the government began a ‘War of
Attrition’ across the Suez Canal, to wear down Israeli occupation of the
Sinai Peninsula (Barnett and Levy, 1991). Though Webster’s description of
Geertz’s ‘peculiar species of good faith’ is worth hanging onto, as the rela-
tionship between observer and observed remains a question in this area,
it must be remembered that the fieldwork on which In an Antique Land is
based was conducted well over a decade after the research by Geertz that
Webster describes, at the start of what Appadurai describes as a period of
‘trenchant and untiring’ criticism of the anthropological archive.12
ii Village Translations
The unsettling nature of Ghosh’s translations is clear throughout the
work. It is evident from both form and subject of the narrative that his
focus is not on his immediate surroundings; the first section opens in
the home of Abu-’Ali, a shopkeeper with whom Ghosh is staying:
Lat·aîfa
1
I first began to dream of Cairo in the evenings, as I sat
in my room […] I would try to shut out the noise [of
Abu-’Ali] by concentrating on my book or my diaries
or by turning up the […] radio, but [his] voice always
prevailed. (1992, 21–23)
Ghosh displays two forms of distancing, immediately complicating his

translations. While the one-word title – shown above using white space
and a line break, but presented by Ghosh on a separate page – labels this
narrative strand with the name of the village Ghosh stays in, the first
words point in a different direction: from the moment Ghosh arrives in
Egypt, his thoughts and dreams have been turned towards Cairo. In this
preference for the country’s capital over the rural areas of his fieldwork,
Ghosh aligns himself with a tendency to view the country through
the lens of the city: ‘Cairo is Egypt’s metaphor for itself’, as they are
both known as Mas·r, ‘derivative of a root that means “to settle” or “to
civilize”’ (1992, 32).13
In another act of distancing, Ghosh removes himself from the atmo-
sphere of the house around him: he turns to the comfort of his book,
the self-involved intimacy of his diaries, or the technology of his radio
to ‘shut out the noise’ of Abu-’Ali and Lataifa. His decision to turn to
a book is particularly interesting, given his choice of reading matter:
while in Egypt, the author reads Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One
Hundred Years of Solitude, which caused him to ‘begin to think of all the
ways in which the whole world is visible in the microcosm of this one
small place, like Márquez’s Macondo’, and James Boswell’s The Life of
Samuel Johnson, which ‘had a very powerful influence on [Ghosh’s writ-
ing] at that time […] because what Boswell really does […is] listens to
people speak’ (Zanganeh, 2011, n.p.).14 His reading not only indicates
his willingness to fictionalise life in Lataifa, comparing the village to the
famous imaginary location of Macondo, but also underlines the extent
to which his own writing, influenced by Boswell, is at the forefront of
his mind from the start. Ghosh’s engagement with the villagers is to be
on his own terms, and in the service of the narrative he writes, rather
than as the result of the unwanted intrusions of daily life in the village,
symbolised by the noise of Abu-’Ali’s voice that Ghosh tries to ‘shut out’.
This attitude towards the fellaheen persists in the work’s first dialogue:
Ghosh, reporting the speech of a young man wishing to help Ghosh
with his anthropology, edits his interlocutor into silence. Ahmed, son
of a friend of Ghosh’s, follows his father’s gossip about a local farmer
with a lesson in Egyptian agriculture:
Ahmed […] was a great deal more heedful of my duties as a gatherer

of information than I. ‘Corn, as you ought to know, is harvested […]
towards the start of the Coptic year which begins in the month of
Tût. . .’ (1992, 26)
The final ellipses are, crucially, Ghosh’s own. While Ahmed is anxious
to ensure Ghosh has as much information as possible at his disposal,
the author exercises his own restrictions, and is selective in what he

records. This selectivity, of which Ghosh is undoubtedly aware, calls
into question the motives behind his actions: Ahmed is only accorded
space within the text as an information-gathering foil for Ghosh’s satire,
inviting readers to ridicule his misplaced earnestness. The tone of the
admission that Ahmed ‘was a great deal more heedful of [his] duties as a
gatherer of information’ indicates that, for Ghosh, these encounters are
not about ‘gather[ing] information’. This leads to a paradox: although
Ghosh assumes the mantle of the accomplished Western social scientist –
he is known by the fellaheen as ‘ya doktór’ – he shows a certain degree
of scorn towards the ‘duties’ of such a figure; he is writing against
anthropology, while remaining positioned within the subject, as one
of MacCannell’s ‘interactants […] also […] detached from the situation’
(see this chapter, Section II.i).
While Ghosh is selective with the material provided by the fellaheen,
however, he does not welcome questions about his own culture: his
polite, euphemistic presentation of Hindu beliefs signals a reluctance to
engage. We see this when he is first questioned about religion:
‘It’s cows you worship–isn’t that so?’

[…] I cleared my throat. I knew a lot depended on my answers. […]
‘In my country some people don’t eat beef because . . . because
cows give milk and plough the fields and so on, and so they’re very
useful.’ (1992, 47)
When he asserts that ‘a lot depend[s] on [his] answers’, Ghosh places

himself in a position of self-importance: the underlying assumptions are
that, first, his listeners would not be able to comprehend a full, honest
admission, so he must edit his response to provide an acceptable answer
to the question; and second, the Egyptian perception of ‘Indian’ culture
rests entirely on what he is about to say. In reacting to these assump-
tions, Ghosh tells his listeners what he thinks they want to hear and
then attempts to guide conversation in a different direction. At times
during his stay in Egypt, it is clear Ghosh sees Geertz’s ‘species of good
faith […] verg[ing] on bad faith’ as acting in only one direction: rather
than being ‘reciprocal pretence[s]’, these situations are to be under his
own control, and on his own terms.
There are moments, however, when this position of superiority is
vacated by Ghosh: sometimes, although he feels that he is in control
of his interactions, this is not the case. Ghosh is urged to accompany
his questioner Ustaz Mustafa to the mosque; while Mustafa is insistent,
he does not force his beliefs on the other: Ghosh does not have to do
anything, but can just watch the Muslims praying in order to understand
Islam. Given that Mustafa’s suggestion could be read as a description
of an observing anthropologist, the author’s refusal is a surprise. As he
reflects:
A part of me had wanted to go […:] it was, in a sense, my duty, part of

my job. But when the moment had come […] I had been too afraid,
and for the life of me I could not understand why. (1992, 49)
Ghosh’s uncertainty is signalled by two dislocations at the level of

his language: there are disjointed, ungrammatical phrases separated
by multiple commas, which show his attempts to come to terms with
what he, as a practising anthropologist, should do as ‘part of [his] job’;
also, there are the harsh fricatives and clashing personal pronouns of
the unsettling construction ‘for the life of me I’. In both examples, the
prose moves awkwardly, as if the author is unbalanced by the situation:
linguistically speaking, Ghosh has fallen over himself.15 Significantly,
however, these examples of transnational writing are not textual strate-
gies consciously put in place by an overseeing author, as in the case of
Ghosh’s ellipsis in narrating Ahmed’s narrative, Ondaatje’s fragmented
Franciscan epigraph (Chapter 1, Section III.ii), or the generic switching
of Seth’s diary (Chapter 2, Sections II.ii and II.iii). Here, the linguistic
signals of confusion, rather than self-aware textual devices, are indica-
tions that Ghosh, for all he professes he ‘could not understand why’
he refused Mustafa’s invitation, has a reason: he sees the invitation of
ostensible intercultural communication as an attempt by Mustafa to
project his beliefs and practices onto Ghosh and assume a dominant
position.
Shortly afterwards, Ghosh presents an episode in which his perspec-
tive on the villagers is highlighted, in an interesting foreshadowing of
his writing in The Glass Palace. Towards the end of his first visit, one of
the villagers purchases a new diesel water-pump, a novelty among the
farmers of Lataifa. As the device is manufactured in India, it is known
as ‘al-makana al-Hindi’, ‘the Indian machine’; the provenance of the
machine instantly confers ‘expert’ status on Ghosh, the only Indian in
the area, and he is asked to pronounce judgement on this product of
his home country (1992, 73). With the watchful eyes of the Egyptians
on him as he is shepherded into the presence of this machine, Ghosh
sees that escape is impossible, and he will have to present an opinion.
After peering at the pump in what he hopes is a knowledgeable fashion,
and tapping it with his knuckles, Ghosh declares that the farmer has
bought an excellent machine. Here, in contrast to the performances of
Seth’s travel, we see a performance that is forced upon the author: he
feels obliged to go through the motions of pronouncing an opinion,
whether or not he wants to. Alongside this compulsion, there is a sense
of detachment in Ghosh, as he thinks about the respect he feels the
pretence of knowledge has earned him:
I began to wonder how Lataifa would have looked if I had had the
privilege of floating through it, protected by the delegated power of
technology, of looking out untroubled through a sheet of clear glass.
(1992, 74)
One way of analysing this is as a commentary on the translation pro-

cess: the ways in which something is changed by the interpretative,
transitive qualities of translation. The author develops this idea in The
Glass Palace, which also features episodes in which ideas of mediation
and translation are analysed: Ghosh’s literature works to undermine
concepts of privileged observation attendant on traditional, often Euro-
centric modes of interpretation.
The substance through which this translation is effected is also impor-
tant, however, leading to another interpretation of this episode; glass,
as is clear from the title of the later novel, assumes a significant role.
Glass, as well as being used in construction, is inherently fragile – the
implied glass bubble of privilege and power in which Ghosh ‘float[s]’
thus puts him at risk. Moreover – with implications for the integrity of
Ghosh’s narrative – as well as letting through light, glass distorts it. Glass
is thus a substance of ambivalence, encapsulating ideas of fragility and
power, clarity and confusion; while the ‘clear glass’ of this translation
purports to present an accurate image of a foreign ‘other’, to what extent
is this altered by the process? This is a contradiction with which Ghosh
struggles: he knows the translation provided by the ‘delegated power of
technology’ would give an ‘untroubled […] clear’ view of the subject, yet
also he is aware that this translation would render the subject – in this
case, the village and its inhabitants – different enough for the viewer to
‘wonder how [it] would have looked’ when seen from this perspective.
The confusion in this passage is exacerbated by the fact that Ghosh is a
perpetually translated self: not only is he ‘translated’ from India to England
to Egypt, but after spending time in Lataifa – and travelling to Cairo to
continue research into the life of ‘Bomma’ – he moves to the neighbouring
village of Nashawy. Ghosh does not give a definite reason for this move;
indeed, he presents it as if his academic mentor, Dr Issa, is simply helping

him to move away from his overbearing landlord, Abu-‘Ali:
Dr Issa had arranged for me to leave Abu-‘Ali’s house, to move out of

Lataifa, to Nashawy. (1992, 98)
The ungrammatical, breathless rush of this sentence indicates Ghosh’s

excitement at leaving Lataifa; it also highlights the problems of trans-
lation in In an Antique Land. The author’s need to keep moving – to
remain in a state of geographical translation – is something he cannot
explain, and it leaves his language disjointed, awkward, and hurried.
The lack of conjunctions in this asyndetic extract also presents Ghosh’s
departure from one village and his travel to the next as separate, iso-
lated movements: ‘to move out of Lataifa’ and ‘to Nashawy’ are placed
alongside each other, yet the translation between the villages is made
without a significant connection.
While Ghosh’s navigation between the two villages is not explored,
the interrogations of the author – begun in Lataifa – continue in
Nashawy. On an early visit to the home of a male friend, Ghosh is inter-
rogated by a woman of the house:
‘Is it true […] in your country people burn their dead?’ […] ‘Don’t
they know it’s wrong? You can’t cheat the Day of Judgement by burn-
ing your dead.’
‘Please […] do you know when Ustaz Sabry will be back?’
[…] ‘Soon. But tell me this: is it true that you worship cows? […]
Just the other day you fell to your knees in front of a cow […].’
‘I tripped,’ I said […]. ‘I’ll come back some other time: tell Ustaz
Sabry.’ (1992, 125)
The assertion that cremation enables those unworthy of redemption

to ‘cheat the Day of Judgement’ is comprehensible, as she espouses the
Muslim belief that people are resurrected and thus that dead bodies
must be buried, not cremated.16 In Ghosh’s presentation, however,
the practice is presented as a decision depending on the perspectives
of those involved: in comparison with his worldliness, the woman’s
disbelief that those who cremate their dead do not ‘know it’s wrong’
comes across as closed-minded, and her reference to ‘cheat[ing]’ is made
to sound childish. Similarly, her interpretation of his actions in front
of the cow is seen as a dogged attachment to an ‘Indian’ stereotype
that ignores a prosaic explanation, and Ghosh draws humour from the
episode at the other’s expense. His attitude is also of interest when we

consider the author’s gender bias: he backs away from a confrontation
with an unnamed woman and orders her to inform the man of the
house – Ustaz Sabry – of this visit. The final sentence is formed from
two clauses: the first describes Ghosh’s intention to ‘come back some
other time’; the second is an imperative, ordering the woman to inform
another man of Ghosh’s visit. Without knowing the tone of this conver-
sation, and making allowances for the fact that Ghosh’s use of this order
may indicate a rudimentary grasp of Arabic rather than a misogynistic
peremptoriness, this episode cannot be read as indicating a definite atti-
tude of the author’s. It is nevertheless true that this sentence, in passing
over the woman in favour of Ustaz Sabry, enacts a linguistic and semantic
exclusion on her person: Ghosh exacerbates the inherent gender bias of
a society in which it is the men who work in the fields, where Ghosh
spends much of his time, and the women who remain indoors.17
Limitations of space prohibit my exploring every one of the numerous
scenes in which Ghosh asks questions of the Egyptian fellaheen and they
in turn interrogate him, but my analyses of Ghosh’s time in Lataifa and
the first of his interactions in Nashawy have been designed to build an
awareness of the environment of anthropological questioning in which
In an Antique Land is situated. It is into this atmosphere of enquiry that
the episodes arrive on which I now focus, in the final section of this
chapter to focus on Ghosh’s travelogue. These passages – located at
the centre of this narrative of travel and translation – are structurally
dependent on the earlier scenes; furthermore, the fragmentation and
disintegration at play in the narrator trigger a fundamental reconsidera-
tion of the work as a whole, and of Ghosh as a transnational author.
iii ‘Natural’ Curiosity

The questioning of Ghosh about Indian customs comes to a head on
two occasions, in which his reactions present a new perspective on the
author’s transnationalism. The first sees him invited, as guest of hon-
our, to a wedding. Ghosh dreads this, as he knows he will be subject
to the scrutiny of the fellaheen, and tries his best to escape from the
sombre ‘festivities’ inside the house, watching the bridal dance outside.
Inevitably, he is recognised, and hauled inside, whereupon questions of
cremation and circumcision recur; his response to the personal tone of
the questioning – asking about his own circumcision – is a physical one:
My limbs seemed to have passed beyond my volition as I rose from the

divan, knocking over my shusha [sic].18 I pushed my way out. (1992, 204)
As in From Heaven Lake and An Equal Music, a moment of physical

incapacitation – as Ghosh’s legs appear to ‘have passed beyond [his]
volition’ – signals a rupture in the text. Here, the rupture involves a
similar moment of disintegration on the part of the author, as he fails to
cope with the returning of the anthropological gaze he has directed at
the fellaheen, and it leaves Nabeel, the groom’s brother, confused, as he
explains that the wedding guests were only asking questions, as Ghosh
himself does, and wonders why the author ‘let[s] this talk of cows and
burning and circumcision worry you so much? These are just customs;
it’s natural that people should be curious’ (1992, 204).
This, however, is the end of the chapter – we do not read Ghosh’s
response. What we do get is a narrative from the author’s childhood, as
the next chapter begins with the dramatic sentence ‘I sometimes wished
I had told Nabeel a story’; this story is designed to explain the author’s reac-
tion to the Egyptians’ questions through a description of Hindu–Muslim
riots in 1960s Dhaka. In the central episode, a young Amitav witnesses a
mob of ‘hundreds of men, their faces shining red in the light of the burn-
ing torches in their hands, rags tied on sticks, whose flames seem to be
swirling against our walls in waves of fire’ (1992, 208). The proliferating
clauses of this sentence mimic both the tumbling, out-of-control energy
of a riot and also Ghosh’s own exuberant memories, which are ‘very vivid,
but at the same time oddly out of synch’ (1992, ibid). It is this sequence,
and his subsequent evocation of cities destroyed by fire because of a cow
found dead in a temple or a pig in a mosque, and women and men abused
and killed because of their dress or physical appearance, that convince
Ghosh, at the end of the chapter, that he cannot expect the Egyptian
fellaheen to understand an ‘Indian’s terror of symbols’ (1992, 208).19
Significantly, though, Ghosh has described his childhood home life as
one of great privilege, in a house with ‘a large garden, and high walls’.
His encounters with post-Partition violence are restricted to sanitized
viewings of a ‘sloppily edited film’, a metaphor that introduces the
concept of a distanced process of editing; most importantly, he admits
that there is a happy end to the episode of violence at the centre of this
self-justificatory chapter:
Nothing did happen. The police arrived at just the right moment […].
Next morning […] the refugees who had gathered [in the garden]
were sitting peacefully in the sun. (1992, 209)
Ghosh presents a scene of peace in the aftermath of violence, yet one

cannot help wondering whether the arrival of the police, coming ‘at
just the right time’, would have occurred if this scene had been played
out in a less well-to-do region of Dhaka. The nonchalance of Ghosh’s
reference to a ‘lucky’ police intervention, coupled an earlier throwa-
way line stating that refugees congregated on their ‘island’ because it
was ‘the only “Hindu” house nearby that happened to have high walls’
(1992, 206; emphasis added), indicates a lack of awareness of the impact
of the violence on those directly involved. Moreover, the tranquillity
suggested by the easy language of ‘gather[ing]’ undermines the violence
embedded in the concept of being a ‘refugee’, seeking ‘refuge’ from a
group, political force, or situation.20 This passage calls into question
the notion that the author can lump himself in with the Indian whose
fear of symbols might be driven by a direct experience of the rioting:
can Ghosh justify his reluctance to answer questions about ‘cows and
burning and circumcision’ using the resonances of those second-hand
experiences?
The second occasion on which there is a fracturing in the identity
of the author, as he struggles to cope with a conflicting mix of emo-
tions around intercultural difference, comes at the end of his time
in Nashawy. The episode is central to the text, a fact acknowledged
by Ghosh himself: he documented the exchange between graduate
anthropologist and religious elder in a successful essay from 1986,
‘The Imam and the Indian’, and ‘later incorporate[d] it into the larger
text of In an Antique Land as a poignant and pivotal moment that
would dramatise the conjuncture of several threads in that narrative’
(Mondal, 2008, pp. 41–42). Besides Ghosh himself, critics have rec-
ognised this encounter as being of the utmost importance: Mondal’s
reference to the episode takes pride of place at the beginning of the
main body of his monograph (2008, 41); Christi Ann Merrill refers to
it as ‘one of the most self-revealing and yet revelatory scenes’ in the
book (2007, 119); Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan present an
analysis of the encounter in the context of a wider discussion of travel
writing (1998, 57–58); and Clifford uses Ghosh’s 1986 essay as what he
calls an ‘in medias res’ springboard for his entire work on ‘dwelling-in-
travel’ (1997, 1, 2).
Ghosh’s meeting with the Imam, which takes place in the Nashawy
market-place, follows an abortive attempt on the part of the author to
engage with the religious leader, who has in the past been an expert in
administering herbal medicines, in conversation on the subject of tradi-
tional remedies. The Imam has now established himself as a purveyor of
the ‘modern’ injections for which there is a growing market among the
villagers, and has done his best to leave behind the traditional ‘herbs
and poultices’. He urges Ghosh to forget about these traditions, as he is

trying to do, and the author has a realisation:
I knew then that he would never talk to me about [traditional]

remedies […:] the mere mention of them was as distasteful to him as
talk of home to an exile. (1992, 192–93)
For the Imam, the use of natural remedies shows a deplorable lack of
modern civilisation – a central idea in the market-place dispute to fol-
low. Moreover, Ghosh presents this reaction via a metaphor – likening
the Imam’s ‘distaste’ to that of an ‘exile’ reminded of ‘home’ – that
performs two functions: primarily, it underlines the questions of home,
belonging, and travel central to this work. Also, it presents the Imam’s
attitude to ‘traditional medicine’ as fundamentally problematic, as
it refers to both an awakened longing for a former state – an ‘exile’s’
nostalgic longing for ‘home’ – and a simultaneous need to embrace ‘the
new’, seen in the ‘distaste’ of the exile for anything outside his adopted
country of residence.
The Imam separates himself from Ghosh, refuses to engage in further
conversations, and ignores him when they meet in public: the Imam
‘scarcely deign[s] to acknowledge [his] greetings when [they] pass each
other in the village’s narrow lanes’ (1992, 233). This rudeness finally
comes to a head, when Ghosh goes up to him in the village market-
place, and the Imam’s reply to a friendly ‘good morning’ is remarkably
confrontational:
‘Tell me […] why do you worship cows?’

Taken by surprise I began to stammer. […]
‘That’s what they do in his country. […] Did you know? They
worship cows.’ (1992, 234)
There is a degree of confrontation here that is absent from the fellaheen’s

earlier incarnations of this position. The Imam’s blunt questions are the
condensing of a previous line of tentative beliefs into fact, his position as
religious leader lending his words authority. This continues, as he explains
to the assembled crowd that something else they do ‘in his country’
is ‘“They burn their dead”’. The Imam’s religious presence makes a fact of
this opinion – admittedly, here, of one that is true. In placing this along-
side the accusation of cow worship, however, he gives the ‘increasingly
tongue-tied’ Ghosh time to answer neither charge: in the minds of those
around them, the Imam lends power to his argument as a whole.
The Imam then casts the author as a member of a ‘primitive and

backward’ society, and the episode reaches its climax as he turns to ‘the
West’ for moral example, as he knows Ghosh has spent time in Europe:
‘Have you ever seen them burning their dead? […] They’re not an
ignorant people. They’re advanced, they’re educated, they have
science, they have guns and tanks and bombs.’ (1992, 235)
This entrance of ‘the West’ into the conversation, triangulating the

India/Egypt relationship in what Merrill calls a ‘three-way rhetoric of
postcolonial irony’ (2007, 107), triggers an explosion of feeling from
Ghosh. In contrast to his previous nonchalant acceptance of Indian
‘custom’ – the status quo was ‘“how it was when [he] came into the
world […he] had nothing to do with it”’ (1992, 169) – the response is
strident and emotional:
Suddenly something seemed to boil over in my head, dilemmas and

arguments I could no longer contain within myself.
‘We have them too! […G]uns and tanks and bombs. And they’re
better than anything you’ve got in Egypt–we’re a long way ahead of
you.’ (1992, 235–36)
Ghosh’s violent outburst echoes the uncontrolled reaction – ‘beyond

[his] volition’ – to questions about ‘cows and burning and circumci-
sion’ at the earlier wedding, and the fact that he can ‘no longer contain’
arguments within himself sees him reacting, finally, in the way that a
reader has expected throughout the earlier references to circumcision,
cremation, and cow-worship. This time, Ghosh makes no attempt to
modify his reaction to fit with his audience, and instead we see him
drawn to the same level of haranguing ‘debate’ as the Imam, shouting
about ‘guns and tanks and bombs’.
After Ghosh is led away, he summarises what has happened:
[We were] delegates from two superseded civilizations, vying […] to

establish a prior claim to the technology of modern violence.
At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we
understood each other perfectly. We were both travelling, he and I:
we were travelling in the West. (1992, 236)
Critics focusing on this episode generally read this as it is presented

to the reader by Ghosh: the narratorial conclusion ‘We were both
travelling […] travelling in the West’ signals that this is a cross-cultural

encounter enabling Ghosh to bemoan the influences of ‘the West’ on
both his own Indian and the Imam’s Egyptian cultures. The passage,
according to Holland and Huggan, positions In an Antique Land as an
interventionist ‘challenge to […] familiar kinds of neoimperialist travel
writing that […] tak[e] the West as [their] frame of reference’ (1998, 58);
Clifford asserts that this episode ‘delivers a sharp critique of a classic
quest – exoticist, anthropological, orientalist’ (1997, 5). For these critics,
Ghosh’s work is an example of ‘counter-travel’ writing that undermines
a dominant discourse.
The episode is complicated significantly, however, by the fact that
Ghosh himself is an interested party: his emotional engagement with
ethnographic discussion at this point means his narration can no longer
claim disinterestedness, as it does not conform to the dialogue it pre-
sents. If he were observing a heated debate between two other ‘delegates
from […] superseded civilizations’, then his narration could be read as
a straightforward ‘critique’ or ‘challenge’. As it is, he is himself one of
the delegates, and is in fact hurt by the exchange: he is ‘crushed’, and
feels that he and the Imam have ‘participated in [their] own final defeat,
in the dissolution of centuries of dialogue’ between their respective
cultures (1992, 236). While he asserts that he and the Imam ‘understood
each other perfectly’, the confusion in which he is left undermines any
understanding. This is tackled, to some extent, in Merrill’s reading of
Ghosh’s ‘postcolonial translations’, as she asserts that for both Imam
and Indian ‘the teleology proves unstable ground’: Ghosh’s narrative
‘mixes narration and exposition to try to reconcile sides of [his] persona
that have been rendered seemingly irreconcilable’ (1997, 120). Merrill
does not probe further into this confusion, though, content to attribute
the shifting uncertainties of Ghosh’s writing to ‘the irony that is transla-
tion’ (1997, 121). It is from this ‘irony’, which Merrill herself does not
explore, that my analysis of Ghosh’s work grows: while he ‘tr[ies] to
reconcile sides of [his] persona’, he often fails to do so, as a result of the
implications behind reading linguistic and cultural translations through
the lens of the author’s own ‘moving across’. This failure is a definite
part of Ghosh’s writing, in its focus on the inadequacies and confusions
of translation.
Moreover, in what tone – positive, negative, neutral – does Ghosh refer
to the idea of ‘the technology of modern violence’, as he tries to make
sense of what has happened? As I proceed to look at a very different
text by Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace, it will become clear that ideas
of modernity and violence are at the forefront of the author’s mind, in
conjunction with the translations of a transnational identity. They are,

in fact, central to a novel that describes, at the same time, the develop-
ing technologies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, and the
violent atrocities that were often enabled by this very human progression
into modernity. In this context, the phrase ‘technology of modern vio-
lence’ offers a troubling mixture of celebration and disaster, of creation
and destruction; this episode from the early travelogue is thus at the heart
of the translations and mis-translations of Ghosh’s work.
III The Glass Palace
i ‘Burma’s Multicultural Aspect’ or ‘Modern History

under […] Colonialism’?
I now extend my argument about Ghosh’s work, whereby his shifting,
often contradictory presentations of cultural translation, undercutting
his narratives of travel, are signs both of his involvement with his sub-
jects of study and of his connections with the ‘West’. Moreover, the
fact of his identity as one who has himself been ‘translated’ makes the
concept an uncertain and ambivalent one in his work: I explore this
through episodes of various kinds of translation in The Glass Palace with
roots in In an Antique Land. My focus on the millennial novel enables
me to examine Ghosh’s relationship with his surroundings and his
translations between cultures, so as to explore the influence of his travel
writing on his later work. This is partly a response to limited, nationally
rooted analyses like Christopher Rollason’s summary:
The Glass Palace […] traces the criss-crossing fortunes of two families
across Burma, India and Malaya, and underscores Burma’s multicul-
tural aspect while placing its modern history under the sign of both
colonialism and world war. […The narrative] place[s] Burmese reali-
ties in a wider geopolitical context[:] Asian and, beyond that, global.
(2009, 12)
Rollason’s analysis is broadly correct: the novel does indeed focus on

the political history of Burma.21 What this glosses over, however, is the
extent to which The Glass Palace is not simply an account of ‘Burmese
realities in a wider geopolitical context’, but an interrogation of that
context: to focus on the ‘Burmeseness’ of the work is to lose sight of
Ghosh’s attention to the shifting relationships that both rupture and
structure the histories interwoven in the novel.
Neither, on the other hand, is this solely a novel about Empire and
its effects, as others have argued: Jayita Sengupta analyses ‘Ghosh’s ren-
dering of British colonialism and its aftermath in […] three countries’
in The Glass Palace (2002, 26); N.K. Neb asserts that ‘The Glass Palace
is primarily the story of three generations of a family spreading over
three countries […] of the British Empire’ (2007, 202); and Mansing
G. Kadam refers to the novel’s depiction of the ‘enmeshed histories of
Burma, Malaysia and India in the British [imperial] regime’ (2006, 19).
Ghosh undoubtedly engages with the concept of British imperialism
and its brutal effects on a number of countries in Asia, but it restricts the
broad scope of the work to suggest that this is the ‘primar[y]’ focus of
The Glass Palace. Kadam comes closest to an accurate assessment of the
novel when he explains that ‘Ghosh debunks the national, political and
geographical boundaries [of the three countries] and supports his own
idea that nationalism is an imaginative construct’ (2006, 19).
My point is that The Glass Palace is not simply a novel about Burma,
Burmese people, and Burmese history; nor is it a work solely focusing
on the violent machinations and after-effects of British imperialism: it
is a novel about the uncertain and confusing interactions between the
two. It is a work devoted to concepts of translation, whether historical,
cultural, or linguistic: the novel addresses the many manifestations of
the idea of ‘moving across’. I focus on three different sorts of translation
as ways of acknowledging the novel’s challenge to criticism that places
it either as a work ‘about’ the history of Burma or as a text devoted
to an anti-imperialist, postcolonial point of view. First, I address the
idea of historical translation, looking at the successes and failings of
Ghosh’s engagement with nineteenth- and twentieth-century history,
and dwelling on ruptures in his prose at moments of historical transla-
tion. I continue by focusing on a crucial intertext for Ghosh: forming
a chronological and semantic bridge between the two texts in this
chapter, the set of travel essays Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma
describes time spent by Ghosh in the two countries in the work’s title.
In particular, a passage from this travelogue is reused by Ghosh in a
way that focuses attention on ideas of intercontinental translation and
political interdependence. Finally, I focus on another sort of translation:
linguistic. This surfaces at intervals throughout the novel; I interrogate
the ways in which Ghosh employs various Burmese linguistic elements
in this predominantly English-language work, and ask to what purpose
he does so.
After presenting these different translations, I conclude by looking
at some of the metaphors at the end of The Glass Palace. In a narrative
thread dominating the conclusion of the novel, the idea of photography

is an important metaphor for – translation of – the experiences of the
second and third generations of a central family. Ghosh’s exploration of
this representation of human experience coincides with the emotional
development of a central character, Dinu, as he understands the impor-
tance of ‘bridge[s] of metaphor’ that link human thoughts (2000, 276).
A family reunion is effected through a series of photographs (2000,
486, 488, 496), and Dinu’s narrative arc concludes as he sets up a photo
studio whose name evokes a symbol that resonates throughout the
novel: ‘The Glass Palace: Photo Studio’ (2000, 502). I thus end the chapter
with an exploration of this ambivalent, titular symbol: emblematic of –
at the same time – a lost culture and a new political movement, a way of
understanding and a closing-off of thought, a simultaneous clarity and
opacity of vision, ‘The Glass Palace’ acts as a lens through which Ghosh
views both small-scale Burmese national history and far-reaching geo-
political relationships. Again, glass is a material used both to observe
and to distort the view: whereas in In an Antique Land the author himself
had the ‘privilege of […] looking out untroubled through a sheet of clear
glass’, in this novel it is the ‘Glass Palace’ that ‘translates’ the experi-
ences of the characters. When the opening scenes, in which a riot surges
through the Burmese royal ‘Glass Palace’, are retold to a character who
was at the scene, she refuses to believe it: ‘Dolly clapped her hands over
her ears. “It’s a lie. Every word of it. You’ve made it all up”’ (2000, 147).
Ghosh’s novel responds to this act of denial, as the characters’ narra-
tives are told and retold, translated and mistranslated: Ghosh repeatedly
questions narratorial authorities, including – crucially – his own.
ii Translation A: History
The Glass Palace covers a period stretching from the British invasion of
Mandalay in 1885 to the sixth year of the house arrest of pro-democracy
leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon, 1996.22 As the novel opens, we
are introduced to an 11-year-old Indian boy called Rajkumar, who
is living and working in Mandalay after being laid off from his job
as an errand boy on a sampan that moors in the city after having
been found to need repairs. It is through the eyes of this temporary,
‘foreign’ resident of Mandalay that we witness the circumstances and
aftermath of a major event in Burmese history: the British invasion
of 1885, which brought an end to Burmese independence. This epi-
sode, according to one historian of the period, ‘signalled the start of a
period of internal disorder and indigenous resistance to colonial rule’
(Chew, 1979, 372).
Several events then take place, in a sequence in which Ghosh calls

into question the national affinities and loyalties of those involved: the
vanguard of the invading British army is composed of Indian sepoys,
whose faces display no emotion at all, and who ‘“for a few coins […]
allow their masters to use them”’ as they wish; then, watching these
soldiers parade past, it strikes Rajkumar that he has not seen any of the
‘usual Indian faces’ in the bazaar that day, and finds himself the subject
of a threatened racially motivated attack, even though the Burmese
people had until then been accepting of this Indian in their midst;
then, while it is the invading forces who instigate the looting of the
iconic Glass Palace – a central building in the royal compound – the
ransacking is taken up with enthusiasm by the residents of Mandalay,
who turn on their own royal family and leave the Queen screaming in
a ‘fury caused as much by her own impotence as by the presence of the
mob in the palace’ (2000, 27–33). The national confusions of the novel’s
opening are summarised in the racially indeterminate figure of Saya
John, lover of Rajkumar’s landlady, who saves the young Indian from
racial attack in the bazaar: although he dresses in European clothes,
Saya John comes from ‘“somewhere in Malaya”’, speaks to Rajkumar in
broken Hindustani, and ‘“look[s] Chinese”’; moreover, not only has he
spent time working in Singapore, he also quotes approvingly from the
Bible (2000, 8, 9, 10, 29, 30).
During the first few sections of the seven-part novel, we follow the
development of several narratives, which link characters through love,
friendship, or conflict. Ghosh details the 1885 transportation into exile
in the Indian city of Ratnagiri of King Thebaw, Queen Supayalat, and
their entourage, including a young servant called Dolly, with whom
Rajkumar falls in love when he sees her during the ransacking of the
Glass Palace (2000, 34). Entwined with this narrative of exile and decay –
in which the royal family, kept in isolation in ‘Outram House’ on the
outskirts of Ratnagiri, is cut off both from the Burmese homeland and
people of their past and from any social interaction in the present – is a
parallel and inverse story of assimilation and growth, as Rajkumar deve-
lops into a successful international merchant, back in Burma, under the
guidance of Saya John. Meanwhile, the only significant connection with
the outside world permitted by the royal family’s British jailors is the
company of the ‘Indo-Anglian’23 Collector Beni Prasad Dey, who arrives
in Ratnagiri with his politically progressive wife Uma Debi in 1906.
Uma, who strikes up a friendship with Dolly, introduces Rajkumar –
a friend of a relation of hers – who is now a wealthy Burmese merchant
and has come to Ratnagiri to seek Dolly’s hand; Rajkumar and Dolly
marry, and travel back to Burma. Meanwhile, Uma’s nephew Arjun goes
to war on the side of the British Empire, and is stationed in Afghanistan

and Malaya,24 while his twin sister Manju remains in India and marries
Neeladhri (known as Neel), the eldest son of Rajkumar and Dolly. In con-
trast, Rajkumar and Dolly’s second son, Dinanath (shortened to Dinu),
opposes the war on the grounds of ‘leftist sympathies […and] support
for […] resistance movements in China and Spain’ (2000, 307), travels
to Malaya, and finds love with Alison, the granddaughter of Saya John, in
spite of an affair between Alison and the locally billeted Arjun. Towards
the end of The Glass Palace, we are presented with the story of Jaya, the
only child of Neel and Manju, who travels to Burma in middle age from
her home in India, attempting to track down her long-lost uncle Dinu.
Dinu, now going by his Burmese name of U Tun Pe, has developed a
lifelong love of photography into a successful and politically influential
business that numbers Aung San Suu Kyi among its clients.
I provide this extensive plot summary for two reasons: firstly, I want to
show the extraordinary complexity of this plot Ghosh admits took ‘five
years […] to write’ (2000, 549). Secondly, and more importantly, I mean
to show the extent to which he engages with the developing narrative of
modern world history. I have mentioned the two historical bookends of
the work – the British invasion and Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest – but
there are numerous other historical markers that connect with fictional
events. These range from general comments, as when Saya John’s son
Matthew sets up a rubber-producing operation in Malaya at a time when
the British Colonial Government is looking to India to ‘supply coolies
and workers for the plantations’ (2000, 183), to more specific informa-
tion, such as the fact, fifty years later, that Manju and Neel have not long
been married when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain,
declares war on Germany ‘on behalf of Britain and her Empire’ (2000,
305). Further context is provided by references to cars (a ‘“brand-new […]
1908 Hutton”’ and an ‘“Oldsmobile Defender […] this year’s model, a
genuine 1914”’ [2000, 193, 197]), artists and film stars (Dinu likes ‘“Alfred
Stieglitz” […] Charlie Chaplin […] Robert Capa’ [2000, 274, 307]), and
other trappings of the twentieth century (a ‘Brownie camera from Rowe
and Co.’ or a ‘“Martin C-130 seaplane”’ [2000, 215, 298]).
Moreover, there are explicit links between historical and narrative
events, as when Rajkumar and Matthew, relaxing on the rubber planta-
tion, discuss recent events in 1914:
‘“Sarajevo”? […] Where’s that?’

