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Chronotopes of Colony; Nation and Empire in Gora and Kim

Dipankar Roy

Nations; like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully
realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.
Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration1

The present essay focusses on the representation of the nation in the novel – its different natures, its
role in the collective process of national imaginings. I have decided to take up two novels –
Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora (1910) and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) – as two different responses
to the question of the nation in a colonial context. Bhabha in his essay, ‘DissemiNation’ gives a list of
literary texts where the ‘nation’ is present as a ‘metaphor’.2 I add Tagore’s Gora to that list since
search for motherland by the protagonist is one central motif in the text. Kipling’s novel, on the other
hand, is an example of a literary endeavour in the larger project of the imperial act of comprehending
the subcontinent under the rule of the Empire. Thus, by juxtaposing Kipling’s ‘India’ with Tagore’s
‘India’, as some kind of a counter-point, this paper will explore how different ideological motives
influence the shaping up of almost the same material into completely different manifestations in
finished products. In Kim, the vast space of the country is represented in the novelistic plane as the
explored, surveyed and codified subcontinent of the Empire, ‘the jewel in the crown’. In Gora, the
same space is transformed into some kind of a symbolic space from where and for which the
discourse of nationalism can be enunciated in the idioms of – ‘horizontal society-many as one-
people’ – in a narrative of homogeneous visual time of the ‘nation’ which is targeted to be fully
realized ‘in the mind’s eye.’

In my paper, I shall use Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘chronotopes’ as some kind of a mainstay. The
spatial and temporal dimensions of Gora and Kim and the natures of representations of nation in them
are to be explored from Bakhtinian perspectives in this sense. Bakhtin introduces his concept of
‘chronotope’ in his long essay, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the novel; Notes toward a
Historical Poetics.’3 Bakhtin’s study of literary chronotopes are testimonies of the intertwined
relationship that exists between the synchrony of poetics, a spatial science and the diachrony of
history, a radically temporal form of knowledge (the subtitle of Bakhtin’s Monograph ‘Notes toward
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a Historical Poetics’, is a significant pointer in this respect) It is to be noted that Bakhtin not only
uses chronotope as a unit of narrative analysis, a ‘time/space’ armature, a recurring ‘structure’ which
is very close to the Russian Formalists’ notion of ‘device’. He incorporates within his concept a
dimension of correlation between the cultural environment out of which texts emerge and the choice
of particular chronotopes by the author for a novel. It must be added here that Bakhtin categorically
denies that there is a direct ‘realistic’ reflection of the experienced world in literature. It would be
safer to say that literary chronotopes are highly sensitive to historical change: different societies and
periods result in different chronotopes both inside and outside literary texts, and there exists a
correlation, highly complex and multilayered in nature, between a particular, historical intra-textual
world and an equally particularized extra-textual world. So, one comprehends that the means by
which any presumed plot transforms a story will depend on formal (‘made’) features in a given text
as well as on generally held conceptions of how time and space relate to each other in a particular
culture of a particular time. This brings us close to my present venture — the study of the texts which
were composed in a cultural environment which took shape to a large extent from the colonial
encounter between the British imperialism and the rising Indian nationalism. However, the fact that
the authors of these texts belonged to the contesting camps cannot distract us from the element of
hybridity involved in such encounters and the cultural ‘cross overs’ which can be traced in the novels.
Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope, however, bears a close connection with the history of genres and in
that respect, it will be worthwhile, on the outset, to state that it was the ‘classic realist’ genre of novel
which was still reigning supreme in Europe. I shall refer to the details of Bakhtin’s theory of
chronotope and its various categories when I shall discuss the texts at length and their chronotopic
natures but for now, it can be stated, following Bakhtin, that a particular world-view regarding space-
time shares a symbiotic relationship with the chronotopic manifestation present in a text produced
inside that world-view. I begin with the imperialistic world-view of the ‘West’ out of which emerges
Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim. But first I shall discuss, in short, Bakhtin’s theoretical formulations of
the ‘adventure-chronotope’, its different categories and their intrinsic characteristics since Kim quite
evidently falls under the category of adventure-novel.
In the first few sections of his monograph ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’ Bakhtin
analyses the development of the chronotopic sense of human life in two influential early types of
adventure-novel. Their ancient chronotopic images have been carried forward within the generic
structure to the present day bringing with them intact, many of their originating ideological values.
The first type discussed is the Greek romance as ‘adventure novel of ordeal’. Its typical plot begins
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with the unexpected meeting and instantaneous love between the hero and heroine. The ‘story’ tells
of the obstacles they face, their separations, their adventures as they strive to return and their final
reunion and marriage. What interests us about Bakhtin’s long and exhaustive discussions of a number
of Greek romances is Bakhtin’s diagnosis of the particular kind of treatment of temporal and spatial
frames, two main ingredients of chronotope, in these romances. Bakhtin writes. ‘In these novels we
find a subtle and highly developed type of adventure-time . . . This adventure-time and the technique
of its use in the novel is so perfected, so full, that in all subsequent evolution of the purely adventure
novel nothing essential has been added to it down to the present day.’4 About the spatial dimension of
these romances he writes, ‘The action of the plot unfolds against a very broad and varied
geographical background, usually in three to five countries separated by seas. . . . There are
description, often very detailed, of specific features of countries, cities, structures of various kinds . . .
the habits and customs of the population, various exotic and marvellous animals and other wonders
and rarities.’5 Bakhtin’s identification of the motif of ‘life on the road’ will also be very relevant for
my discussions and, therefore, he should be quoted in this respect, too, at length:
Of special important is the close link between the motif of meeting and the chronotope of
the road (‘the open road’) and of various types of meetings on the road. In the chronotope
of the road, the unity of time and space markers is exhibited with exceptional precision and
clarity. The importance of the chronotope of the road in literature is immense: it is a rare
work that does not contain a variation of this motif, and many words are directly
constructed on the road chronotope, and on road meetings and adventures.6
We, therefore, will have to keep in mind Bakhtin’s chronotopic model of ‘abstract adventure-
time’ and ‘abstract space’ discernible in the Greek ‘adventure novel of ordeal’ when we shall enter
Rudyard Kipling’s world of imperial adventure presented in Kim. [‘The adventure chronotope is thus
characterized by a technical, abstract connection between space and time, by the reversibility of
moments in a temporal sequence, and by their interchangeability in space.’]7
Bakhtin designates the second type of ancient novel as the ‘adventure novel of everyday life’. As
the name of this category suggests, it unites adventure-time with everyday temporality; central to it is
the theme of metamorphosis or transformation. Transformation into characters of a lower social
sphere allows the hero to ‘eavesdrop’ upon everyday life and this chronotope is influential in the
picaresque novel with its low-life hero as servant or rogue. An enduring chronotopic motif is that of
the road, as ‘path of life’ or meeting place. In the words of Bakhtin ; ‘Metamorphosis serves as the
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basis for a method of portraying the whole of an individual’s life in its more important moments of
crisis : for showing how an individual becomes other than what he was’8 and he further clarifies, ‘In
keeping with this principle, the novel provides us with two or three different images of the same
individual, images that have been disjoined and rejoined through his crisis and rebirth.’9 Bakhtin
opines that the ‘adventure novel of everyday life’ is an advancement over the Greek romances in the
respect that space becomes more concrete and it gets saturated with a time more substantial :
. . . . Space is filled with real, living meaning and forms a crucial relationship with the hero
and his fate . . .The concreteness of this chronotope of the road permits everyday life to be
realized within it. But . . . main protagonist and the major turning points of his life are to be
found outside everyday life. He merely observes this life, meddles in it now and then as an
alien force; he occasionally even dons a common and everyday mask — but in essence he
does not participate in this life and is not determined by it.10
Another comment of Bakhtin about the unique nature of the hero as an adventurer in the
‘adventure novel of everyday life’ deserves our close attention as questions of ‘being and becoming’
will be a major issue in my discussion of the chronotopic structure of the novel Kim:
Finally. . . the adventurer . . . and in particular the parvenu fulfill analogous functions in
the novel. The role of the adventurer and parvenu is the role of one who has not yet found a
definite or fixed place in life, but who seeks personal success — building a career, . . .
this role impels him to study personal life, uncover its hidden workings . . . And so, he
begins his journey “to the depths” (Where he rubs shoulders with servants, prostitutes,
pimps and from them learns about life ‘as it really is’.) . . . . The position of such
characters is admirably suited to exposing and portraying all layers and levels of private
life.11

