Dujes 2020

Volume 28 ISSN : 0975-5659 [Print]
2019-20 : 2581-7833 [Online]

www.dujes.co.in
DIBRUGARH UNIVERSITY
JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES
(A UGC-CARE Listed Peer-Reviewed Journal)
Editors
Meena Sharma Basil N. D. Diengdoh
Department of English
Dibrugarh University
Dibrugarh, Assam
Dibrugarh University Journal of English Studies
Volume 28, 2019-20
ADVISORY BOARD
Ashok K. Mohapatra
Professor of English, Department of English, Sambalpur University,
Jyoti Vihar, Sambalpur, Odisha - 768019. e-mail : mohaashok@gmail.com
B. K. Danta
Professor of English, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Department of
English & Foreign Languages, Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam - 784028.
e-mail : bkdanta@tezu.ernet.in/bkdanta@gmail.com
Nandana Dutta
Professor of English, Department of English, Gauhati University, Guwahati,
Assam-781014. e-mail : nandana@gauhati.ac.in
Sukalpa Bhattacharjee
Professor of English, Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University,
Shillong-793022. e-mail : bsukalpa@hotmail.com
N. Rama Devi Murru
Professor of English, Department of Indian and World Literatures, English and
Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad - 500007.
e-mail : nramadevieflu@gmail.com
Ananda Bormudoi
Associate Professor of English, Department English, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh,
Assam, PIN- 786004. e-mail : ananda.bormudoi@gmail.com
EDITORIAL BOARD
Mridul Bordoloi Nasmeem F. Akhtar
Anurag Bhattacharyya Lakhipriya Gogoi
Dipak Kumar Doley Deeptangshu Das
Lakshminath Kagyung
EDITORS
Meena Sharma Basil N. Darlong Diengdoh
Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English,
Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh-04. Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh-04.
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Published in : March, 2020
Published by : The Registrar, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh
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About the Journal
Since its inception in 1976-77, the Dibrugarh University Journal of English

Studies [DUJES, ISSN : 0975-5659 (Print), ISSN : 2581-7833 (Online)] has been
providing a space for analysis, intervention and research across a wide range of
areas related to English Studies. It is an annual blind peer-reviewed journal
which publishes full-length articles on all aspects of English Studies. The journal
invites relevant contributions in areas such as Literature(s) in English as well as
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to research and research methodology, linguistics, ELT, and related fields of
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DUJES  Volume 28  2019-20  ISSN : 0975-5659 [Print]/ ISSN : 2581-7833 [Online]

(iv)
CONTRIBUTORS IN THE CURRENT ISSUE

Jaishree Kapur is a Ph.D. Research Fellow at the University School of
Humanities and Social Sciences, Indraprastha University, New Delhi.
Harshit Nigam is as an Assistant Professor (Guest) at Miranda House, Delhi

University.
Saurabh Sarmadhikari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English

in Gangarampur College in DakshinDinajpur district of West Bengal.
Dr. Sangeetha Puthiyedath is an Assistant Professor with the English and

Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India.
Manika Arora is a research scholar in the Department of English and Cultural

Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh.
Sinjan Goswami currently teaches at the Department of English, Mathabhanga

College in West Bengal as an Assistant Professor.
Dr. Sumneet Kaur, has been working as an Assistant Professor in the

Department of English, Guru Nanak Dev University for eighteen years
and specializes in Feminism and Postcolonial Literature.
Chandan Kumar Panda works as Assistant Professor at the Department of

English, Rajiv Gandhi Central University, Itanagar, India.
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of English at Manikchak

College, affiliated to the University of Gourbanga, Malda.
Dr. Nakul Kundra is Assistant Professor of English at DAV University,

Jalandhar, Punjab, India.
Issa Omotosho Garubais a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of English,

University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria.
Jitamanyu Das is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, Jadavpur

University, West Bengal.
Khalida Ahmed is a Research Scholar at the Department of English, Gauhati

University, Guwahati, Assam.
Rima Barua is a Ph.D. Scholar in the Department of English, North Eastern Hill
University, Shillong, Meghalaya.