‘A long way away.’ Matthew laughed.
No more than anyone else in the world, did either of them have
an inkling that the killing in Sarajevo would spark a world war. Nor
did they know that rubber would be a vital strategic material in this
conflict […and] the commodity would come to be valued more than
ever before, increasing their wealth beyond their most extravagant
dreams. (2000, 201)
This passage is typical of a strength of Ghosh’s writing: he repeatedly

displays his appreciation of the extent to which major political, his-
torical events are composed of small details relevant to the course of
individual human lives. Also – while it occasionally feels as if his prose
labours under the weight of his historical research – the reference to the
worldwide value of rubber shows the dizzying proliferation of transna-
tional references in Ghosh’s prose: here, Ghosh not only explores the
link between the global and the transnational in his fiction, but also in
the turbulences of his own identity, as seen in In an Antique Land.
These convolutions echo throughout the novel, as heightened emo-
tion often coincides with written moments of both historical refer-
ence and transnational rupture. When Arjun and his military batman,
Kishan Singh, step off a train, for example, as they return to Arjun’s
family home for his sister Manju’s marriage, they are met, in an obvi-
ous piece of historical signposting, in a ‘brand new 1939 model […]
8 horse-power Jowett’ (2000, 272). At this historically marked moment,
emotion ruptures the smooth surface of Ghosh’s prose, as his lan-
guage slips into the phrases of romance: after Arjun’s youngest sister,
Bela, has ‘stole[n] a glance’ at Kishan Singh, his responding smile has
a ‘physical impact – like a blow from a flying object’ (2000, 275).
Translation, at least in its historical form, is a troubling idea for Ghosh;
as I continue my study of the different sorts of translation at work in
the novel, I remain aware of this tendency for moments of translation
and heightened emotion to cause significant rents in the fabric of
his writing.
iii Translation B: Intertext

The successes of Ghosh’s heavily researched historical approach are
often evident, not least in writing that combines intertextual refe-
rences within his own work and a sensitive exploration of the many
geographic and cultural translations that constitute the modern world.
Over the next few pages, it is this intertextuality on which I focus, as
it draws a particular chronological and thematic link between In an
Antique Land and The Glass Palace – the texts are linked in this instance
through Ghosh’s second work of travel writing, the collection of essays
Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma.
Although Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma was released in

1998, the journeys described in the essays take place earlier in the
1990s, shortly after the publication of In an Antique Land. Also, while
the collection was published two years before The Glass Palace, Ghosh’s
assertion that the 2000 novel was five years in the writing illustrates
both the overlapping and interdisciplinary nature of much of the
author’s work, and his drive towards meticulous research: Dancing in
Cambodia, At Large in Burma thus provides a strong chronological link
between the two texts on which I focus in this chapter. The individual
essays in the collection also bridge the divide between travelogue and
novel: ‘Dancing in Cambodia’ (1998a, 1–53) begins with the same
research-focused inquisitiveness of Ghosh’s enquiries into ‘Bomma’,
as he explains that having ‘recently arrived in Phnom Penh [he has]
become curious about’ the early twentieth-century Cambodian royal
family (1998a, 6). ‘At Large in Burma’ (1998a, 65–114), meanwhile, ends
with Ghosh interviewing Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon in 1996, the
year of the final Burmese visit of The Glass Palace: this link is emphasised
in Kadam’s analysis of the way in which ‘Aung San Suu Kyi’s struggle
for democracy in Burma and its historical context’ is explored both in
Ghosh’s travel writing and in his novel (2006, 29).
The intertextual reference that interests me, however, links the later
novel with the opening paragraphs of Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in
Burma:
On 10 May 1906, at two in the afternoon, a French liner called the

Amiral-Kersaint set sail from Saigon carrying a troupe of nearly a hun-
dred classical dancers and musicians from the royal palace at Phnom
Penh. They were to stage the first ever performance of Cambodian
classical dance in Europe, at the Exposition Coloniale in Marseille.
Also travelling on the Amiral-Kersaint was the sixty-six year-old ruler
of Cambodia, King Sisowath, along with his entourage. (1998a, 1)
The influence of this passage on the novel is clear in the following

extract, describing a stop on a European cruise made by Uma with an
Indian companion early in the twentieth century:
They hadn’t gone far before Uma was mistaken […] for a Cambodian;
dozens of people had gathered round her, asking if she was a dancer.
It turned out that King Sisowath of Cambodia had recently visited
[Marseille], with a troupe of dancers from his palace. The dancers
had enjoyed […] great success; the whole city was mad for them; the
great sculptor, Mr Rodin, had come down from Paris […] to draw their
likenesses. (2000, 188)
This foundation in the same research is one of several echoes of the travel
text in the novel. For example, the Rodin sketches Ghosh mentions in
passing here are central to Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma: not
only are four sketches included in the first essay, but one is reproduced
on the cover of the first hardback edition. I bring up the source of this
episode so as to highlight the way physical travel and transnational,
geopolitical relationships are united in this moment: not only are the
characters brought to the shores of another continent for the first time
in the novel, but in this stepping onto European soil Uma activates a
relationship between the colonial polarities of France and Cambodia.
The scene acts as a signifier of a crossing made by the characters in
both geographical and political terms: it is a literal, ‘carrying across’,
act of metaphor. Also, in recalling this relationship between France and
Cambodia, Ghosh dwells on the particularly fraught aspects of translation –
linguistic and physical – that recur throughout The Glass Palace, a novel
interrogating the existence of a world in which the Cambodian dancers
‘perform’ for a French audience in a location with a name carrying politi-
cally dubious connotations: the ‘Exposition Coloniale’.25
Despite this beginning, however, with its obvious influences on The
Glass Palace, Ghosh’s 1998 travel work is more than solely a denuncia-
tion of the politics of colonialism: the main narrative of the first essay,
‘Dancing in Cambodia’, involves a young relation of one of the dancers’
companions, who grows from the ‘young boy called Saloth Sar […] “very
good boy”’ (1998a, 5, 13) of his sister-in-law’s memories into the mass-
murdering dictator Pol Pot. The character of Pol Pot is the driving force
behind the essay, and the introductory historical reference to the dancers
is both ancillary to and a fundamental part of this, as the link between
France and Cambodia takes centre stage: Ghosh carefully studies Pol Pot’s
French education, which the author believes lay behind many of the
events in 1970s Cambodia; according to Sar/Pot’s older brother, ‘“it was
the knowledge he got in Paris that made him what he is”’ (1998a, 35).
This sobering transnational debt leads Ghosh to a phrase that explains
his position in both travelogue and novel, and extends throughout his
work: he muses on ‘the power of Cambodia’s involvement in the culture
and politics of modernism, in all its promise and horror’ (1998a, 43). This
use of the term ‘modernism’ might appear to be inaccurate, as Ghosh
makes it clear – referring to ‘promise and horror’ – that he is describ-
ing the sorts of ‘inescapable forces of turbulent social modernization’
that Michael Levenson asserts were ‘the destabilizing context of cultural

Modernism’: Modernism, in its capitalised form, was a response to the
‘promise and horror’ of this ‘modernization’, rather than the subject of
such ‘promise and horror’ (1999, 4). Ghosh, however, writing in lower
case, aligns himself with Jürgen Habermas’s description of modernism
as that which ‘makes an abstract opposition between tradition and the
present’; ‘modernism’, in the case of Ghosh’s formulation, is indistin-
guishable from a ‘kind of aesthetic modernity’, one feature of a developing
modern world (Habermas, 1985, 4).
In its intertextual debt to Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma,
the 2000 novel is a response to this ‘culture and politics of modernism,
in all its promise and horror’: it is certainly a theme to which the
author repeatedly returns. One passage focusing on vexed questions
of ‘modernism’/’modernity’ and ‘progress’ sees the Queen of Burma
compose a response to the ‘rare [official] visitors’ to Ratnagiri, site of
Burmese royal exile:
The Queen greeted them with her proud, thin-lipped smile. Yes,
look around you, look at how we live. […] They took our kingdom,
promising roads and railways and ports, but mark my words, this
is how it will end. In a few decades the wealth will be gone – all
the gems […] timber […] oil – and then they too will leave […] our
golden Burma […] We were the first to be imprisoned in the name of
their progress; millions more will follow. […] A hundred years hence
you will read the indictment of Europe’s greed. (2000, 88)
There are two voices here. Primarily, there is the ‘proud, thin-lipped’
narrative of Queen Supayalat, speaking in the first-person plural. While
she may be using the ‘royal we’ to refer to herself alone, she could also
speak in the plural on behalf of the exiled, maltreated court: Ghosh
has explained that, with the neglect of the royal family by the British,
Outram House has succumbed to filth and disease, and ‘decay ha[s]
become the Queen’s badge of defiance’ (2000, 87). As the passage deve-
lops, however, she begins to speak for her whole country, ‘our golden
Burma’, and finally for imprisoned non-Western peoples of the future.
In this movement, the second voice in the passage emerges: that of
Ghosh himself. While this speech is presented as the prophecy of a late-
nineteenth-century queen, the narrative is evidently inflected by the
postcolonial hindsight of a late-twentieth-century author: Supayalat’s
assertion that ‘millions more’ will suffer at the hands of ‘Europe’s greed’
is in fact Ghosh’s comment on the global atrocities of the twentieth
century, which he sees as rooted in the acquisitive growth of European

colonialism. This is at the forefront of a reader’s mind, as Supayalat’s
speech follows a list of contemporary European dignitaries who were
interested in fostering links with Asian visitors; in spite of the apparent
atmosphere of transnational collaboration surrounding this list, the
spectre of global conflict is in attendance: among the names is Emperor
Franz Joseph, the uncle of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassina-
tion triggered war in Europe in 1914. This passage, then, is a clear devel-
opment of Ghosh’s reference, in Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma,
to the positive and negative aspects of modernity that lay behind the
advances and calamities of the twentieth century.
In The Glass Palace, Ghosh takes the complex and unsettling ideas of lin-
guistic and cultural translation developed throughout his first travelogue,
In an Antique Land, and marries them to the political, historical, and
geographical knowledge attained during the writing of his second trav-
elogue, Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma. In so doing, he develops
several insights into the colonial political machinations of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries – and the devastating consequences of such
actions – that illustrate his committed investment in the intersections of
colonialism and modernity, and underline the geopolitical nature of his
transnational literature. This geopolitical focus colours my final section on
translation, in which I turn to specific examples of translation that unite
Burmese and Indian identities through Burmese and English languages.
iv Translation C: Language
It is through Rajkumar that Ghosh first addresses the idea of linguistic
translation. When the British advance on Mandalay it is Rajkumar who
breaks the news, yet the early warning is discounted because it comes
from an Indian, one who is ‘not an authority to be relied upon […an]
“idiot kalaa”’ (2000, 3, 11). Though the Burmese word ‘kalaa’ is untrans-
lated, there is an explanation in Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma –
another link between Ghosh’s travel writing and his novel. During time
spent with a rebel group in ‘At Large in Burma’, he speaks to the leader,
Ko Sonny, whose heritage means he has been subject to racial abuse:
‘people […] point to [him] and say kala (“foreigner”), although [he has]
never left Burma in [his] whole life’ (1998a, 103). Sonny’s racial origins
have already featured in the narrative:
‘Are you Indian?’ I […] noticed that his spoken English sounded
oddly like my own. I nodded, and […] took another look at him.
Suddenly, I sat up. ‘And you?’ I asked.
‘My parents were Indian,’ he said, with a smile. ‘But I’m Burmese.’
(1998a, 88–89)
It turns out Sonny’s history – with parents ‘from families of well-to-do

Indian businessmen’ who settled in Burma – is analogous with that
of Ghosh, whose family once lived in Burma but decided to return to
India: when Ghosh uses ‘kala’ to refer to Rajkumar in The Glass Palace,
it carries resonances both of the earlier character of Sonny and of the
author himself.26
This authorial connection with the Burmese word ‘kalaa’27 strengthens
the link between Rajkumar and Ghosh, and heightens the extent to
which the author wants his readers to empathise with this alienated
‘“fool of an Indian”’ (2000, 7). The feelings of alienation continue
as Rajkumar’s story unfolds alongside that of the royal family: while
Thebaw and Supayalat undergo physical exile, Rajkumar feels the lin-
guistic exile of a ‘kalaa’ in a foreign country, and it is only through hard
work that he establishes himself as a successful businessman. The nar-
ration of Rajkumar’s development begins with a description of his time
in the timber trade, in which Ghosh’s detailed research leads to intrigu-
ing details of an industry that, paradoxically, fuelled the construction
both of the British Empire and of Burmese infrastructure. Vast numbers
of teak trees are felled in forests through which flow ‘chaung[s…] rush-
ing mountain stream[s]’ (2000, 68), which start the trunks on their
journeys:
Teams of elephants would go to work, guided by their handlers,

their oo-sis and pe-sis […]. Belts of wooden rollers would be laid
on the ground, and quick-fingered pa-kyeiks, specialised in the tying
of chains, would dart between the elephants’ legs, fastening steel
harnesses. […]
Dragged to the banks of chaungs, the logs were piled into stacks […].
With the first rains, the puddles along the streams’ beds would stir and
stretch and join hands, rising slowly to the task of clearing away the
debris accumulated over the long months of desiccation. […]
Thus would begin the logs’ journey to the timberyards of Rangoon.
(2000, 69–70)
Here the subject of literal, physical translation of teak signifies the

‘translation’ of economic wealth for those involved; Rajkumar – like
Ghosh, both ‘kalaa’ and ‘translated’ individual – is drawn to this move-
ment. More importantly, though, there is a high density of Burmese
words, all of which are untranslated – though the phrase ‘oo-sis and
pe-sis’ is preceded by the partially explanatory ‘their handlers’, it remains
shrouded in mystery. Then, when ‘oo-si’ is next used, as Rajkumar con-
templates ‘join[ing] a company’s workforce as an oo-si’ (2000, 124), it
has passed into the unitalicised form, as if assuming its place in the
novel’s Anglophone lexicon. Ghosh manipulates the Burmese language
to achieve an effect in the consciousness of his English-language reader,
who assumes familiarity with Burmese culture.
Linguistic translation remains a concern as we shuttle between the
narratives of Rajkumar and the Burmese royal family, and the follow-
ing passage again shows Ghosh using his polylingualism to achieve an
effect on his reader. The Indian ‘District Collector’, servant of the British
Empire, and his wife, Uma, are visiting Outram House for the first time
when Ghosh ruptures the English text with his use of a Burmese word:
On the wall […] was a small watercolour. The painting was a depiction
of a landscape at sunrise[…]. Suddenly, with a clap of her hands, Uma
uttered a loud cry. ‘Pagan!’
The word had the effect of an explosion in a confined space.
Everyone jumped, turning to look in Uma’s direction. […] ‘On the
wall – it’s a picture of Pagan, isn’t it?’ (2000, 107–108)
The word ‘Pagan’ – capitalised because it refers to a place in Burma –

provides an interesting translational nexus. The Burmese word is
emphasised on the second syllable, as is indicated by the accent in the
title of an article on ‘Pagán, Wetkyi-in Kubyauk-gyi, an Early Burmese
Temple with Ink-Glosses’ (Ba Shin, Whitbread, and Luce, 1971): its
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) spelling, roughly speaking, is
pə’gan, and this is undoubtedly how it would be read – and heard – by
a Burmese speaker.28 The fact that this Burmese word appears in a novel
written in English, however, and in a scene set in early twentieth-century
India, dramatically alters its impact – the word ‘pagan’, in its IPA spelling
of ‘peıgən, will often be read by an English reader as a pejorative refe-
rence to a ‘person not subscribing to any major or recognized religion,
esp[ecially] the dominant religion of a particular society’ (Simpson et al.
[eds], 2013). This was a particularly loaded term in the context of British
Imperial rule in India: in a climate in which an equivalence was made
between ‘non-Christian’ and ‘non-believer’, the dismissive use of the
word ‘pagan’ to refer to all ‘native’ Indian religions enabled the British
to lend moral authority to their assertion of Christian, British domi-
nance. In a typical example, one nineteenth-century British missionary
to India described, with an easy equivalence, ‘admirers of Paganism and

of the Hindoo mythology’ (Campbell, 1839, 67).29 The translation thus
effected by Ghosh’s use of this word causes a rupture or fragmentation
to occur in the surface of a novel in which a tapestry30 of Burmese and
Hindi speech is represented, in the main, through the medium of the
English language.
The idea of translation as rupture, disruption, or fragmentation has
been a commonplace since the early twentieth-century work of Walter
Benjamin. Benjamin uses a particular image to illustrate the connection
between translation and translated text:
A translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original,

must […] incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus mak-
ing both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments
of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a [broken] vessel.
(1999 [1955], 79)
This passage is built upon in Paul de Man’s analysis of Benjamin’s ideas:

translation is ‘a suffering […] a disarticulation […] a falling apart of [the]
original work […] every translation is totally fragmented in relation to
the original’ (1985, 39, 44). Translation performs an act of violence
on the original, and Ghosh brings this violence to the fore using the
un/translated word ‘Pagan’, which hovers between Burmese and English
meanings.
Ghosh’s prose in the ‘Pagan’ episode acts in two different yet com-
plementary directions. At a fundamental level, putting a Burmese word
in the mouth of an Indian character in this English text, written by an
Indian author, highlights several strands of anti-colonial sentiment.
There is the physical displacement of the exiled Burmese royal family
in India, who long for a connection with the ‘kingdom […] our golden
Burma’ to which Queen Supayalat refers in her anti-British lament.
There are the political commitments of Uma herself, who, after the
death of her husband in Ratnagiri, travels abroad, and joins a political
movement: this party of expatriate Indians understand there to be a
connection between their treatment abroad and the ‘subject status’ of
the country of India, and revolt against the British Empire, attempt-
ing to win round to their cause those friends and relatives who serve
in the British Indian Army and ‘look[ing] for allies abroad, developing
links with the Irish resistance in America’ (2000, 222). Also, however,
Ghosh’s emphasis on this rupturing translation underlines a transna-
tionalism that leads the narrative away from these obvious, strident
anti-colonialisms; in the final part of this chapter I look at translations

that offer a more redemptive, recuperative approach towards the politics
of modernity in Ghosh’s work.
v Literature, Photography, and ‘The Glass Palace’

In the final pages of this chapter, I focus on a narrative strand that
assumes some importance in the latter part of the novel: the story of
Dinanath/Dinu, the second son from the marriage of the Burmese-
resident-Indian Rajkumar and the once-exiled-in-India-Burmese Dolly.
Like his brother Neeladhri/Neel, Dinu is given two names, as is customary
among expatriate Indians in Burma: Neel has the Burmese name Sein
Win, while Dinu is also called Tun Pe (2000, 195). Dinu, who will later
take to using his Burmese name, thus symbolises the unity of Indian
and Burmese identities towards which the ‘kalaas’ Ko Sonny, Rajkumar,
and even Ghosh himself all reach.
After a childhood attack of polio, Dinu is physically disabled; in a
novel driven by the movement and travel of its characters it is interest-
ing that the narrative comes to be dominated by one whose movement
is fundamentally restricted.31 When we are initially introduced to Dinu
as an adult, he is a thoughtful, observant, and socially reticent figure,
in direct contrast with the other character introduced at the same time,
Neel’s vivacious brother-in-law Arjun. Dinu, whose hesitant romantic
overtures and private passions become central to the narrative, is the
second character – after his ‘kalaa’ father – who could be associated
with the scholarly figure of the author himself. Ariela Freedman notes a
link between character and creator in her analysis of Ghosh’s essay ‘The
Testimony of My Grandfather’s Bookcase’, about the books that lined
the walls of Ghosh’s grandfather’s house in Calcutta:
Ghosh describes re-encountering such a bookcase in the home of the

writer Mya Than Tint […] a translator, a mediator between literatures
through language, who translated not only Tolstoy’s War and Peace
but also Gone with the Wind. Readers of The Glass Palace will recog-
nize this library and its unlikely genesis; Ghosh has given it to Dinu.
(2005, 125)
There are two important points to be made, here. First, this Mya Thin Tint
is a translator: by association, Ghosh himself – who admits he ‘raided
[the family bookcase] regularly’ as a child (1998b) – takes on the mantle
of a ‘mediator between literatures through language’. Second, however,
Freedman is incorrect to assert that Ghosh gives this library to Dinu.
Though he is a thoughtful, cerebral character, Dinu is more likely to be

associated with photography than literature, with ‘reproductions […]
cut out of magazines […] photographs by Stieglitz, Cunningham, and
Weston’ (2000, 279); the works of Tolstoy and Mitchell are not men-
tioned in association with Dinu.32 Nevertheless, in drawing this unsub-
stantiated link, Freedman shows the strength of the associations – based
on the idea of translation – between author and character.
The section of the novel in which we meet the adult Dinu and Arjun
begins with a point that emphasises the importance of language, metaphor,
and representation:
Dinu understood words and images and the bridge of metaphor that
linked the two. (2000, 276)
These lines, self-referentially calling to mind the process in which the

narrative is engaged, underline the links between Dinu and Ghosh:
the ‘kalaa’ link, via Ko Sonny and Rajkumar; the connection with
Aung San Suu Kyi, who is interviewed by Ghosh (1998a, 111ff.) and is
photographed by Dinu (2000, 496); and the name ‘The Glass Palace’ (see
below). Further, the passage provides an apt summary of this transna-
tional work: Ghosh’s interrogation of the various sorts of translation in
the novel allows the author to work towards an understanding of ‘words
and images and the bridge of metaphor that link[s] the two’. As we have
seen in the mistranslations and miscommunications of In an Antique
Land, however, this understanding is not always achievable. The idea
of photography, with which Dinu is closely associated, enables Ghosh
to explore the significance of this metaphorical ‘bridge’. The artistic,
human elements of the process, however, must be balanced with ‘the
“complicity” of photography in the articulation of particular kinds
of surveillance and observation’ (Price, 1996, 105); this ‘complicity’
is called into question in The Glass Palace. As Dinu takes up an impor-
tant narratorial position in the novel, the practice of photography
becomes inextricably linked with Dinu’s observations, and these obser-
vations structure the narrative. This can be seen in this description of
the time Dinu spends taking photographs alone in the forests of the
rubber plantation:
With every day that he spent on the mountainside Dinu could feel
his pictures changing. It was as though his eyes were adjusting to
unaccustomed lines of sight […]. He saw the site as being replete with
visual drama – the jungle, the mountain, the ruins, the thrusting
vertical lines of the tree trunks juxtaposed against the sweeping

horizontals of the distant sea – he laboured to cram all these ele-
ments into his frames. (2000, 349)
Freedman explores the relationship between the novel and photogra-

pher Raghubir Singh, whom Ghosh thanks in the ‘Author’s Notes’ for
being his ‘mentor and teacher in all things related to photography’
(2000, 551): Dinu’s ‘experiments with photography provide Ghosh with
a way to address the methods, beliefs, and role of the artist […] Dinu
is a self-consciously modernist photographer’ (Freedman, 2005, 123).
‘Self-conscious modernis[m]’ is both a theme of the novel and a structural
principle: ideas of translation – historical, linguistic, and visual – are
strategies for dealing with an ever-shifting modern world.
This also marks the beginning of a significant romantic encounter.
Dinu’s labour ‘to cram all […] elements [of nature] into his frames’ leads
into a sexually motivated viewing of Alison, granddaughter of Saya
John, who sits near the stream where Dinu is working:
He was no longer looking at her directly, but through the ground

glass of his viewfinder, so that the image was partitioned from its
surroundings and endowed with a startling clarity and vividness. The
lines were clean, pure, beautiful – the curve of her thigh crossing his
viewfinder diagonally, describing a gentle ellipsis.
She heard the click and looked up, startled […].
‘Dinu?’ she called out. ‘Is that you?’
He didn’t try to answer but kept on moving […] He dropped his
camera on the grass. (2000, 350–51)
Dinu’s camera replaces his own ‘direct’ gaze, as Ghosh bridges the gap
between these two people through the technological medium of photog-
raphy. This gap is signified in the text by an ellipsis in the text:33 the pho-
tograph that is taken occurs in the gap between the first two paragraphs,
as the narrative moves straight from Dinu’s preparatory view through the
viewfinder to Alison’s reaction to the audible click of the shutter. This
fragmentation in structure underlines an aspect of photography on which
Ghosh focuses, here, as Dinu’s camera lends this shy man the courage to
approach Alison, but is then discarded: photography – like, in other situ-
ations throughout Ghosh’s work, linguistic translation – is both an ena-
bling feature of personal interaction and an ultimately insufficient one.
Photography, then, is a central concern, underlined by the fact that
the novel’s title reoccurs at the end of the work when Dinu – now
known by his Burmese name, U Tun Pe – sets up a studio in Yangon.34

The name of this enterprise is introduced dramatically, at the end of a
chapter, as Jaya looks at a flyer from U Tun Pe’s business:
The [paper] was smudged and crumpled. [ Jaya] peered at it closely,

deciphering the letters. The first words that met her eyes were: ‘The
Glass Palace: Photo Studio.’ (2000, 502)
This revelation is an echo of the process that Ghosh’s readers go

through: ‘The Glass Palace’ are indeed the ‘first words that me[e]t [the]
eyes’ of anyone who picks up this novel. This reminder of the iconic
building with which the novel began – and in which Dinu’s parents first
met – locates the phrase at the centre of Ghosh’s work. This centrality
of an icon of Burmese royal power lies in the material of its construc-
tion: like the implied bubble of privilege and power in which Ghosh
imagined ‘floating through [Lataifa], protected by the delegated power
of technology’ (1992, 74), and like the surface of Dinu’s viewfinder, the
palace is made from glass. Glass, which encapsulates ideas of fragility
and power, clarity and confusion (see this chapter, Section II.ii), enables
Ghosh to translate the experiences of his characters and yet also distorts
that same presentation. Dinu, who sets up the studio, ends the novel
by offering his home as a centre of debate in Yangon to which left-wing
dissidents can come and talk about banned subjects such as ‘“pictures …
photography … anything that comes to mind”’, and calls each weekly
session his ‘glass palace day’ (2000, 507; emphasis original). In the
middle of a repressive political regime in 1990s Burma, Dinu is able to
put forward this symbol of translation and mediation that remains a
profoundly ambivalent one, and he does so using a clear example of a
fragmented linguistic structure that emphasises the transnationalism of
this novel.
Ghosh, in the works of travel writing and transnational literature
that have been my focus in this first chapter of ‘Travelling On’, has
dealt with the representations and mis-representations of transnational
identity, through his focuses on various different-yet-connected mani-
festations of ‘moving across’ or ‘carrying over’: translation, anthropol-
ogy, photography, and metaphor. Rather than acting as a positive
reinforcement of transnationalism, however – as Homi Bhabha asserts,
in his analysis of the ‘transnational and translational’ as a part of a cul-
tural ‘strategy of survival’ – these ideas also problematise the idea: they
complicate, confuse, and undermine the transnational representations
put forward in these literary works. Such an uncertainty is evident in
the early work of the final author on whom I focus in this monograph,
Salman Rushdie. Like Ghosh, Rushdie’s travel writing, also located mid-
career, addresses the ambiguities and complications of cross-cultural
interaction. Furthermore, as is the case with all the writers on whom
I focus, Rushdie’s later work involves a series of transnational intertextual
returns, not only to the author’s own travelogue, but to various literary
and cultural predecessors: Ondaatje’s Greek mythology, Seth’s quoting
of Tennyson, and Ghosh’s allusions to Stieglitz and Capa, are followed
by Rushdie’s eclectic series of references to the work of – among others –
William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Cecil B. DeMille, and Jennifer Lopez.
4
Salman Rushdie: Political Dualities
and Imperial Transnationalisms
I ‘Metaphors of Migrancy’
Few contemporary writers can be more associated with metaphors

of migrancy, travel, and displacement than Salman Rushdie, yet
Rushdie’s one travel book, The Jaguar Smile, has been largely over-
looked both by postcolonial critics and by scholars of travel writing.
(Moynagh, 2008, 177–78)
Maureen Anne Moynagh’s insight into the critical blind spot with
regard to Salman Rushdie’s travelogue, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan
Journey, is a useful one; it is also an assertion that, broadly speaking,
chimes with my avowed purpose with respect to all four authors in
this monograph. From Rushdie’s literary beginnings as a copywriter
producing advertising slogans,1 to early novels engaging with ideas
such as the global peregrinations of the character Flapping Eagle in his
first novel, Grimus (1975),2 the various migrant identities of Kashmiri,
Indian, and Pakistani characters in his multiple Booker- and James Tait
Black Memorial Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children (1981),3 or non-
fiction passages such as the exploration in the title essay of Imaginary
Homelands of the argument that ‘the past is a country from which we
have all emigrated’ (1991, 12), the author has long been focused on the
significance of displacement and movement with respect to the human
condition. Furthermore, literary analysis of a later novel, The Satanic
Verses (1988), is often inescapably entwined with the critical furore –
and subsequent fatwā issued by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, which
led to Rushdie spending over nine years in hiding4 – surrounding the
publication of the supposedly Islamophobic text. This is a shame,
especially given the perspicacity of Rushdie’s analysis, in the opening
153
section of The Satanic Verses, of a migrant as ‘a man who sets out to

make himself up’ (2006 [1988], 49), and his later assertion that the
novel was ‘an attempt to create a work out of his own experience of
migration and metamorphosis’ (2012b, n.p.).5 The author’s extended
concern, throughout his writing career, with the relationship drawn
by Moynagh between concepts of metaphor and of migrancy is sum-
marised in Rushdie’s 1985 description of migrants as ‘people who
ha[ve] been translated, who ha[ve], so to speak, entered the condition
of metaphor’ (Rushdie and Grass, 2000 [1985], 77; as explored above in
my Introduction; see also Chapter 1, Section II).6
Moynagh’s assertions, though, do not go far enough: while she is
right to assert that The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey ‘has been […]
overlooked both by postcolonial critics and by scholars of travel writing’,
I would question her separation of the two categories. It is my belief,
and one of the principal arguments of this final chapter, that the very
focus on concepts of migrancy, travel, and displacement in Rushdie’s
work renders such a separation of the two categories – of ‘postcolonial
critics’ on the one hand and ‘scholars of travel writing’ on the other –
inherently flawed. In this chapter, I will conclude ‘Travelling On’ – and
the monograph as a whole – by exploring this questionable division,
analysing certain episodes from Rushdie’s travelogue alongside passages
from a later work of transnational fiction in order to once more high-
light the extent to which an author’s later work requires re-evaluation
in light of its foundations in travel writing. The two books in question
are among Rushdie’s lesser-known works. The multiple prizes won by
Midnight’s Children, the thinly veiled Pakistani setting of Shame (1983) –
the location, in the fictional town of ‘Q’, makes the novel a barely dis-
guised, ‘bleak, harsh portrait’ (Mujeebuddin, 2003, 131) of the country in
which Rushdie’s own family made its home after the young Salman was
sent to school in England7 – and the fatwa issued after the publication
of The Satanic Verses all make the author’s three big novels of the 1980s
the focus of much literary criticism of Rushdie’s work.8 I do not mean,
however, to stress the existence of pre-fatwa and post-fatwa periods
in Rushdie’s work, although such a momentous event is guaranteed, to
a certain extent, to effect a change in both the person and the output
of an author.9 I would like, rather, to emphasise a certain continuity in
Rushdie’s work, through my focus on The Jaguar Smile and Fury: on the
one hand, a relatively critically neglected travelogue10 taking as its sub-
ject a journey made two and a half years after the publication of Shame,
and over two years before The Satanic Verses was released; on the other,
the author’s second published novel after the end of his fatwa-induced
Salman Rushdie: Political Dualities 155
years in hiding,11 which, focusing on the same millennial period (see