Kim — a Journey through the Empire in

Imperial Adventure -Time
I shall, use Bakhtin’s formulations of adventure chronotopes to untie the textual strategies of Kim
with the purpose of showing how the motive of ‘writing the nation’ (in this case, ‘writing the
empire’) shapes up the particular chronotopic structure of the novel, remaining within the realist
genre of the English novel tradition.
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Kim is most commonly viewed as a novel about life on the Great Wheel of Life (for the spiritual
lama) and the Grand Trunk Road (for the opportunistic Kim) under the British Raj around 1880. It
foregrounds mimicry and hybridity in its winding narrative of an Irish boy who thinks in Hindi, is
taken to be a street urchin and a Sahib, and oscillates between British and Indian dress, speech and
identity. Kim was published in a year in which the British realized the numerical discrepancy between
themselves and the ‘natives. According to the 1901 census, there were only 1,70,000 Europeans on
the subcontinent, including soldiers, and half again as many Eurasians, in comparison with 294
million Indians. Kim is also a novel about the methods through which these thousands attempted to
comprehend these millions while also resisting the threat of Russian incursions. Our initial premise is
that the project of comprehensibility has shaped itself up in the line of an adventure story through the
vast, almost unthinkably vast for the British perceptions, spaces of the ‘Orient’ called India. Rudyard
Kipling’s novel, in this regard, is in line of the frenzied verbosity of the colonizers and their wives
too which expressed itself, in order to write about the colonized world and thereby, to disseminate its
incomprehensibility, variously in travelogues, letters, histories, poems, epics, legal documents,
records, memoirs, biographies, translations, censuses and novels. Seen from this postcolonial
perspective, British colonialism seems to be one huge attempt of ‘textual takeover’ of the non-
Western world. Elleke Boehmer, a distinguished postcolonial critic, in her study of colonial and
postcolonial literature foregrounds imperial textual production as an attempt, through writing, to
domesticate the alarming alterity of ‘recalcitrant peoples, unbreachable jungles, vast wastelands, huge
and shapeless crowds’ which is at the same time ‘an attempt at both extensive comprehension and
comprehensive control.’12
The plot-structure of Kim, which is very similar to that of picaresque narratives as it unfolds the story
of a long journey which begins with a chance encounter between the lama and Kim in the Oriental
city of Lahore and ends in the foothills of north India, is an example of the adventure-chronotope.
The ingrained imperialist motive of the author’s world-view, however, transforms the ‘abstract
adventure space’ of which Bakhtin speaks about in his discussion of the ‘adventure novel of ordeal’
into a much more concrete ‘imperial adventure space’. India — a very important part of the British
empire, gradually emerges during the narrative framework of the novel as a palpable existence with
myriad geographical terrains, motley groups of people, exotic life-styles, prehistoric mountain ranges,
teeming city lives, vast agricultural fields. The geographical concreteness of Kipling’s descriptions,
his sharp eye for details and local colours — his presentation of a living picture of India — a fact
made possible by his long stays in this country as a child and later as a working journalist in Punjab
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(he finally left India in 1889) — has been praised by his admirers and acolytes time and again. My
present purpose is to search for the imperial structure hidden in the ‘chronotopic space’ of the novel
— a space that opens up by the apparently meandering narrative of the novel; a ‘space’ ripe enough
for geographical appropriation.
On the surface, it is Kim’s wanderings which build up the structure of the novel. Most of his
voyages move within Punjab, around the axis formed by Lahore and Umballa, a British garrison town
on the frontier of the United Provinces. Kim also makes excursions to Simla, to Lucknow and later to
Kulu valley; with Mahbub Ali he goes as far south as Bombay and as far west as Karachi. The
concreteness of the ‘chronotopic-space’ of the novel is built up largely by these wanderings of Kim
and his adventures during these wanderings. But there are two significant motifs in the description of
Kim’s travels which stand out for our present purpose. One is obviously Kim’s journey through the
Grand Trunk Road, built by the great Muslim ruler Sher Shah in the late sixteenth century which runs
from Peshawar to Calcutta — which, is an unmistakable reproduction of what Bakhtin calls
‘chronotope of the road’ — ‘a path of life’ which provides the meeting place for the hero with people
from diverse social strata. Life on the Grand Trunk Road is, therefore, a symbolical representation of
the Oriental world of the colony — mostly untouched by the passage of time and throbbing all the
time with pulse of this age-old country:
The Grand Trunk Road at this point was built on an embankment to guard against winter
floods from the foothills, so that one walked, as it were, a little above the country, along a
stately corridor, seeing all India spread out to left and right. It was beautiful to behold the
many-yoked grain and cotton wagons crawling over the country roads: one could hear their
axles, complaining a mile away, coming near . . . It was equally beautiful to watch the
people, little clumps of red and blue and pink and white and saffron, turning aside to go to
their own villages, dispersing and growing small by twos and threes across the level
plain.13
The colourful panorama representing the sedate and peaceful life-style of the agricultural north-
India gives our hero, a Sahib by birth, a sense of a cultural identification which can be termed with a
profound psychological overtone — ‘desire of the Other’14
The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together — Kim sat up and
yawned, shook himself and thrilled with delight. This was seeing the world in real truth:
this was life as he would have it — bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and
beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food and new
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sights at every turn of the approving eye. . . India was awake, and Kim was in the middle
of it, more awake and more excited than anyone, chewing on a twig that he would
presently use as a toothbrush; for he borrowed right and left-handedly from all the customs
of the country he knew and loved. (p - 84)
It is interesting to note that the idea of India as a vast, heterogeneous space where one can
literally lose oneself, traversing through it — by road — a journey that can last for an indefinite
period is counterpointed by another clearly discernible motif — the railway journey — which opens
up a new kind of ‘social space’ and a completely different temporality. ‘Railway’ is projected in the
novel not only as a gift to the ‘Orient’ from the Western civilization but a powerful symbol of the
Industrial Revolution which has become successful to bind a vast country like India by means of the
swifter communication system. ‘Railways’ is, thus, an important means for the ‘West’ to bring under
control the enormous spaces of the empire. In the novel, a journey by train (te-rain as it is
pronounced by the natives in the novel) creates a new kind of social space where classes literally
belonging to a cross-section of the society are thrown together — thereby, giving the novelist an
opportunity to ‘narrate’ an India not in its spatial dimension but ‘India’ of the ‘people’ — the
heterogeneous colonial ‘subjects’.
They entered the fort-like railway station, black in the end of night; the electrics sizzling
over the goods-yard where they handle the heavy Northern grain-traffic.
‘This is the work of devils!’ said the lama, recoiling from the hollow echoing darkness, the
glimmer of rails between the masonry platforms, and the maze of girders above. He stood
in a gigantic stone hall paved, it seemed, with the sheeted dead — third class passengers
who had taken their tickets overnight and were sleeping in the waiting rooms. (p - 34)
As the first train-journey in the novel begins we see that the lama and Kim are posited with a
motley crowd comprising a Sikh artisan, a Hindu Jat from the rich Jullandur district, his wife, a
Hindu money lender, a young Dogra soldier and an Amritzar courtesan : “ ‘I say,’ began the money-
lender, pursing his lips, ‘that there is not one rule of right living which these te-rains do not
cause us to break. We sit, for example, side by side with all castes and peoples.’” (p - 36) This
breaking-down of the old-order by the advent of the western technology is quickly counterbalanced
by new ‘interpellated’ subjects: “‘Great is the speed of the te-rain’, said the banker, with a
patronising grin. ‘We have gone farther since Lahore than thou couldst walk in two days: at even, we
shall enter Umballa,’ ” (p - 39) The motif of train-journey is, therefore, really a reworking of the
hero’s journey ‘to the depths’ in Bakhtin’s discussion of the chronotope of the ‘adventure novel of
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everyday life’ where he rubs shoulders with all kinds of people and learns from them about life ‘as it
really is.’
The adventure-chronotope, thus, gives ample opportunity to Rudyard Kipling for realizing the
great imperial project of comprehending, codifying and thereby establishing authority over the
empire — symbolically represented in the novel by the hero’s capacity to mix with the Indian
subjects and to participate in an authentic ‘Indian’ life. In the words of Edward Said, ‘It is as if by
holding Kim at the centre of the novel (just as Creighton the spy master holds the boy in the Great
Game) Kipling can have and enjoy India in a way that even imperialism never dreamed of.’15 Kim’s
adventures are directed toward the realization of the notion that to govern India it is essential to know
India (an ideology, quite clearly present in the novel, in the form of colonel Creighton’s character, an
ethnographer and a colonial official — a clear case of the nexus between ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’). I
shall come to the question of ‘hybridity’ present in Kim’s character and the process of ‘becoming’
(Kim’s finding of an answer to the persistent quest “Who is Kim?” at the end of the novel) later but