(v)
Sayan Chaudhuri is currently pursuing Ph.D. in the Centre for English Studies,
JNU, New Delhi.
Subhasish Guha is, at present, a Guest faculty in the Department of English,

PritilataWaddedarMahavidyalaya (University of Kalyani), Nadia.
Dr. Pradipta Shyam Chowdhury is working as Assistant Professor of English

in The University of North Bengal.
Ambika Vishnu Kamat is a Doctoral Research Scholar at Department of

English, Goa University, Taleigao Plateau, Goa, India.
Dr. André Rafael Fernandes is a Professor in the Department of English, Goa

University, Taleigao Plateau, Goa, India.
Smithalekshmi S. is currently pursuing her doctoral research at the School of

Letters, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala.
Sonu Sujit David is a Ph.D scholar of the Department of English, JAIN

(Deemed-to-be-University), Bangalore.
K. G. Bhuvana Maheshwari is the External Guide, Department of English,

JAIN (Deemed-to-be-University), Bangalore.
Srideep Mukherjee is Associate Professor of English at Netaji Subhas Open

University, Kolkata.
Padumi Singha is working as an Assistant Professor in the P.G. Department of

English, Bongaigaon College (affiliated to Gauhati University) since
2008. At present, the author is pursuing Ph.D. from the Department of
English, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya.
Hamari Jamatia is enrolled in the Ph.D. programme of the English

Department of the University of Hyderabad.
Pritam Panda is a research scholar (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and

other Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow.
Anjan Saikia is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Kamargaon

College, Golaghat, Assam.
Khandakar Shahin Ahmed is Assistant Professor, Department of English,

Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh.

CONTENTS
Pages
Choice(s) and Whose Choice(s)? : De-construction of Choice(s)

in Fire and Queen
Jaishree Kapur and Harshit Nigam 1-10
Representing Delhi: A Study of ‘Gaze’ Construction in Select

Chapters of Mayank Austen Soofi’s the delhiwalla (2010) series
(hangouts, portraits, monuments and food+drink)
Saurabh Sarmadhikari 11-20
Exteriorizing the Interior – Diseased Minds, Diseased Bodies:

Illness as a Trope in Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm
Sangeetha Puthiyedath 21-30
“Pick a story and see where it will lead you”: Reconfigurations of

the Cultural Narratives in Sujata Bhatt’s Selected Poems
Manika Arora 31-40
“Servant to Hunger”: A Panpsychist Reading of J. M. Coetzee’s

Life and Times of Michael K
Sinjan Goswami 41-49
Diasporic Characters’ Desire to Take a ‘U-Turn’ in Selected

Punjabi Short Stories
Sumneet Kaur 50-65
Nature in Nuremberg: A Study of W G Sebald's After Nature

Chandan Kumar Panda 66-82
Freeing Every Last Man of Shawshank: A Reading of Frank

Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay 83-94
The Mother of the Vaishnav Nation in Bankim Chandra

Chatterjee’s Anandamath: Construction and Worship
Nakul Kundra 95-107
Migration and Memory in James Welch’s The Heartsong of

Charging Elk: A Postcolonial Study
Issa Omotosho Garuba 108-122
Italian Travel Narratives on India: Translation in the Politics of

(vii)
British Imperialism
Jitamanyu Das 123-132
Forms of Social Transmission and the Making of the Public Self

in Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Khalida Ahmed 133-139
The Possibility of ‘Counter Travel’ in the Age of ‘Belated

Travelers’: Tahir Shah as a Counter Traveler in Sorcerer’s
Apprentice
Rima Barua 140-154
Representing the Urban in Rana Dasgupta’s Capital

Sayan Chaudhuri 155-170
Sexuality, Selfhood and Self-Annihilation in William Blake’s

Poems
Subhasish Guha 171-180
Honour(ing) Existence, Resisting Honour: Exploring The

Pakistani Bride as the Testament to Establish and Exercise Khudi
Pradipta Shyam Chowdhury 181-192
Racial Subalternity of the Issei in Select Japanese North

American Fiction
Ambika Vishnu Kamat and André Rafael Fernandes 193-210
Writing the Body: A Feminist Reading of the Poems of Rajathi