Introduction, n. 7) as Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Seth’s An Equal Music, and
Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, also has similar foundations in the author’s
travel writing.
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey is an account of a short visit
to the country made by Rushdie in the summer of 1986.12 The dictator
Anastasio Somoza García and his descendants spent many years rul-
ing Nicaragua, supported – both covertly and overtly – by successive
governments of the United States. Somoza himself began his ascent to
power in the wake of the US occupation of the country (1912–1933),
assuming power in 1937 and ruling until his assassination in 1956; his
dynasty lasted until 1979, when the dictatorship was toppled by revo-
lutionaries known as ‘Sandinistas’. These insurrectionists were named
after the revolutionary hero Augusto César Sandino, who fought for
national sovereignty and an end to the US occupation of Nicaragua,13
and was killed by Somocista forces in the early 1930s – as Rushdie puts
it in his summary of the bloody history of the country, Sandino had
become ‘thoroughly mythologized’ and was now a collection of stories
(1997 [1987], 12). The government of the United States, after backing
Somocista Nicaragua for the majority of the twentieth century, was
vehemently opposed to the Sandinista regime; continuing US support
for counter-revolutionary, anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua (‘contras’)
was a controversial topic, across the world, throughout the 1980s.14
If we were only given Rushdie’s presentation of Sandino’s death, it
would be clear where the sympathies of the author lie in this political
situation: his identification with the oppressed, revolutionary, counter-
imperialist figure of Sandino is evident in the emotive references to
the leader’s ‘betrayal’ and ‘assassination’ at the hands of Somoza’s
‘thugs’. In reality, however, Rushdie’s political leanings are underlined
throughout by the author’s numerous connections with the Sandinistas –
and with their leader, the revolutionary, poet, and statesman President
Daniel Ortega. As Rushdie explains in the first chapter of the
travelogue – ‘HOPE: A PROLOGUE’ – he developed an interest in the coun-
try while living in London, witnessing from afar the interventions of the
United States in Nicaragua after the 1979 end to the dictatorship, and
drawing comparisons between these acts of aggression and the imperial
violences he had himself witnessed as the ‘child of a successful revolt
against a great power’: the British Empire in India (1997 [1987], 4). This
is followed, however, by the information that Rushdie became a spon-
sor of the Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign in London, and travelled
to the country as the guest of the Sandinista Association of Cultural
Workers (ASTC), the organization that brought together ‘writers, artists,

musicians, craftspeople, dancers, and so on’ (1997 [1987], ibid). His text
is therefore presented from a position of invited privilege, as – in spite
of his purported East/South solidarity with the Nicaraguans – he travels
there as a representative of that very ‘mighty West, or North’ (1997
[1987], ibid) from which he was, initially, so quick to separate himself.15
Rushdie occupies a dual position, representative of both an oppressed,
imperially objectified minority and a culturally hegemonic elite.16
The Jaguar Smile is presented as an impromptu diary of Rushdie’s time
in Nicaragua. He explains that he was in the country for three weeks in
July 1986, and did not travel to Nicaragua intending to write a book;
however, he finds that his encounter with the place has affected him
to such an extent that he finally feels that he ‘ha[s] no choice’ but to
produce the travelogue (1997 [1987], 5). Rushdie’s insistence on the
off-the-cuff nature of his writing and his use of the diary form to com-
bine authority with a sense of immediacy gives the text echoes of the
other travelogues in this monograph (see my discussion of Ondaatje’s
‘MONSOON NOTEBOOK’ [Chapter 1, Section III.iii], Seth’s Tibetan diary
[Chapter 2, Sections II.ii, II.iii], and Ghosh’s diary of life in Lataifa
[Chapter 3, Section II.ii]). In Rushdie’s travel work, this leads to a
whimsical tone that Graham Huggan observes in analysing the text as
a ‘mixture of comic travelogue and hyperbolic political commentary’
that can be ‘compared to the genre that it incorporates: the political car-
toon’ (2000, 44, 45). Throughout The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie ‘constructs
his persona as political tourist’ (Moynagh, 2008, 179);17 in so doing, he
combines discussions of political events after the Sandinista revolution
with disquisitions on topics such as the link between realism and fic-
tion, authoritarian censorship, poetry, war, and ‘Third World’ identity
politics.
My second textual focus in this chapter is Rushdie’s 2001 novel Fury,
which explores the personal life and circumstances of the British–Indian
academic Professor Malik ‘Solly’ Solanka. Solanka leaves his wife and
son, relocates to New York, and starts a relationship with the beautiful
Neela Mahendra, nearly thirty years his junior. The title refers to the
emotion that Solanka feels is driving him throughout the novel, and
leads him to make a series of attempted self-justifications; he searches
for the reasons behind this ‘fury’ in several strands of autobiography,
from references to childhood trauma (2000, 81)18 to contemporary
visions of the ‘Furies’ of ancient Greek myth (2001, 123).19 As Sarah
Brouillette explains in her article on Fury, the similarities to Rushdie’s
own life are striking – and the attempted justifications are thus not only
Solanka’s, but also those of the author himself. This autobiographical

element of Rushdie’s latest fiction fuelled much contemporary criticism
of the novel:20
The reception of Fury was generally hostile. Rushdie himself was

subject to critique, as he had recently invited public censure by
leaving his third wife and their son to move to New York and start
a relationship with Padma Lakshmi, a Miss Universe contestant and
model half his age. Indeed, a complaint about the novel that appears
repeatedly in the literary press is that it is simply a memoir, a calcu-
lated effort at self-construction and defence designed to deflect the
public criticism of his private life. (Brouillette, 2005, 139)
Brouillette’s article not only provides a helpful introduction to Fury, it

also helps lay the theoretical groundwork for this chapter, as it links
the novel with Rushdie’s travelogue. In particular, Brouillette focuses
on the fictional political conflict that features in the novel, in which
Rushdie mirrored the ethnic, political divisions in contemporary Fiji
between indigenous Fijians and the descendants of indentured labourers
from the Indian subcontinent that had resulted in coups and protests
from the late 1980s onwards. Brouillette explains that events in Fury
are ‘based on the real political turmoil in Fiji in 1999 and 2000’, which
received ‘considerable newspaper coverage in New York’ (2005, 139).21
As Brouillette notes, the date of the first Fijian coup in recent years –
‘COUP NO. 1’ (Usher, 1992, 12) – was 1987, the year of The Jaguar Smile‘s
publication; and the Sandinista revolution ‘has a political valency not
entirely unlike Fiji’s recent volatility’:
The Fiji Labour Party, endorsed by a significant portion of the Indo-

Fijian population, came to power in May 1999, making Mahendra Pal
Chaudhry […] the first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister. Many welcomed
his ‘Rainbow Coalition’ as a positive move toward breaking down
the boundaries between so-called ‘ethnic’ Fijians and Indo-Fijians.
However some ethnic Fijians opposed the new government on the
grounds that Fiji should always be run for and controlled by other
[ethnic] Fijians; in 2000 they actually took control through violent
means, encouraging some Indo-Fijians to organize their own coun-
tering protests. (Brouillette, 2005, 147)
I shall explore the fictionalisation of these Fijian events in Fury in

Sections III.ii and III.iv, below; at this stage, it is sufficient to note the
parallels Brouillette draws between the novel and The Jaguar Smile,
correspondences that are rooted in political comparisons: the ‘fictional
account of a national liberation struggle’ presented in Fury means that,
in Brouillette’s opinion, ‘one of the novel’s companion texts is The
Jaguar Smile […]. Both works draw attention to the processes through
which images and their origins become radically separate, as cultural
products are used to sell or promote political ideologies’ (2005, 139).
She goes on to assert, however, that the differences between the works
are important, because of the shift in Rushdie’s perspective revealed in
the move from ‘leftist politics sympathetic to resistance movements’ to
an appreciation of the ways in which these politics ‘are incorporated into
contemporary media culture and enshrined in cultural commodities’ as
a part of the ‘more solipsistic interest in the status of authorship and
origins’ that she asserts the author has developed over the course of his
career (2005, 139–40). In this chapter I present analyses of the two texts,
not in order to reject Brouillette’s conclusions about the development
of Rushdie’s attitude towards authorship, literature, and belonging,
which are both interesting and valid. I mean rather to emphasise the links
between The Jaguar Smile and Fury, connections rooted in the form and
content of Rushdie’s travel-related writing: these links speak to the ‘meta-
phors of migrancy, travel, and displacement’ highlighted by Moynagh
that remain an integral part of Rushdie’s writing self. As Andrew Teverson
makes clear, criticism of Rushdie’s travelogue was remarkably varied, and
the text ‘inspired widely divergent responses’ (2007, 85); in this chapter
I consider the reasons behind such divergence, which is by no means
limited to the reception of the author’s travel work.
II The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey
i ‘Cosmetic’ Politics and Colonialism

The second chapter of The Jaguar Smile – ‘SANDINO’S HAT’, which begins
the account of Rushdie’s travels, after ‘HOPE: A PROLOGUE’ – opens with
a quotation:
‘Cristoforo Colón set sail from […] Spain, to find the lands of the
Great Khan, where there were castles of gold […] However, instead
of that world, another, also rich, beautiful and plenty of fantasy, was
discovered: America.’ (1997 [1987], 6)
There are several interesting things about this passage. Primarily, it

sets up Rushdie’s investment in literary, cultural, and social ideas
about travel from the beginning of the book, as the author launches
straight into a description of his travel, without any description of the
Nicaraguan political context.22 Rushdie attributes the quotation to a
‘tobacco map’ read by the author during a Caribbean stopover on his
way to Nicaragua, yet there is no evidence for this, and the passage
could just as easily be an authorial creation. In which case, an obvious
mistake in the very first line is made by Rushdie himself: ‘Cristoforo’ is
the Italian translation of the name of the (in)famous explorer (known in
English, most commonly, as ‘Christopher Columbus), but ‘Colón’ is the
Spanish version of this individual’s surname (Encyclopaedia Britannica,
2012). This confusion indicates the way in which Columbus/Colón is
an ideal figure for the author, for two reasons: first, the fifteenth-century
explorer is the seminal figure of imperial expansion, and bringing him
up here emphasises the iniquities of colonial domination, a constant
concern for Rushdie. Secondly, however, Columbus/Colón is an inter-
stitial figure: his place of birth is disputed, and while he was probably
born to Genoese parents he may have grown up in either Italy or Spain
(as evidenced by this composite name used by Rushdie). Exacerbating
this national confusion, after surviving a shipwreck off Portugal in his
mid twenties, he settled in Lisbon and made his name in the Portuguese
‘merchant marine’; then, after being rejected for patronage by King
John II of Portugal, he sailed under the command of the Spanish King
Ferdinand (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013).
The passage about Colón, which may or may not be a quotation
from an unknown source, sets up two themes integral both to this text
in particular and to Rushdie’s work more generally: colonial expansion
on the one hand, and transnational, interstitial belonging on the other;
in both cases the idea of travelling, of existing in transit, of ‘dwelling in
travel’ (Clifford, 1997, 2) is of central importance. In The Jaguar Smile,
we will later come across references to the indigenous peoples of the
continent ‘discovered’ by Colón, in the context of inter-racial rancour in
Nicaragua after government-sanctioned ‘resettlement’, who hated being
‘resettled’: many of them were racially different from the surrounding
people; ‘they were Amerindians, Miskito or Sumo’ (1997 [1987], 57).23
Rushdie emphasises that those who were treated as a unified whole for
the purposes of post-revolution resettlement were in fact very different
sets of people. Moreover, they are populations between whom there
have been significant examples of oppression. He learns more about
this in the coastal province of Zelaya, in which ‘Amerindian’ Miskito
‘monarchs’, often educated in the British West Indies or in Britain
itself, ran a ‘puppet’ kingdom for the British, and themselves ‘repressed
the Sumos and Ramas [two other ‘Amerindian’ races] thoroughly’. The
author realises his ‘mental picture of the Miskitos as a “pure” tribal peo-
ple whose ancient way of life had been disrupted […] might need […]
revision’ (1997 [1987], 97): Rushdie’s engagement with Nicaragua calls
into question the suspect idea of racial ‘purity’.
This points towards another concern of the travelogue, which is
focused in part on presenting in a new light – literally, re-presenting –
the history and politics of Nicaragua. As Rushdie stresses here, the
theme of colonisation does not simply set up an ‘oppressive Westerner –
downtrodden native’ dialectic, but allows him to explore the various
examples of inter-racial power imbalances in the country. This explora-
tion is complicated, though, by the fact that he is invited to Nicaragua
as a guest of the aforementioned Sandinista Association of Cultural
Workers. His ASTC affiliation exposes him to various aspects of the
cultural life of the country through the lens of the Sandinista movement:
pro-revolution, anti-Somoza regime, anti-United States. Moreover, as he
discovers, many high-ranking Nicaraguan politicians are artists, writers,
and poets – from the Vice President, the novelist Sergio Ramírez (1997
[1987], 14) to Ernesto Cardenal, the country’s most internationally
renowned poet and also the Minister of Culture (1997 [1987], 29): the
easy coexistence of politics and art blurs the boundaries between artistic
observation and political interpretation.
One example of this blurring occurs when Rushdie is uncertain how
to react to the apparent embrace of press censorship by the leaders of
the revolution. His unhappy reaction is most evident during a meet-
ing with a representative of the primary newspaper of the Sandinista
National Liberation Front (FSLN). After initially voicing opposition to
the concept of censorship, Rushdie’s interlocutor presents a view of the
idea as a necessary evil:
‘If a mother has a sick child […] she takes it to the hospital without
first putting on her make-up.’
[…] ‘So […] are such matters as the freedom of the press just
cosmetic?’
His face lit up […]. ‘Cosmetic […]. Yes.’ (1997 [1987], 33)
The word ‘cosmetic’ is an interesting one, and its importance to Rushdie

is signalled structurally at this point by the end of both paragraph and
section at the word ‘yes’: the white space of Roberta Rubenstein’s ‘signifi-
cant narrative pause’ (1998, 158; see Chapter 2, Section II.i) highlights
the newspaperman’s closing comment, which Rushdie describes as ‘the
most chilling remark’ he hears in Nicaragua. Rushdie’s interpretation

of this word – and that intended by his interlocutor, given the refer-
ence to make-up – is of ‘cosmetic’ in the primary dictionary definition,
‘having power to adorn, embellish, or beautify (esp. the complexion)’
(Simpson et al. [eds], 2013). Bruce Robbins, however, in exploring the
etymology of the word ‘cosmopolitan’ (a term I call into question
in my Introduction, Section III), observes that both ‘cosmetic’ and
‘cosmos’ originally ‘simply meant “order”’ (1998, 253).24 Though Rushdie’s
understanding of the term here is as a synonym for ‘adornment’, the
word can be read with the help of this etymology: implementing
censorship in Nicaragua is a case of promoting order. The two readings
of the word ‘cosmetic’ – as ‘order’ and ‘adornment’ – establish the
atmosphere of ambivalence and duality that comes to dominate The
Jaguar Smile: for the newspaperman, freedom of the press is a beneficial
but not strictly necessary ‘cosmetic’ ‘adornment’; what Rushdie himself
does not recognise at this point is that the absence of press freedoms
ensures the maintenance of ‘cosmetic’ ‘order’.
Rushdie’s responses to Nicaraguan politics, furthermore, are compli-
cated by his identity as a ‘Westerner’: regardless of his ‘Eastern’ national
affiliations, as the ‘escritor hindú’ (Indian writer) (Rushdie, 1997 [1987],
14), he is known as a writer travelling from the UK, the location of his
first associations with the ASTC. This background of ‘Western’ privilege
can lead Rushdie to adopt a position of overt superiority with respect
to the Nicaraguans, which is here reflected in his negative reaction to
‘the official line’ on censorship, and implicit denigration of the nascent
Nicaraguan state; his criticism of the Nicaraguan government could be
read as a partial apologia for the intervention of the United States in
the region. He forestalls such an argument, however, in the paragraph
following the ‘cosmetic’ reference:
I remembered being in Pakistan during the 1965 war with India […]
divid[ing] Pakistani claims to have shot down Indian planes by
ten, and […] multiply[ing] admitted losses by the same factor. […]
I remembered, too, my outrage at the British government’s manipu-
lation of the news media during the Falklands/Malvinas war. What
had been unacceptable to me there was […] unacceptable here. (1997
[1987], 33)
Starting by calling on his experiences on the Indian subcontinent,

Rushdie implicitly asserts that he is speaking both from experience and
as a citizen of the non-‘West’ when he criticises the control over the
press enacted in Nicaragua. Moreover, he draws a further comparison

from his experience, which confers another layer of authority on his
pronouncements: he calls to mind the actions of the British govern-
ment in a later period of conflict, that was precipitated by colonial
aggression on the part of the British/Argentine authorities, as indi-
cated by the compound ‘Falklands/Malvinas’, uniting the English and
Spanish names for the islands in question. With these two examples,
Rushdie invokes both his ‘Eastern’ origins and his ‘Western’ credentials
in order to denounce the suppression of communication that he sees
taking place under the Sandinista government: ‘”Everybody censors the
press in wartime.” That was the official line […] and […] it wouldn’t do’
(1997 [1987], ibid ).
The ‘official line’ – and the author’s uncertain attitude towards a tacit
acceptance – recurs when Rushdie describes the drafting of a Nicaraguan
constitution. The title of the chapter, ‘ABORTION, ADULTHOOD AND GOD’,
refers to the three troublesome issues that have to be resolved before
any consensus is reached: a woman’s right to jurisdiction over her own
body after conception, an explosive topic in a deeply Catholic country
like Nicaragua; the legal age at which children become adults, a bone
of contention in a society in which men join the armed forces, and
die in great numbers, from the age of sixteen onwards; and the mat-
ter of whether or not this new constitution should invoke the name
of God (1997 [1987], 72–73). This tripartite stumbling-block is not as
important, however, as resolving the present political uncertainty in the
country, a Nicaraguan ‘state of emergency’; Rushdie’s reasoning for this
is linked with his ‘uncomfortable’ personal political experience:
(My own relationship with the term Emergency, formed during

Mrs Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial years of emergency rule in India in the
[…] 1970s, was an uncomfortable one.) (1997 [1987], 74; emphasis
original)
Rushdie’s ‘uncomfortable’ engagement with the ‘Emergency years’

in India was made clear in the only slightly veiled presentation, in
Midnight’s Children, of Indira Gandhi as the tyrannical, dictatorial
‘Widow’ (2010 [1981], 239ff.). His use of parentheses in this case, then,
is by no means meant to indicate a tangentially related point, follow-
ing grammatical convention; on the contrary, he uses this form as a
calculated, authorial way of drawing attention to the importance of his
point: while he applauds the sense in which he has seen the Nicaraguan
people ‘trying hard to construct for themselves a new identity’, he
remains sceptical about a situation that he feels may mirror a little too
closely unpleasant experiences from his past.
ii Exile: Internal, External, Personal, Collective

An important idea in The Jaguar Smile is that of exile. This is especially
relevant to Rushdie, who was born in the contested Indian/Pakistani
territory of Kashmir, a locus of conflicted belonging featured at the start
of Midnight’s Children, and who spent time in exile after the fatwa. The
focus on exile in The Jaguar Smile is unexpected, however; at church
he hears readings from the biblical book of Exodus and an intriguing
sermon:
Father Molina wove [the readings] into […a] metaphor in which the
people of Nicaragua were equated with the Israelites in […] captivity.
[…] The idea that a people could be exiled inside their own country
[…was] striking and fertile. (1997 [1987], 45)
The concept of being exiled inside one’s own country is one to which
Rushdie returns when speaking to Nicaraguan workers who have been
relocated as a result of the revolution, and asking them whether their
environment feels like home, or a place of temporary lodging:
‘What do you mean? We’ve put our sweat into this earth, we’ve
risked our lives for it. […] Of course it’s home.’
[…] Somocista Nicaragua had literally not been these people’s
home, and […] the revolution had really been an act of migration
[…] They were inventing their country, and, more than that, them-
selves. (1997 [1987], 65; emphasis original)
Migration, for Rushdie, is a process of continual, continuous reinvention.

Here Rushdie, in a parallel of Ghosh’s reactions to talk of ‘cows and
burning and circumcision’ (see Chapter 3, Section II.iii), inserts his ideas
about ‘home’ and ‘exile’, saying to the men that they are ‘lucky’; the
idea of ‘home’ has always been a problem for him:
They didn’t understand, though, and why should they? Nobody was
shooting at me. (1997 [1987], 66)
This is revealing. Ghosh, in the analysis following his flight from the
Nashawy wedding reception before the ‘curious and horrified’ gazes of
the assembled guests (1992, 204), asserted that his experience of the
Dhaka riots, ‘cities going up in flames […] women disembowelled for

wearing veils or vermillion’ meant that he knew the Egyptian fellaheen
would not be able ‘to understand an Indian’s terror of symbols’ (1992,
210). Rushdie, however, knows that his own confusions about ‘home’
and ‘exile’ pale into insignificance next to the concerns of those who
have physically suffered as a result of these ‘problem[s]’; he remains
aware of his position of privilege, in which the anguish of uncertainty
about the idea of home is limited to psychological discomfort rather
than actual bodily harm.
This sermon, after the references to the sensitive political issue of
abortion (see this chapter, Section II.i), is another example of a link
between religion and politics. This is most obvious in the fact that many
of the revolution’s leaders have religious connections – from the poet
and Minister of Culture, Father Ernesto Cardenal (1997 [1987], 29), to
Archbishop Obando y Bravo, discussion of whose political connections
occupies President Ortega in a meeting with his advisers (1997 [1987],
85–87). Also, when Rushdie first enters Father Molina’s church, he sees
murals featuring Augusto César Sandino and Carlos Fonseca, respec-
tively the aforementioned revolutionary leader and the founder of the
FSLN; although, admittedly, the positioning of these figures is ironically
described as on ‘modest’ side-panels, playing a ‘strictly supporting role’
to Christ and his angels (1997 [1987], 43). The link goes beyond simple
juxtapositions, though, for the ‘versicle-and-response’ format of the
Catholic Mass is the blueprint for much political activity:
Sandino’s […] slogan, patria libre o morir (a free homeland or death),

was […] the national rallying-cry, and at the end of public meetings
a platform speaker would invariably call out ‘Patria libre!’ to which
the crowd would roar […] ‘O MORIR!’ (1997 [1987], 10)
Another example occurs when President Ortega speaks at a rally: he pro-

vides numerous facts and figures about the deaths of public sector workers,
each time demanding from the crowd ‘“Quién es culpable?”’ (that is, ‘Who
is to blame?’) and getting the chorused reply ‘“Reagan”’ (1997 [1987], 39).
Rushdie’s early introduction of the versicle-and-response idea comes
at a significant point in the travelogue. His thoughts are initially
prompted by an artwork that echoes Michael Ondaatje’s use of religious
iconography (see Chapter 1, section IV.iii):
A painting by […] Gloria Guevara, […] Cristo guerrillero, showed a

crucifixion […] in a […] Nicaraguan landscape. [On the cross] there
hung a Christ-figure who wore, instead of a loin-cloth and a crown of

thorns, a pair of jeans and a denim shirt. (1997 [1987], 10; emphasis
original)
Instead of traditionally conceived accoutrements, based on the story of

Christ’s crucifixion in the Bible, the figure at the centre of the painting
is attired more casually; when interpreted in conjunction with the title
(a ‘guerrillero’ is a member of a Guerrilla movement of soldiers),25 this
tableau is obviously to be read as the mourning of a dead Nicaraguan
soldier. Not only is this a linking of politics and religion, however: it also
provides an implicit validation of the actions of the real-life Nicaraguan
guerrilleros. Paradoxically, however, the crucified subject’s attire could
be seen as ‘Western’, with the rugged all-over denim reminiscent of
the southern United States; the multiple liminality of this character,
positioned between religion and politics, soldier and Christ, ‘Eastern’
revolutionary and ‘Western’ establishment figure, is a reminder of the
author’s own variously interstitial position in this country.26
The use of Christian iconography supports this interstitial quality,
as Rushdie explains in his analysis of the revolution. He concludes by
using another word weighted with several meanings:
The Nicaraguan revolution [was] a passion. The word had secular

as well as well as Christian resonances. […] That was what […]
Guevara’s painting revealed. (1997 [1987], ibid; emphasis original)
The fusion highlighted by the word ‘passion’ – hovering between secu-

larism and religion – is marked by a formal switch from prose to poetry,
at the very moment the word ‘revealed’ is used: here Rushdie quotes
from a poem by the Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli, ‘Until We’re Free’.27
Unlike in From Heaven Lake, however, which uses snatches of Vikram
Seth’s poetry at moments of heightened emotion, all the poetry in
The Jaguar Smile – such as that which lends the work its title (see this
chapter, Section II.iii) comes from other sources. Belli’s poetry reappears
shortly after this, as the poet speaks at a contemporary cultural festival
attended by Rushdie, and though he explains that her poem ‘close[s]
the evening’, the poem – and, significantly, the chapter as a whole – is
left open-ended, as an ellipsis tails off into the night:
earth for sowing love

[…] full of smiles.
I want to explode with love . . . (1997 [1987], 28; emphasis original)

The reference to ‘clos[ure]’ indicates this can be read as standing for the
whole text: while it professes to offer analyses and conclusions, it is left
open-ended, a paean both to Nicaragua and to Rushdie’s own identity.
I preserve the form of this poem – with lower-case initials, emphases,
and white space – because I believe the appearance of Rushdie’s text is
particularly important to the reading of it; as in the case of Seth’s diary
(see Chapter 2, Section II.ii), the effects of dislocation transmitted in
generic switches are reinforced by the visual gaps and markers used by
the author. Here I agree with Clingman’s point about transnationalism
in literature having to do with two layers of form: both ‘recognizable
formal characteristics […] structures of time and space’ and ‘what
informs […] produces […] more visible patterns’ (2009, 10–11; empha-
ses original). This is true for all four authors in this study, leading to
parallels throughout The Jaguar Smile. On one occasion, shortly before
speaking to the workers about exile, Rushdie relates a journey with
the FSLN through hostile territory, a description that echoes the tense
atmosphere of Ondaatje’s description of Anil and Sarath’s drive through
rebel country in Anil’s Ghost; this is explored through clipped, almost
ungrammatical lists reminiscent of Seth’s transnational writing:
There were vultures sitting by the roadsides. The road-signs were

punctured by bullet-holes. […]
Then there was a tree lying across the road, blocking our way. Was
this it? Was this where Contra fiends with machetes between their
teeth would burst from the foliage, and goodbye escritor hindú?
It was just a tree across the road.

(1997 [1987], 62–63)
This bathetic ending is echoed in Ghosh’s ‘nothing did happen’ conclu-

sion to the rioting story from his childhood. Rushdie, though, rather
than playing on the importance of what could have happened, inserts a
narrative break (marked using a character similar to the given above,
a character that he uses at the start of each chapter), accepts the reality
of the safety that his position of privilege as guest of the government
affords him, and moves on. Again, transnationalism is about the form
of a text as well as what it is informed by.
A final connection with more than one of the other authors in this
study occurs at the end of Rushdie’s text, in the final chapter: ‘SILVIA:
AN EPILOGUE’.28 Like Seth at the end of From Heaven Lake, Rushdie sits in
the comfort of an airline seat – a qualified, but privileged position – and
muses on his time in Nicaragua. Unlike Seth, however, he does not do

so in isolation: reminiscent of Ghosh’s interaction with the Imam in
In an Antique Land, the author interacts with a local of the country, a
Nicaraguan-born woman called Silvia. Silvia, unlike the Egyptian Imam,
is critical of her country of birth – which she has been visiting from her
home in Paris to spend time with her dying mother – so the exchange
with Rushdie is altogether more measured than that in In an Antique
Land. Two passages are worthy of comment, however. Firstly, there is
Silvia’s reaction to a stock line of questioning, as Rushdie asks if she
thinks the Sandinistas should try and make peace with ‘the Americans’:
‘You said “Americans”.’