now let us look at how the ‘abstract adventure time’ of Bakhtin is transformed in this great imperial
novel into a chronotopic-time which can be termed as ‘imperial adventure time.’
Unlike the tight, relentlessly unforgiving temporal structure of the metropolitan European novels
contemporaneous with Kim (the bourgeois individualistic, alienated world with oppressive
calendrical time of Flaubert and Zola, names of texts like Madam Bovary and Nana immediately
come to mind) the predominance of the luxurious geographical and spatial expansiveness of the
opulent Indian space in Kim can apparently make one slightly giddy and lose one’s sense of time [“
‘It is less than three days since we took the road together and it is as though it were a hundred years
(Kim)’”] (p-81) But the textual strategy of ‘spatialization of time’ can be ripped open if we take help
from Bakhtin’s discovery of the peculiar chronotopic nature of the ‘adventure novel of ordeal’ where
the interchangeability of ‘spatial’ and ‘temporal’ dimensions takes place. The sensuous, living world
of Kim’s ‘India’ traversed by the lama and Kim, by road and by train — ‘this roaring whirl of India’
— “all castes and kinds of men move here . . . brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers
and bunnias, pilgrims and potters — all world coming and going” (p-67) — radiates a sense of
immediate corporeality. But the text, on closer scrutiny, offers another mode of narration of space
which assumes temporal dimensions. The description of the northern mountain ranges of India, Kim
and the lama’s laborious journey through them and Kim’s wonder at the sheer natural beauty of those
places surreptitiously introduces a sense of timelessness, unchangeability and eternity:
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At last they entered a world within a world — a valley of leagues where the high hills were
fashioned of the mere rubble and refuse from off the knees of the mountains. Here one
day’s march carried them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer’s clogged pace bears him in
a nightmare. . . Above these again, changeless since the world’s beginning, but changing to
every mood of sun and cloud, lay out eternal snow. (p - 255)
The sense of timelessness ingrained in these type of nature-descriptions is quite congruent with
the common ‘Oriental’ stereotype of the ‘Spiritual-India’ — clearly made visible in the text by the
lama’s journey toward the Middle Way for a release from the Great Wheel of Life [“I saw all Hind,
from Ceylon in the sea to the hills and my own painted Rocks at Such-zen . . . . . . . ; I saw every
camp and village . . . . . . . for they were within the Soul. By this I knew the Soul had passed beyond
the illusion of Time and Space and of Things.”] (p - 311)
But the imperial design present in the text undercuts this stereotype and makes subsequent
modulations in chronotopic - time: ‘All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange
tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers and visionaries : as it
has been from the beginning and will continue to the end.’ (P-40) The ‘timeless spiritual India’ is
consistently counterbalanced by the ‘exotic, magical India’ where the everyday existence of some
groups of people would involve adventures of the wildest kinds. Such an India unfolds to Kim as he
hears the tales of his fellow-students at St. Xavier’s — whose fathers worked as subordinate officials
in Government departments, as army officials, as captains of the Indian Marine or as commanders-in-
chief to a feudal Raja’s army or even planters, shopkeepers and missionaries:
They were used to jogging off alone through a hundred miles of jungle, where there was
always the delightful chance of being delayed by tigers; but they would no more have
bathed in the English Channel in an English August than their brothers across the world
would have lain still while a leopard snuffed at their palanquin. There were boys of fifteen
who had spent a day and a half on an islet in the middle of a flooded river, taking charge,
as by right, of a camp of frantic pilgrims returning from a shrine. There were seniors who
had requisitioned a chance met - Rajah’s elephant in the name of St. Francis Xavier, when
the Rains once blotted out the cart-track that led to their father’s estate, and had all but lost
the huge beast in a quicksand. (P-137 - 138)
The exotic atmosphere which India could offer is most directly represented in Kim’s encounter with
Lurgan Sahib:
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Kim was conscious that beyond the circle of light the room was full of things that smelt
like all the temples of all the East. A whiff of musk, a puff of sandal-wood, and a breath of
sickly jessamine-oil caught his opened nostrils.
‘I am here’, said Kim at last speaking in the vernacular; the smells made him forget that he
was to be a Sahib. (p - 164)
The atmosphere of magic of Lurgan’s Sahib’s shop where broken-jars are brought together by
the owner’s magical power and his little Hindu assistant-boy [this boy reminds the present writer of
the snake-charmer boy of the painting which served as the cover of Edward Said’s book Orientalism]
is an enumeration of another India which is juxtaposed with the colonial India and its newly-emerged
ambience of the Railways, telegram, allopathic medicines and missionary school (St. Xaviers’ of
Lucknow — ‘Gates of Learning’). The subconscious of the text seems to hint at an ‘India’ which is a
land of uninhibited sexuality — where sexual fantasies of the ‘West’ can find articulation — where
homosexuality, sex with small boys (there are enough suggestions in the text of a homosexual
bonding between Lurgan Sahib and the Hindu boy) are not considered aberrations but are merely
different modes of exploring the world of sex. The painting which I mentioned seems like an
invitation to the land of alternative sexual fantasies. The chronotopic structure of Kim, therefore,
gives one a strange kind of ‘double-time’ — of the ahistorical and historical India. The chronotopic-
time in the novel is used, thus, somewhat ‘bifocally’16 where on the one hand, the lama’s search for
the ‘River of Healing’ becomes a refracted image of the ‘inscrutable timeless’ heritage of the ‘East’,
— situated at a temporal distance and on the other there is Kim’s realization of the ubiquitous nature
of the Great Game and his subsequent participation in it — situated very much within the proximity
of imperialist history. The temporal dimension of the chronotopic nature of the text is such that that
‘timeless’ India and the ‘historical’ India are projected alternatively; much like the way the zoom lens
of a modern day camera functions; telescoping and microscoping alternatively.
So, from a postcolonial point of view, Kim’s responsibility of drawing maps of the regions with
the help of compass-box etc. — a responsibility given to him by the conductors of the Great Game
and which he tries to perform to the best of his ability — becomes a symbolical gesture for the
colonizers of a spatial, geographical appropriation of the land of the colonized. Similarly, the
treatment of the ‘Great Mutiny’ within the chronotopic plane of the novel becomes a clear case of
doctoring the empirical world of history and creating a fictionalized, temporal world of imperialist
polemic. The version of the old, loyalist soldier of the Mutiny is highly charged by the British
rationale for what happened:
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A madness ate into all the Army, and they turned against their officers. That was the first
evil; but not past remedy if they had then held their hands. But they chose to kill the
Sahib’s wives and children. Then came the Sahibs from over the sea and called them to
most strict account. (p - 62)
Colonial rule is, therefore, a legitimate act of bringing under control the ‘sudden madnesses’ of
which the natives are capable of — a civilizing mission for restoring peace and maintaining law and
order. The superiority of the ‘Western Race’ which becomes apparent becomes quite incidental in the
narrative of harmonious heterogeneity of a peaceful India under the colonial rule of the British
Empire. Seen from this perspective it becomes clear why the erudite ‘Oriental’ Abbot Lama has to
regard Kim, the white boy, as his saviour (“Child I have lived on thy strength as an old tree lives on
the lime of an old wall”). The chronotope of the novel is, therefore, structured to an extent by a
motivation to create an imaginary India, without nationalist aspirations but on the contrary, emitting a
sense of contentment in living permanently under the able guidance of a superior race. In the words
of Francis Hutchins in his book The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India, by the late
nineteenth century, an
. . . . India of the imagination was created which contained no elements of either social
change or political menace. Orientalization was the result of this effort to conceive of
Indian society as devoid of elements hostile to the perpetualization of British rule, for it
was on the basis of this presumptive India that Orientalizers sought to build a permanent
rule.17
To go back once again to Bakhtin and his theorizations of the adventure-chronotope, we are
faced with the complexity of the role of the adventurer — ‘one who has not yet found a definite or
fixed place in life’ and whose search for an identity is an important motif behind the ‘adventure time’
of such novels. Kim’s persistent questioning of his true identity “Who is Kim?” (in pages 131, 202
and 305 of the edition which I am presently using) is identical formulation of the search for an
identity-motif in the ‘adventure novel of ordeal’ as discussed by Bakhtin. In the ‘Introduction’ to the
section of Kim in Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader18 Peter Childs catalogues a
number of discussions which have focussed on the ‘problem of identity’ in Kim. I do not have
sufficient scope to deal with this issue extensively. But, from the primary perspective of this chapter
— that of the strategies involved in the act of ‘narrating the nation’ I want to offer a few insights.
Homi K. Bhabha in his essay ‘DissemiNation’ has extensively dealt with the dichotomies involved
between the ‘pedagogic’ and ‘performative’ in the projection of the nation and its ‘people’ and refers
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to the ‘cultural difference as a form of intervention’ which ‘participates in a supplementary logic of