Salma and KuttiRevathy
Smithalekshmi S. 211-224
Anxiety, Alterity and Alienation of Pan-diasporic Kerala Women

in Arranged Marriages: An Analysis of Janu in
JaishreeMisra’s Ancient Promises
Sonu Sujit David and K. G. Bhuvana Maheshwari 225-241
From Page to Screen: Bangladesh Revisits

Tagore’s Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders)
Srideep Mukherjee 242-259
The Representation of the Aged in J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction: A

Select Study
Padumi Singha 260-269
Missionary Ethnography and the Manufacturing of Desire in

North-East India

(viii)
Hamari Jamatia 270-286
Analysis of Ideology of Domesticity in Charlotte Mary

Yonge’s The Daisy Chain; Or, Aspirations: A Family
Chronicle and Frances Wright Collins’ The Slayer Slain
Vishnu Priya T. P. 287-305
Utopian Visions of Feminist Science Fiction: A Pathway to

‘Better’ Futures
Pritam Panda 306-315
Demystification of the Postmodern Dialectics of Space and

Identity in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs
Anjan Saikia 316-330
Aboriginal Places and Colonialist Interventions: Interrogating

Spatial Politics in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit
Khandakar Shahin Ahmed 331-344

pp. 1-10
CHOICE(S) AND WHOSE CHOICE(S)? :

DE-CONSTRUCTION OF CHOICE(S) IN
FIRE AND QUEEN
Jaishree Kapur and Harshit Nigam
Abstract
“What it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute, the category of
woman?” asks Judith Butler in her essay, ‘Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire’.
Refusing to accept the very subject of ‘woman’ in stable or abiding terms, she
interrogates the “immutable character of sex” to foreground that one’s sexual
identity is as much socially constructed as one’s gendered identity. Thus one
is forced to reflect on Butler’s question, “Can construction be reduced to
choice?” What happens when a person rejects this constructed identity and
doing so explores the multiple selves? This paper is an attempt to
understand the evolving ‘self’ of women in the Indian Cinema through the
case study of Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996) and Vikas Bahl’s Queen (2014), and
to analyze therein the limited ‘choices’ granted to the women, preconditioned
by the disciplinary institutions, such as religion, custom, home, family,
marriage, society, and how the women explore their identity by widening or
‘de-constructing’ the scope of these monolithic ‘choices’. The paper neatly
divided into four sections will contextualize the films against the backdrop of
the ‘liberal’ and the ‘new’ economy, followed by a close reading of the films,
and conclude with an attempt to question the limited assertion of the
‘choices’ in the select films. More specifically, the authors probe the narrow
and the limited scope of this ‘de-construction’ as the ‘choices’ are being
regulated by the spectators, the performers, and the filmmakers within the
contemporary urban cultural matrix.
Keywords : India Shining, multiplex, urbanity, desire, lesbianism,
reductionist gaze.
I
Indian Cinema as a medium of popular entertainment resonates
everywhere, and from its nascent stage visualized the conflict between tradition
and modernity, east and west, conservatism and radicalism, the integral
determinants of the social and the cultural life in the subcontinent. It has also
remained a significant site of appropriations and formulations of ‘what is new?’
and to dispense the past. The attempts within the cinematic imagination to
negotiate and assert the modern urban culture paved a milestone in defining the