[…] ‘I’m sorry. North Americans. Unitedstatesians. Reaganians.
Them.’ (1997 [1987], 136)
Here we see Rushdie’s characteristic wordplay, as a description of those

from the US is created in the same vein as the collective ‘Americans’;
the term ‘Unitedstatesians’ makes a specific point, that ‘Americans’ are
not simply those living in the fifty states north of the Mexican border.
This neologising provides intertextual echoes of Rushdie’s other work,
from the ‘“hit-take, hit-alliance, hit-conception, hit-terious […] oppo-
site of mis-”’ of the autodidact Vasco Miranda in The Moor’s Last Sigh
(2006 [1995], 150) to the ‘everywhichthing’ of Midnight’s Children (2010
[1981], 328, 331).29 Also, however, semantically varying references
to ‘America’ abound in the travelogue, from the irony-laden descrip-
tion of a world ‘“rich, beautiful and plenty of fantasy […] America”’
(1997 [1987], 6), to the references to political interference from
‘neo-conservative America’ (1997 [1987], 41), or the confusingly named
‘Amerindians’ (1997 [1987], 57, 97) (see n. 23 of this chapter): these
various interrogations of the term are a further intertextual link with
Fury, a novel that is in places a damning critique of contemporary
culture in the United States (see below, particularly Section III.i).
The end of Rushdie’s exchange with Silvia – and the work itself – is
a paragraph that calls to mind Amitav Ghosh’s work, though with a
significant difference in self-awareness:
We parted […], and returned to our separate lives, two migrants mak-
ing our way in this West stuffed with money, power and things, this
North that taught us how to see from its privileged point of view.
But maybe we were the lucky ones […:] we had seen the view from
elsewhere. (1997 [1987], 137)
The two travellers have significant connections to the ‘postcolonial’

world, to the underdeveloped ‘East’ and ‘South’ implicit in Rushdie’s
language, but also have adopted the mantle of the privileged ‘West’ and
‘North’ – the world of comfortable airline seats. Whereas Ghosh states
that he and the Imam are ‘travelling in the West’, leaving behind their
former lives, however, Rushdie ends on a more inquisitive note. Not
only does he put forward an important concern about migration – how
is he to ‘mak[e his] way in this West stuffed with money, power and
things’ without losing sight of his Eastern origins? – but he also asserts
an inherent paradox in his work: by acknowledging the existence of
a ‘view from elsewhere’, he shows his awareness of the double bind
of travel writing, that it is essential to view a place from elsewhere if
one is to comment on it critically, but that such a positioning renders
the commenter fundamentally misinformed about the subject. This
ambivalence, at the heart of both Rushdie’s travel writing and his later
literature, has persisted throughout The Jaguar Smile, and is explored
most fully in a chapter presenting Rushdie’s analysis of the travelogue’s
title, just before he meets Silvia, to which I will now turn.
iii A Transferred Smile – A Smile, Transferred

While the title Rushdie gives his text is only explained at the end of
the travelogue, the anonymous limerick on which the name is based is
given as the work’s epigraph:
There was a young girl of Nic’ragua

Who smiled as she rode on a jaguar.
They returned from the ride
With the young girl inside
And the smile on the face of the jaguar. (1997 [1987], vii)
The poem is in keeping with Rushdie’s love of verbal play – explored

in his background in advertising, and clear at the level of individual
words in his neologistic fiction. The metre of this limerick, a typical
example of ‘nonsense and comical verse […which] snap[s the reader]
with a sharp twist in the last line’ (Padgett [ed.], 1987, 98), alters the
word ‘Nicaragua’: a syllable is removed, so that the rhythm ‘Nic’RAGua’
matches the amphibrach formed by the words ‘a JAGuar’. Moreover,
as well as situating the work geographically, the limerick establishes
the atmosphere of translation at the heart of this travelogue: the main
title, ‘The Jaguar Smile’, refers to a facial expression that has been
translated, or ‘move[d] across’ (Chapter 1, Section II), from the human
passenger described in the limerick, who exists in an erstwhile position of

dominance – ‘she rode’ – to the initially submissive feline vehicle. Also,
at the end of the text, Rushdie reveals that, throughout, he has been
‘plagued’ by the limerick about the young Nicaraguan girl and the
‘transferred smile’ (1997 [1987], 128–29). This focus on the idea of
transference is promising, when we remember the etymological link
that runs from the original Latin transferro (‘move across’) to the verb
‘translate’ (see Chapter 1, Section II), and on to the idea of the migrant,
one who is ‘moved across’ (see this chapter, Section I).
The particular fertility of the poem, however, is realised following
a nightmare Rushdie has about being pursued across an unidentified,
constantly changing landscape by the disembodied smile. He explains
how he wakes up one night in a ‘jumble of nightmare, limerick and
sweat’ (1997 [1987], 129), a collocation of mental, literary, and physical
references that maintains an atmosphere of confusion just as Ondaatje
does at the opening of Running in the Family (see my Introduction,
Section I). This is followed by an explanation:
The limerick […] was capable of both a conservative and a radical

reading […:] there were […] two limericks, two Misses Nicaragua rid-
ing two jaguars. (1997 [1987], ibid )
These versions reveal Rushdie’s ambivalent attitude towards the coun-

try: in one reading, the young girl symbolises the revolution – young,
fresh, idealistic – and the jaguar stands for geopolitics in general, or the
US in particular; as Rushdie explains, to nurture a fledgling society and
economy in the face of near-omnipotent national and international
opposition ‘[is] indeed to ride a jaguar’. In the alternative reading,
however, the jaguar – initially subservient to the smiling girl, implied
by the active ‘as she rode on’ – is the plucky underdog, the revolution-
ary forces: the violence with which the revolutionary jaguar achieves
its intention of gorging on the Nicaraguan nation, symbolised by ‘Miss
Nicaragua’, thus calls into question the morality of the Sandinista
insurrection. Rushdie, in adopting this reference to a poem with two
very different interpretations in the title of his work, underlines the
ambivalence of his attitude to the country – and, by extension, to ideas
of travel and travel writing, throughout his work. Moreover, his placing
of the transposed smile at the centre of this work also underlines the
importance of transferral and movement to his work: both travel and
metaphor-making (and, thus, migration) are part of Rushdie’s travel
writing and his transnational literature. The chiastic pairing formed in
the limerick – girl and jaguar, jaguar and girl – emphasises this, as the
facial expression moves from subordinate prey to dominant predator
but also from human controller to controlled beast.
The binarism of Rushdie’s response to his surroundings is highlighted
early in the text, when an interlocutor mentions that the ‘real threat’ in
Nicaraguan politics is the CIA. Rushdie’s reaction, both in his neologistic
conversion of the initialism into a Latinate-sounding word30 and in his
assertion of a split in his identity, is worth quoting at length:
Ah yes, la Cia. My reflex reaction to [this] was simultaneously Eastern

and Western. The Western voice inside me, […] fed up with cloaks and
daggers and conspiracy theories, muttered, ‘not them again’. The
Eastern voice, however, understood that the CIA really did exist, was
powerful, and although it was easy to make it a scapegoat, it was also
just a bit too jaded, too cynical, to discount its power. (1997 [1987],
18; emphasis original)
Rushdie’s confusion over his ‘simultaneously Eastern and Western’

reaction is exemplified on a structural level by the linguistic confusion
of ‘it/its’ towards the end of the passage: ‘…it was easy […] make it a
scapegoat […] it was also a bit too jaded […] discount its power’. Here
the word ‘it’ passes from an impersonal general reference (‘it was easy’)
to a specific pronoun referring to the object of the sentence (‘make [the
CIA] a scapegoat’) to one indicating the subject (‘[the Eastern voice]
was also a bit too jaded’) and into a possessive pronoun relating to
the object (‘discount [the CIA’s] power’). This two-letter word, with its
shifting meanings during the end of the sentence, is symbolic of the
author’s uncertainty about his position in Nicaragua: he travels in the
country as an international, ‘Western’ observer, but is identified as an
‘Eastern’ voice, ‘the hindú’; yet also, while arriving at the invitation of
those involved in Nicaraguan politics and culture, he remains unsure
about the ethics of some of the activities of the Sandinista move-
ment, and is reluctant to join wholeheartedly either with Nicaraguan
condemnation of United States involvement in the region or with the
unquestioning approval of the Sandinista government. This interstitial
position – between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ – ties in with his discussion
of his reactions to the India/Pakistan and Falklands/Malvinas conflicts.
This simultaneity is explored most thoroughly in a chapter that
appears to offer a fresh start in the travelogue. The chapter, which is set
in Bluefields, a town and region on the Atlantic coast, is easily the long-
est in the text; this change in length, alongside the shifts in geographical
and political focus that I go on to discuss, gives the impression that

this chapter is not only a fresh start, but also a self-contained book-within-
a-book. This sense is underlined by another feature of the chapter: it
begins with a map. To understand the significance of this, it is necessary
to consider the beginning of the travelogue: like the other three authors
in this study, Rushdie begins his travelogue with a map of the area, a
map of Nicaragua that marks Honduras to the north, Costa Rica to the
south, and the towns he visits on his travels. This chapter, two-thirds of
the way through the work, is also marked by a map: this time, the focus
is on the area around Bluefields, and it is done in the same line-drawn,
sparsely annotated style as the first map (1997 [1987], 94). Added to
this is the chapter title: ’THE OTHER SIDE’. This has several meanings:
most obviously, Rushdie has literally moved to ‘the other side’ of the
country, as his focus has moved from the Pacific coast and the towns
around Managua – the Nicaraguan capital – to Bluefields and the
surrounding Atlantic coast towns. There is a geographical separation,
emphasised by the lack of links between the sides, in terms of commu-
nication or transport: to live in Bluefields is, according to its inhabitants,
to ‘accept remoteness’ (1997 [1987], 96).
This isolation feeds into another possible interpretation of the chapter
title: Rushdie is visiting ‘the other side’ of Nicaragua, politically speaking.
Bluefields is the site of the ‘puppet Miskito “kingdom”’ set up by the
British, and its British connections mean that it gradually acquired
a significant Creole population; the consequent racial divisions were
fuelled by the Somoza decision to hand over the Atlantic coast to vari-
ous transnational companies, who made fortunes out of the local gold
mines and created an entirely dependent financial situation, in which
the native people were used to imported US produce and thus entirely
reliant on foreign employers and manufacturers (1997 [1987], 98). This
destroyed the local economy, meaning that the Sandinista revolution
was met with scepticism in an area that is ‘as poor as mud’, and in
which the bars regularly run out of beer, the roads are dangerously full
of pot-holes, and the indigenous Rama language is dying out through
lack of investment: although the region certainly suffered under the
Somoza regime, the inhabitants are reluctant to embrace the newest
incarnation of government, the Sandinistas. This is, then, the ‘other
side’ of the country, as the FSLN are well aware: they know that their
government has made a series of ‘disastrous, alienating mistakes’ in
their policies involving those on the Atlantic coast (1997 [1987], 103).
The chapter focuses on ‘the Autonomy project’, a Sandinista attempt
to right these wrongs and deliver some independence to the region.
When the project is first proposed, many politicians oppose it on the

grounds that it ‘smack[s] of Balkanisation’;31 the counter-argument is
that the project is not dividing the country but ‘recognizing the division
that actually exist[s]’ (1997 [1987], 105). The duality of this coexisting
argument and counter-argument is typical of The Jaguar Smile, a text of
contradictions and ambivalences. The chapter focuses primarily on the
atmosphere of death that pertains throughout the region as a result of
the machinations of the Contra: in almost every Bluefields house he
visits, Rushdie hears stories of death, in a town in which the inhabitants
live with the ‘constant possibility of dying’ (1997 [1987], 107–13). Yet
Rushdie’s presentation of this climate of fear is remarkably detached –
indeed, his description of his own departure from Bluefields and return
to Managua for the conclusion of the work is not a reflection on the
realities he has witnessed, but a description of an image that verges on
magical realism. As he leaves the town, he notices a preponderance of
black butterflies, particularly on the airstrip:
As I walked to the aeroplane [a] swarm surrounded me, escorting me.

[…] I reached Managua an hour after the passing of a hurricane
[…]. It was a good thing the light aircraft I’d flown in hadn’t been
caught in the storm. Maybe the butterflies had brought me luck.
(1997 [1987], 115)
This content echoes the magical realism of Márquez that is a confirmed

influence on the writing of Amitav Ghosh (see Chapter 3, Section II.ii);
also, the butterflies, as well as being presented by Rushdie as ensuring
his safe passage across Nicaragua, mediate the transit of the narrative
itself, which passes silently across the country, underlining the sense of
detachment and privilege that surrounds Rushdie’s travel in the text.
This focus on travel between locations pertains throughout Rushdie’s
work, reflecting his personal history. The narrative of migration with
which The Satanic Verses begins, for instance, starts with a plane crash in
which ‘the jumbo jet Bostan, A I-420, blew apart without any warning’,
providing its migrant occupants with an unusual entry into the UK,
falling from ‘twenty-nine thousand and two feet’ (2006 [1988], 1–2).32
A repeated questioning of the need for travel, the significance of move-
ment between locations, and the importance of transnational affilia-
tions all feature in Rushdie’s millennial work of fiction, Fury, to which
I now turn: the protagonist, Malik Solanka, a British-Indian academic
living in New York, has moved smoothly to the east coast of the United
States from Cambridge, and before that from Bombay. In spite of this
global movement, however, Rushdie cannot help but return to the same
narrative features, succumbing to the lure of intertextual reference:
Solanka grew up – and suffered the abusive treatment that lies behind
his behaviour throughout Fury – on ‘Methwold’s Estate’ in Bombay
(2001, 80), named after a housing estate owned by a prominent charac-
ter in the 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. This revisiting of an important
textual touchstone foregrounds the intertextual dependence that is in
evidence throughout Fury, and marks one last form of travelling, that
dominates the final section of this monograph on transnational litera-
ture: the transplanting of a semantically resonant location from one
text to another.
III Fury
i Technology, Anger, and Empire

On 25 June 2000, a press release was issued to mark the historic achieve-
ment of a first complete draft of ‘an initial sequencing of the human
genome – the genetic blueprint for human beings’ (‘White House Press
Release’, 2000, n.p.). While the unveiling was presented as a politi-
cal statement, being held in the residence of the US President by Bill
Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, this was actually the
scientific culmination of many years’ work by the international Human
Genome Project (HGP) – ‘a joint project of HHS [the US Department
of Health and Human Services], DOE [the US Department of Energy],
and international partners in the UK, France, Germany, Japan, China’
(‘White House Press Release’, 2000, n.p.) – in conjunction with Celera
Genomics Corporation, a private company.33 This news was thus both
a statement of transnational, cooperative intent at the turn of the third
millennium CE and a sign of the now-ubiquitous involvement of private
companies in scientific progress:
[President Clinton] congratulated the scientists working in both the

public and private sectors on this landmark achievement, which
promises to lead to a new era of molecular medicine, an era that will
bring new ways to prevent, diagnose, treat and cure disease. (‘White
House Press Release’, 2000, n.p.)
Salman Rushdie’s work of millennial transnational fiction, Fury – released

in 2001, but focusing on the summer of the HGP announcement –
questions the assumptions inherent in Clinton’s statement. Fury’s focus
on the negative aspects of transnational spread and technological
advance in a culture in which public and private sectors are increasingly

becoming fused suggests that the ‘new era’ of the President’s speech
may not be one to be welcomed; it is this sentiment, and the ways in
which it is enabled by the dependence of Fury on The Jaguar Smile, that
is my focus for the rest of this chapter.
Rushdie refers to the HGP announcement at a central emotional point
in the novel, with which I begin my focus on Fury. The reference is one
of several contemporary touchstones in a text primarily focused on the
year 2000, the year in which Rushdie’s protagonist, the British–Indian
academic Malik Solanka, abandons his wife and young child and moves
to New York for reasons that emerge during the novel. Fury begins by
describing the hit movie of the 2000 summer, the Ridley Scott film
Gladiator (2001, 6); Solanka meets the woman with whom he becomes
besotted, and who thus assumes a central position in the narrative, dur-
ing a broadcast of the Holland-Yugoslavia Euro 2000 quarter final (2001,
53); there are Spoonerising references to the 2000 campaigns for US
President, which constitute ‘George W. Gush’s boredom and Al Bore’s
gush’ (2001, 87); the narration mentions that a Concorde has crashed in
France, marking the date as the 25th of July 2000 (2001, 114); one char-
acter mentions the Screen Actors Guild strike of summer 2000 (2001,
144); there are references to the US sports stars Latrell Sprewell and
Serena Williams (2001, 176); and Fury moves towards its conclusion as
the media fill with the stories of athletes at the 2000 Sydney Olympics
in September, from performance-enhancing Chinese and American
athletes to the record breaking of sprinter Michael Johnson (2001, 213).
In the final chapter, in which Solanka returns to England to spy on the
family he has abandoned, it is clear that time has passed, and narrative
progression is again accompanied by real-life, extra-textual reference, to
a bright spring day ‘at the height of the [2001] foot-and-mouth epi-
demic’ (2001, 256).
Rushdie’s reference to the Human Genome Project comes early in
the narrative, in a key scene in which a furious reaction is sparked in
Professor Solanka. His fury is an important theme of the novel – as is clear
from its title – and is related to his sudden flight from his family home,
having found himself, in a drunken stupor and driven by ‘the laughter
of [his personal] demons’ (2001, 107), standing over his sleeping wife
and child with a carving knife; coming to his senses, and not feeling
able to trust himself, he leaves them without a word of explanation.
The source of his ‘demons’, however, is tricky to ascertain, making it
difficult to separate out the unconscious motivations of – and justifica-
tions for – his anger: Solanka has a history of childhood sexual abuse,
which could be a factor, particularly given its repression, in ‘sentences

that must never be completed’ (2001, 135); the products of the doll-
making that has long been his creative outlet have become co-opted
by corporate money-making behemoths, permanently frustrating his
original intentions for these creations; in general, he may feel that the
globalising advances of technology and media are superseding him.
This last possible reason may go some way towards explaining his
reaction to the HGP announcement. Reading the day’s newspaper in a
café, he learns of the discovery, and feels ‘the dull irritation, the slow
anger, of the fool’ (2001, 45) as he realises that the knowledge brought
to the scientific community by the HGP findings uncovers a mystery of
human existence that he will never be able to understand:
The […] papers were calling [the HGP report] the best version yet of
the ‘bright book of life’, a phrase variously used to describe the Bible
and the Novel; even though this new brightness was not a book at all
but […] a code written in four amino acids, and […] Solanka wasn’t
good with codes. (2001, 44–45)
The scientific discovery is thus immediately associated with two things:

first, with an unreadable narrative; second, with Solanka’s own inabi-
lity to comprehend said narrative. The flippant dismissal of the HGP
sequence as a ‘new brightness’, and ‘not a book at all’, conceals a jealous
reaction to what he sees as his own exclusion from this realm of knowl-
edge. Throughout Fury, questions about creative control and the power
of knowledge will be highlighted through examples of Solanka’s fury.
Here, this fury spills over in a violent physical response. After a
paragraph in which his internal monologue consists of angry thoughts
about the HGP, it becomes clear that his ‘dull irritation’ and ‘slow anger’
have not remained confined to his private thoughts:
He felt like a drone. […] The new age had emperors and he would
be their slave.
‘Sir. Sir.’ A young woman was standing over him […] ‘I’m going to
ask you to leave, sir.’ […] Solanka was […] perplexed: ‘What appears
to be the trouble, Miss?’
‘What is the trouble, sir […] is that you have been using bad language
[…] and so loudly. […] You have been shouting it out.’ (2001, 45–46)
What is particularly interesting here is the way in which Rushdie plays

with formal convention: a reader assumes that because Solanka’s anger
has been presented in the novel via his internal monologue – and thus,
formally speaking, located outside quotation marks – his fury does not
have an audible impact on the other characters in this novel. The fact
that this anger is able to escape, overwhelming even formal convention,
underlines the narrative impact of Solanka’s emotions. Rushdie’s reader
is unmoored by this, joining the protagonist in a position of incompre-
hension: while the novel is presented as the narrative of an omniscient,
third-person narrator, at times like this it veers into an unpredictable,
unsettling subjectivity.
A particular example of unmooring occurs in the presentation of the
novel’s principal New York narrative: the story of the violent killings of
three 19- and 20-year-old female socialites. These killings are important
for various reasons, and I go into more detail below (see this chapter,
Section III.iii); for the moment, I simply want to consider the narrative
presentation of the deaths, in the narration of Solanka. Though it tran-
spires the only involvement he has in the deaths of the three women is
that the man framed for their murder is an old friend of Solanka’s, Jack
Rhinehart, episodes of fury such as that following the HGP news lead to
lapses in Solanka’s memory, such that he is himself uncertain whether
or not he is the killer. The narrative establishes early on that Solanka
likes to go for long walks across the city (2001, 4); on one walk he
stays out all night, in an oppressive New York humidity that soaks his
linen jacket and Panama hat (2001, 42). At the end of this chapter, he
retreats to his apartment, and sleeps in his suit (2001, 52); this sets up
a later scene:
[Solanka] awoke in his bed – fully dressed, again, with strong drink
on his breath – without knowing how or when he’d reached it. With
consciousness came fear of himself. Another night unaccounted for.
(2001, 82)
These suspicions are exacerbated by news from the dead women,

who mentioned, in the days leading up to their deaths, having seen a
‘Panama-hatted stranger “lurking oddly”’ (2001, 76): Solanka himself,
and thus the reader, is unsure as to whether or not it is his Panama-
hatted figure – during one of his ‘unaccounted[-]for’ nights – who has
played a role in these deaths: we join the protagonist in a state of igno-
rance about this key information, keeping the narrative in tension and
giving the novel a curious sense of ambiguity.
In this respect, we see a strong link with The Jaguar Smile, particu-
larly with respect to the tension generated at key moments such as
the tree across the road in the middle of Rushdie’s guerrilla excursion
(see Section II.ii), in which ambiguity is not only a feature of the text’s
subject, but embedded in the narrative structure. This link between con-
tent and form is also explored in Fury through Rushdie’s use of Ancient
Greek mythology.34 As he returns from his all-night walk, Solanka is
struck by the incongruity of the architecture on his street, particularly
that of a building designed with a ‘mighty DeMille-Assyrian entrance’
(2001, 43). ‘DeMille-Assyrian’ here refers to the Hollywood director
Cecil B. DeMille, whose epic films (such as Cleopatra [1934], Samson
and Delilah [1949], and The Ten Commandments [1956]) were often set
in regions of the world such as the pre-CE kingdom of Assyria, a part of
northern Mesopotamia;35 Rushdie is setting up this architectural style
as a movie version of Classicism, with little regard for historical or cul-
tural accuracy. This is clear in the scathing description of the dedication
engraved in the building’s stonework:
[The building was] dedicated […] ‘to Pythianism’, without any

embarrassment at the clash of Greek and Mesopotamian metaphors.
Such plundering and jumbling of the store-house of yesterday’s
empires, this melting-pot or métissage of past power, was the true
indicator of present might. (2001, 43)
Solanka goes on to explain this perceived Greek–Mesopotamian clash –

‘Pythianism’ refers to Pytho, the ancient name of Delphi, site of the
temple to the Greek god Apollo – but the tone in which he presents this
‘classical mishmash’ (2001, 44) is revealing. It is strange that Solanka,
whose birth in India in the mid-1940s36 means his immediate family
has been on the receiving end of violent imperial injustices, views the
remnants of empires – the aftermath of these very structures of imperi-
alist violence – as being susceptible of ‘plundering’; the former colonial
masters are presented in the same light as those colonised peoples who
were themselves literally ‘plunder[ed]’. Similarly, while ‘métissage’ is
often used with colonial connotations and the phrase ‘melting-pot’ is
normally linked with immigration and racial diversity, here they are
used as pejorative terms.37 The ambiguity inherent in the words Rushdie
uses – the variant forms in which these ideas are presented – offers an
interesting comment on the anti-imperial content of the passage.
This conflicting perspective on the effects of imperialism, in evidence
in The Jaguar Smile in Rushdie’s troubled attitude towards censorship
in the Nicaraguan regime, is a feature of the author’s writing: there
is a sustained ambiguity, throughout, that makes it difficult to locate
Rushdie as a solely Indian, British–Indian, British, or ‘postcolonial’

author. This is at the root of Solanka’s fury: here, and on many other
occasions throughout the novel, his angry reactions follow a similar
narrative ambiguity, whether it is a paradoxical expression of impotence
in the face of newly acquired potency (as in the case of the powerful
new knowledge implied by the HGP announcement), or a simultaneous
rejection of and sympathy for the effects of imperialism (in the suscepti-
bility of empires themselves to ‘plundering and jumbling’). This second
example, and its links with the titular emotion of the protagonist, is
explored in various ways in Fury, which starts with an early episode of
post-imperial angst and later centres on a narrative of conquest and
colonisation that comes to dominate Solanka’s life.
ii Empire and Genre

Early in Fury, Solanka encounters the copywriter Mark Skywalker, ‘from
the planet Tatooine’ (2001, 34). Tatooine is the fictional home planet of
Luke Skywalker, the Jedi adventurer and protagonist of the original Star
Wars film series (1977–83); Luke was played by actor Mark Hamill, and
this is presumably the source of the first name of Rushdie’s copywriter,
cementing his links with the franchise, though Solanka observes that his
interlocutor is distinctly ‘un-Jedi-knight-like’ (2001, ibid ). There are links
in this encounter to the novel’s other science-fiction elements and to
Rushdie’s roots in copywriting, but the significant moment arises when
the issue of nationality is raised. Skywalker assumes Solanka is British,
and, in a telling parenthesis, this is accepted, as Solanka ‘(d[oes]n’t get
into the postcolonial, migrational niceties)’ (2001, 35). The protagonist’s
silence on the subject of the postcolonial ‘niceties’ of his existence –
which are not ‘niceties’, as is clear in his troubled relationship with
India38 – leads Mark to ask his advice on a campaign he is designing,
entitled ‘THE SUN NEVER SETS ON AMERICAN EXPRESS INTERNATIONAL BANKING
CORPORATION’:
‘As a Britisher […] you’re saying the British won’t be insulted? […]
Because of the British empire, I mean. On which the sun never sets.
There’s no offence intended. That’s what I want to be sure of. That
the line doesn’t come across as an insult to your country’s glorious
past.’ (2001, 36)
This query is positioned ironically, directed at a character whose Indian

past makes him well aware of the damage done by the British Empire:
Britain’s ‘glorious past’ is an Imperial myth, only evident to those in
positions of privileged dominance, both in Britain and in erstwhile

colonies like the India of Solanka’s, and Rushdie’s, birth. The question,
therefore – apparently an innocent enquiry – triggers an angry response
from the protagonist.
Moreover, Solanka’s ire is exacerbated by a paradox in Skywalker’s
deferential attitude towards Britain. The copywriter’s anxiety is taken at
face value, as a particularly American – ‘Unitedstatesian’ (see this chapter,
Section II.ii) – ‘cultural hypersensitivity’, defined as an ‘almost patho-
logical fear of giving offence’ (2001, ibid ). Yet Solanka’s identity is tied
up in the ‘postcolonial, migrational niceties’ side-lined by Skywalker,
so this in fact signals a cultural insensitivity. Though Rushdie presents
the New York environment as an apparently culturally welcoming
one – to take just this example, a non-white-skinned man is accepted as
‘a Britisher’ without any questioning of his racial origins – the
New York attitude towards others is shown to in fact be remarkably
offensive towards other cultures, in its lack of knowledge about cul-
tural difference; purported cultural acceptance is a sign of fundamental
cultural ignorance. Anger at this ignorance suffuses Solanka’s response,
evident in the searching rhetorical questions at the end of this paragraph,
with which the reader is shown Solanka’s internal monologue:
Where was […] this anger coming from? Why was he being caught
off guard, time and again, by surges of rage that almost overwhelmed
his will? (2001, ibid )
These ‘surges of rage’ are initially associated with specific episodes: there
is the first, in which Skywalker’s friend Mila Milo asserts that she gets the
impression Solanka is looking for something on his endless urban peram-
bulations, and Solanka’s snapped response is that all he is looking for is
to be left alone (2001, 5); this is followed by the above example, as he is
angered by Skywalker’s cultural insensitivity; later, we come to the episode
in which he reacts to the HGP announcement. To learn more about the
motivations behind these displays of anger – directed at the intrusions of
others, at the paradoxes of culturally sensitive insensitivity, or at feelings
of technological impotence – it is necessary to look at Solanka’s progres-
sion through the narrative, and in particular the way Rushdie engages with
ideas about different expressions of imperialism, the relationship between
his novels and travel writing, and questions of narrative form and content.
These are all explored in the central narrative strand of the
novel, which concerns the Professor’s relationship with three women.
Dominating the circumstances of his initial move to New York, there
is the wife whom he abandons in the episode with the carving knife,
Eleanor Masters Solanka; on arrival in the city, he becomes romanti-
cally and intellectually involved with Mila Milo, who reminds him – an
erstwhile doll maker – of one of his own creations and encourages him
to devise a series of ‘NC-17 dolls’ (2000, 138) with a serious intellectual
message that does justice to Solanka’s inquisitive, questing, academic
instincts; most significantly, there is the sexually and politically active
beauty Neela Mahendra, for whom Solanka in turn jilts Mila. All three
of these characters enable Rushdie to explore different facets of imperia-
lism. Firstly, it is Eleanor Masters Solanka who introduces the concept
of race in the novel, through her theories about Shakespeare’s Othello
(2001, 11 [for more on this, see below, Section III.iii]). Then, Mila Milo
is present at a planetarium in New York when Solanka realises that
the world came into being, in the beginning, as ‘things flew apart.
The centre did not hold’ (2001, 116); these lines are, primarily, a refe-
rence to W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1920), but also to a
seminal work of postcolonial, anti-imperial literature that quotes from
Yeats’s poem, Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart: ‘Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’
(quoted by Achebe, 2001 [1958], v).39 The most obvious link with ideas
of Empire, however, is in the character of Neela Mahendra.
Neela Mahendra’s introduction, in the first place as the new girlfriend
of Solanka’s friend Jack Rhinehart, comes as the travel-writing founda-
tions of Fury are highlighted:
‘She’s one of yours,’ Rhinehart said […] ‘Indian diaspora. […] In the
eighteen-nineties her ancestors went […] to work in what’s-its-name.
Lilleput–Blefescu.’ (2001, 61)
As well as the ethnic connection to Solanka – ‘“one of yours”’ – the nam-

ing of Neela’s home country is noteworthy: ‘Lilleput–Blefescu’ conflates
the names of the warring islands in the first section of Jonathan Swift’s
famous work of travel writing, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the
World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver (1726). Known as Gulliver’s Travels,
this is a seminal text, both in the travel writing genre in general and in
the arena of fictionalised travelogues in particular: Holland and Huggan
highlight the fact that Gulliver’s Travels, in the early eighteenth century, is
‘already a satire on travel writing’ (1998, vii); Hulme and Youngs describe
Swift’s text as ‘the most significant modern version’ of the speculative
travelogue (2002, 5); James Buzard places it first in his list of ‘imaginary
travelogues’ (2002, 37); and Lisle asserts that this is the exceptional text
that ‘proves [that] there have always been travelogues that escape the
bounding practices of literary genre’ (2006, 58). Rushdie’s use of the con-
struction ‘Lilleput–Blefescu’ takes this ‘escape’ to an extreme, particularly
as Solanka ends up travelling to the group of Pacific islands in ques-
tion: Swift’s fiction-as-travelogue has become part of another author’s
fiction-with-a-theme-of-travel, blurring the boundaries between fiction,
non-fiction, and fictionalised-non-fiction still further.
This has particular relevance in this text, for several reasons. First,
there is the extent to which the novel has its structural and narrative
foundations in Rushdie’s work of travel writing, which genre is itself one
where fact and fiction are often intermingled (see above, Introduction,
particularly Section IV and n. 25, including Youngs on the ‘barrier
[erected] needlessly and misleadingly between fiction and non-fiction’
[1994, 9–10]). Second, there is Rushdie’s amalgamation of the fictional
with the factual, as when Mila, describing the life she lived with her
father, a writer, refers to a large PEN conference, at which ‘Norman
Mailer invited George Shultz to speak at the Public Library’, and which
featured ‘Sontag […] Gordimer […] Updike, everyone’ (2001, 111–12);
this conference, featuring these speakers, really did take place. Finally,
there is the inclusion of various musings on the status of fact and fic-
tion within the text, as can be seen in the example of the ‘memoirs’ of
a fictional character (see this chapter, Section III.iii). We must also keep
in mind the fictional nature of Swift’s text: Rushdie is not only basing
one of the central satirical components of his fiction on the travel writ-
ing of another, but he is implementing these foundations using a work
of travel writing that is already itself a satire of the travel writing genre.
As explained at the beginning of this chapter, ‘Lilleput–Blefescu’ is
Rushdie’s pseudonym for a particular place in the real world: this is an
‘ornamental Gulliver reference to Fiji in [an] insistently ornamental
book’ (Eder, 2001, n.p.). Rushdie uses the phrase ‘indigenous Elbees’, a
representation of the vocalisation ‘L-B’, to refer to the island ‘natives’;
Neela comes from the community of descendants of those who trav-
elled as indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent, referred to
in the novel as ‘Indo-Lilleputian’, or ‘Indo-Lilly’. The Gulliver references
continue, later, when the narration of Neela’s history moves from Jack
to Neela herself, as she breaks off her liaison with Rhinehart and starts
her relationship with Solanka:
‘The Elbees say […] the only end of a soft-boiled egg to break is the
little one. Whereas we […] are the Big Endians, from Big Endia.’ She
cackled […], tickled at her own joke. (2001, 157)
It is not clear, here, what it is that she is laughing at. Is Neela’s joke
simply the wordplay of ‘Big End’/‘Big Endia[n]’? This adjective originates
in Swift’s travelogue, in which a bone of contention between the islands
of Lilleput and Blefescu is the socially acceptable method of opening a
soft-boiled egg: the two populations advocate cracking opposite ends.
Swift’s satire of the sorts of dispute that lead to dogmatic ideas of a
homogenous national identity means that the islands’ nationalisms are
tied to the ludicrous distinction between the ends of an egg; in Swift’s
narrative, the island of Lilleput passes an edict commanding all subjects
to ‘break the smaller end of their eggs’, and those who refuse and flee
to the court of nearby Blefescu are described as ‘the Big-endian exiles’
(1985 [1726], 85). Rushdie’s knowledge of this Swiftian wordplay means
Neela could be laughing, not at the adjective itself, but at the intrusion
of fiction onto her narrative: Rushdie highlights the meta-fictionality
of his own text by allowing his character to briefly stand apart from the
narrative and pass judgement.
The centrality of Lilleput–Blefescu increases as Fury progresses. The
relationship between Solanka and Neela does not occupy much of the
novel, beginning around the time she explains her ‘Big Endian’ origins,
and breaking off in a scene in which the various threads of Solanka’s
narrative are brought together: Eddie, the new boyfriend of the jilted
Mila, appears at Solanka’s bedside late at night, seeking revenge with
knife in hand; Mila, in trying to placate Eddie, reveals that she and the
Professor have had a relationship, information that is not well received
by the newly awoken Neela; Eleanor then turns up, having flown to
New York with her new partner, Morgen, an old friend of Solanka’s,
to take him to task for his abandonment; the scene ends with this
erstwhile friend punching Solanka, and Neela returning to her country
of birth (2001, 229–33). After this crescendo of fury, hastening the novel
to its conclusion, Solanka flies to Lilleput–Blefescu, pursuing Neela
deeper into this fictionalised world in order to save her from the mael-
strom of the ‘L-B’ revolution with significant echoes of the Sandinistas
of The Jaguar Smile. I focus on this denouement in the final section of the
chapter; before that, I want to return to the beginning of the narrative
in order to look at another important intertext in the novel, though this
time not one of Rushdie’s own.
iii Shakespeare, Love, and Dolls