secondariness similar to the strategies of minority discourse.’19 My point is that in Kim even the
potentially threatening ‘minority discourse’ of the natives is appropriated by the positioning of
‘hybridity’ in Kim’s identity. An Irish by birth but a street-urchin of the Lahore city by turns of
circumstances who thinks in Hindi, Kim is picked up by the colonial masters and is reminded of his
special status [‘a white man is a white man no matter what the circumstances are’] and is given the
best possible colonial education in India at St. Xavier’s, Lucknow — only to be prepared adequately
for the ‘Great Game’ which requires de-Englishization at certain moments in work which can be
effortlessly achieved by Kim. Kim’s act of dressing up as a Sahib features prominently in the novel.
He moves like a fish in water up and down the social ladders of Indian society. Kim’s hybridity and
mimicry of the colonized’s world are, therefore, foregrounded in the novel. The ultimate realisation
of Kim as regards to his identity is cleverly formulated with sufficient rhetoric to somewhat suppress
the fact that his unique characteristic qualities are hard to come by in the Great Game for which he
determines to work for during the rest of his life:
Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion.
Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be
tilled and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true — solidly planted
upon the feet. (p - 305)
Kim’s character, however, has a ‘double’ in the text. He is Hurree Babu; an M. A. of University
of Calcutta who lectures Kim about Wordsworth and who considers himself a Spencerian and who
dreams of becoming one day the fellow of the Royal Society. During the course of the novel he
works as a spy for the British Secret Service in India. Just opposite to the outcome of the ‘cultural
crossover’ successfully performed by Kim, Hurree Babu’s attempts at westernization become a
pathetic travesty of the Western civilization: ‘He represents in little India in transition — the
monstrous hybridism of East and West,’ the Russian replied . . . ‘He has lost his own country and has
not acquired any other’. (p - 259)20 The historical reality is that it is precisely the ‘Bilingual Western-
educated’ class of Hurree Babu which formulated the nationalist consciousness in its initial stages for
the people of India. Chronologically too, Hurree Babu happens to be exactly the contemporary of the
educated elites of India, especially of Bengal, who established the Indian National Congress in 1885.
The caricature of the English-educated class of Bengal in the form of Hurree Babu, therefore, falls
very much within the paradigm of imperialism.
 13

Kim’s participation in the myriad Oriental life-style may or may not be an act of gratification of
the ‘desire of the Other’ for the colonizing race but it is certain that his hybridity and a sort of
counter-mimicry robs the native the perspective of a dissenting minority discourse. The ‘Otherness’
of the colonized is appropriated but the reversal of the process — i.e., the appropriation of the
metropolitan-West. Even its possibility of achieving some amount of success is drastically subverted.
The imperial adventure-chronotope of Kim in this way presents the empire in its most alluring and at
the same time, antiseptic form for the colonizing bourgeoisie for happy consumption. I end this
section with a very significant comment of Edward Said: ‘of all the major literary forms, the novel . .
. its normative pattern of social authority the most structured: imperialism and the novel fortified each
other to such a degree that it is impossible . . .to read on without in some way dealing with the
other.’21