2 Jaishree Kapur and Harshit Nigam
nation through epithets such as ‘shining, ‘rising’, and ‘unbound’. The endeavors
behind the notion of “India Shining” had started getting mobilized in the last
decade of the 20th century with the advent of the ‘liberal’ economic policy and its
free market strategies.1 There has been a small segment of the middle class
population throughout the post-independence era which craved for the western
style products, commodities, fashion, and cultural trends.
Liberalization gave birth to the fetishism for these western goods. Further,
the IT revolution led to an accelerated proliferation of the western cultural
imports, and simultaneously created a need to circulate the Indian goods and the
cultural harvest in the west. The cosmopolitan cultural forms drew the world into
a commercial sameness but also garnished these forms with one’s own history
and culture. This expanded the foreign market for the Indian films, and also
created the fertile grounds for the production of the Crossover films. 2 The hype in
the cosmopolitan culture led to a remarkable change within the themes, the
iconography, and the mise-en-scenes of the films.3 At this critical juncture, Deepa
Mehta’s Crossover film Fire (India/Canada), depicting an intimate and physical
bonding between Radha (Shabana Azmi) and Sita (Nandita Das), sisters-in-law
living in a joint middle class family in the metropolis of Delhi, and struggling to
assert their ‘choice’ and sexual desire, against the conservative family being
regulated by the disciplinary institutions of religion, custom, conjugality, and
society came out in the theatres. The film challenges and subverts the narrative
conventions of the popular Indian Cinema – allegiance for family, devotional
wife, strife between the brothers living under the same roof, and loyalty for
mother. Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996) provided coup de grace for the realpolitik of
the Indian cinematic and visual culture, and accelerated the churning of the
women oriented films, not just imitating the chauvinistic male standards of
‘feminine’, rather taking a radical position, and still further defining the ‘female
experience’.4 This depiction of the ‘female experience’ on the Indian celluloid got
fully verbalized at the intersection of the advent of the multiplex cinema halls and
the spatial politics of the urban centers.
The successive governments through the early 1990s 5 made attempt to
remove the stringent laws and the licensing policies, releasing economy
altogether free from the clutches of the state. The major benefactor of this “era of
deregulation” (Athique and Hill 2) was the media industries. The ‘new’ economy
validated the newer consumption patterns related to the aspirations of the new
urban middle class, emblematic of the social progress, so to say. Moreover, the
granting of the status of an official industry for the film business in 2001
strengthened the role of the entertainment and the leisure sectors. It also led to
the difference in production, marketing, and reception of films. The form or the
‘content of the form’ for the films drastically changed over the past fifteen years,
and registered a trend setting within the public culture and the Indian capital.
Mahesh Manjrekar’s Astitva (2000), Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish (2012),
Vikas Bahl’s Queen (2014), Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink (2016), Alankrita
Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016), Ravi Udyawar’s Mom (2017) are

Choice(s) and Whose Choice(s)? … 3
the representative features of the contemporary period, which either through

their theme or form established the trend of ‘female experience’, and offered new
embrasures for the women’s ‘choices’. There has also been a shift in the portrayal
of the women characters, making them more complex in response to the local and
the global forces. Vikas Bahl’s Queen (2014) is a product of these changes within
the sociology of the Indian Cinema. Queen (2014) narrates the self evolving
journey of an ordinary Indian girl, Rani (Kangana Ranaut) whose ‘choices’ have
been limited by the family and the society. The film also etches an altogether
different denouement from the erstwhile films, where the heroine decides to
leave the man who cannot love her unconditionally, and moves on with the
assertion of her ‘choice’.
II
Fire6 borrows the name of its lead characters from the epic heroines to
presents the story of Radha (ShabanaAzmi) and Sita (Nandita Das) 7, caught in a
loveless marriage within the traditional Hindu joint family setting. The husbands,
Ashok (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and Jatin( Javed Jaffrey) control their ‘labour’
(they nurse biji, the grandmother along with the other domestic chores, Ashok
regulates his desires for the past thirteen years by not touching Radha’s naked
body laid in front of him, whereas Jatin suggests Sita to bear his child while he
maintains his affair with Julie) , ‘mobility’ (they either move out of the four walls
of the house along with the family or only to buy vegetables), ‘work’ (regardless of
any share in the profit, they accentuate the family business), and subdue the very
identities of these women leaving them in no-choice, no exit situation.
Deepa Mehta chooses to visualize not only a provocative lesbian connection
between Radha and Sita, rather bluntly enunciates the orthodox heterosexuality
by claiming the film as one “which explores choices, desires and psyche of people
who are victims of tradition”8, by rendering visible those women who chose to
reject both the alternatives , ‘baby producing machines’ and ‘dutiful wives’.
Society provides Ashok the ‘choice’ to find another woman for himself but both
the women have to carve a path within the limited ‘choices’ available to them. The
death of the heterosexual relationship gives birth to homoeroticism. This
homoeroticism is neither innate nor an accident but a conscious ‘choice’ that they
assert.
‘Lesbian gaze’ has been engorged in the film through the exchanged looks
and the everyday physical attraction between Radha and Sita. Sita asks Radha to
oil her hair. Communication is established through look, touch, and scent of the
hair oil. Sita’s enactment of ‘butch’ or the male role (butch-femme) within the
dance sequence is captured by the ‘lesbian gaze’ of Radha, substituting the ‘male
gaze’ or voyeurism of the popular cinema where woman is seen as a commodity.
Laura Mulvey has suggested that the film form is structured by the “unconscious
of patriarchal society”, and only cater to male desire. However, the ‘lesbian gaze’