While Fury depends to a large extent on the travel- and travel-writing-
related foundations of The Jaguar Smile, there are several other textual
precursors to Rushdie’s novel. Primary among these – in that they occur

early on in the text – are the tragedies of Shakespeare. Solanka meets his
second wife, Eleanor – subsequently, mother of his only child, Asmaan –
at the end of her PhD thesis; her argument is as follows:
At the heart of each of the [Shakespearean] tragedies were unanswera-

ble questions about love […:] to make sense of the plays, we must […]
attempt to explicate these inexplicables […]. Why did Hamlet, loving
his dead father, interminably delay his revenge […] why did Lear,
loving Cordelia […], fail to hear the love in her opening-scene hon-
esty […] why was Macbeth […] led by the erotic but loveless Lady M.
towards an evil throne of blood? (2001, 10)
Eleanor follows this with her argument about Othello, which is not
only particularly powerful, but also foregrounds several concepts that
recur in Fury. The argument revolves around the figure of Desdemona,
Othello’s wife, who is falsely accused of infidelity:
Desdemona’s death is an ‘honour killing’. She didn’t have to be

guilty. The accusation was enough. The attack on her virtue was
incompatible with Othello’s honour. […] She’s not even a person
to him. He has reified her. She’s his Oscar-Barbie statuette. His doll.
(2001, 11)
This passage has repercussions throughout Fury, as it becomes clear that

this is a novel about guilt, about attacks, and – significantly – about
‘Oscar-Barbie statuettes’: this Shakespearean climate of ‘honour’ and
‘guilt’ sets the stage for several other narrative strands in Fury.
This reference to doll-making links this presentation of Desdemona
with two of the narratives that are central to Fury. The first is the
story of Solanka himself, who, after a visit to the doll’s houses of the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, is inspired to ‘construct microcosms of
his own’, complete with dolls – including representations of celebrated
philosophers – to populate these ‘microcosms’. The most famous of his
dolls is a young girl called ‘Little Brain’, created as an interlocutor for
these ‘Great Minds’, who skips through time to hold discussions with
Averroës, Galileo Galilei, Socrates and others in the television series that
grows from these creative beginnings (2001, 16–17). However, while
Solanka intended Little Brain to be a clever, interrogating ‘everygirl’
around which to build a series about great developments in rational
thought throughout history, it later transpires that the figure of Little

Brain was swiftly co-opted as the face of a global entertainment brand:
[Little Brain’s] first, late-night, [television] series, of which nobody

expected much, had been made […] as […] Solanka desired. […] ‘L.B.’
was the disciple, while the philosophers she met were the […] heroes.
After the move to prime time, however, the channel’s executives
soon weighed in. The […] format was […] too highbrow. Little Brain
was the star, and the new show had to be built around her. (2001, 96)
Solanka, as an academic, had designed his creation to be subservient to

his ‘Great Minds’ educational project, yet this intelligent female figure
is adopted by the media as a television star, model, actress, singer – and
even herself an author, as she releases several volumes of ‘memoirs’.
These publications enable Rushdie to muse further on the line between
fact and fiction, that he treads throughout this fiction peppered with
factual contemporary references: Little Brain’s first ‘memoir’, the auto-
biography of a fictional individual, is at first categorised by booksellers
as ‘non-fiction’, and the decision to re-categorise it and ‘move it […]
across into the world of make-believe was resisted by both readers and
staff’ (2001, 98). In providing this focus on the purported factual status
of a fictional text, Rushdie presents three significant ideas: he muses on
the possibly fictive nature of supposedly ‘non-fiction’ writing; he offers
another suggestion of the relentlessly self-interrogating nature of this
narrative, which repeatedly calls attention to its own structures; and
he underlines the intertextual relationship between Fury and The Jaguar
Smile, a travelogue that is itself an interrogation of the interrelation of
concepts of fiction, non-fiction, and the boundary between the two.
The ‘Little Brain’ narrative feeds into the second way in which
doll-making – foregrounded both in Eleanor’s summary of the figure
of Shakespeare’s Desdemona and in Solanka’s career as doll-maker – is
important to the narrative of Fury: in particular, to the story of homicide
and lust that forms the back-drop of Solanka’s time in New York, and
in which Solanka briefly feels himself to be implicated. The actions of
a suspected serial killer are introduced at the start of the novel, as Mila
Milo – in wondering about Solanka’s walks across the city – reminds
him that there is a serial killer hitting women on the head with a lump
of concrete (2001, 4), and this narrative of murder continues in the
background of Solanka’s story: in the middle of a later episode, the
second killing is shown in a matter-of-fact newspaper headline (2001,
63). After the third killing, Solanka muses on a possible link between his
own fury and the climate of anger which he sees as present in New York,
and reflects on the lives of the three girls. His reference to fury is pre-
ceded by another Shakespearean reference, a couplet from The Merchant
of Venice that is quoted, questioned, and then adapted by an imagined,
interrogative voice in his internal monologue:
Tell me where is fancy bred? / I’ the heart or i’ the head? […]

He shook his head. You’re avoiding the issue, Professor. […] Let’s
get to anger […] Let’s get to the goddamn fury that […] kills. Tell me,
where is murder bred? (2001, 70; emphasis original)
The murders are then described, as are the three victims: Saskia ‘Sky’
Schuyler, Lauren ‘Ren’ Muybridge Klein, and Belinda ‘Bindy’ Booken
Candell. The passage concludes with another reference to Shakespeare,
as the ‘lump of concrete put out [the] lights’ of the American girls, an
echo of Othello’s ‘put out the light, and then put out the light’ as he
kills Desdemona (Shakespeare, 1997 [c. 1601–2], V.ii.7). Just as Rushdie
adopts and adapts a poetic excerpt (the limerick) in writing his trav-
elogue, his transnational work has intertextual links with Elizabethan
dramatic poetry, throughout a modern-day treatise on anger and
violence.
During Solanka’s explication of the characters and positions of the
girls with respect to their society, a further link to Eleanor’s argument
about Shakespearean tragedy emerges:
All three were beautiful […] long […] blonde […] accomplished.
[…] A living doll. These young women were born to be […] fully
accessorized Oscar-Barbies […] conform[ing] to Eleanor’s definition
of Desdemonas. […] And now there was a murderous Othello on the
loose […] killing them in this Y2K revision of the play. (2001, 72–73;
emphasis original)
In this way, Rushdie’s use of Shakespeare links concepts of doll mak-

ing and materialism with the idea of violence, in a connection that is
echoed in Solanka’s personal history: having seen his creation Little
Brain taken over by the forces of commercialisation, leading to a loss
of creative control, Solanka has a breakdown and insists all simulacra
of Little Brain are removed from his house. When this does not satisfy
him, he unleashes his anger at Eleanor, leading to the episode in which
he stands over the sleeping figures of Eleanor and Asmaan with a knife,
his last act before fleeing for New York fearing the fury within him
(2001, 107–108; see this chapter, Section III.i). The tableau with Solanka
and the knife, while being a clear reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and
the protagonist’s question ‘is this a dagger which I see before me […]?’
(Shakespeare, 1988 [c. 1606], II.i.33), is also a reworking of a scene
from Hamlet, in which the Prince of Denmark stands over the praying,
unsuspecting form of his uncle, killer of his father, but fails to ‘do it pat’
and use the sword he has drawn to kill his uncle and revenge his father
(Shakespeare, 1987 [c. 1600], III.iii.73).
iv A Furious Smile
The links between Rushdie’s travelogue and his work of millennial fic-
tion, while not as overt as those evident in the work of Ondaatje, Seth,
and Ghosh, are significant, and go beyond Rushdie’s use of the genre of
fictionalised travel writing in the ‘ornamental Gulliver references’ (Eder,
2001, n.p.) to Neela Mahendra’s South Pacific birthplace. Numerous
other parallels between the two texts emerge; in the final section of this
chapter, making particular reference to the Lilleput–Blefescu-centred
conclusion of Rushdie’s novel, I explore three ways in which the nar-
rative of Fury reveals its thematic and structural foundations in The
Jaguar Smile: the transforming concept of masks and masking, the idea
of doubling or ambivalence, and the way in which Rushdie uses formal
and generic switches to achieve certain literary effects.
Firstly, there is the idea of the mask. Early in The Jaguar Smile, describ-
ing the festivals and folk dances he witnesses in Nicaragua, the author
uses the mask to draw one of many connections between art and
politics in the travelogue, when he sees that one of the masks worn
by a ballerina at a public performance is the same as those worn by
Sandinista guerrillas; the associations of the mask with the activities
of the Sandinistas ‘transform’ the dancer ‘into something wondrously
strange: not a masked dancer, but a guerrilla in a tutu’. He follows this
by explaining that the ‘true purpose’ of a mask is not concealment,
but transformation: a culture of masks is one that ‘understands a good
deal about the processes of metamorphosis’ (1997 [1987], 14–15). This
transformation is in evidence in Fury, in which masks are worn by
two groups of people: apparently very different, but both with violent
intentions. Firstly, there are figures seen in the vicinity of the murders
of the ‘Oscar-Barbie statuette’ girls, who adopt the faces of Disney char-
acters in a grim inversion of the standard ‘movie cartoon as childhood
comfort’ trope. Secondly, there are the similarly violent participants in
the Lilleput–Blefescu revolution, who wear the masks of the characters
created by Solanka in his series of ‘adult […] R-rated, NC-17 dolls’: the
protagonists of a revolution based on fact but refracted through the

lens of an eighteenth-century fictionalised travelogue, Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, assume the masks of a set of creations created by the central
character of this turn-of-the-twenty-first-century novel; fictions exist
within fictions, within quasi-non-fictional fictions.
The first instance of masking – the self-disguising of those seen near
the society girls’ corpses as Disney’s Goofy, Buzz Lightyear, and Robin
Hood – follows a section in which Solanka thinks about his abandoned
son, Asmaan. The chapter begins with a reference to the psychological
pain of separation that is not only an allusion to episodes of Solanka’s
own violent fury, but also foregrounds acts of violence in New York and
Lilleput–Blefescu:
Asmaan twisted in him like a knife. (2001, 126)
Reminders of his son evoke this gut-wrenching in Solanka, and the

passage focuses primarily on Asmaan’s love of never-ending repeats of
much-loved cartoon Disney movies;40 significantly, two of these are Toy
Story and Robin Hood, source of two of the masks seen near the ‘concrete
lump’ killings. The Hollywood ‘Olde Englishe’ language of Robin Hood
recurs when Solanka considers the parallels between the Disney charac-
ter’s evasions of the ‘Sheriff of Notting Ham’ and the modern-day killers,
‘eluding the Sheriffs of Manhattan. Oo-de-lally!’ (2001, 130). This
macabre link between film characters and violence follows Solanka: it is
Jack Rhinehart, friend of the protagonist and former lover of Neela
Mahendra, who agrees to hide the Disney costumes for the killers, the
victims’ three boyfriends, in the hopes of being admitted to a secret
society; Jack is framed for the murders, and killed by the group of young
men in a clumsy attempt to fake his suicide (2001, 194–99).
The ‘Puppet Kings’ of Solanka’s invention, meanwhile, are the crea-
tions – and, at least initially, the servants – of the doll-maker figure
Professor Akasz Kronos, who is modelled on Solanka himself: Kronos’s
‘long white hair’ (2001, 130) mirrors the ‘long silver hair’ of Rushdie’s
protagonist (2001, 219). The leader of the revolution on Lilleput–
Blefescu, whose followers take the masks of the Puppet Kings, naturally
adopts the mask of the leading figure, so that when Solanka travels to
the region at the end of the novel, and sees a large billboard bearing
the face of the revolution’s commander-in-chief, the face staring back
at him, ‘framed in long silver hair, with its wild eyes and dark-lipped
Cupid’s bow mouth, was his very own’ (2001, 239). The woman in
Kronos’s life, ‘Zameen of Rijk’, is modelled after Neela Mahendra;
when Neela joins the L-B revolution, she assumes the mask of Zameen,
performing an act of non-concealment – hiding behind a representa-
tion of her own face – that supports Rushdie’s earlier assertion, in the
travelogue, that the ‘true purpose of masks […] is not concealment,
but transformation’. In Neela’s case, the transformation effected by
this multiplication of her image is one of dilution, as her forceful, self-
confident sense of identity becomes subservient to the personality cult
of the leader of the revolution, ‘Kronos’; in a particularly Rushdiean
matryoshka of irony, it is soldiers playing the roles of characters created
by Solanka who eventually bring about the destruction of Neela, his
beloved, who is herself wearing the mask of one of his characters.
This succession of maskings and duplicated identities leads to my
second point of comparison between the two texts, which is the idea of
doubling. This is highlighted most obviously in The Jaguar Smile in the
limerick at the centre of the travelogue, but is also evident in Rushdie’s
representation of the two sides of the country – opposed both geographi-
cally and politically – in the ‘versicle-and-response’ doubling rhythm of
political and religious activity, and in a final example in which two sons
from one family edit the newspapers of rival political factions: Rushdie
talks to their sister-in-law, ‘formidable […] matriarch of the deeply
divided […] clan’ (1997 [1987], 116). This essential ambivalence continues
in the later novel, which abounds with examples of doubling and
confusion. Most obvious is the doubling between Solanka’s ‘Puppet-
Kings’ and the protagonists of the revolution on Lilleput–Blefescu, in
which the avatars of Solanka and Mahendra take centre stage in the
drama. Also, however, the ‘Puppet-Kings’ already contain references to
doubling; Solanka explores this as he gives details of the back story of
Mogol, the leader of the small nation of Baburia (2001, 162), formed of
two mountainous islands and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the
Pacific country of Lilleput–Blefescu, itself a fictionalisation. Mogol, in a
further echo of The Jaguar Smile, this time in the uniting of cultural and
violent attributes in a senior politician, is a ‘poet, […] astronomer, […]
but also a soldier of Coriolanus-like blood-lust’:
[Solanka] was […] entranced by the shadow-play possibilities […] of

the two sets of doubles[:] the encounters between ‘real’ and ‘real’,
‘real’ and ‘double’, [and] ‘double’ and ‘double’. (2001, 187)
The closing scenes of the novel are Rushdie’s own exploration of the
‘shadow-play possibilities’ of the sets of doubles he has created, although
Solanka realises that his ‘entranced’ appreciation of the intellectual
possibilities of his creativity is insufficient to predict or avert the ‘encounter

between “real” and “real”’ that leads to Neela’s death: this is no hypotheti-
cal ‘“double” [versus] “double”’ match, but a ‘ruthless action’ in reality,
with a fatal impact on Solanka’s life (2001, 254).
Finally, I want to look at the way in which Rushdie uses formal and
generic switches to achieve particular effects. These devices not only
establish the link between The Jaguar Smile and Fury, they also underline
the connection between form and content that I have seen as a crucial
part of the transnational literature of all four authors in this study, from
Ondaatje’s ‘MONSOON NOTEBOOK’ to Seth’s and Ghosh’s ‘diaries’. The
two most prominent generic switches in Fury mark important shifts
in the narrative. Rushdie has already referred to James Joyce’s famous
1939 modernist novel Finnegans Wake (2001, 117); the chapter in
which Solanka first spends time alone with Neela begins in particularly
Joycean fashion, as the narrative prose of the previous chapter, in which
Solanka muses on the modern penchant for cultural reproduction dis-
played in the Jennifer Lopez 2000 remake of a Raquel Welch film, gives
way to a cacophony of competing voices, with no context provided:
A song for Jennifer: We’re living in a retro world and I am a retro-

grade girl.
11
‘In the future, sure theen’, they don’t listen no more to
this type talk radio. […]’ – ‘Yo, lissen up. Dunno what
jive […] Speedy Gonzalez there was handing out.’
(2001, 142–43)
The voices of the phone-in – the Latino critic, and the respondent whose
initial xenophobia gives way to outright racism – assume the place of
Rushdie’s narration: this generic switch has several functions. The change
foregrounds issues of race, that are brought to the fore as the novel pro-
gresses; it emphasises the variety of cultural forms mixed in this text about
the spread of global media; and, most importantly, it signposts the nar-
rative entrance of a central figure: the phone-in voices have been heard
by Solanka, emanating from a nearby taxi as he waits to meet Neela –
and discuss their mutual friend, Jack – outside a New York museum.
It is not just the shifts in genre employed by Rushdie that present
the transnationalism of his material. As I bring this monograph to a
close, I want to revisit the ideas of Stephen Clingman one last time, in
his focus on the layers of transnational form. In Fury, the ‘recognizable
formal characteristics’ (Clingman, 2009, 10) are not only inter-generic
switches comparable to those of Ondaatje, Seth, and Ghosh – as seen in
the radio phone-in, above – but also uses of different graphical forms:
the back-story of Solanka’s ‘Puppet Kings’ (2001, 161–68) is presented
not in the serif-heavy typeface used throughout the novel, similar to
that used in the roughly contemporaneous 1997 Vintage edition of The
Jaguar Smile, but in the form of more spaced-out lettering of a lighter
weight, and with virtually no serifs or stems. The purpose of this change
is not immediately clear, and only emerges at the end of the chapter,
when the narrative exhorts the reader to ‘click on the links for more PK
info’ (2001, 168): the reference to ‘links’, the embedded hyperlinks of
a website, shows that the entire chapter has been a representation of a
website advertising the ‘Puppet Kings’; Rushdie’s transnational writing
mixes media as well as genres.
This admixture not only highlights the extent to which transna-
tional media and wide-ranging communication are integral parts of the
subject-matter of the novel; these movements across the boundaries
within the novel also demonstrate the centrality of such issues to the
structure of Fury. Moreover, the dependence of these shifts in form and
content on several episodes from The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey –
as explored throughout this chapter – illustrates the extent to which
the generic and formal features of his later work are reliant on his early
work of travel writing, as is the case for all four transnational authors in
this study: the ‘metaphors of migrancy, travel, and displacement’ seen
throughout Rushdie’s writing (Moynagh, 2008, 177) also pertain in the
lives and transnational literatures of Ondaatje, Seth, and Ghosh, a full
appreciation of which entails a critical approach uniting their travel
writing with their other literary work.
Conclusion: Transnational
Literature on the Move
Very much a child of the age of mass communication

and international pop culture, Vikram Seth was on the
move from an early age. (Guneratne, 2000, 339)
As I have explored in this work, all transnational authors are – to a

greater or lesser extent, and in many different ways – ‘on the move’. This
quotation from Anthony Guneratne, at the same time as it underlines
the centrality of movement and travel to the life and work of one of the
authors in this monograph, highlights a particular paradox that has been
central to my understanding of the complexities of transnationalism in
the work of all four authors: the ability to be ‘on the move’, in both a
personal and a literary sense, is predicated on a degree of social privi-
lege. This chimes with my argument throughout this work, which has
focused on the ways in which my selected authors engage deeply with
the experience of travel, and yet has also remained aware of the degree
of privilege inherent in their respective positions. While Ondaatje, Seth,
Ghosh, and Rushdie all engage with subjects across national – and even
continental – borders, in an apparent display of social fluidity, this very
engagement indicates a fixity of social standing: the quality of being ‘on
the move’, for these authors, is a matter of free and unfettered choice,
rather than compulsion or maltreatment. Being able to experience travel
in this way – and, significantly, to write about this experience – is a matter
of privilege. The work of these authors should certainly not be discounted
from transnational consideration as a result of their privileged positions,
however: the very textualities, identities, and geographies of the literature
produced by these authors enable their writing to affect thousands of
people, and open up for consideration many otherwise-unrecorded ideas
about belonging, home, violence, (mis-)communication, and tolerance.
191
I have presented these authors’ travelogues in conjunction with their

later novels in order, primarily, to explore a lacuna in their respective
critical perceptions: I have argued that these authors’ works of travel
writing need reinstating in semantically and linguistically founda-
tional positions within their work as a whole. Travel writing is not just
important in and of itself, although this is often true, as in the case of a
seminal fictional example like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ‘the most
significant modern version’ of the speculative travelogue (Hulme and
Youngs, 2002, 5; see Chapter 4, Section III.ii); individual travelogues
are also vital, fundamental parts of their authors’ personal and literary
identities. In the course of underlining this position, this work has
acknowledged the critical centrality of travel writing to discussions of
other literature. In particular, I have shown the existence of a clear link
between travel writing and texts variously described, not unproblem-
atically, using terms like ‘postcolonial’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ – literatures
referred to in the course of this study as ‘transnational’. These transna-
tional literary works are demonstrably tied up with the travel writing
preceding them in hitherto unacknowledged ways, whether that might
be through specific examples, as in the parallel examples of crucifixion in
Ondaatje (Chapter 1) and Seth’s episodes of incapacitation (Chapter 2);
intertextual relationships, evident in Ghosh’s early-twentieth-century
Marseille steamship and ‘idiot kalaa’ (Chapter 3); or a recurrence of certain
themes, such as Rushdie’s masks, doublings, and cartoons (Chapter 4).
In this work I have explored the travel-focused foundations of the
transnational literary project of these authors at the turn of the twenty-
first century, and these have continued in the intervening decade
and a half, for the subjects of both ‘Travelling Out’ and ‘Travelling
On’. Michael Ondaatje followed the transnationalism of Anil’s Ghost
with the formally complex Divisadero: the 2007 novel ranges from
nineteenth-century France to 1980s rural California and contemporary
San Francisco, and from half-a-dozen historical novelists to a fictional
academic studying a fictional poet; the chronological and geographical
shifts of this novel are foregrounded, underlined and undermined by
the same generic switches and temporal and spatial narrative jumps
that I have traced in the other literature in this study.1 Then, in 2011,
he published The Cat’s Table, a work – ostensibly of fiction – that saw
Ondaatje return to the roots of his own life as a transnational indivi-
dual, describing the trip made by an 11-year-old boy from 1950s Ceylon
to England in an almost exact representation of the journey made by
the author himself at that age. Rachel Bower, in reviewing the novel,
describes Ondaatje’s exploration of the ‘nascent potential’ of such a
journey, for both protagonist and author (Rooney et al., 2012, 105):
the adjective ‘nascent’, stressing the generative effect of Ondaatje’s
experience of travel, emphasises the often permeable border between
travel writing and transnational literature. Vikram Seth, meanwhile,
maintained the dual focus of the prose in An Equal Music with the 2005
biographical work Two Lives (see Chapter 2, n. 6): set in the same city
as his millennial novel, Two Lives features the mixing of genres that is
a transnational hallmark of both An Equal Music and From Heaven Lake,
along with a focus on several reactions to British Imperialism and the
aftermath of World War II. Recent years have also seen news of the
publication of A Suitable Girl, a work Seth describes as a ‘jump sequel’
(Collett-White, 2009, n.p.) to his 1993 epic novel A Suitable Boy. As this
description suggests, A Suitable Girl is a delayed continuation: the pro-
tagonist of the first novel, now in her seventies, decides to find a wife
for her grandson, in Seth’s words, ‘whether [the young man] is thinking
about it or not’ (Collett-White, 2009, n.p).2 Though this ‘jump’ is in
chronology rather than geography, the Indian settings are very different
spaces: A Suitable Boy is set in the uncertain political times of the decade
after Independence in 1947, while A Suitable Girl is focused sixty years
later, in a time of economic security in which India came third in a list
of global Gross Domestic Products (International Monetary Fund, 2013,
n.p.); the act of travelling between the two countries – one embryonic,
one reaching a political, economic peak – shows Seth’s investment in
ideas of movement and change.
Amitav Ghosh, first of the ‘Travelling On’ authors, is currently two-
thirds of the way through a series of historical novels called the Ibis
trilogy (see Chapter 3, Section I), which began in 2008 with Sea of
Poppies, a novel set in part aboard a nineteenth-century trading ship,
the eponymous Ibis, traversing the same Indian Ocean region on which
he focused in In an Antique Land. Not only are the characters populating
the Ibis – a ‘motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts’
(Ghosh, 2011a, n.p.) – thus literal markers of travel, they are metaphors
for processes of migration and travel, in the sense that they are them-
selves ‘move[d] across’ the Indian Ocean (compare the discussion of
Ondaatje in Chapter 1, Section II).3 The second part of the Ibis trilogy,
River of Smoke (2011), continued this concentration, and – focusing on
competing imperialisms in the run-up to the first nineteenth-century
Opium War between the British ‘barbarians’ and the Chinese ‘Celestial
Empire’ (Ward Fay, 1975, title)4 – further developed the author’s engage-
ment with global history that was in evidence in The Glass Palace: his
own online introduction to River of Smoke describes his latest novel as
‘on the grand scale of an historical epic’ (Ghosh, 2011b, n.p.). Finally,
Salman Rushdie’s fictional work since Fury has crossed time-periods – as
in the extensive narrative flashbacks of Shalimar the Clown (2005) – and
continents, seen in the oscillations between the respective examples
of ‘precarious life’ in the Kashmiri past and Los Angeles present of
this same novel (Morton, 2008, title), or the paralleling of Medici and
Mughal courtly life in the varying Italian and Indian sixteenth-century
settings of The Enchantress of Florence (2008).5 Moreover, questions of
travel and migrancy have not remained confined to his works of fiction,
as Rushdie has returned to the concept of exile – an understandable
preoccupation, given his personal history – with a volume of autobio-
graphy focusing on the time he spent in hiding after the Ayatollah
Khomeini’s fatwa: Joseph Anton (2012a; see Chapter 4, Section I, par-
ticularly n. 4).
Given the recurring presence of thoughts of travel and transition in
both the fictional and non-fictional works of all these authors, there is
a pressing need to acknowledge the continual interdependence of travel
writing and transnational literature. This is something that has been ena-
bled by the structure of this monograph, in its bivalent focus on the two
genres, and on two different manifestations of travel writing: early-career
and mid-career. The latter aspect of this binary format, however, opens
itself up to one question in particular: why is there this division between
‘Travelling Out’ authors, creating works of travel writing at the begin-
ning of their fiction-writing careers, and ‘Travelling On’ writers, whose
explorations of the genre occur significantly later? One answer is that this
differentiation, while ostensibly a useful one, suggests a separation where
none in fact exists: what Travel Writing and the Transnational Author has
shown is that there is an intertextual web of relationships between cer-
tain writers’ travelogues and their other work, regardless of chronological
position, that indicates the all-pervasive influence of travel writing on all
transnational authorship. Admittedly, this is a simplistic answer: there are
evidently marked differences between the two styles of authorship, not
least in the fact that the later positioning of the ‘Travelling Out’ trave-
logues involves a more direct political engagement that has ramifications
for these authors’ later works.6 Nevertheless, in spite of this increased
political engagement, the role of travel in an author’s writing career is
not, it seems to me, markedly altered by a difference in the travelogue’s
position: the strong interdependence of travel writing and transnational
literature overrides such chronological differences.
An acknowledgement of the strength of this relationship between
travel writing and transnational literature is particularly necessary
in the case of those authors, such as those on whom I have focused,

whose personal, national origins are described as ‘postcolonial’. While
postcolonial literary studies has seen an extensive period of growth
(see Introduction, Section I), this critical concern has in large part been
focused on the question of cultural representation. This is, admittedly,
an important consideration of mine in this book. A subject that has not
had such a degree of attention, however, is that of the lives and trav-
els of the authors under consideration – more particularly, the way in
which these authors’ lives inevitably influence the writing they produce.
Works of criticism such as the recent collection (2010) and monograph
(2012) by Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund (see my Introduction,
Section I) focus on the importance of this politicising relationship,
a focus that this monograph has continued. Travelogues, as I suggested
at the start of my Introduction in quoting Debbie Lisle, show authors
‘express[ing] political commitments’ in their position of ‘literary repre-
sentations of journeys across the globe’ (Lisle, 2006, 1): this means that
these authors’ other literary representations on a similarly global and
‘postcolonial’ scale must necessarily be connected with their works of
travel writing. Also, however, the privileged positions from which such
authors present their travel work complicates the attitudes to living and
writing exhibited by those from formerly colonised countries;7 in this
monograph, I have presented a reassessment of these authors that calls
into question received ideas about their ‘postcolonial’ literature – and,
thus, about ‘postcolonial literature’ in general.
I have written this book in the conviction that the way certain literary
works are presented – whether via commercial publication, through aca-
demic research, or in putting together educational reading lists – needs
reconsideration. The subjects of my individual chapters have all been
authors whose literary works have assured them substantial recognition
and acclaim: they are stalwarts of what might be termed a ‘postcolonial
literary canon’, and the ‘millennial’ works of transnational literature on
which I have focused have all been examples of this. Furthermore, as
I explored in the Introduction, the selection of these works has been a
calculated one; I have aimed to focus on a particular aspect of literature
at the turn of the third millennium CE that addresses both the endur-
ing problems of the late twentieth century and the transformative pos-
sibilities of the beginning of the twenty-first (compare McLeod, 2004,
162; see my Introduction, n. 7).8 These texts have not simply been
the latest movements forward in the writing careers of their respec-
tive authors, however: the later works’ dependence on the individual
authors’ travelogues indicates that a certain amount of retrospection is
also involved. The turn of the twenty-first century precipitated in these

particular authors both a reaching-back for earlier works of travel writ-
ing and a looking-forward towards a continuing period of postcolonial,
transnational popularity for themselves and their work.
What does this mean for our appreciation, analysis, and critique of
their work – and for the process of postcolonial ‘canonisation’, inherent
to the presentation of many such literary works? The influence of trave-
logues on the political, travel-inflected writing of transnational authors
continues to be felt, and any decisions about what is to be read – and why –
must take into account the shifting, symbiotic relationship between
travel writing and transnational literature. To paraphrase Guneratne,
transnational literature has always been on the move – in the cases of
the authors in this monograph, as they move into their fourth or fifth
decades of writing, this will continue to be the case. In appreciating this
progress, we need to remain aware that the link between the authors’
travel writings and their other works has significant consequences for
a critical appreciation of their respective oeuvres: each chronological
step forward also involves a certain degree of revisiting past work. This
oscillation must continue to be acknowledged; given the positioning
of these authors within a ‘postcolonial canon’, the centrality of their
travel-inflected writing requires of us as readers a rethinking of what we
understand by the term ‘canon’. Such a rethinking does not so much
involve a complete uprooting of the concept, as a reconsideration of
the way in which transnational authors are located within the canon –
an area that remains a dynamic field of enquiry, as is clear from several
recent essays, collections, and monographs interrogating the idea of
literary canon-formation, both generally (Grabes, 2008; Papadima,
Damrosch, and D’haen [eds], 2011) and from a specifically postcolonial
perspective (Menon, 2010; Sommer, 2011; Mukherjee, 2013).
The etymology of the word ‘canon’ suggests an ossified, regimented
body of work: both its origins in the idea of a rule (kanẃn) laid down by
the Christian Church and the accepted contemporary use of the term
‘canonical’ as a synonym for ‘fixed’9 contribute to the sense of formality,
establishment, and immutability inherent in the idea (Simpson et al.
[eds], 2013). Liviu Papadima’s etymologically focused introduction to
the subject expands on this:
According to dictionaries, a ‘cannon’ is a device usually employed to

break walls, whereas the slightly shorter word ‘canon’ seems to imply
the opposite. Built out of fragile and composite raw materials such
as rules, norms, measurements, conventions, names, judgments,
beliefs, contentions, and much more, with the help of sophisticated

machineries that include exegesis, gossip, salons, universities, maga-
zines, academies, encyclopedias, and publishing houses, aesthetic
canons are meant to make objects of art endure. (2011, 9)
The unspoken assertion in Papadima’s opening lines is that a ‘canon’