Gora — Search for the Mythical Time of the ‘Nation’ within the Urban
Space of a Colonial Metropolis
In the concluding section of his monograph ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’ Bakhtin
writes, ‘. . . this world the world that creates the text for all its aspects — the reality reflected in the
text, the authors creating the text . . . readers who recreate and in so doing renew the text —
participate equally in the creation of the represented world of the text.’22 He further clarifies his point
thus — ‘Out of the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation)
emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work (in the text).’23
Seen from this perspective, ‘chronotope’ can be said to provide a means to explore the complex,
indirect and always mediated relation between art and life. For example, in nineteenth-century French
novels a ‘fundamentally new space’ opens up in literature, the ‘space of parlors and salons’. This
newly-opened possibility can be explained by the peculiar importance such space assumed in Paris at
that particular time. In other words, the space-time dimension of a work of art and its nature shares a
close relationship with the generally held conceptions of how time and space relate to each other in a
particular culture at a particular time. In fact, Bakhtin ascribes a kind of symbiotic relationship
between the chronotopes of life and art: ‘The work and the world represented in it enter the real
world and enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its
creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing of the work through the
 14

creative perception of . . .readers.’24 This comment of Bakhtin makes room for a tripartite relationship
that would exist in a proper chronotopic study of a novel ; between the real-life chronotope and the
chronotope of the art and also the chronotope of the re-creative perceptions of criticism. I am, at
present, going to deal with a text that was written in the first decade of the twentieth century — a
period when nationalist discourse was fast coagulating around the newly-formulated idea of the
‘nation’. So, before going on to the chronotopic plane of the text it is necessary, following Bakhtin’s
theories, to cast a quick glance at the real life chronotope of Tagore’s times in relation to which the
chronotope of Gora emerges.
In his discussion of Calcutta, the city of Bengali, Bhadralok nationalist activists, — ‘The City
Imagined : Calcutta of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’,25 Sumit Sarkar distinguishes
between different regions of the city and their socio-cultural environments which were responsible
for the development of the Bengali mentalité : ‘The city in many important respects was, and
remains, not one but many, distinct in residential areas, languages and cultures, self-images, but
interacting in everyday life in relationships of inequality — and occasional conflict.’26 Sarkar
demarcates three major segments of the metropolitan space of the city — Sahebpara, ‘heterogenous
intermediate zone’ and the ‘Calcutta of the Bengalis’ which lay in the nineteenth century to the north
and north-east of the intermediate zone situated somewhat at the centre of the city. While the first
segment was a clearly discernible symbol of political supremacy which was reflected by the colour of
the skin of the inhabitants of this zone, the second segment was primarily dominated by the
enterprising Marwaris who rose to become the main subordinate agents of the British business firms
and to whose hands Bengali merchant princes had to give away the ‘commerce’ of the city — the
zone, the economic heartland. The third zone was inhabited by the Bengalis, predominantly Hindu,
with the proportion of upper castes (Brahmins, Kayasthas, Vaidyas) higher than most other parts of
Bengal. This was primarily the zone of the middle-class (madhyabitta) bhadralok world which
situated itself below the aristocracy of dewans and banians but above the lesser folk who had to soil
their hands with manual labour in countryside or town. This middle class was the only class which
went for the colonial education in a big way because their status of small-scale rentiers of land hardly
gave them enough financial support and, for that reason, they had to equip themselves for the
professions of teacher, journalist, government official, or clerk. The bhadralok culture was
formulated by this middle-class and the English-educated, ‘enlightened’ upwardly mobile Bengali
elites and the spirit of ‘nationalism’ grew out of this culture. It is extremely interesting to note that
Calcutta ‘the imagined city’ of the superior Bengali culture was in a strictly ‘spatial’ sense out of
 15

bounds for the middle-class people who were struggling to maintain a decent life-style — after giving
up the economic supremacy to the non-Bengalis along with the political supremacy already in charge
of the British. The major areas of the city whose cultural inheritance, the Bengalis thought, lay with
them were absolutely alien to the middle-class and over which they had no control. The spatial
dispossession from the important localities of the city — a city — symbol of colonial hegemony,
brute coercive drives of the rulers, in the form of physical terror, epitomised by the British sergeants
or the temporal alienation due to the ruthless, disciplinary motives of the British mercantile firms —
with their strict insistence on duty-hours and rigorous following of the ‘clock time’ — a
phenomenon, which the Bengali clerks simply abhorred — resulted in a wish to get away from the
chronotopic sphere from Calcutta and search for alternative reality.27
This brings us to the other important feature of the ‘chronotope’ — the concept of time. A
number of cultural historians and social scientists have extensively dealt with the nationalist
conception of ‘time’ in the colonial age — a conception which was deeply influential in any
indigenous attempt of writing history for the motherland or creative writing targeted at the educated
middle-class.28 Despite some insurmountable differences in their sophisticated arguments, on one
point almost all of them agree — and it is the mythical perception present in the Indian conception of
‘time’ which was diametrically opposite to the historico-calendrical time of the Western civilization
conceived largely in the idioms of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’. In the field of creative writing,
Meenakshi Mukherjee in her discussion entitled ‘Purana to Nutana’ showed how the newly-risen
genre, like the novel, which was primarily a ‘Western’ import also imbibed the traditional mythical
view of time within its structure, — a view which was not linear but cyclical in nature.29
The mythical conception of time became largely instrumental in the nationalist discourse’s
‘strand of immemorialism’ necessary for the building up of the notion of ‘nation’ — an act of
temporal telescoping which laid claim for the antiquity of India — the ‘nation’. Sudipta Kaviraj in his
brilliant essay ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ notes the importance of mangal-kavyas and their
narration of the mythical world in this regard. He quotes Antonio Gramsci’s comment about a phase,
quite similar to that of Indian nationalism, of the invention of Italian nationalism in order to dissect
the narrative strategies of the formation of a ‘nation’; ‘. . . History was political propaganda, it aimed
to create national unity — that is, the nation — from the outside and against tradition, by basing itself
on literature. It was a wish, not a move based on already existing conditions.’30 The ‘invention of
tradition’ (to use one of Hobsbawm’s famous phrases) had to be a collective narrative in order to be
 16

effective. Kaviraj writes: ‘For this is a thought-form which is by definition collective, its syllables can
be uttered only by a collective subject or on its behalf, to use the Foucauldian trope of enonciation.’31
The collective narrative with the purpose of inventing a tradition opens up a new space for the
‘imagined’ — the space occupied by a ‘collective self’ — the ‘we’. In Bengal, since the ‘we’ of the
Bengali intellectual turned out to be a rather parochial thing in the fight against the injustice of the
mighty British empire, a process of widening the ‘collective self’ set in. Kaviraj writes, ‘. . . Bengalis
entering into narrative contract with communities who had nothing really to do with them in the past,
constantly gerrymandering the boundaries of their national collective self.’32 The Rajputs, the
Marathas, the Sikhs – all gradually came to secure a place in the new ‘we’ — which came to be
coterminous with the land of India – the ‘nation-space’ inhabited by ‘its’ people. This new narrative
of ‘constructed’ ‘nation space’, however, spoke in the idiom of the ‘India as an antiquity’. The
chronotope of the narrative of Indian ‘newly-risen’ nationalism, therefore, has the curious space-time
combination of a vast land of millions of people — the ‘we’ and the ‘time immemorialness of an old
tradition’. Kaviraj must be quoted here at length:
National groups, although they are gesellschaften must at least in the romantic period of
their rise against foreign control, present themselves to themselves . . . as gemeinschaft. It
is at one level a coalition of group interests which wishes to merge into an overwhelming
combination against the ruling power; but apparently it must pretend . . . that it is an
immemorially ancient community. Actually, it must be a bond of secular interests, but in
ideology it must be represented as a mystic unity of sentiments.33
We have, therefore, come a long way from the claustrophobic world of the British merchant
offices, situated in the white-dominated metropolitan world of Calcutta and the relentless ‘clock-
time’ of chakri (job) to the ‘pedagogic’ chronotope of the ‘nation’ — its ‘mytho-religious idea of
time’ (to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase) and the idea of space of millions of Indians in a land of
rivers, mountains, forests and broad fields — the metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national
identity — the chronotope of Bharatmata (‘mother India’). And the historical period we are talking
about here — is the ‘Swadeshi’ period – the few, dizzy inspiring years during 1905 — 1908 when the
middle-class Bhadralok seemed on the point of gaining command over the alien city, through
struggle. Sumit Sarkar writes, ‘Swadeshi Calcutta, predictably, had its principal spatial location in the
middle-class and Hindu quarters to the north of intermediate zone, along with Bhowanipur and
Kalighat — but there were some penetrations into other areas and social levels.’34
 17