verbalizes the desire of the two women. There is awakening of the lesbian identity
in the flashback. Mother tells Radha “close your eyes … and you will see”. To see
is upshot of getting visible. For Radha coming out as a lesbian is crucial. From
hetero-normative point of view, Radha is sterile for her husband but “from
lesbian point of view she is rather like a virgin than a saint” (Telmissany 268).
Fire is symbolic. On the one hand, the ‘agnipariksha’ that Radha has to undergo
can be seen as a compromise with the traditional customs. On the other side it
can be seen as an assertion of ‘choice’. In the film watched by Mundu, Sita says
“Let the flames be my witness”. However in Mehta’s film it is Radha, “who has to
go through fire in order to complete the circle of her sexual experimentation, and
be reborn like a phoenix as a lesbian woman” (268).
Radha gently oils Sita’s hair, cooks food for her which they eat together,
and both caress each other’s feet. Debunking the ethics of Karvachauth, Radha
both literally and symbolically substitutes Jatin to quench Sita’s thirst. The
constant food, water, fingers, feet imagery catalyze the eroticism on the screen. In
addition to the cardamom “for fresh breath”, Radha adorns Sita with her own
wedding bangles as a substitute for Jatin’s wedding ring, which carries sexual
undertones. Together they look at their single image in the mirror, replicating
each other’s gaze which on the one hand becomes a tool for the self-identification,
and on the other, a medium to recognize the solidarity of their relationship.
Radha’s empathy with the Queen of Karvachauth ritual, “She didn’t have much
choice” is immediately bashed by Sita, “We can find many choices” indicating, the
shift in the nature of ‘choices’ from the mythical figures to the contemporary
women.
Sita’s constant yearning for her mother is satiated by the childless Radha
who also mothered her own mother-in- law (by nursing, feeding, and cooking),
and in turn becoming the ‘other’. Later, she tells Sita, “in an instant he [Ashok]
looked like a child”, and she wanted to kiss him as a mother. Radha’s motherhood
blossoms in the arms of Sita, and after their first kiss, Radha recalls her mother,
symbolic of an erotic dream as it leads to her sexual awakening. The kiss which
had been prohibited by the Central Board of Film Censors, and judged by the
conservatives as a ‘non Indian practice’ will be the first act of double dissidence
committed by Sita and Radha. Kissing is therefore a challenge to both the
cinematic conservatism and the socially accepted heterosexual paradigms. These
women not only assert their personal sexual ‘choices’ but also question,
challenge, and subvert the normative patriarchal authority. Sita denies to have
Jatin’s child, slaps him back calling him a “pompous fool”, whereas Radha
debunks her domestic duties, derides Ashok, “Why don’t you feed biji tonight?”,
simultaneously refusing to lie down next to him “to help him test his desires”.
Desire plays a crucial role in determining ones ‘choices’. According to the
dictums of Swamiji, “desire brings ruin” which is questioned by Radha, “Does it?
Without desire I was dead; without desire, there is no point in living. I desire to
live. I desire Sita, I desire her warmth, her compassion, her body, I desire to live
again”, shattering Ashok’s vow of celibacy as he fails in his test and kiss her