is concerned with building walls and erecting barriers – a point that
she later makes more explicitly, in referring to the ‘boundaries inher-
ent to the process of canon formation’ (2011, 16). What the authors in
this monograph have shown is that these divisions and obstructions,
whereby certain literary works are cut off from others and ‘ma[de to…]
endure’, have no place in the continuous, continual analysis of postco-
lonial literature: the inclusive, intertextual links between travel writing
and transnational literature ensures that these authors’ works – and
‘postcolonial literature’ more generally – require a constant process of
reconsideration, reconstruction, and re-evaluation.
Notes
Introduction
1. See Chapter 2, Section I.
2. Clingman’s ideas about transnational (fictional) literature are explored in
detail in Section IV of this chapter.
3. Complications of the monolithic idea ‘The West’ are presented by several
critics: Stuart Hall explains that ‘“the West” is a historical, not a geographical
construct. By “western” we mean […] a society that is developed, industria-
lized, urbanized, capitalist, secular, and modern […] Nowadays, any society
which shares these characteristics, wherever it exists on a geographical map,
can be said to belong to “the West”’ (1996, 186); Neil Lazarus asserts that ‘the
West’ is ‘an ideological category masquerading as a geographical one’ (2002,
44); and Timothy Brennan describes ‘the West’ as ‘a historical rather than a
geographical construct’ (2007, 43).
4. The first edition of Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts was published over
a decade after Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin were among the first to offer
an historical summary of the field: ‘The development of colonial discourse
theory, in the work of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, follow[ed] on
from Edward Said’s landmark […] Orientalism (1978)’ (1989, 197). My own
summary is by no means a comprehensive list, but traces one of numerous
trajectories through the subject.
5. Although this monograph is written from a literary-critical perspective,
Ang’s and Tölölyan’s analyses do of course raise ideas about other contem-
porary economic and political incarnations of the ‘transnational’ such as in
the term ‘TNCs’ (transnational corporations). Peter Gran’s 2009 study of the
world economy, for example, states that the ‘core meaning [of transnational-
ism] seems to be one based on the assumption of the existence of the TNC
as the embodiment of market autonomy and of economic rationality in that
market’ (2009, 13).
6. While Jameson’s piece, in the opinion of a review by Aijaz Ahmad, contains
‘quite numerous’ troubles in its suppression of ‘the multiplicity of significant
difference among and within both the advanced capitalist countries and the
imperialized formations’, and suffers from its ‘cultural location […as] a first-
world text’, it is ‘entirely salutary’ in its assertion that ‘the so-called literary
canon’ should not be based on ‘the exclusionary pleasures of dominant
taste but upon an inclusive and opulent sense of heterogeneity’; Jameson’s
appreciation of cultural diversity will always deserve acknowledgement in
such literary-critical discussions (Ahmad, 1987, 3, 24).
7. Anil’s Ghost (2000), An Equal Music (1999), and The Glass Palace (2000)
were all released in a sixteen-month period at the end of the twentieth
century, while Fury (2001) begins with an explicit focus on popular cultural
events of the summer of 2000; I thus use the adjective ‘millennial’ – here,
and throughout this book – in the sense defined as ‘of, relating to, or
198
Notes 199
characteristic of the latter years of the 20th cent[ury]’ (Simpson et al. [eds],
2013). The focus is not an arbitrary one: this chronological cluster indicates
a set of literary work similar to that which John McLeod, in a different con-
text, has described as a swathe of postcolonial artworks that offer ‘aesthetic
paths’ leading to a simultaneous consideration of both ‘enduring and emerg-
ing problems at the end of the twentieth century’ and ‘new possibilities and
modes of transformation at the beginning of the new millennium’ (2004,
162).
8. Though somewhat limited in its geographical scope (see Chapter 1, n. 6,
below), Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing is a good
place to start in this respect.
9. The respective schoolings of Ondaatje and Rushdie are covered in, for
example, Ed Jewinski’s Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully (1994)
and Bloom’s ‘Chronology’ of Salman Rushdie (Bloom [ed.], 2003). For those
unfamiliar with The Doon School, it is an independent establishment in
northern India run along male-only, English public school lines: early mas-
ters included former teachers at Eton College and Harrow School, England.
Doon is a self-proclaimed ‘institution of excellence’ with an ‘international
reputation’ that is ‘dedicated to producing leaders of the future’, to quote
from the school website. The narrator of an embedded video on the site
asserts even more strongly that Doon alumni are a class apart: addressing
a typical Doon pupil in a whimsical second person, presumably targeting
potential applicants, he explains that ‘there’s no explaining the pride you
feel in belonging to this unruly, eccentric, frequently brilliant community’.
10. For more information on the interesting and critically underexplored rela-
tionship between transnationalism and fe/male inequalities, see the follow-
ing: Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem (eds, 1999); Biemann (2002); Mohanty
(2003); Falicov (2007); and Marchand (2011).
11. These modes and ethics may in and of themselves possess a degree of privi-
lege, of course: the comfortably-well-off lifestyles of the four authors under
consideration are signalled by the freedom with which they have been able
to travel between countries, all their lives. This is yet another consideration
for a future class-centred analysis of these authors’ lives and works.
12. One branch of a British bookshop chain, until well into the 2000s, had
shelves labelled as follows: ‘General Fiction’, ‘Crime and Thriller’, ‘Science
Fiction and Fantasy’, and ‘Romance and Saga’. ‘Travel Writing’ was posi-
tioned on an adjacent wall, in between ‘Biography’ and ‘History’. For a genre
of literature built on Euro-centric, imperialist foundations, such a placement
is an unconscious legitimating of a factualising impulse of Empire; it displays
a neo-colonial need to present what is ostensibly a branch of creative litera-
ture, inflected by colonial models, as incontrovertible fact.
13. To take one example, Lisle asserts that Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway
Bazaar inaugurated the ‘modern “renaissance” of travel writing’ (2006, 2).
In Theroux’s text, the author’s journey through Asia – and thus the travel
writing that emerges, the book we hold in our hands – is funded by a series
of lectures he gives on the subject of ‘the American novel’. It is the very idea
of fiction that supports Theroux’s privileged position as a self-confessed ‘lazy
vulgar sybarite searching Asia for comfort’ (1977 [1975], 223). For more on
Theroux’s engagement with the genres of travel writing and fiction, on his
200 Notes
conception of ‘great [Anglo-American] literature’, and on the relationship

between this literature and the idea of the travelogue, see Lisle (2006, 50–54).
14. In contrast to the references of Rubiés to the officer class, a detailed account
of collaborative traditions among lower ranks on board ship (with reference
to a social, historical milieu rather than the creation of a literary text) is pro-
vided in Linebaugh and Rediker’s introduction to the idea of a seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century ‘hydrarchy’. A ‘hydrarchy’ describes a unification of
rank-and-file sailors or privateers amongst themselves: the ‘self-organization
of sailors from below’ (2000, especially 144, 162).
15. As well as references to the work of Pico Iyer, a travel writer of Indian parents
and British/US education living in Japan, there are analyses of the Indian
travel writing of V.S. Naipaul, and Gary Younge’s No Place Like Home: A Black
Briton’s Journey through the American South. Particularly relevant to Chapters
1, 3, and 4 of this book, there are references to both Running in the Family
and The Jaguar Smile, and a whole sub-section on In an Antique Land.
16. In spite of this focus on objective ‘Western’ travel writing, I remain aware
throughout this book – as, for instance, in referring to the Other Routes
anthology (see n. 8, above) – of the existence of travelogues written by
authors from these very objectified countries.
17. As well as the excellent analyses previously mentioned, there is a useful sum-
mary of the history of travel writing in James Duncan and Derek Gregory’s
‘Introduction’ to Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (1999).
18. Though this is a useful introduction, the Greek provided is slightly incor-
rect: the original is ‘diaspeírein’, or ‘diaspeirein’ (Simpson et al. [eds], 2013,
‘diaspora, n.’).
19. Although non-Euro-American visions of the ‘cosmopolitan’ take centre stage,
here, there have been important European contributions in the past decade
from Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande (2007 [2004]), David Harvey (2009), Robert
Spencer (2009, 2011), and Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (eds, 2010).
20. ‘We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic
connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin, 1975, 84).
21. Galtung’s comments build on a history of interdisciplinarity in peace studies,
from Richard Ned Lebow’s belief that ‘multi- and interdisciplinary research
is not only valuable but critical to peace and security studies’ (1988, 508)
to Paul Rogers and Oliver Ramsbotham’s assertion that a ‘central concern
with issues of peace and conflict’ requires ‘multi-disciplinarity […a] holistic
approach’ (1999, 742) and Alan Collins’s description of ‘Peace Studies [:]
a truly interdisciplinary field’ (2007, 5).
22. Debbie Lisle is one critic who picks up on this positioning of travelogues,
from the saturation of travel writing with ‘formal elements of other literary
genres’ to the fact that its practitioners are ‘handcuffed to the narration of
brute facts’, devoting a whole chapter to the blurring of boundaries between
fact and fiction in travelogues. (2006, 27–67) Also of note are Holland and
Huggan, cited by Lisle, on the fact/fiction interplay for the travel writer,
who often demonstrates ‘great erudition, but without seeing fit to respect
the rules that govern conventional scholarship’ (Holland and Huggan,
1998, 9, quoted in Lisle, 2006, 29). It is interesting to note that Lisle’s
reference to travel writers as ‘handcuffed to the narration of brute facts’
Notes 201
carries resonances of Salman Rushdie’s fictional Saleem Sinai’s description

of himself as ‘handcuffed to history’ (2010 [1981], 9): while Lisle’s analysis
is presented as a factual critique of literature and politics, she is not herself
immune to the pokings and proddings of literary metaphor.
23. For the reference to Sebald’s self-classification, see Clingman (2009, 32).
24. The point is one also made by James Clifford in the 1986 collection Writing
Culture, when he refers to ‘fictions in the sense of “something made or fash-
ioned,” the principal burden of the word’s Latin root, fingere’ (Clifford, 1986, 6).
25. The term ‘dwelling-in-travel’ is taken from a later work by James Clifford,
Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997, 2). While
the factual and fictive aspects of travel writing have long been a considera-
tion in analyses of the genre, my argument against the unhelpful erecting
of inflexible generic barriers is supported by a point made by Tim Youngs
in referring to the travel writing of ‘great explorers’ in the late nineteenth
century: ‘to call these texts non-fictional is to erect a barrier needlessly and
misleadingly between fiction and non-fiction. They may be quest romances
based on journeys actually undertaken, but the parallels with fictional
accounts of adventure are too close for there to be such a rigid distinction’
(Youngs, 1994, 9–10; emphasis added).
26. Theroux’s use of the metaphor of train travel to explain the medium in
which he writes supports Lisle’s point about the intertwining of style and
substance: ‘the narrative structure of travel writing is contained in the jour-
ney and vice versa’ (2006, 37).
27. A Google Scholar search in October 2013 using the terms ‘“Ghosh” ⫹ “In an
Antique Land”’ returned 718 hits; ‘“Seth” ⫹ “From Heaven Lake”’ pointed
to just 115 articles.
1 Michael Ondaatje: The ‘Prodigal–Foreigner’,

Reconstruction, and Transnational Boundaries
1. For more on the history of the island’s names, see E.F.C. Ludowyk on the
labels as ‘evidence of the familiarity of voyagers from all over the world with
this island’ (1966, 3).
2. The one non-European also has an imperialist connection: although Ptolemy
was ‘an Egyptian […] of Greek descent’, he was a citizen of the Roman Empire
(Encyclopædia Britannica, 2013).
3. For more on the relationship between Western imperialism and translation,
see Cheyfitz’s assertion that those in the developed world ‘must be in transla-
tion between cultures […] if we are to understand the dynamics of our impe-
rialism’ (1991, xvi). See Chapter 3 for more on processes of translation, both
linguistic and cultural.
4. Gerardus Mercator, mentioned by Ondaatje above (1984 [1982], 63), was a
European traveller and cartographer whose world map ‘project[ed] an image
[…] strongly reinforcing […] Europeans’ view of their own world hegemony’
(Harley, 1988, 290).
5. Here, as in the next chapter, I use pinyin transliteration of Chinese names in
English across the board, although some of the sources I quote employ other
spellings; de Silva, for example, refers to this particular traveller as ‘Fa Hsein’.
202 Notes
6. Faxian is the only traveller cited by de Silva in his description of the island’s
‘pre-history’, and it remains the case that accounts of pre-modern Sri Lankan
travellers are in short supply; a recent collection of the history of African and
Asian travel writing, to which I refer in my Introduction (nn. 8, 16), while it
purports to offer an alternative to European accounts of travel, and sets out
‘to illustrate that the world was “mapped” by non-European peoples as well
[as by Europeans]’, does not contain a single instance of either a Sri Lankan
author or a traveller writing about the country (Khair et al. [eds], 2006, 11).
7. ‘Balangoda man’, using the name Balangoda (a region in the island’s south)
to refer to prehistoric Sri Lankans, probably derives from the discovery
of paleo-anthropological remains there. In research on the subject, there
has always been some uncertainty, however: recent work refers to prehis-
toric islanders ‘popularly known as Balangoda Man’, but offers no further
explanation (Simpson, Kourampas, and Perera, 2008, 3; emphasis added).
R.B. Herath, earlier in the decade, was no more conclusive, asserting that pre-
historic finds ‘enabled archaeologists to build up a picture of what is generally
known as the “Balangoda cultures”’ (2002, 9; emphasis added). Earlier still,
Chelvadurai Manogaran accords ‘Balangoda man’ the status of a legendary
being ‘who roamed the country in prehistoric times’ (1987, 21; emphasis
added). The quasi-mythical ‘Balangoda man’ – of uncertain provenance,
ethnically disconnected, ‘roaming’ the land – is a fitting basis for Sri Lanka’s
history of contested national identity.
8. Another network in which Sri Lanka can be seen to be embedded is a religious
one: an account of the island’s transnational situation may also take account
of the early relationships between India and Sri Lanka via the medium of
Buddhism. These links, however, post-date the arrival of Aryan peoples, let
alone Sinhalese or Tamils; as de Silva asserts, ‘the early Aryans brought with
them some form of Braˉhmanism. By the first century BCE, however, Buddhism
had been introduced to the island, and was well established in the main areas
of settlement’ (1981, 9; emphasis added). Although I make brief reference to
ideas of Buddhism and iconography in Ondaatje’s later work below, a full
treatment of the numerous connections between Buddhism and conflict in
Sri Lanka lies beyond the scope of this book. Further reading on the subject
can be found in Tambiah (1992) and H.L. Seneviratne (1999).
9. Mukherjee, in her haste to castigate Ondaatje’s ethnocentricity, asserts that
in Running in the Family ‘we do not have any references to writers of Sri Lanka
or other Third World countries’, yet then describes what is, for her, ‘the
only redeeming feature of the book […:] the one stanza Ondaatje quotes
from a poem of [Sri Lankan poet] Lakdasa Wikkramasinha’ (1985, 51, 57;
emphasis added). The Wikkramasinha poem, moreover, ‘Don’t Talk to Me
about Matisse’, is not only used by Ondaatje as the title of an entire section
of the travelogue (1984 [1982], 61–101), but sets up a powerful meditation
on the several racial voices and competing imperialisms at play in his family
history.
10. Crucially, the visits on which Running in the Family is based took place before
the beginning of the most destructive phase of the Sri Lankan civil war. For
more on the situation in the 1980s and 1990s, see below, Section IV.i.
11. This quality, as I explore more fully in Chapter 2, is one that Ondaatje shares
with Seth.
Notes 203
12. For the original quotation about Billy the Kid..., see Sam Solecki, ‘An
Interview with Michael Ondaatje (1975)’ (Solecki [ed.], 1985, 13–27).
13. The disturbing nature of this, forcing together linguistically the concepts
of belonging and alienation, echoes Freud’s description of the literary
‘uncanny’: ‘The German word “unheimlich” is obviously the opposite of
“heimlich” [homely], “heimisch” [“native”] – the opposite of what is familiar;
and we are tempted to believe that what is “uncanny” is frightening pre-
cisely because it is not known and familiar’ (2001 [1919], 931). Ondaatje’s
unsettling prose represents his complex feelings of belonging in Sri Lanka;
the author is, at times, both metaphorically and literally ‘unheimlich’.
14. This section contains the only instances of poetry in the travelogue, as four
original poems are presented in succession; this sequence concludes with
‘The Cinnamon Peeler’, the only one of the four to be included in Ondaatje’s
later collections of poetry (1984 [1982], 87–97).
15. This is a device that Ondaatje often uses at the start of his work: Coming
through Slaughter (1984 [1976], 5), In the Skin of a Lion (1988 [1987], 1), Anil’s
Ghost (2000, 5–6), and Divisadero (2007, 1) all begin in this way. For more on
the italicised opening of Anil’s Ghost, see Section IV.ii below.
16. This absorption in the disciplines of his characters is supported by Ondaatje
in an interview given shortly after the publication of Anil’s Ghost: ‘what
people do is a way of getting close to how they think. […] So when I’m writ-
ing, there is a process of learning, which is the most interesting for me. […]
I want to know how a doctor works, or how a musician works’ ( Jaggi, 2000,
7). See also Milena Marinkova’s exploration of the ‘affective impact’ of
Ondaatje’s writing, that is ‘achieved through an aesthetic of multisensory,
fluid, and historically inflected writing’ (2011, 6).
17. The role played by the non-governmental organisation (NGO) in this work
is an interesting one: Anil, whose identity with respect to the country is
already a vexed one, has her prodigal–foreigner status former complicated
by the fact of her position as an outside observer. The NGO is not a key
feature of the work as a whole, though, which focuses more on the particu-
larities of wartime identities and relationships than on the position of Sri
Lanka in itself. The key adjective in a discussion of the novel is thus not
necessarily ‘global’ but ‘glocal’, a term that Cristina Şandru usefully employs
in her description of ‘a “glocal” imaginary that eludes any one source of
hegemonic worldliness’ (2010, 104). See also Lindsey Moore’s introduction
to the special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature on ‘Glocal
Diasporas’ (2010).
18. From the outset, Ondaatje juxtaposes an interrogation of the health of a
country with an investigation into its inhabitants’ bodies, a Foucauldian
collocation bringing together the politics of the body and the ‘body politic’.
See, especially, Foucault (1991 [1975]).
19. Although there is a gap of 18 years between the release dates of the two
works, the temporal setting of Anil’s Ghost, a full decade into the past, places
it much closer to Ondaatje’s own experiences in Sri Lanka – in Running in the
Family – than the bare facts of publication suggest.
20. In the months leading up to the 2009 armistice, the government faced
increasing pressure from both outside and inside the country to end the war,
yet its position of dominance over the Tamils meant those in power turned
204 Notes
a deaf ear to international calls for mediation and/or investigation: nearly a

decade after Anil’s Ghost, life continued, grimly, to mirror art.
21. It is Sirissa’s disappearance that leads the artist Ananda, in recreating the face
of a skeleton found by the scientists, to ‘reconstruct’ the peacefulness that he
so desperately wants to see in death. (See above, Section III.iii.)
22. I disagree with the number of central characters Davis suggests: while Anil,
Sarath, Sarath’s brother Gamini, and Ananda are all important narrative
voices, the perspective of Palipana, Sarath’s former archaeology teacher, is
not so essential. The first four are thus given prominence in my discussion.
23. Somewhat surprisingly, given her description of the detective as ‘a modern-
day knight whose quest is to unearth the truth of the crime’, Davis ignores
the gendered implications of an unthinking inclusion of Anil in this tra-
dition of – in Philip Marlowe’s self-description – the male, knight-errant,
‘shop-soiled Galahad’ (Chandler, 2005 [1942], 214).
24. Although ‘soldier’ might be considered a similarly well-travelled figure, in
the bounded location of Sri Lanka all seven characters other than ‘sailor’ are
tied to the land.
25. Conrad’s novella is the first text in Clingman’s study of transnational fiction,
with its focus on ‘sounding, reversal, connection, routes, [and] navigation’
(2009, 33).
26. Knepper’s wider analysis is inaccurate, as seen in her description of this man
as Anil’s ‘ex-husband Cullis’. Anil has in fact been married, to a control-
ling, jealous man whose name is not given, echoing the fact that once Anil
‘escaped him she would never say his name’ (2000, 144).
27. I borrow this term from Alison Sharrock, who defines it as ‘how parts relate
to parts, wholes, and holes’ (2000, 5).
28. While this is by no means an unexpected feature in a work of detective
fiction, the cultural dimensions of the intertwined narratives complicate a
classification of Anil’s story as a detective investigation.
29. Anil is nagged by a doubt about the fact that she had heard no dogs barking
near the truck; Kertzer explains this detail foregrounds the macabre nature
of what is to unfold, as it is a clue borrowed from a Sherlock Holmes story,
‘Silver Blaze’, in which the silence of a stable dog unlocks a story of murder
(2003, 126).
30. Amnesty International’s investigations into torture in Sri Lanka in the 1980s
found victims’ sufferings extended from beating, burning, and electric
shocks to ‘mock executions’ (Amnesty International, 1985, 2).
31. Jennifer Hyndman and Malathi de Alwis’s study of gender dynamics in war-
torn Sri Lanka supports my reading of Ondaatje’s work: in their analysis of
the interactions between people’s bodies and the country’s roads against a
backdrop of the fear and pain of war, the road is central to their understand-
ing of national identity in the country; more than simply an artery of trans-
port, the road is a ‘site of conflict, mobility, military/militant strategising
and logistical access’ (2004, 547).
32. Another link between hospital and hell is made when Anil arrives at the
Kynsey Road hospital where she is a ‘foreign celebrity’ (above, Section
IV.ii): a senior doctor yells at staff, calling them ‘devils’, and is described
as a ‘Cerberus’, linking this doctor with the mythological Latin and Greek
monster-dog at the gates of the underworld (2000, 24–25).
Notes 205
33. The word ‘hospital’ comes from medieval Latin ‘hospitaˉle’, ‘place of reception
for guests’, while ‘hospitable’ is derived from an almost identical source,
‘hospitaˉre’, ‘to receive as a guest’ (Simpson et al. [eds], 2013). A hospital is –
should be – a place into which patients/guests are welcomed, hospitably.
34. The ‘aspect[s]’ to which Ondaatje refers are social, political, geographical, or
meteorological portraits of the country.
35. The passage also calls to mind Anil’s later viewing of the maps on the wall
at the Archaeological Offices (2000, 146), to which I refer above, Section II.
2 Vikram Seth: The Performing Wanderer and

Transnational Disintegration
1. Gauri Shankar Jha is another critic to assert that the period in which Seth wrote
From Heaven Lake had a ‘substantial impact on his career of creativity’ (2008, 236).
2. The positioning of this work is particularly interesting, as Three Chinese Poets
is made up of a series of translations: the concept of translation, as I estab-
lish above (Introduction, Section III; Chapter 1, Section II) and explore in
greater detail below (Chapter 3), is central to the travelling, transitive selves
of transnational authors like Seth.
3. The evident sidelining of these other textual forms – poetry, beast fable, and
libretto – lies beyond the scope of this chapter.
4. See Chapter 1, Section III.ii, for an etymological unpacking of this word.
5. Seth won the 1985 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for The Humble Administrator’s
Garden; two years later, the CPP became the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize,
which A Suitable Boy won in 1994. He has asserted, though, that ‘the term
[“post-colonial”] is o.k. […] as an academic category, but for the person being
categorized (i.e. the writer), it’s best not to concentrate on it […] but to get
on with […] the complex and un-categorisable mesh of the story they’re
seeking to tell’ (HarperCollins Publishers, 2010).
6. The first words of From Heaven Lake are a declaration of Seth’s identity as
Indian (1983, p. xi), but the author is an evident fan of cross-cultural inter-
action: he is ‘a polymath (his nickname at [school] was “genius”) […who]
speaks not just English and Hindi but Chinese and German’ (Atkins, 2002, 9).
Seth’s German stems from time spent as a teenager with a German-speaking
great-uncle and aunt, documented – from English and German sources – in
the auto/biographical Two Lives (2005). The fragments of biographical text
reproduced in Two Lives thus exist in an interesting translational nexus:
‘most of [the] translations [are] by Seth himself […] neither into nor out of
his mother tongue, […] Hindi, but into his second language (English) from
a third one (German)’ (Rollason, 2010, 31).
7. Ahmet Gurata uses Awara – and its 1964 Turkish remake, Avare – as a case
study in a recent charting of the spread of Indian cinema in Turkey (2010);
outside the realm of film studies, the influence of the Kapoor movie per-
sists to this day, as a 2010 sampling of ‘Awara hoon’ by British–Asian artist
Kan D Man is just one of many recent rap/grime/hip-hop remixes of the
theme tune (Simplybhangra.com).
8. Although the constructions ‘prodigal–foreigner’ and ‘foreign friend’ are
fundamentally different – one is a structure of my own creation, the other
206 Notes
is a direct quotation – it is worth focusing on their similarities: not only do

they, on the face of it, suggest a see-sawing between national affiliations or
identities, but they put forward a complication of such an easy dichotomy.
Furthermore, in both terms a pair is presented in which the bringing
together of the two parts involves a change to those same constituents,
wherein the words (‘prodigal’ and ‘foreigner’, ‘foreign’ and ‘friend’) all alter
in meaning.
9. Barnett’s exploration of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques
Derrida leads him to ideas about ‘responsibility and responsiveness […and]
the reception of guests and generosity towards strangers’ that resonate pow-
erfully with my reading of Seth’s work (2005, 5, 6).
10. This xenophobia is reinforced by the fact that this encounter carries echoes
of an episode from Frantz Fanon’s seminal Black Skin, White Masks, in which
a French child reacts to the author’s appearance: ‘“Look, a Negro!” […]
“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!”’ (1986 [1952], 111–12).
11. The phenomenon of ‘passing’ for one of another race – most commonly
associated with politicised racial division in the United States – has tradition-
ally been employed in the Chinese context in order to, as one nineteenth-
century traveller has put it, ‘screen [one]self from observation’ (Chang,
2007, 32).
12. An added layer of performance is involved when we consider that the condi-
tions of Seth’s absence from his home may be radically different from those
of his interlocutor: while the other may have been forced, for political and/
or financial reasons, to leave his family, there is no sense in which the author
has suffered a similar fate; Seth is certainly not an ‘exile’ in Edward Said’s
terms, who has experienced ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human
being and a native place, between the self and its true home’ (2000, 173).
13. Trevor Field, writing about the use of the diary in fiction, challenges Riccio’s
reference to ‘the intimacy of poetry’ in describing this as ‘the most intimate
form of writing’ (1989, 154). Whether Seth’s intimacy is at this point real or
performed is a matter that is open for debate: publishing ‘“genuine”’ diaries
and letters sent from abroad has long been, after all, ‘an accepted literary
ploy found in many travel accounts’ (Batten, 1978, 23).
14. From the ‘Sixteen Articles’ of August 1966 (Yung Lee, 1978, 66).
15. Heinrich Harrer, who fled across the Himalayas from WWII incarceration
in northern India and spent 18 months trekking across Tibet, describes his
first sight of the ‘distan[t…] golden roofs of the Potala’ as a moment of great
spiritual feeling for his party: ‘this […] compensated us for much. We were
inclined to go down on our knees like the pilgrims and touch the ground
with our foreheads’ (1997 [1952], 111).
16. Seemita Mohanty observes that An Equal Music is ‘devoid of any ethnic or
multicultural presence, or any Indian content’ (2007b, 193), and Bhagabat
Nayak echoes this in the curious – and rather similar – assertion that it
is ‘a novel […] devoid of Indian ethics’ (2007, 209); both critics quote
L.K. Sharma’s reference to ‘an Indian locating a story in […] Hyde Park and
peopling it with non-Indian characters’. According to the Office for National
Statistics, 29.9% of the 1998–99 population of ‘Inner London’ were from
‘ethnic minority groups’ (‘Focus on London 2000’), a proportion that is
certainly not represented in An Equal Music.
Notes 207
17. It will be immediately clear from my emphasis on the structural dependencies

and careful construction of An Equal Music that I do not agree with
P.S. Sanyal’s assertion that ‘there is no system or plan behind [the] arbitrary
arrangement’ (2004, 26) of the novel.
18. This is also the first indication in the novel of an unsettling sense of time:
Michael says later that he has yet to visit Venice – it has ‘no history’ for him
(1999, 357) – which implies that this anguished cry of ‘not Venice’ in fact
post-dates the narrative it apparently introduces.
19. This punning homonym is not original to Seth: as early as Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs Dalloway (1925), the physician who recommends one of his own
mental health hospitals for the war veteran Septimus Warren Smith is called
Dr Holmes, prompting a punning reference from Septimus to ‘Holmes’
homes’. This is more than a simple piece of wordplay, as Bonnie Kime Scott
explains: ‘the original pun has the additional dimension of metonymy,
where Holmes becomes the architecture those of his profession have con-
structed to confine and convert mental and verbal disorder’ (1988, 378).
20. Julia reacts to this narcissism, when Michael reveals it to her, with biting
sarcasm. When she explains that the concert in Vienna will be the last time
she plays in an ensemble, he pleads with her, saying that he ‘can’t stand’
to hear her talk like this; her response turns Michael’s sentence on its head:
‘“You can’t stand it,” says Julia, with a touch of scorn’ (1999, 286; emphasis
original).
21. It is not only episodes from Seth’s work that are echoed in this episode: it
also has resonances of the opening of Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (see
Introduction, Section I), and of Rushdie’s dream about the ‘Jaguar Smile’
limerick (Chapter 3, Section II.iii).
22. As well as Balibar’s work, the twenty-first century has seen monographs such
as Andrea L. Smith’s (2006) and the reissued work of Dipesh Chakrabarty
(2008 [2000]), as well as an essay collection on ‘racism[,] postcolonialism[,
and] Europe’ (Huggan and Law [eds], 2009).
23. One critic describes An Equal Music as ‘a sensitive novel that has something
of the delicacy of a haiku’ (Iyer, 2007, 132).
3 Amitav Ghosh: Uncertain Translation and