Now that an idea is given about how time and space related to each other in reality of the period
in which Gora was written, it is about time that we enter into the literary chronotope of the text and
try to find in it reflections or variations of the chronotopic types which Bakhtin discussed in his essay
and the motif of ‘narrating the nation’ — of which we are presently concerned — gets formulated in
it. I shall begin my discussion with a few comments of Bakhtin. In the concluding section of his essay
Bakhtin writes:
In the novels of Stendhal and Balzac a fundamentally new space appears in which
novelistic events may unfold — the space of parlors and salons (in the broad sense of the
word) . . .this is where dialogues happen, something that acquires extra-ordinary
importance in the novel, revealing the character, “ideas” and “passions” of the heroes . . ..
In the parlors and salons . . . is found the barometer of political and business life, political,
business, social, literary reputations are made and destroyed. . .
. . . Most important in all this is the weaving of historical and socio-public events together
with the personal and even deeply private side of life . . . Here the graphically visible
markers of historical time as well as of biographical and everyday time are concentrated
and condensed; at the same time they are intertwined with each other in the tightest
possible fashion, fused into unitary markers of epoch.35
From the above comments, I isolate three main characteristics from Bakhtin’s formulations of the
particular chronotope of Balzac’s and Stendhal’s novels — chronotopic space of salons and parlors,
extensive use of dialogues to unravel “ideas” and characters and the weaving of socio-cultural time of
a particular epoch with the biographical and everyday time in the lives of the characters. Even a
cursory reading of Tagore’s text Gora reveals the authorial insistence on dialogues, long
conversations and hard-fought debates within the chronotopic plane. (There are a number of pairs in
the novel between whom extensive exchanges of dialogues take place; Gora-Binoy, Gora-
Pareshbabu, Gora-Sucharita, Gora-Haranbabu, Sucharita-Binoy, Sucharita-Pareshbabu, Gora-
Anandamoyi, Anandamoyi-Sucharita, Anandamoyi-Binoy). With the help of dialogues, a number of
contemporary issues like the ‘real’ nature of India - the nation, Hinduism and its quintessential
qualities, Brahmoism, the role of women in the society, casteism, patriotism, tradition and modernity
are raised and discussed within the fictional plane. Unlike his other two overtly ‘political’ novels,
Ghare-Baire and Char Adhyay Tagore does not directly deal with the contemporary political issues
— the raging one being the ‘Divide of Bengal’ in 1905. (Although the novel was written in the last
years of the first decade of the twentieth century, the temporal background of the story is set in the
 18

last quarter of the nineteenth century) Nevertheless, it is the dialogic mode of narration present in the
text that condenses and concentrates the unitary markers of the epoch.
This brings us to the third important chronotopic quality of the kind of European novel that
Bakhtin discusses — the ‘social’ space manifested through the space of salons and parlors and its
counterpart in our text — the newly-opened social space of Brahmo majlish and adda (these Bengali
words are difficult to translate for their peculiar Bengali ambience — ‘society’, ‘meeting’ would not
be good translations) where Brahmo-women, gradually coming out into the open and meeting
members of the opposite sex in social gatherings (women were even taking part in politico-cultural
reinvention of rituals like rakhi-bandhan in the open streets of Calcutta).36
It is really a potentially dangerous thing to compare the natures of the ‘social space’ of French
salons and Brahmo majlish. But, it would not be altogether wrong to transpose the importance of
‘salons’ in the French ‘public’ sphere — where cultural and social trends largely originated and
fought for supremacy with other forms of cultural formulations — to the formation of Bengali
cultural discourse in the newly-opened ‘public sphere’ of addas, majlishes — taking place mostly in
well-to-do Brahmo homes, offices of newspapers and journals or political organizations. Most of the
long stretches of dialogue take place in the Brahmo household of Paresh Babu in the text of Gora.37
The new ‘civic-space’ of adda or majlish was, therefore, soon turned into a discursive field where the
Bengali bhadralok discourse gradually took shape. It is the new civic-space of adda during the
practice of socializing among educated bhadraloks of both Hindu and Brahmo communities – usually
taking place in Brahmo houses, that opens up a new chronotopic space where the narrative of the
‘nation’ can unfold and the important social, religious, familial and cultural markers of the
‘constructed’ nation can be enunciated and legitimized to a great extent. Unlike the predominantly
‘spatial’ and ‘geographical’ narrative of ‘India’ in Kim, ‘India’ as a ‘nation’ unfolds in the
chronotopic plane of this novel mostly as a pedagogic subject. The feel of the nation, its specific
form, its people, its culture, its religion, its temporal existence, — the ‘nation’ as an idea (the
temptation is too great to use Benedict Anderson’s oft-quoted phrase, ‘nation — an imagined
community’) – all are communicated to the reader by a multi-nuanced and multi-perspective grand-
narrative. Let us look at a few such dialogues where ‘nation’ the discursive object opens up:
. . .Binoy said: Tell me; is India very real, absolutely clear, to you? India is in your
thoughts day and might, but what way do you think of her? . . . . (Gora) said: “As the
captain of a ship when he is out on the ocean keeps in mind the port across the sea, both
while at work and during his leisure, so is India in my mind at all times.” . . . . “I may miss
 19

my task; I may sink and drown, but that port of a great destiny is always there. That is my
India in its fullness — full of wealth, full of knowledge, full of righteousness. Do you
mean to say that such India is nowhere?38
Gora’s voice seems to be an almost perfect echo of the dominant discourse of the rising
nationalist consciousness about which we have written in the beginning of this section. The
‘imagined’ nature of ‘India — the nation’ is quite evident from the figurative manner of speaking and
the list of attributes being tagged with that assumed perfection of the country. In the section entitled
‘Imagination as a problem in the History of Nationalism’ of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay ‘Nation and
Imagination’ the historian, during his discussion of roles played by European Romanticism and
Hindu or Buddhist perceptions on the nationalist consciousness in India and the role of ‘imagination’
in it, writes: ‘. . . the nation of India ...... not only ‘imagined’, it may have been darshaned as well’39
The search for an alternative reality in the times of an alien rule — a motif of which we have spoken
earlier in this essay has a clear manifestation in the act of ‘imagining’ a nation - ideal, perfect,
beautiful (Sonar Bangla - ‘golden Bengal’ is such a similar formulation); a ‘nation’ which is situated
outside the historical flow of ‘everyday-time’ (pratyahik — the everyday) and a manifestation of the
nitya or the chirantan (the eternal). Let us look at anther comment of Gora and hopefully the
‘imaginary’ nature of the nation comes to light:
Gora went on: “Here where we read and study, where we go about seeking employment,
slaving away from ten to five without rhyme or reason — because we call this falsehood of
some evil genie India, is that any reason why 350 millions of people should honour what is
false and go about intoxicated with the idea that this world of falsity is a real world? How
can we gain any life, for all our efforts, out of this mirage? . . . . But there is a true India,
rich and full, and unless we take our stand there, we shall not be able to draw upon the sap
of life either by our intellect or by our heart. (p - 18)
In the above extract, there are clear signs of a tendency to get away from the chronotopic world
of ‘colonial reality’ and create an alternative chronotopic world of the ‘nation’. Throughout the novel
this drive is consistently present; only the ideas regarding the exact ideological nature of this
‘construct’ and its specific religio-cultural markers are ‘dialogised’ by the different points of view of
different characters and long exchanges of dialogues between them. In this way, within the
chronotopic time and space of addas, informal gatherings of a Brahmo house we are offered glimpses
of Binoy’s India, Paresh Babu’s India, Sucharita’s India, Anandamoyi’s India and of course Gora’s
India. Gora’s ‘India’ is always abuzz with the noises of a national collective self’ — ‘350 millions of
 20

people’ — the people who are the inhabitants of the nation — another common gerrymandering motif
of ‘nationalism’; “Those whom you call illiterate are those to whose party I belong. What you call
superstition that is my faith! So long as you do not love your country and take your stand beside your
own people, I will not allow one word of abuse of the motherland from you”. (p - 51) The religious
contours of Gora’s India are overtly Hindu. The ‘imagined’ India is, according to him is a ‘Hindu’
nation but he uses the word ‘Hindu’ along with its widest connotations and the ‘colonial’ India is to
be rejuvenated by the arrival of a ‘superman’ Brahmin: “The Hindus are a nation and such a vast
nation that their nationality cannot be limited within the scope of any single definition.” (p - 294) —
“India wants the Brahmin of firm, tranquil and liberated mind - when once she gets him then only
will she be free!” (p - 87 - 87)
Paresh Babu’s views about India justly identify the ‘revivalist’ streak dormant in the discursive
formations of ‘nationalism’ of Gora with its strong Hindu overtones; “I cannot say that I know India;
and I certainly do not know what India wanted for herself, . . . but can you ever go back to the days
that are gone ? . . . [w]hat good can we do by stretching out our arms in vain appeals to the past?” (p -
88), Sucharita’s ‘India’ while retaining the ‘strand of immemorialism’ is much more catholic in
texture:
This is a wonderful country! How many thousands and thousands of years had God’s
purpose been working to make it surpass all other countries in the world? How many
people from other lands have come to make this purpose complete? How many great men
have taken birth in our land? . . . . What great truths have found utterance here? What great
austerities have been performed? From what a variety of standpoints has religion been
studied? And how many solutions to the mystery of life have been found in this land? This
is our India! (p - 360)
Sucharita’s speech is interesting from another point of view. Hers has the function of
championing the ‘spiritual’ — the “inner” domain of the ‘East’ — bearing the “essential” marks of
cultural identity with which the indigenous ‘nationalism’ tried to fight the narrative of ‘modernity’
and ‘progress’ with which the ‘West’ staked its claim for supremacy. But, so far we have been
identifying traces of affinity present in the text of Gora with the discourse of nationalism. But the
project of writing the nation has certain inner-contradictions ingrained in it. Let us look at them now.
In his essay ‘DissemiNation’ Homi Bhabha writes:
The people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic. They are
also a complex rhetorical strategy of social reference, where the claims to be representative
 21

provoke a crisis within the process of signification and discursive address. . . . the people
are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy . . . the people are also the ‘subjects’
of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-
people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people . . . In the production
of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist accumulative temporality of
the pedagogical and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative.40
So, the narrative of many as one or the ‘collective-self’ living in the ‘horizontal, homogeneous
empty time’ of the constructed ‘nation’ has an inherent contradiction in it — what Bhabha terms as
the ‘split between the pedagogical and the performative’. The pedagogy of the discourse of
‘nationalism’ can never contain within it the heterogeneous temporal existence of the people of the
nation. In the later part of his essay, Bhabha, therefore, argues that the official discourse of
nationalism, by its very status of ‘constructedness’, opens up the possibility for a ‘minority discourse’
— the discourse of the Other. The task of narrating the nation, in this way, involves a confrontation
with the ‘supplementary space of cultural signification’ - be it from the differently constructed voice
of women emanating the perspectives of ‘women’s time’ (this is Julia Kristeva’s notion which
Bhabha quotes in his essay) or the subaltern existence which threatens to pull down the ‘Civic
Imaginary’ of the official discourse (in the case of our present text, the Bhadralok discourse)
Within the chronotopic plane of the novel the attack on the official version of the nationalist
discourse with the predominance of Hindu idioms in it comes from Anadamoyi: “I have long ceased
to take pride in my caste . . . . . . . Aren’t Christians human beings? If you alone are the elect of God,
why has He made you grovel in the dust first before the Pathans, then before the Moghuls, and now
before the Christians?” (p - 27) It is she who breaks free from the limits of nationalist discourse and
utters a counter-discourse of universal humanism: “What after all is the difference, my son, between
Brahmo and orthodox Hindu? There is no caste in men’s hearts – there God brings men together and
there He Himself comes to them.” (p - 183) Anandamoyi’s India, thus, ruptures the chronotopic
formation of the ‘imaginary India’ that has been so persistently foregrounded by the dialogues uttered
by Gora. In the words of Bhabha, ‘Being obliged to forget becomes the basis for remembering the
nation, peopling it anew, imagining the possibility of other contending and liberating forms of
cultural identification’41 — Anandamoyi’s consciousness is one such liberating forms of cultural
identification.
But the ‘act of forgetting’ which Bhabha identifies in the narrative of ‘nation’ — a Freudian
‘repression’ of a ‘cultural’ unconscious – most often gets registered in the chronotopic plane of
 22

literary text. This is one clear sign of the autonomy of ‘artistic reality’ which does not conform to
Fredric Jameson’s idea of looking at all kinds of literature of the Third World as some kind of a
‘nationalist allegory’. In the chronotopic plane of Gora the ‘minority discourse’ which is usually
situated in the margins of nation-space — is uttered by the subaltern barber who lives in a
Mohammedan village and who has adopted an unfortunate Muslim boy whose family has been
devastated by the British Indigo planters. Asked about his such an extremely unorthodox act of
adopting a Mussalman boy, the poor Barber replies; “What’s the difference, sir? We call on Him as
Hari, they as Allah, that’s all.” (p - 133) It is, in fact, the plights of the subaltern-India, represented in
the chronotopic-space of the novel which opens up during Gora’s travels through the countryside and
his involvements in some forms of social work in the neighbourhood that bring him in touch with the
lower strata of his beloved country — that most clearly subvert the autonomy of the imagining of the
bhadralok’s alternative reality, manifested in the narration of the ‘nation as an imagined community’.
In chapter XVII Gora and Binoy go to visit the neighbourhood for doing the rounds of their regular
social work. On reaching there, they come to learn about the sudden and extremely unexpected death
of Gora’s enthusiastic follower, Nanda – the youthful son of a carpenter. Nanda, we are told, has been
a very accomplished cricket player. In the mixed company of the elite and the subaltern members of
the Sports and Cricket club founded by Gora in the neighbourhood ‘Nanda stood easily first in every
kind of manly exercise.’ (p - 78) Nanda could have been an ideal signifier for the virile young
generation of the emerging nation in its anticolonial struggle. But Nanda dies even before the early
glimpses of his potential could be noticed. And the manner in which he dies – spread of tetanus
infection in a small wound inflicted by a chisel as Nanda had been treated by a local exorcist – speaks
volumes of the chasm existing between the elite, nationalist projects of fighting with the imperial
rulers and setting up indigenous institution of ‘nation-state’ and the real mass of illiterate subaltern
classes – living amidst poverty, superstitions, caste systems, unhygienic surroundings and other social
evils. The ‘silent’ presence of Nanda within the chronotopic plane of the text is a clear proof of the
‘split’ that exists between the pedagogic programme of the ‘nation-people’ and performative
attributes of the lived existence of ‘real people’. It is, in fact, the realization of this ‘split’ that helps
Gora overcome his euphoric empathization with the ‘India’ of his imagination:
Now I have truly the right to serve her, for the real field of labour is spread out before me
— it is not a creation of my own imagination — it is the actual field of welfare for the
three hundred millions of India’s children! . . . . In me there is no longer any opposition
between Hindu, Mussalman, and Christian. Today every caste in India is my caste, the
 23