Transnational Confusion
1. Although, as Chambers asserts, this connection is ignored by many practis-
ing ethnographers, it has long been a subject of critical study: predecessors of
her work include Diane Lewis’s 1973 article ‘Anthropology and Colonialism’,
Paul Rabinow’s 1986 chapter ‘Representations are Social Facts’, Graham
Huggan’s 1997 piece on ‘(Post)Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Magic
of Mimesis’, and a 2002 essay by Talal Asad, ‘From the History of Colonial
Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony’.
2. The uncertainty suggested by the use of ‘probably’ quickly disappears, as
Ghosh refers to the slave as ‘Bomma’ for the rest of the book. The author
follows this pattern throughout the work, as hypotheses about names, loca-
tions, and relationships give way to certainties. One example comes when
Ghosh muses on the language of communication between the Egyptian and
208 Notes
Indian merchant colleagues of Ben Yiju, the master of ‘Bomma’, which is

most likely a pidgin language, ‘possibly compounded largely of Perso-Arabic
and north Indian elements’; this atmosphere of speculation vanishes as
Ghosh proceeds to consider how Ben Yiju and his Indian wife Ashu ‘adapted
that argot to the demands of the marital bedroom’ (2000, 281; emphasis
added). Shirley Chew describes the reading of ‘Bomma’’s name as a ‘sleight
of hand […] undermin[ing] any pretence on Ghosh’s part to scholarly inter-
pretation’ (2001, 203).
3. Section II of my Introduction has a more complete list of critical work
from c. 1990 onwards on the subjects of travel, colonialism, and cultural
production.
4. As I am a non-Arabic speaker, I follow Ghosh’s lead in the use of diacritics
in transcribing names: in one of the many academic notes appended to
In an Antique Land, the author explains that he has tried to limit diacritic
transcriptions as much as possible, usually indicating the spelling of a word
or proper noun only on its first occurrence (1992, 357). The one exception
to this, in my case, is in representing the beginning of the first chapter of
Ghosh’s visit, in Section II.ii.
5. The proximity of this final visit to the outbreak of war in the region is,
however, called into question by the inaccuracies of Ghosh’s own memory.
Although his assertion that he left Calcutta for Cairo on 20 August 1990,
‘exactly three weeks’ after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1992, 349) only exag-
gerates slightly (the invasion in fact took place on the 2nd, 18 days earlier),
his reference to a football match between Egypt and Algeria ‘earlier in the
year’ (1992, 352) that had fatal consequences for Iraqi/Egyptian relations is
rather more inaccurate: the game took place on 17 November 1989. These
distortions of history enable Ghosh to present events with greater narrative
power – by making the temporal differences neater, for example, or by com-
pressing occurrences into a shorter space of time. (A chronology of the war
is provided in Bennett and Paletz [eds], 1994; for details of the football
match, see ‘FIFA.com – 1990 FIFA World Cup Italy™’, 2013.)
6. As well as covering the whole of this period, In an Antique Land bears numer-
ous intertextual debts to Ghosh’s DPhil thesis, ‘Kinship in Relation to the
Economic and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community’;
though this was not published, it was written in 1981, a year before Running
in the Family, and two years before From Heaven Lake. Neelam Srivastava has
written the definitive account of the relationship between thesis and text,
arguing that ‘In an Antique Land is effectively a rewriting of the ethnographic
material of the thesis […which] is transformed by an emphasis on the inter-
subjective and narrative aspects of the cultural account’; In an Antique Land
is ‘a completely different re-elaboration of the fieldwork [Ghosh] did in
[Lataifa and] Nashawy’ (2001, 45, 59).
7. See, for example, the sections of The Shadow Lines (1988) that focus on World
War II, the Partition of India, and rioting in Dhaka in the 1960s; or the nar-
rative strands of The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) that deal with the Victorian
scientist Ronald Ross.
8. Shirley Chew, for example, describes 1498, the date on which de Gama
arrived at the Malabar coast, as ‘a key date in In an Antique Land’ (Chew,
2001, 203).
Notes 209
9. This essay is the precursor to the 1997 monograph, Routes, which starts with
an analysis of In an Antique Land.
10. See my Introduction, Section III, for further reflections on the troubling
usages of the term ‘cosmopolitan’.
11. This is unsurprising. Chambers, for one, suggests that while Ghosh ‘is quite
successful in bringing out the tensions between different social classes’ in
Nashawy, his ‘treatment of gender is […] somewhat less perceptive’ (2006, 13);
and even his attitude to class is questioned by Inderpal Grewal: ‘the difficulty
of reclaiming medieval history as postcolonial cosmopolitanism’ is revealed
by ‘the construction of gender and class in Ghosh’s text’ (2008, 187).
12. The full passage to which I refer reads: ‘The archive of anthropology is a
shadow presence in the chapters that follow. That is not because it is inher-
ently better than some other disciplinary archive. Indeed, critiques of this
archive have been trenchant and untiring in the past fifteen years’ (Appadurai,
1996, 11). Appadurai, writing in 1995/96, thus places the first year of Ghosh’s
Egyptian research as a turning-point in the history of anthropology.
13. Ghosh’s ignoring of the violence inherent in both the terms ‘settle’ and
‘civilize’ illustrates the romanticising attitude to the city demonstrated at
this point in his writing.
14. See also Ghosh’s interview with Chambers, in which he asserts that Boswell
‘had an enormous impact on [him] because Life of Johnson is all conversa-
tions; that’s how the whole book is constructed’ (Chambers, 2005, 28).
15. This dislocated ‘I’, coming as Ghosh refuses to watch Mustafa, raises the
homonymic issue of disturbed vision: the dislocated ‘eye’. This echoes the
‘sight’/‘site’ puns Mondal sees in Ghosh’s accounts of visits to ‘sites’ of interest –
a temple and houses in Mangalore, an Egyptian shrine – entailing failures
of ‘sight’: ‘Ghosh offers an opening into those cultural practices which do
not privilege the visual, and sometimes even see the “eye” as the […] most
deceptive of organs’ (2008, 81). See also Mary Louise Pratt’s discussion of ‘the
(lettered, male, European) eye that […] could familiarize (“naturalize”) new
sites/sights’ (1992, 31).
16. As Humayun Ansari explains, in an article on Muslim practices in Britain:
‘for the vast majority of Muslims, death and the afterlife are central tenets
of faith. Because of their belief in corporeal resurrection, burial is normally
the prescribed mode of disposal, and mainstream Islamic traditions prohibit
cremation’ (2007, 548).
17. It is noteworthy that so much of Ghosh’s time is spent in the fields, although
not many of his (literal) ‘fieldwork’ questioning sessions are successful: in
the travelogue, Ghosh opens up an irony wherein being ‘in the field’ is asso-
ciated with ‘failing to complete fieldwork’.
18. While I would not presume to correct Ghosh’s Arabic, Ahdaf Soueif asserts that
the author ‘ought […] to have got the Egyptian word for nargila or hubble-
bubble right […] write out one hundred times “shisha”’ (2004 [1993], 231).
19. As Srivastava explains, this scene, already a fictionalisation of sorts, has
already been further fictionalised by Ghosh: the episode occurs ‘in the same
year and place where [the protagonist] Tridib is killed in [Ghosh’s 1988
novel] The Shadow Lines’ (2001, 55). Where Srivastava implicitly approves
of Ghosh’s summary, quoting verbatim Ghosh’s assertion about Egyptians
failing to comprehend Indian experience as a result of ‘the heavy memory
210 Notes
of Partition and its attendant tragedies’, I feel it is necessary to question his

assumption: as I explain, Ghosh’s somewhat sanitised experience of the riots
undermines such assumed moral superiority.
20. Patricia Krus, reflecting on Hélène Cixous’s explication of the word, asserts
that the term originated in French anti-Protestant political discourse of the
eighteenth century; ‘the word [“refugee”] is historically linked to persecu-
tion and conflict’ (2007, 124).
21. Except for a single reference to Burma as ‘Myanmar as it [is] now called’
(2000, 501), Ghosh refers to the country throughout The Glass Palace as
‘Burma’. This does not evoke the same sense of the past as Ondaatje’s refer-
ences to ‘Ceylon’, however (see Chapter 1, Section III.i); Ghosh’s language
is not another piece of linguistic nostalgia. While the official name was
changed to ‘Myanmar’ on the 1989 orders of the military government, this
was not accepted by all parties; there has been ‘considerable dispute over the
historical uses of either “Burma” or “Myanmar”’, rendering the use of the
‘official’ term politically and historically contentious (Steinberg, 2001, xi).
I follow Ghosh, and refer to ‘Burma’ throughout this chapter.
22. Urquhart’s description of The Glass Palace as ‘a Doctor Zhivago for the Far East’
(see this chapter, Section I), thus does Ghosh’s work a disservice in terms of the
period covered: while Boris Pasternak’s epic novel does conclude years after the
title character’s death, with a text written by Yuri Zhivago being read by char-
acters who are ‘removed from the period in which [Zhivago] wrote not only by
literal decades but also by enough upheaval to fill several generations’ (Avins,
1995, 61), the Russian novel barely covers the first half of the twentieth century;
compare this with the 111 years – and four generations – of The Glass Palace.
23. I refer to Dey’s identity as one of Indian descent who had been ‘to Cambridge
[and] returned a minor hero, having been accepted into the grandest and most
powerful imperial cadre, the Indian Civil Service’ (2000, 158; emphasis added).
Dey’s favourite composer is the Austrian Schubert, and he wishes to share with
his wife a Western world of literature and art: he is an Anglicized Indian, or
‘Indo-Anglian’, rather than an ‘Anglo-Indian’ of European descent. For more
on the term ‘Indo-Anglian’, which I take from a literary context, see Anuradha
Dingwaney Needham’s description of the ‘Indo-Anglian novel’ as a ‘peculiarly
hybrid cultural/textual form […] written in English by writers […] from, or at
least originally from, the [Indian] sub-continent’ (1988–89, 614).
24. As elsewhere in this chapter (see nn. 21 and 34), I adopt Ghosh’s name for
the country, preferring historical/narrative verisimilitude (Malaya) over cur-
rent political accuracy (Malaysia and/or Singapore).
25. Describing ‘L’Exposition coloniale’ in Paris, a quarter of a century after the
Cambodians’ visit, Patricia Morton explains the organisers ‘understood this
exposition as a didactic demonstration of the colonial world order, based on
cooperation among the colonizing powers and the West’s responsibility to
continue colonization and its good works’ (2000, 3; emphasis added).
26. In spite of the orthographical correspondence in English transcription,
there is no suggestion in the classic comparative linguistic studies of C.J.F.
Smith Forbes (1881) or Pe Maung Tin (1922), nor in the more recent work
of Myint-U (2001), that there is an etymological connection between the
Burmese word for ‘foreigner’, given here as ‘kala/kalaa‘, and the Hindi/Urdu
word for ‘black’, also transcribed in English as ‘kala’.
Notes 211
27. According to Myint-U, the spellings – ‘kala’ and ‘kalaa’ – are interchangeable;
both referred, in nineteenth-century Burma, to ‘an “overseas person”, a person
from south Asia, west Asia or Europe and probably insular south-east Asia
as well. It included the English, the French, the Armenians, the Jews, and
all the various people of the sub-continent with whom the Burmese were
familiar. […The] English were simply termed the English Kala (Ingaleit kala)’
(2001, 89–90).
28. IPA transcriptions – and any faults therein – are my own.
29. For more on the link between the relative spreads of colonialism and
Christianity in India, see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial
Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (1999) and Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault
Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (2002). For more
recent reflections on ‘the relationship between Christianity and the political
sphere’ in India, see Srivastava, 2008, 81.
30. For Ghosh, the weaving of threads has always been a central metaphor for
writing; witness his description of the cloth-weaver’s loom as a ‘dictionary-
glossarythesaurus’ (1986b, 74). Ghosh, with his background in anthropology
and his command of several languages, is no doubt aware of the origins of
the English word ‘text’ in the Latin textus, literally ‘that which is woven,
web, texture’ (Simpson et al. [eds], 2013).
31. Though I do not pursue this line of enquiry, critics such as Ato Quayson and
Clare Barker offer compelling analyses of the roles of disabled characters in
postcolonial fiction. (See Quayson on ‘the presence of disabled people in
post-colonial writing [that…] marks the sense of a major problematic […]
nothing less than the difficult encounter with history itself’ [1999, 65–66].
More recently, Barker develops these ideas in arguing for greater recognition
of the fact that ‘postcolonial writing […] frequently engages with disability
as an ontological and socially contextualized phenomenon’, particularly
with respect to disabled child narrators, who ‘function as “prosthetic” char-
acters, narrative ciphers who lend visceral, embodied weight to the authors’
commentaries on postcoloniality’ [2011, 3, 24].)
32. Later in the novel, Dinu lives in an apartment containing ‘rows of glass-
fronted bookcases’ (2000, 507). The contents of these are not mentioned,
however.
33. This occurs, appropriately enough, at the same moment as Ghosh uses the
word ‘ellipsis’ to refer to an elliptical shape, a usage that is described in the
dictionary as ‘now rare’: the last recorded instance of ‘ellipsis’ used to mean
‘ellipse’ is 1857 (Simpson et al. [eds], 2013).
34. Although Ghosh uses the name ‘Burma’ throughout the novel (see above, n.
21), it is interesting that he chooses the military government’s ‘official’ name
of ‘Yangon’ to refer to the Burmese city that historians such as Myint-U refer
to exclusively as ‘Rangoon’.
4 Salman Rushdie: Political Dualities and

Imperial Transnationalisms
1. While none of Rushdie’s most famous compositions in the field of advertis-
ing straplines demonstrates a proclivity for focusing on travel or migrancy,
212 Notes
his own description of his dual writing background – in both paid and
(initially) unpaid creative writing – makes reference to Homer’s mythical
exploration of the idea of a travelling, wandering identity, the Odyssey: ‘The
sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus
lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course’
(2010 [1981], xi).
2. Catherine Cundy, in her essay on Grimus, highlights this early work’s explo-
ration of an area ‘subsequently handled with greater depth and maturity
in Rushdie’s later work – ideas of […] the problems of exile’; referring to
Timothy Brennan’s analysis of the novel, she also describes one of Flapping
Eagle’s journeys as a ‘representation of the social climbing of the emigrant’
(1996, 12, 19).
3. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, the 25th anniversary
‘Booker of Bookers’ Prize in 1993 and the 40th anniversary ‘Best of Booker’
Prize in 2008 (BBC News, 2008). The novel also won the James Tait Black
Memorial prize in 1981 (‘James Tait Black | Previous Winners | Fiction’, 2010).
4. Rushdie explores his experience of spending nearly a decade in hiding after
the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence (for the full text of which, see
Chase, 1996, 375) in Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012a), which takes its name
from the pseudonym under which Rushdie lived between 1989 and 1998.
The historical and cultural background to the fatwa has been explored
by several critics, and from numerous perspectives: Ziauddin Sardar and
Merryl Wyn Davies, as early as 1990, asserted that the ‘Rushdie affair’, as
it quickly became known, ‘has a long history, an emotionally charged pre-
sent, and could, unfortunately, have a devastatingly long future’ (1990, 3);
Daniel Pipes, writing in the same year, but in a text revised after the end
of the fatwa, wrote about the ‘lasting impact on relations between [the]
Muslim diaspora and its host population’ (2003 [1990], 18); more recently,
Kenan Malik has described how the ‘affair’ was ‘the moment at which
a new Islam dramatically announced itself as a major political issue in
Western society’ (2009, 3).
5. The Satanic Verses received a large degree of critical acclaim: as well as being
shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize, it won the 1988 Whitbread Award for
novel of the year (British Council Literature, 2011). Moynagh, building on
Timothy Brennan’s work on ‘the Rushdie affair’, asserts that ‘the substantial
portions of The Satanic Verses that satirize the imperialist nostalgia of post-
imperial Britain, that are pointedly critical of the anti-democratic impulses
of neo-liberalism, have been lost to the “affair”, displaced by the book’s
parody of Islam’ (2008, 211).
6. See also the author’s initial notes for The Satanic Verses, reproduced in a
recent article: ‘The act of migration […] puts into crisis everything about the
migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and
culture and belief. So if [The Satanic Verses] is a novel about migration it must
be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes’
(2012b, n.p.).
7. Rushdie was sent to England – and Rugby School – in 1961, at the age of 14
(Cundy, 1996, xv); as explored above (Introduction, n. 9), this education can
be compared with that of Ondaatje, who was sent to England and attended
Dulwich College at the age of 11, some years earlier ( Jewinski, 1994).
Notes 213
8. A Google Scholar search in October 2013 for criticism on the author’s

major works of fiction, up to and including Fury, gave the following results:
‘“Rushdie” ⫹ “Grimus”’, 448 results; ‘“Rushdie” ⫹ “Midnight’s Children”’,
2860; ‘“Rushdie” ⫹ “Shame”’, 7130; ‘“Rushdie” ⫹ “The Satanic Verses”’,
6500; ‘“Rushdie” ⫹ “The Moor’s Last Sigh”’, 658; ‘“Rushdie” ⫹ “The Ground
Beneath Her Feet”’, 677; ‘“Rushdie” ⫹ “Fury”’, 2930. While it would appear
that the criticism of Fury is in line with the quantity generated by the novels
of the 1980s, these 2930 results are skewed both by the later writing of the
novel (and its consequent appearance in reprints of earlier texts) and by the
use of a single-word title. Two of the first three hits, for example, are a link to
the 2012 e-book re-issue of the 1992 essay collection Imaginary Homelands –
which includes Fury in the list of publications – and a reference to The
Ground Beneath Her Feet, a novel in which the lone word ‘fury’ appears half-
a-dozen times.
9. As Nick Cohen explains, in an article that uses the critical response to the
fatwa as a form of political, ethical litmus test, the protests had ‘chilling
effects’, both for Rushdie and for the editors and translators with whom he
worked, worldwide (2013, n.p.). Rushdie explains in his memoir, through
the somewhat melodramatic device of third-person narration, just how
much of an effect it had on his life: ‘Afterwards, when the world was explod-
ing around him […] he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the
name of the BBC reporter […] who told him that his old life was over and a
new, darker existence was about to begin’ (2012a, 3).
10. An October 2013 Google Scholar search using the terms ‘“Rushdie” ⫹ “The
Jaguar Smile”’ returned just 203 hits.
11. Although the fatwa has never been revoked by those in power in Iran – and
thus is still technically in effect – it was at least toned down in a statement
released in September 1998 by the Iranian Foreign Minister, who ‘publicly
divorced his Government […] from the death threat’ (Crossette, 1998, n.p.).
12. This was not Rushdie’s first trip abroad of the decade, nor was it his first jour-
ney with literary – and travel writing – connections: as Cundy explains in
her ‘Chronology’ of the author, in 1984 Rushdie travelled ‘through Central
Australia with the writer Bruce Chatwin’ (1996, xv). The travel writer was a
close friend of Rushdie; coincidentally, the author explains that he attended
a memorial service for Chatwin on the day that news of the fatwa broke,
14 February 1989 (Rushdie, 2012b, n.p.).
13. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, in his chapter on the recent history of the country in
the Cambridge History of Latin America, reflects on the postcolonial irony of
the consequences of Sandino’s protest movement, arising from the fact the
United States employed the ‘supposedly non-partisan’ Nicaraguan National
Guard to fight Sandino’s forces, the Ejérjito Defensor De la Soberanía Nacional
de Nicaragua (EDSN): ‘Sandino’s goal of defending national sovereignty had
to be achieved by Nicaraguans killing Nicaraguans – a position which under-
lined the difficulty of prosecuting a nationalist cause in a country where
the imperialist power could rely on national agents to defend its interests.’
(1990, 326).
14. My history of Nicaragua is taken from Bulmer-Thomas’s chapter (see previ-
ous note), and Clifford Staten’s comprehensive volume on Nicaraguan his-
tory (2010). Staten describes the beginnings of US Nicaraguan involvement
214 Notes
in the late nineteenth century, US occupation of the country between 1912

and 1933 ‘that left a legacy of overt intervention’, the ‘close ties’ between
Somoza’s regime and US presidents from Roosevelt to Carter, and the involve-
ment of the US administration in ‘remov[ing] the Sandinistas from power […]
Reagan’s primary goal’ in Nicaragua in the 1980s (2010, vii, 2, 51, 115).
15. Florence Babb, in her discussion of post-revolutionary, postcolonial, ‘political
tourism’, offers further context: ‘The Sandinista victory in 1979 drew
another class of travellers to Nicaragua. Journalists, artists and writers, engi-
neers, and activists of many backgrounds made their way to the country,
often in delegations, from the United States and elsewhere. Some stayed for
a time and wrote books based on interviews with militants and celebrated
figures’ (2010, 44).
16. This argument, stressing the extent to which there is a definite separation in
Rushdie’s work between his ‘postcolonial’ self-assertions and his background
in the Western establishment, is, of course, not a new one – see Graham
Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic for the clearest explanation of the ‘staged
marginalities’ in the work of authors such as Rushdie (2001, especially
83–104), and Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary
Marketplace for an analysis of the ‘collapsing of distinctions’ in Rushdie’s
work ‘between the private self and the public text’ (2007, 107).
17. Moynagh’s words here can be compared with my argument about the
authors in this monograph: Ondaatje’s reconstruction (Chapter 1, Section
III.iii), the performances of Seth’s travel (Chapter 2), and Ghosh’s attitude
towards the fellaheen (Chapter 3, Section II.i and others).
18. Quotations in this chapter are from Fury: A Novel by Salman Rushdie.
Published by Jonathan Cape; reprinted by permission of The Random House
Group Limited.
19. Solanka’s explanation of the original name for these Greek goddesses
provides a further manifestation of the duality that surfaces throughout
Rushdie’s work: the ancient Greeks were so afraid of ‘their most ferocious
deities’ that they refused to use the accurate name ‘Erinnyes’ (‘Furies’), for
fear of inciting ‘these ladies’ lethal wrath’; as a result, ‘with deep irony, they
called the enraged trinity “the good-tempered ones”: Eumenides’ (2001, 123).
20. Brouillette refers to several negative reviews of Rushdie’s novel, as well
as to John Sutherland’s piece in support of Fury, ‘Suddenly, Rushdie’s a
Second-Division Dud’, which decries those critics who jumped to denigrate
Rushdie’s novel before it had even been released in the shops, and ends with
the line ‘Shame on you, British book trade, shame on you British reviewers’
(2001, n.p.).
21. My own understanding of the historical background to events in Fiji in the
late 1990s – which came to a head in 1999/2000, in the period about which
Rushdie is writing – is heavily supplemented by a source used by Brouillette:
the collection Coup: Reflections on the Political Crisis in Fiji (Lal and Pretes
[eds], 2008 [2001]). One of the two editors of the volume is the historian Brij
Vikash Lal, a prominent figure in the Fijian media who knew personally the
leader of the 2000 coup, George Speight.
22. This is not strictly the beginning of the travelogue, but even the opening
– the aforementioned ‘HOPE: A PROLOGUE’ – begins by making reference to
the author’s direct experience of the Nicaraguan diaspora: the purchase of
Notes 215
the London house next door to Rushdie’s own by the wife, the ironically
named ‘Hope’, of the Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1997
[1987], 3).
23. The term ‘Amerindian’ is itself a Western misnomer, as it is a combination
of ‘America’, the European name for the landmass between the Pacific and
Atlantic Oceans, and ‘Indian’, a fallacious description of the native peoples
based on the mistaken belief of Christopher Columbus (see above) that,
in landing on Caribbean soil, he had in fact traversed the globe and made
it to the ‘lands of the Great Khan’. This represents ‘the ironies of colonial
representation’ (Chamberlin, 1993, 5): Columbus was convinced of the pos-
sibility of finding ‘a route to India by a western navigation’, and ‘continued
to assert his belief […] after the discovery of Cuba and Hispaniola [Haiti and
the Dominican Republic]; not doubting that these islands constituted some
part of the eastern extremity of Asia: and the nations of Europe, satisfied
with such authority, concurred in the same idea. Even when the discovery
of the Pacific ocean had demonstrated his mistake, all the countries which
Columbus had visited still retained the name of the Indies’ (Edwards, 1805,
vol. I, 2–3; emphasis added).
24. The etymology of ‘cosmos’ returns in Fury, when Malik Solanka refers to
a ‘creative cosmos’ surrounding his various creative projects (2001, 190):
cosmos is much more than an adornment; it is an element of fundamental
order, and the origin of creativity.
25. The painter’s famous Argentine revolutionary namesake provides the definitive
introduction to the subject of guerrilleros and guerrilla warfare (Guevara, 1961).
26. Another meeting of East and West presented via the medium of clothing
occurs when Rushdie encounters the children of the president, who wear
‘Masters of the Universe’ t-shirts, featuring the ‘eternal battle of He-Man
and Skeletor; another indication of the omnipresence of US culture’ (1997
[1987], 36). This reference to the ubiquity of US culture, as well as the
paradoxical collocation of ideas of fatal conflict and children’s cartoons, will
return in Fury (see this chapter, particularly Section III.iv).
27. In an intertextual link with Fury, Rushdie gives this poet’s name to an elderly
‘diva’ Malik Solanka sees performing in a Cuban bar in New York, Doña
Gioconda (2001, 172).
28. This mirrors the first chapter of the work (see above, n. 21). Starting with a
figure embodying the pro-US dictatorship of the pre-revolutionary years, and
finishing with one who criticizes the easy conflation of the terms ‘United
States’ and ‘America’, The Jaguar Smile is bookended by chapters named after
Nicaraguan women with very different attitudes towards national identity.
29. Rushdie’s work has long focused on particular linguistic acrobatics, from
the anagrams ‘provid[ing] the basic framework’ of his first novel, Grimus
(Parameswaran, 1994, 37) to the example of the novel that ‘exhausts itself
in facile wordplay’, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Gonzalez, 2005, 155).
30. My use of ‘initialism’ in preference to ‘acronym’ is in deference to David
Crystal, who observes a distinction between the two such that initialisms
‘reflect the separate pronunciation of the initial letters of the constituent
words’, while acronyms are ‘pronounced as single words’ (2003, 1).
31. This is a Eurocentric reference to the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
break-up of the Balkan peninsula in Eastern Europe, once part of the
216 Notes
Ottoman Empire: a region with history ‘dominated by the theme of national

revolt and the formation of new governments’ ( Jelavich, 1983, 171).
32. The precise height fallen by the characters in The Satanic Verses was, until
the 1950s, thought to be the height of Mount Everest; the reason for this
apparently outdated reference in a narrative focusing on 1980s immigration
is that ‘the height of Mount Everest, 29,002 feet, was compulsory knowledge
for geography students in the [British] colonies’ (Mishra, 2007, 262). The two
Indian entrants into 1980s Britain – falling the exact measurement drilled
into thousands of colonial subjects, across the British Empire – act as meta-
phors for the imperialist and racist subjugation clear in the rest of the text.
33. Celera Genomics has the mildly disturbing agenda of ‘personalizing disease
management’. While this presumably indicates an intention to tailor disease
management processes to the company’s individual customers, the juxtapo-
sition of the words ‘personalizing’ and ‘disease’ is a strange and uneasy one
for a health organisation to adopt.
34. This provides another link with the writing of Michael Ondaatje, whose
engagement with myth is clear at various points in his work (see Chapter 1,
especially Section IV.iii); moreover, Ondaatje’s use of Christian iconography
alongside Greek myth is another link with Rushdie’s travel writing (see this
chapter, Section II.ii).
35. For an interesting take on the Orientalist tendencies of one of these DeMille
films, see Sarah Hatchuel on Cleopatra (2011, 135 ff.); also, Alan Nadel’s
political reading of The Ten Commandments ‘as a product of Cold War ideol-
ogy’ (1993, 416) chimes with the political engagement of Rushdie’s writing
about the imagined/real ‘Lilleput–Blefescu’/Fiji conflict.
36. The opening line of the novel introduces him as 55 years old in the early
summer of 2000, meaning he was born at least two years before Indian
Independence in August 1947.
37. On métissage, see Françoise Vergès’s definition of the term as one ‘that
spoke of the cultural and social matrix of diversity born of colonization and
assimilation into the colonial project’ (1999, 8); the common use of ‘melting
pot’ is clear in the full title of Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish
Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1998).
38. The centrality of India is highlighted when Solanka, towards the end of the
novel, gets a flight from New York to the South Pacific, with a stopover in
Bombay (Rushdie’s name, indicating Solanka’s existing connections with
the city of ‘Mumbai’, which changed its name from ‘Bombay’ in 1995).
Solanka’s traumatic relationship with India, that leaves him feeling ‘giddy,
asphixiated’, and refusing to disembark with the other passengers, derives
from the sexual abuse he suffered during his childhood, so this stopover
is significant; also, however, it can never have happened. Though Rushdie
describes a flight east, across Atlantic and Pacific – dwelling on this direction,
as to fly east is to ‘hurtle towards the future’ (2001, 236) – the journey would
in fact have been in the other direction, via LAX in California (about 8,000
miles, rather than nearly 16,000): Rushdie’s departure from geographical fact
indicates how deeply ingrained is Solanka’s negative attitude towards his
country of birth.
39. Solanka makes reference to the poem later in the novel, when he describes
the ‘brave new world’ of technological development into which he is
Notes 217
launching his ‘Puppet-Kings’ dolls (2001, 225): his creations are ‘slouching
towards Bethlehem to be born’ (Yeats, 1989 [1950], 187).
40. The link with cartoons is also foregrounded in The Jaguar Smile, in which
Rushdie notices satirical cartoon graffiti on a wall in Managua that portrays
a close relationship between deferential Nicaraguan politicians and the
patronising figure of ‘Uncle Sam’ (1997 [1987], 80).
Conclusion
1. The ambivalences of transnationalism are encoded in the very title of the
novel, which takes its name from Divisadero Street, San Francisco, home of
one of the characters, Anna: the history behind the name ‘Divisadero’ is never
clear, for as soon as it is said to come ‘from the Spanish word for “division”’
because of its historical positioning as the dividing line between the urban and
the rural, Anna asserts that there is an alternative, as the name ‘might derive
from the word divisar, meaning “to gaze at something from a distance”’, in
honour of a nearby hill (Ondaatje, 2007, 142). This tension between division
and distance persists throughout the novel, which is in large part the story of
Anna’s life as an academic, studying a writer’s work and struggling to come to
terms with a traumatic past; the protagonist acknowledges the constant pres-
ence of duality in her life and work immediately after the discussion of the
street’s name, describing herself as ‘look[ing] into the distance for those [she
has] lost’ (Ondaatje, 2007, 143).
2. Although the author’s ‘jump sequel’ was scheduled for publication in 2013,
in July 2013 he was in ‘delicate negotiations with his publisher’ as it became
clear that ‘Seth’s muse [was] not dancing to the publisher’s marketing beat’
(Bury, 2013, n.p.): having received a $1.7m advance for A Suitable Girl, Seth
had failed to deliver the manuscript on time.
3. In considering the status of these people-as-metaphors, also compare Rushdie’s
description of migrant peoples as those who ‘have been translated […]
enter[ing] the condition of metaphor’ (Chapter 4, Section I).
4. Building on Peter Ward Fay’s presentation of these nineteenth-century Sino–
British conflicts, Daniel R. Headrick provides an instructive summary of the
imperialist tensions leading to the first Opium War: ‘what the British traders
called free enterprise was smuggling and piracy to the Chinese officials, and
what was law enforcement to [the officials] the traders saw as unjustified and
whimsical interference’ (1979, 240).
5. As one reviewer put it, The Enchantress of Florence portrays ‘a synchronous
world of parallel realities in which the seeds of secular humanism flower […]
twice – once in northern Italy and simultaneously in northern India’
(Neuman, 2008, 675).
6. The shifting degrees of political engagement shown by various transnational
authors are explored in a recent article by Pankaj Mishra; among many other
subjects, the piece comments on the way in which the literary career of one
of these ‘Travelling On’ authors, Amitav Ghosh, has seen an ‘excavat[ion of]
a suppressed emotional history of the vast networks of labour and capi-
tal that made the modern world’ (Mishra, 2013, n.p.). This line resonates
with the ‘ink-blackened concertinas’ of In an Antique Land that captured
218 Notes
the imagination of James Clifford (see Chapter 3, Section II.i): the basis of
Ghosh’s transnational work in his travel writing is one way that the ‘global
novel’ described by Mishra is invested with political weight.
7. Such a complication can be seen in the uneasy outlook on the subject of
Empire displayed, for example, by Salman Rushdie, in Malik Solanka’s vari-
ous attitudes towards the Empires of the United Kingdom, the United States,
Mesopotamia, and ‘Lilleput–Blefescu’ (Chapter 4, Sections III.i and III.ii).
8. Amitav Ghosh’s recurring focus on ‘the culture and politics of modernism, in
all its promise and horror’ (1998a, 43) serves as a reminder that the dualities
of modernism – and modernity – remain as pertinent at the end of the twen-
tieth century as at its outset.
9. This understanding, though now commonplace, is not a recent one. In
the nineteenth century, Nietzsche described the process by which truth, a
‘mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms’ became
fixed: they ‘have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and
rhetorically, and […] after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory’
(1994 [1954; essay from 1873], 46–47).
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Index
Note: n after a page reference refers to a note number on that page.

Adorno, Theodor, 101 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 17, 200n20
‘Amerindian’, 159–60, 167, 215n23 ‘Balangoda man’, 35, 202n7
An Equal Music, 69, 72, 89, 93–4, 98, Balibar, Étienne, 75, 94–5 see also An
99, 100, 106, 110, 116, 117, 155, Equal Music and Europe
193, 198n7, 207n17, 207n23 Bhabha, Homi, 5, 14, 15, 16–17, 22,
and Europe, 75–6, 94, 95 34, 68, 114, 151, 198n4
and From Heaven Lake, 72, 76, 77, biography, 20, 37, 47, 50, 73, 193,
81, 91, 95, 99, 108, 109, 119, 130, 199n12
193 autobiography, 27, 38, 40, 46, 115,
and fugue see fugue 156–7, 184, 194, 205n6
and London, 72, 94, 95, 96, 99, boundary, 17, 52–3, 68, 74, 95, 110,
101, 102, 105, 109, 110, 206n16 136, 190
and postcolonialism, 95, 96 ethnic, 157, 160
Anderson, Benedict, 16, 28 generic, 18, 19, 181, 184, 200n22
Anil’s Ghost, 17, 19, 21, 27, 30, 34, 38, transnational, 18, 21, 52–3, 62–6
68, 116, 117, 155, 166, 198n7, see also Clingman
203n15, 203n16, 203n19, 204n20 Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita
and the boundary, 52–3, 62–5 Mannur, 14–15
and intratextuality, 61 British Empire see under colonialism
and investigation, 57–62 Brouillette, Sarah, 156–8, 214n16,
plot, 53, 56, 58, 59, 66–7 214n20, 214n21
political responsibility in, 28, 55, 56 Burma/Burmese, 17, 138, 139, 141
and reconstruction, 31, 48 as Myanmar, 210n21
and Running in the Family, 51, 52, history, 118, 135–6, 137, 141, 147
54, 55, 56, 57 and India, 135, 136, 138, 139,
and transnationalism, 53, 192 144–5, 146, 147, 148
anthropology, 10, 19, 45, 48, 53, language, 115, 136, 144–8, 210n26
113–14, 115, 116, 119, 120, politics, 143, 145, 148, 151
121–3, 124, 125, 126, 129, 130,
131, 134, 151, 202n7, 207n1, Canada, 1, 7, 21, 27–9, 37, 38, 39, 43,
209n12, 211n30 44, 54
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 5, 14, 15 canon
Arabic, 117, 129, 208n2, 208n4, literary, 3, 23, 195–7, 198n6
209n18 musical, 103
artwork, 31, 164, 199n7 Carlson, Marvin A., 71, 93 see also
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and performance in Seth
Helen Tiffin, 6, 13, 198n4 Ceylon, 29, 32, 34, 44, 192
Asia/n, 6, 21, 28, 42, 59, 75, 95, 135, to Sri Lanka, name-change, 12, 36,
136, 144, 199n13, 202n6, 205n7, 210n21
211n27, 215n23 Chambers, Claire, 113–14, 207n1,
autobiography see under biography 209n11, 209n14
235
236 Index
China/Chinese, 35, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, cosmopolitanism, 4, 14–15, 122, 161,
79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 192, 200n19, 209n10
138, 139, 173, 174, 193, 201n5, ‘countertravel writing’ see Holland
205n1, 205n6, 206n11, 217n4 and Huggan
‘Cultural Revolution’, 88, 206n14 cremation, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132,
and India, 17, 22, 71, 72, 91–2, 94, 133, 163, 209n16
110 Crucifixion see under Christianity
and Tibet, 71, 72, 92, 110
‘un-’, 82, 91, 93 Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in
Christianity, 211n29 Burma, 136, 144
Crucifixion, 62–3, 64, 72, 164–5, criticism, 2
192 and The Glass Palace see under Glass
in Ghosh, 146–7 Palace, The
in Ondaatje, 41, 64, 216n34 and translation, 22, 140–4
in Rushdie, 164–5 Davis, Emily S., 57–8, 59
class see under privilege DeMille, Cecil B., 152, 177, 216n35
Clifford, James, 29, 52, 55, 116, diary form, 2, 206n13
121–2, 131, 134, 159, 201n24, and Ghosh, 115, 123, 124, 156, 189
201n25, 213n14, 218n6 and Rushdie, 156
see also fingere and Seth, 85–6, 90, 115, 126, 156,
Clingman, Stephen, 3, 18–19, 21, 16, 189
34, 49, 50–1, 52–3, 62, 78, 114, diaspora, 7, 13–15, 16, 73, 77, 180,
119, 166, 190, 198n2, 201n23, 200n18, 212n4, 214n22 see also
204n25 see also boundary and Braziel and Mannur and exile and
fingere and metaphor in Ondaatje Tölölyan and compare home
and metaphor and translation disintegration, 87, 88, 93, 97, 99, 103,
and novel form and syntax and 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 129–30
transnational form Dissanayake, Wimal, and Rob Wilson,
colonialism 15–16, 22
and anthropology see anthropology dolls, 49–50, 175, 180, 185, 187
anti-colonial sentiment, 147–8 ‘Little Brain’, 183–4, 185
British Empire, 34, 136, 139, 145, ‘Oscar-Barbie statuettes’, 183, 185,
147, 155, 178–9, 216n32 186
in discourse, 5, 198n4 ‘Puppet Kings’, 187–8, 190, 217n39
and education, 216n32 Doon School, The, 9, 116, 199n9
and expansion, 13, 159, 162 Duncan, James, and Derek Gregory,
and history, 13, 32, 135–6, 137, 200n17
139, 142 ‘dwelling-in-travel’ see Clifford
and identity, 86 see also Naipaul
or imperialism, 6–7, 8–9, 20, 96, Edwards, Justin, and Rune Graulund,
159, 177–80, 216n32 2–4, 13–14, 15, 195
neo-colonial, 199n12 Egypt/ian, 17, 115, 117, 119, 120,
and politics, 8, 13, 27–8, 36, 142–4, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 167,
177, 210n25, 216n37 201n2, 207n2, 208n5, 208n6,
postcolonial see postcolonialism 209n12, 209n15, 209n18
and religion, 146, 211n29 fellaheen, 10, 120, 122–3, 124, 125,
and representation, 215n23 129, 130, 132, 164, 214n17
and travel writing see under travel and India, 125, 133, 134, 209n19
writing and Islam, 125–6
Index 237
ellipsis, 17, 19 Fiji/an, 17, 23, 157–8, 181, 214n21,

and Ghosh, 119, 124, 126, 150, 216n35
211n33 revolution, 157
and Ondaatje, 28, 29, 42, 46, 47, foreign/er/ness, 4, 27, 30, 34, 37, 42,
48, 49, 51, 68, 92 43, 44, 45, 47, 52, 54, 57, 61, 64,
and Rushdie, 165 74, 75, 76, 83, 94–5, 100, 127,
and Seth, 72, 75, 77, 80, 92, 99, 137, 144, 145, 171 see also kala
106, 107, 110 definition, 40–1
ethnocentrism, 21, 30, 202n9 ‘friend’, 79–81, 84, 109, 205n8
ethnography, 2, 113–14, 122, 134, compare ‘prodigal–foreigner’
207n1, 208n6 ‘prodigal–’ see ‘prodigal–foreigner’
and travel writing, 11, 13 stressing one’s, 82, 88
see also Rubiés Freud, Sigmund, 203n13
ethno-politics, 28, 32 From Heaven Lake: Travels through
Europe/an, 5, 33–5, 43, 64, 65, Sinkiang and Tibet, 2, 21, 22,
66, 72, 75–6, 93–5, 97, 107, 30, 69, 70, 75, 80, 85, 89, 91,
113, 133, 138, 141–2, 143–4, 100, 110, 117, 165, 166, 205n1,
200n19, 201n4, 202n6, 209n15, 205n6, 208n6
210n23, 211n27, 215n23, 215n31 and An Equal Music see under An
see also An Equal Music and Equal Music
Balibar and orientalism criticism, 70–3, 201n27
exile, 14, 39, 55, 57, 85, 101, 132, date, 21, 116
138, 143, 145, 147, 148, 163–4, and performance, 22, 71, 76–9
166, 182, 194, 206n12, 212n2 fugitive, 97–9, 103
see also migration and diaspora fugue, 99, 103–6
and compare home ‘The Art of F-’, 103, 104, 105, 109
Fury, 172, 177, 178, 180, 183, 190,
Falklands/Malvinas, 161, 162, 170 194, 198n7, 214n20, 215n24,
‘false maps’ see Sri Lanka/n mapping 215n26, 215n27
fatwā, 153, 154, 163, 194, 212n4, and anger, 23, 156, 174, 175–6
213n9, 213n11, 213n12 and contemporary references, 23,
Faxian, 35, 92, 202n6 157–8, 174
fiction, 4, 18, 20, 22, 23, 31, 49, 53, and criticism, 213n8
55, 57, 63, 72, 119, 124, 154, 158, and Rushdie’s life, 156–7
159, 168, 172, 178, 188, 192, 194, and The Jaguar Smile, 154, 158, 167,
198n2, 199n12, 201n22, 204n28, 174, 182, 184, 186, 189
206n13, 209n19, 212n3, 213n8
and ethnography, 2, 115–16 Geertz, Clifford, 122–3, 125
fingere, 19, 201n24 see also gender, 9, 14, 50, 129, 204n23, 204n31,
Clingman and Clifford and 209n11 see also under privilege
compare transferro genre, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21,
historical, 117, 120, 139 22, 23, 38, 72, 86, 100, 115, 156,
and non-fiction, 181–2, 184, 187, 178–82, 186, 189, 190, 193, 194,
194, 199n13, 200n22, 201n25 199n12, 199n13, 200n22, 201n25
postcolonial see under geopolitics, 6, 7, 8, 13, 17, 22
postcolonialism in Ghosh, 110, 135, 142, 144
transnational see under in Ondaatje, 1, 30
transnational in Rushdie, 169
and travel writing see travel writing in Seth, 22, 70, 78, 93
238 Index
Ghosh, Amitav, 2, 3, 6–7, 8, 12, 15, Guevara, Che, 215n25

16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30, 110, 115, Gulliver’s Travels, 23, 180–2, 186, 187,
122, 123, 124, 128, 130, 131, 132, 192
141, 142, 149, 150, 151, 152,
155, 156, 163, 166–8, 172, 186, Hall, Stuart, 198n3
189, 190, 191, 192, 193–4, 207n2, ‘heimlich’ see Freud, Sigmund
208n4, 208n5, 208n6, 209n11, Hindu–Muslim riots, Dhaka, 130–1,
209n13, 209n14, 209n15, 163–4 see also violence in Ghosh
209n17, 209n18, 209n19, history, 14, 37, 44, 49, 118, 119,
210n21, 210n24, 211n30, 120, 121, 184, 199n12, 200n21,
211n33, 211n34, 214n17, 217n6, 207n18, 209n11, 209n12,
218n8 211n31, 212n4, 217n1, 217n6
and anthropology see anthropology Burmese see under Burma/Burmese
and Burma see Burma/Burmese colonial, 13, 135–6
career, 21, 22, 117–18, 119–20 critical, 3, 5
education, 9, 116–17 compare distortions of, 208n5
Ondaatje, education and Rushdie, family, 27, 31, 36, 37, 40, 49,
education and Seth, education 202n9
and ellipsis see under ellipsis global, 135, 136, 193
and fellaheen see under Egypt/ian ‘handcuffed to’, 201n22
and gender, 9–10, 129, 209n11 and nationality, 27–8
and glass see glass see also Anderson, Benedict
and history, 116, 118, 119, 120, Nicaraguan see under Nicaragua/n
121, 135–6, 137–40 personal, 37, 49, 56, 73, 74–5, 91,
and language, 126, 144–8, 208n4, 97, 117, 145, 172, 174, 181, 185,
209n18, 210n29, 210n21 194, 199n9
and postcolonialism see under political, 39, 56, 135, 136, 137, 155
postcolonialism Sri Lankan see under Sri Lanka/n
and religion, 125–6, 131 ‘stage of’, 116
and translation see translation ‘uses of H-’, 119
and ‘the West’, 114, 125, 133–4, Holland, Patrick, and Graham
135, 143 Huggan, 9, 10, 12, 131, 134, 180,
glass, 100, 150, 211n32 200n22
and confusion, 127, 137, 151 home, 11, 14, 17, 21, 31, 41, 55, 60,
Glass Palace, The, 115, 116, 117, 134, 64, 84–5, 96, 99, 101, 102, 108,
135, 136, 139, 148, 149, 155, 193, 109, 123, 128, 132, 138, 139, 140,
198n7, 210n21, 210n22 148, 151, 167, 174, 178, 180, 191,
and Burma see Burma/Burmese 217n1 compare diaspora and exile
and Dancing in Cambodia, at Large and Ghosh, 126, 130
in Burma, 22, 140–4 in language see Adorno
criticism, 136 and Ondaatje, 10, 29, 35, 40, 42,
and history, 117–18, 137 45, 52
and In an Antique Land, 22, 114, and Rushdie, 154, 163–4
115, 116, 126, 140 and Seth, 74–5, 79, 93, 94, 206n12,
and linguistic translation, 144–8 207n19
and The Glass Palace (Mandalay), homely see Freud
137, 138, 151 hospitality, 54, 65, 80, 205n33
and ‘The Glass Palace’ Photo Studio Huggan, Graham, 6, 38, 156, 207n1,
(Yangon), 137, 151 214n16
Index 239
Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, 1, 9, Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey,

180, 192 The, 30, 153–4, 159, 163, 172,
Human Genome Project (HGP), 177, 186, 200n15, 213n10,
173–4, 175, 176, 178, 179 215n28, 217n40
date, 21, 23
‘Imam and the Indian, the’ (episode), and Fury see under Fury
131–5 and poetry, 155, 156, 165–6,
‘Imam and the Indian, the’ (essay), 131 168–70, 188
imperialism see under colonialism and politics, 23, 156, 158, 161, 165,
In an Antique Land: History in the Guise 169, 186
of a Traveller’s Tale, 2, 9, 30, 113–18, Jameson, Fredric, 8, 198n6
119, 120, 123, 128, 129, 134, 140,
167, 193, 200n15, 208n4, 208n6, kala/‘kalaa’, 144–5, 148, 149, 192,
208n8, 209n9, 217n6 210n26, 211n27 see also foreign/er/
and anthropology see anthropology ness
criticism, 22, 113–14, 115, 118–19, Kamboureli, Smaro, 36, 38, 47, 92
201n27 Kashmir/i, 153, 163, 194
date, 22, 131, 194 Kertzer, Jon, 3, 28, 48, 64, 204n29
and The Glass Palace see under Glass see also Anil’s Ghost, political
Palace, The responsibility in
India/n, 3, 9, 12, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77,
78, 84, 86–7, 91, 94, 123, 125, ‘L–B’ see ‘Lilleput–Blefescu’
126–7, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, language see under Burma/Burmese
134, 137, 138, 139, 141, 144–5, and Ghosh and home and
146, 147, 153, 157, 161, 162, 163, Ondaatje and paradox and
170, 177, 178, 180, 181, 193, 194, Rushdie and Seth
199n9, 200n15, 205n6, 205n7, LeClair, Tom, 27–8, 31, 55, 58
206n15, 206n16, 208n2, 209n19, ‘Lilleput–Blefescu’, 23, 186, 187,
210n23, 211n29, 215n23, 218n7
216n36, 216n38, 217n5 and Fiji, 157, 181, 216n35
British-, 34–5, 139, 146–7, 155, 156, see also Fiji/an
172, 174, 178–9, 200n15, 216n32 origin of the name, 180–2
and Burma see under Burma/Burmese see also Gulliver’s Travels
and China see under China/Chinese revolution, 182, 186, 187, 188
and Egypt see under Egypt/ian Lisle, Debbie, 4–5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
and Empire, 35, 136, 146–7, 155, 31, 180, 195, 199n13, 200n22,
178–9, 216n32 201n26 see also travel writing
Emergency, 162 see also Midnight’s
Children MacCannell, Dean, 121, 125
Ocean, 32, 114, 116, 118, 193 Malvinas see Falklands/Malvinas
Partition, 130, 208n7, 210n19 Márquez, Gabriel García, 124, 172
and Sri Lanka see under Sri Lanka/n maps, 13, 198n3, 201n4, 202n6
and transnationalism see transnational in Ondaatje, 33, 34, 35, 66, 67,
‘Indo–Lilleputian’ see ‘Lilleput–Blefescu’ 205n35
Islam, 209n16 in Rushdie, 159, 171
in Egypt see under Egypt/ian in Seth, 88, 103
and Rushdie see under Rushdie masks, 186–8, 192
in Sri Lanka see under Sri Lanka/n matryoshka nationalities, 46, 74
Iyer, Pico, 90, 200n15 McLeod, John, 6, 13, 15, 195, 199n7
240 Index
memoir myth
definition, 39 in Ghosh, 147
in Ondaatje, 31, 36, 37, 40, 47, 49, in Ondaatje, 22, 33, 51, 53, 63,
52, 55 64, 65, 66, 152, 202n7, 204n32,
in Rushdie, 157, 181, 184, 212n4, 216n34
213n9 in Rushdie, 155, 156, 177, 178,
memory, 31, 36, 45, 92, 99, 142 212n1
and inaccuracy, 176, 208n5
and trauma, 105, 106, 107, 130, ‘naˉgas’, 35 see also Faxian
209n19 Naipaul, V.S., 86–7, 88, 200n15
Merrill, Christi Ann, 131, 133–4 national affiliation, 7, 17, 19, 21, 28,
metaphor, 18, 27, 34, 124, 142, 193, 29, 30, 35, 50, 55, 57, 69, 74, 78,
201n22, 201n26, 218n9 161, 206n8
in Ghosh, 119–20, 130, 132, 136, ‘national narrative’ see Anderson
149, 151, 211n30 neo-colonial, 199n12
in Ondaatje, 10, 42, 48, 50, 58, Nepal, 74, 82, 91
203n13 see also Clingman Nicaragua/n, 23, 155, 156, 159, 160,
in Rushdie, 23, 153–4, 163, 169, 161–2, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171,
177, 190, 217n3 see also Moynagh 177, 186, 214n22, 215n28, 217n40
in Seth, 78, 84, 90, 93, 103 history, 155–6, 171–2, 213n13,
and translation, 34, 114, 137, 213n14, 214n15
151, 154, 169, 217n3 see also revolution, 155, 156, 159, 160,
Clingman and compare fingere 163, 164, 165, 169, 171, 214n15,
Midnight’s Children, 153, 154, 162, 215n28
163, 167, 173, 201n22, 212n3 Sandinista regime, 23, 155, 156,
migration, 7, 14, 16, 17, 33, 60, 101, 160, 162, 167, 169, 170, 171, 182,
114, 163, 169, 193, 216n37 186, 214n14, 214n15
enforced, 13, 14, 15 Sandino, Augusto César, 155, 158,
and Rushdie, 153–4, 158, 163, 164, 213n13
167–8, 169, 172, 177, 178–9, nostalgia, 36, 44, 74, 100, 117, 132,
190, 194, 211n1, 212n2, 212n6, 210n21, 212n5
216n32, 217n3 novel form, 18–20, 48, 72, 175, 190,
millennial, 8, 31, 69, 71, 72, 115, 135, 210n23 see also Clingman
155, 172, 173, 186, 193, 195, 198n7
modern, 7, 14, 16, 35, 57, 108, 132, Ondaatje, Christopher, 41
135, 139, 140, 150, 180, 185, 187, Ondaatje, Michael, 3, 7, 8, 12, 15,
189, 192, 198n3, 199n13, 202n6, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 35, 39, 40,
214n23, 217n6 43, 44, 45, 49, 52, 60, 66, 68, 69,
violence, 133–5 see also violence 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 81, 110, 114,
modernism, 16, 142–3, 150, 189, 218n8 115, 117, 119, 126, 152, 155, 156,
postmodernism, 7, 16 164, 166, 169, 186, 189, 190, 193,
modernity, 15–16, 22, 134, 135, 143, 201n4, 202n8, 202n9, 202n11,
144, 148, 218n8 203n12, 203n13, 203n15,
Mondal, Anshuman A., 117, 118–19, 203n16, 203n18, 203n19,
131, 209n15 204n31, 205n34, 207n21,
Moynagh, Maureen Anne, 153–4, 156, 210n21, 214n17, 216n34, 217n1
158, 190, 212n5, 214n17 and the boundary see under Anil’s
Mukherjee, Arun, 2, 27–8, 29, 38, Ghost
202n9 career, 38, 54, 55–6, 116, 192
Index 241
and class, 9, 10, 199n11 photography, 44–5, 84, 137, 139, 149–51
criticism, 2, 6, 27–9, 31, 36, 37–8, poetry, 1, 2, 20, 28, 38, 42, 46, 51,
39, 47, 48, 55–6, 57–8, 59, 61, 64, 55, 72, 80–1, 86, 106, 108, 156,
65, 202n9, 203n16 165–6, 168–9, 180, 185, 192,
education, 9, 54, 73, 199n9, 212n7 202n9, 203n14, 205n3, 206n13,
compare Ghosh, education and 215n27, 216n39, 218n9
Rushdie, education and Seth, and politics, 28, 55, 122, 155, 160,
education 164, 169, 188
and ellipsis see under ellipsis and rhythm, 50, 108, 168, 188
language in, 1–2, 33–4, 41–2, 46, postcolonialism, 2, 3, 5, 13, 195, 196,
48, 50–1, 54, 58–9, 63, 65, 67, 197, 199n7, 209n11, 213n13,
210n21 214n15
and modernism, 16 and canonicity see canon, literary
and nationality, 27–30, 34, 57, and Europe, 95, 107, 207n22
191 and fiction, 2, 4, 7, 20, 23, 96, 195,
and postcolonialism see under 211n31
postcolonialism in Ghosh, 6, 133–4, 136, 143
and ‘the prodigal–foreigner’ in Ondaatje, 6, 58–9
see under prodigal and resistance see Davis and
and translation see under translation Dissanayake and Wilson
orientalism, 5, 8, 134, 211n29, in Rushdie, 7, 23, 153, 154, 168,
216n35; see also Said 178–9, 214n16
Ortega, Daniel, 155, 164 see also in Seth, 6, 74, 75, 95–6
Nicaragua/n study of, 5–6, 13
Other Routes: 1500 Years of African versus transnationalism, 4, 5, 7, 12,
and Asian Travel Writing, 199n8, 13–16, 17, 23, 58, 74–5, 96, 107,
200n16 192
and travel writing see under travel
Pakistan, 153, 154, 161, 163, 170 writing
paradox, 3, 32–5, 122, 191 Potala, the, 89, 107, 108, 206n15
and language, 92, 101, 168 compare Zola, cathédrales de
and maps, 33–5 commerce moderne
in Ghosh, 119, 122, 125, 145 Pratt, Mary Louise, 8, 13, 116, 209n15
in Ondaatje, 30, 40, 43, 59 privilege, 8, 9, 37, 121, 127, 130, 137,
and religion, 33, 67, 165 151, 164, 166, 172, 179, 191, 195,
in Rushdie, 165, 168, 178, 179, 199n13, 209n15
215n26 and class, 10, 130
in Seth, 75, 76, 79, 81, 93 and gender, 9–10
and transnationalism see under ‘Western’/‘Northern’, 156, 161,
transnational 167–8
‘passing’ (racial), 82, 88, 206n11 prodigal, 30, 41, 42, 44–8, 52, 54, 55,
performance, 38, 40, 46, 51–2, 127, 56, 61, 75, 206n8
141–2, 147, 174, 186, 188, 212n6, definition, 40–1
215n27 ‘–foreigner’, 30–1, 35, 40, 43, 44,
in Seth, 22, 69, 70–1, 72, 73, 75, 45, 47, 48, 52, 54, 55, 68, 75, 79,
76–8, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 203n17, 205n8 compare ‘foreign
88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 103, friend’
104, 105, 109, 110, 127, 206n12,
206n13, 214n17 see also Carlson Quayson, Ato, 211n31
242 Index
reconstruction, 21, 31, 35, 48–52, and masks see masks

197, 204n21, 214n17 and modernism, 16, 189
revolution and postcolonialism
Argentine see Guevara see postcolonialism
‘Chinese Cultural’ see under China/ ‘Unitedstatesian’, 167, 179
Chinese
Fijian, 157 Said, Edward, 5, 198n4, 206n12
‘Lilleputian’ see under Sandinista regime see under
‘Lilleput–Blefescu’ Nicaragua/n
in the Mediterranean, 77 Satanic Verses, The, 153–4, 172, 212n5,
Nicaraguan see under Nicaragua/n 212n6, 216n32
Tunisian, 4 Sebald, W.G., 19, 201n23
Rubiés, Joan-Pau, 11, 200n14 see also Clingman
Running in the Family, 2, 21, 36, 38, Sen, Amartya, 71, 91–2
41, 42, 44, 51, 57, 72, 74, 75, Seth, Vikram, 6, 7, 8, 17, 19, 30, 36,
81, 92, 115, 116, 117, 119, 126, 68–9, 71, 72, 76, 79, 80, 81, 85,
156, 169, 189, 200n15, 202n9, 86–8, 91, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101,
202n10, 203n19, 207n21, 208n6 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 114,
and Anil’s Ghost see under Anil’s 115, 116, 117, 119, 127, 152,
Ghost 155, 165, 166, 186, 190, 191,
and Canada, 1, 27, 37, 39, 54 192, 193, 202n11, 205n5, 206n9,
criticism, 27, 37–8, 39, 40, 55–6 206n12, 206n13, 207n21,
and the Ondaatje family in Sri 214n17, 217n2
Lanka, 10, 31, 36–7, 40, 45, 49 career, 21, 73–5, 205n1
Rushdie, Salman, 6, 7, 8, 12, 15, 17, and China see China/Chinese
18, 19, 20, 23, 30, 159, 160, 161, and cinema, 75, 77, 78
162, 165, 166, 167, 171, 172, 173, criticism, 2, 3, 22, 70, 73, 77–8,
174, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184, 100, 201n27, 205n1
186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, and diary form see diary form
201n22, 207n21, 211n1, 212n2, education, 9, 73, 205n6 compare
212n4, 213n9, 213n12, 214n16, Ghosh, education and Ondaatje,
214n19, 214n21, 215n26, education and Rushdie, education
215n27, 215n29, 216n34, and ellipsis see ellipsis
216n38, 217n40, 217n3, 218n7 and Germany, 12, 205n6
career, 21, 152, 154, 155, 156–7, and language, 74, 82, 83–4, 89, 90,
158, 194, 211n1 92, 96, 100, 106, 107, 109,
criticism, 3, 153–4, 157, 213n8, 205n6
213n10, 214n16, 214n20 and modernism, 16
and diary form see diary form and ‘passing’ see ‘passing’ (racial)
education, 9, 154, 199n9, 212n7 and performance see under
compare Ghosh, education and performance
Ondaatje, education and Seth, and postcolonialism see under
education postcolonialism
and ellipsis see ellipsis Shakespeare, 109, 152, 180, 182–5
and exile, 163–4, 212n2 Sinhala/ese, 12, 32–3, 35, 53, 54,
fatwaˉ see fatwaˉ 202n8 see also Sri Lanka/n race
and Islam, 153–4, 212n4 and compare Tamil
and language, 168–70, 175–6, 182, Spencer, Robert, 4, 200n19
185, 187, 189, 215n29 Spider Blues, 38, 203n12
Index 243
Sri Lanka/n, 1, 12, 17, 21, 22, 27–8, linguistic, 113–15, 134, 136, 144–8,
30, 31, 36, 37, 39, 43, 44, 45, 48, 150
49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, and metaphor see under metaphor
58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 66, 68, 117, mis-, 114, 119, 127, 135, 137, 149
201n1, 202n6, 202n7, 203n13, in Ondaatje, 46, 52, 64
203n19, 204n24 in Rushdie, 154, 168–9, 213n9, 217n3
Buddhism, 53, 65, 202n8 in Seth, 75, 79, 205n2, 205n6
formerly Ceylon see Ceylon to transferro see metaphor and
Sri Lanka, name-change translation
history, 31–5, 53, 56–7 and transnationalism see under
and India, 31, 33, 34–5 transnational
and Islam, 33 transnational, 10, 15, 21, 37, 40, 45,
mapping(s), 33–4, 66 46, 48, 52, 55, 58, 60, 69, 74, 76,
nationalism, 28–9, 38, 40 78, 86, 93, 94, 98, 100, 101, 103,
and the Ondaatje family see under 107, 110, 115, 122, 129, 135, 140,
Running in the Family 142, 152, 159, 171, 172, 185,
race, 32–3, 53 191, 192, 198n5, 199n10, 205n2,
transnational see under 217n1, 217n6
transnational boundaries see under boundary
war, 27, 28, 32, 48–9, 53, 58, 59, fiction, 3, 4, 18, 23, 154, 173,
64, 65, 66, 67, 202n10, 204n30, 204n25
204n31 form, 18–20, 30, 49, 50–1, 56, 72,
Srivastava, Neelam, 77–8, 208n6, 82, 96, 99, 104, 105, 119, 166,
209n19, 211n29 190 see also Clingman
stereotype, 77, 128 ‘imaginary’, 15 see also Dissanayake
syntax, 1, 82, 91 and Wilson
transnational, 18, 51 literature, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 17, 18, 29, 39,
see also Clingman 57, 67, 71, 79, 81, 109, 144, 189,
190, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198n2
Tamil, 12, 32–3, 35, 53, 202n8, ‘moment’ see Tölölyan
203n20 see also Sri Lanka/n race paradox, 35, 75, 79
and compare Sinhala/ese versus postcolonial see under
Tennent, James E., Sir, 32, 33 postcolonialism
Theroux, Paul, 20, 116, 199n13, 201n26 Sri Lanka, 22, 31–5, 202n8
‘Third World’, 27–8, 59, 113, 156 syntax see under syntax
literature, 8, 202n9 see also Jameson textuality, 30, 47, 70, 90, 92, 106, 126
Things Fall Apart (novel), 180 and translational, 16–17, 22, 68,
see also Yeats 114, 151 see also Bhabha
Tibet/an, 17, 22, 71, 72, 74, 78–9, 82, travel writing, 12, 30, 31, 70, 71,
83, 87, 89, 92, 107, 108, 110, 156, 72, 151, 169, 194, 196
206n15 trauma, 46, 56, 58–9, 63, 156,
Tölölyan, Khachig, 7, 198n5 216n38, 217n1
Tourists with Typewriters see Holland travel writing, 50, 70, 79, 115, 116,
and Huggan 131, 140, 141, 151, 152, 168,
translation, 41, 136, 159, 205n2 169, 180–1, 192, 199n12, 199n13,
in Ghosh, 22, 113–15, 118, 120, 200n15, 200n17, 200n22, 201n25,
123, 127–8, 129, 134–5, 136–7, 201n26, 202n6, 213n12, 216n34
140, 142, 144, 148, 149, 150, 151 and colonialism, 6, 8, 13, 135–6,
and imperialism, 33–4, 136, 201n3 142, 144, 199n12, 208n3
244 Index
travel writing – continued ‘travelling cultures’ see Clifford

criticism, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6–13, 17, 37–8, ‘Travelling On’, 22–3, 115, 151, 154,
70–1, 73, 131, 134, 153–4, 180–1, 192, 193, 194, 217n6
186 ‘Travelling Out’, 21, 30, 192, 194
and fiction, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 18, 19, Two Lives, 193, 205n6
20, 21, 23, 72, 115, 141, 154, 168,
172, 180–2, 184, 186, 192, 194, ‘unheimlich’ see Freud
199n13, 200n22, 201n25 ‘Unitedstatesian’ see under Rushdie
foundational, 2, 3, 7, 11, 12, 16,
18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 30, 52, 71, 72, violence, 17, 157, 191
73, 93, 108, 110, 144, 154–5, 158, in Ghosh, 130–1, 133, 134, 135,
179, 180, 182, 190, 192, 193, 194, 136, 147, 209n13
196, 197, 218n6 modern see under modern
political, 4, 9, 11, 30, 195 in Ondaatje, 56, 63, 64, 65
see also Lisle in Rushdie, 155, 169, 175, 176, 177,
postcolonial, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 23, 185, 186, 187, 188
168, 195 in Seth, 98
study, 3, 8–9, 12, 13, 20
transnational see under transnational wanderer, 75, 78, 81, 101, 212n1
travelogues, 1–5, 11–12, 21–3, 31, 36, ‘Awara hoon’, 75, 76, 77–8,
39, 54, 56, 69, 78, 80, 81, 85, 94, 205n7
107, 113, 114, 118, 120, 121, 129,
135, 136, 156, 157, 160, 164, 167, Yeats, W.B., 180, 216n39
170, 187, 188, 200n13, 200n16, Youngs, Tim, 9, 181, 201n25
202n9, 203n14, 209n17, 214n22
‘Trip Lit’, 10 Zola, cathédrales de commerce moderne,
‘Western’ v. ‘Eastern’, 8, 21 108 compare Potala, the

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Travel Writing and the Transnational Author

Travel Writing and the

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Introduction: Travel Writing and Transnationalism 1

My interest in travel writing and transnational literature started with

Ian Fawcus, Gearóid Fitzgerald, Hannah Goldthorpe, Caroline Herbert,

I Travel and the Transnational

I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were

Travel is everywhere in this passage, entwined with Ondaatje’s sinuous,

Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations. This was an important

to longer works by Padmini Mongia (1996), Leela Gandhi (1998), John

The word [‘postcolonial’] must be used carefully, selectively, and

once conquered and ruled by Imperial Britain’ (Ghosh, 2001); and

Diasporas are emblems of transnationalism because they embody the

The ‘question of borders’ is at the centre both of Tölölyan’s ‘transnational

II An Introduction to Travel Writing Studies

Any academic survey laying the groundwork for a study of Western-

Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial

reaction to anthropological questions throughout the work and also

Here, in this spacious centre of the labyrinth of 18th-century Dutch

The privilege inherent in this description is clear, from the start, as

‘Travel writing’ is either a hobby, or else it is a paid job, often referred to

To reassert the importance of the travelogue, it is essential to study

of this Introduction proceeds to explore the implications of such a

III Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, or Both?

The aforementioned collection of essays from Edwards and Graulund,

In the field of postcolonial studies, travel writing has often been

Edwards and Graulund assert that, contrary to the imperialism-centred

and movement resulting from etymological roots in ‘The Dispersion

While this passage initially implies a degree of coercion enacted on

The literature analysed in Travel Writing and the Transnational Author

[The] global/local synergy within what we will track as the transna-

This willingness to let go of the idea of ‘“postcolonial” resistance’ is sur-

What we […] track as the ‘transnational imaginary’ comprises the

This development of Benedict Anderson’s pioneering work on ‘imagined

Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and trans-

There are two things to note. Firstly, transnationality is inextricably

In the transnational world [the community] becomes the border-

This negotiation is undertaken by all four authors in this monograph, as

space that is the ultimate cross-cultural development of what Mikhail

many others), a study of transnational literature involves an engagement

IV Transnational Form and Structure

Stephen Clingman, in his analysis of transnational fiction, asserts the

This idea of a ‘navigational’, ‘transitional’ state is particularly useful to

of its protocols and obligations’ (185). Clingman’s early identification

What makes [sic] fiction transnational are questions of form. […] On

While I utilise historical, geographical, and anthropological perspectives

literature, depend on the presence of travel within and alongside writing;

possess an understanding of both Western and non-Western ideas about

of mythology, formal innovation, and intertextual reference – that his

of ‘Travelling On’ focuses on Salman Rushdie, whose travelogue The

Unfortunately enough, despite the publication of his recent book,

for analyses of Ondaatje and the Sri Lankan ‘homespace’ to which he

Ondaatje, instead of writing about the reality of Canadian life or

I reject Mukherjee’s limited critique: I believe that Ondaatje’s work,

responsibility, as suggested above, but intimate a reaction against the

I sit in a house on Buller’s Road [in Colombo]. I am the foreigner.

‘After fifteen years. The return of the prodigal.’

delineations, underlining the transnationality of Ondaatje’s work, and

II A Short History of Sri Lanka

its history as Ceylon, Tambapanni, Taprobane, Sarandib, and much else,1

become ‘translation’: in other words, to render them comprehensible for

The importance of Ceylon to the British in 1795 was, naturally, very

The assertion here is that it is self-evident – ‘natural’ – that power in