food of all is my food! . . . I tried to make that emptiness look more beautiful by decorating
with all kinds of artistic work . . .Now that I have been delivered from those fruitless
attempts at inventing such useless decorations I feel, Paresh Babu, that I am alive again. (p
- 406)
This is a most thorough denouncing of the ideational chronotope of nationalism’s ‘Imaginary
India’ and its associated discursive formations. In his essay ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the
Novel’ Bakhtin comments, ‘the author-creator, finding himself outside the chronotopes of the world
he represents in his work, is nevertheless not simply outside but as it were tangential to these
chronotopes’ (italics mine).42 This element of ‘tangentiality’ between the author and the chronotope
of his text makes us contemplate why Tagore needed the cross-cultural hybridity of an Irish-man
brought up in a colonial environment of Hindu society to subvert the ‘constructed’ chronotope of a
‘nationalist’ India.43 This raises questions regarding the ideological position of the author, the
production-relations existing at the time of the publication of the book in the print media and also the
socio-cultural composition of the existing reading public. But, an enquiry into these areas of research
is beside the scope of my present essay. I conclude by pointing out that in the chronotopic structures
of the two novels that I have discussed the element of ‘hybridity’ in the protagonists’ characters has
turned out to be greatly instrumental in the project of ‘narrating the nation’.

Notes

1. See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction, Narrating the Nation’, in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration.
(London: Routledge, 1990; rpt. 1995) p-1.
2. See Homi. K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’ in Homi. K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration (London; Routledge, 1990
rpt. 1995) p-293.’
3. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel; Notes towards a Historical Poetics’ in
Michael Holquist (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination, (Austin, Texas; University of Texas Press, 1981). p-84, 250, 253.
4. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p-87.
5. Ibid, p-88
6. Ibid, p-98
7. Ibid, p-100
8. Ibid, p-115
9. Ibid, p-115
 24

10. Ibid, p-121

11. Ibid, p-126
12. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press,1995) pp-94,
97.
13. Rudyard Kipling, Kim, (London, Pan Books in association with Macmillan London, first published in 1901,
published in 1976 by Pan Books, revised edition 1978, fifth rpt. 1980) p-73. All citations are from this text unless
otherwise stated.
14. See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; Loss & Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi, Oxford University
Press, 1986) p-40.
15. Edward Said, ‘Pleasures of Imperialism’ in Culture and Imperialism (London, Chatto and Windus, 1993) p-188.
16. See Michael Holquist, Bakhtin and his World, p-113.
17. Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India, (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1967), quoted in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p-180.
18. Peter Childs (ed.), Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,
1999) p-239.
19. Homi. K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’ in Homi. K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration, p-312.
20. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s, in an altogether different context, formulations about Kipling’s and Tagore’s
different treatments of the same problem of the ‘half-caste’ selves of the heroes of their novels in her essay ‘The
Burden of English’ in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (ed.), The Lie of the Land; English Literary Studies in India (New
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992, rpt. 1993) pp-275-299. (Spivak has been discussing the perspectives of the
English literary historiography in the colonies and the still-to-arrive alternative literary historiography of
postcoloniality).
21. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p-84.
22. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p-253.
23. Ibid.
24. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p-254.
25. See Sumit Sarkar, ‘The City Imagined: Calcutta of the Nineteenth and Early twentieth Century’ in Writing Social
History (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000, 3 rd imp.)
26. Ibid, p-165.
27. In the words of Sumit Sarkar,
The striking fact, therefore, was that the nineteenth-century Bengali Bhadralok seldom wrote about Calcutta
and tended to emphasize the negative features of its life when they did : . . . . Despite the novelty of the
metropolitan experience, cityscapes entered rarely into imaginative literature, unlike, say, in Dickens or
Baudelaire, . . . Calcutta, rather, was often portrayed as the heart of Kaliyuga, the last and most degenerate of
eras in the traditional upper-caste Hindu notion of cyclical time, in which aliens rule and hierarchies of caste,
gender and age are inverted.
Ibid, p-177.
 25

28. See Sumit Sarkar, ‘ Renaissance and Kaliyuga’ in Writing Social History, pp-186-215, Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The
Difference – Deferral of a Colonial Modernity : Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’ in David Arnold
and David Hardiman (ed.) Subaltern Studies VIII : Essays in Honour of Ranjit Guha (New Delhi, Oxford
University Press, 1994, rpt. 1999) pp-50-88 and Partha Chatterjee, ‘ The Nation and its Pasts’, ‘Histories and
Nations’ in Nation and its Fragments : Colonial and Postcolonial Histories and Ashis Nandy, ‘Psychology of
Colonialism’ in The Intimate Enemy, pp-55-63.
29. See Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘From Purana to Nutana’ in Realism & Reality: The Novel and Society in India (New
Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1985) pp-3-18.
30. Antonio Gramsci, Selection from Cultural Writings (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1985) p-253 quoted in Sudipta
Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds.) Subaltern Studies
VII; Writing on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992) p-9.
31. Ibid, p-12.
32. Ibid, p-16.
33. Ibid, p-31.
34. Sumit Sarkar, ‘The City Imagined’, p-181.
35. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel’, pp-246-247.
36. See Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal: 1903-1908 (New Delhi, People’s Publishing House, 1970)
37. For the ambience of Brahmo get-togethers and social meetings, small-scale family-soirées, see Rabindranath
Tagore, Jiban-smriti, Chelebela collected in Rabindra rachanabali, Birth-Centenary Edition, Vol X (Calcutta,
Paschimbanga Sarkar, 1961) pp-3-163 and for a general social and cultural history of the Brahmo Samaj see Sibnath
Sastri, Atmacharit (Calcutta, Signet Press, first published 1921, rpt. 1952) and Ramtanu Lahiri o tatkalin
bangasamaj (Calcutta, first published 1903, rpt. New Age Publishers, 1957).
38. Rabindranath Tagore, Gora (New Delhi, Macmillan, First Edition in January 1924, Macmillan Pocket Tagore
Edition, 1980, rpt. 1999). All subsequent citations are from this edition unless otherwise stated.
39. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Nation and Imagination’, Studies in History, 15. 2. 1999, p-204.
40. See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p-297.
41. Ibid, p-311.
42 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel’, p- 256.
43. See Peter Childs (ed.) Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader, p-239. Peter Childs makes a very
significant observation regarding the choice of ‘hybridity’ for heroes by both Kipling and Tagore and points out the
parallel between the two texts in this respect. About Kim’s Irish ancestry he writes that it is a kind of ‘national
identity which places him simultaneously as both coloniser and colonised’. He adds, “the gesture is repeated by
Rabindranath Tagore in his novel Gora: ‘No, I am not a Hindu,’ continued Gora, ‘Today I have been told that I was
a foundling at the time of the Mutiny — My father was an Irishman.’”