mercilessly to quench his own desire. Jatin’s desire to live with Julie (Alice Poon)
will remain unaccomplished as she herself desires to go to Hong Kong and
become a martial arts film star. Mundu, the servant can only perform the role of a
voyeur, first by watching pornographic videos, and later by secretly looking at the
women as they make love, remaining insatiate in his desire. Radha and Sita are
the only beings who make correct ‘choices’ and accomplish their desires. As a
result, Radha emerges unscathed from her fiery ordeal proving the chastity of her
love but unlike the mythical Sita, leaves the domestic space without waiting for
her husband to banish her. Fire acts both as a destroyer and a purifier as it not
only engulfs the four walls of the house but also purifies the relationship of Radha
and Sita, transferring guilt on to Ashok who leaves her alone when her saree
catches fire to hold biji, a representative of submissiveness to conservatism. The
film poignantly ends with the fiery passion within the hearts of these women,
drenched in rain water, sitting on the land in an open space, bringing together all
the four elements necessary for survival - fire, water, earth, and air.
III
In Vikas Bahl’s Queen (2014), the protagonist Rani (Kangana Ranaut) is
prohibited by her parents, fiancé, and society to fulfill her desires. The functions
that Rani is supposed to enact has been stereotypically preordained, so much so
that she needs help in the selection of her jewellery, for uploading photographs
on Facebook, the presence of her much younger brother everywhere (even on her
date), and to get her passport fixed. Her preference of home science classes and
preparation of sweets in the family confectionary shop are not options but well
determined actions that she has to perform in order to fit her in the role of a girl-
to-be-bride. Vijay (Rajkummar Rao) who incessantly wooed her despite her
claiming that “I don’t like you” till she finally gave in, rejects her saying, “I’ve
changed. A lot of things have changed … you’re still the same”, eventually
resulting in her perpetual begging, “I’ll do whatever you want” accompanied by
the song lyrics, “… main toh idhar udhar phiroon, roothi roothi si…”
representing every ordinary girl who appears to have privileges but is in fact only
a façade. ‘Choice’ too is a privilege, forcing one to think whether behind all the
garb, is there any agency/voice/choice available to women?
The film depicts magnificently that women can explore the ‘choice’ at their
own. The first decision that she asserts is her fulfillment of her dream to go to
Paris on her honeymoon (preceded by the sentence, “If you won’t allow, I’ll not
go”), which eventually becomes her journey of self evolvement. After getting
some cultural shocks, she encounters an Indian-Bohemian hybrid woman,
Vijaylaxmi (Lisa Haydon) who perfectly fits Homi Adajania’s conception and
representation of women projected in My Choice (2015).9 She is sensuous, sultry,
enjoys her libido, can afford the designer clothes on her own. With her bare
clothes, her son (without marriage), her all too often sexual intercourse with

strangers, smoking, drinking, dancing, partying with porn stars, she symbolizes
everything that a stereotypical westernized emancipated woman could stand for.
Moving beyond the surface level, a possible lesbian-friendship can be
traced among Rani and Vijaylaxmi. Rani’s dream of looking at the Eiffel tower
with her married partner is fulfilled along with her. The latter goes behind the
curtain of a Parisian store to the shock followed by the laughter of Rani, who
blurts “I’m not wearing anything”. Rani gives her condoms before they enter the
party while Vijaylaxmi uses her brassiere as a scarf to adorn Rani’s head, stating
“look at your breast and ass, Mi Bella”, metaphorically asking her to look at her
own self, at her body that needs self-acceptance, self-worth, prior any external
recognition. Shedding off all her inhibitions, Rani dances, sings, burps as she
likes in public. She gets herself clicked on the road by strangers, shops, drives,
and cycles with the wide open arms, as if to embrace her new beginning,
cherishing every insignificant thing that was earlier denied to her. Cross dressed,
Vijaylaxmi tells her while departing, “you lost Vijay but you gained Vijaylaxmi …
show me your move.” The move here is not merely a dance posture but also the
movement, the momentum that Rani has to gain for her evolvement. Rani takes
the decision to board the train for Amsterdam to undergo another journey of self-
identification, and when Vijay calls her up (after looking at her strappy dress and
cleavage), she screams “Rani is dead”, signaling the death of the past restraints,
inhibitions, and rejections. Her autonomous decision of not going back to India
without visiting Amsterdam reflects the power to assert one’s ‘choice’ that she has
now inculcated.
To the utter shock of Vijay and the Indian spectators, Rani in Amsterdam
shares her room with a Russian graffiti artist Oleksander (who aims to end the oil
war through his art), a jovial Japanese tsunami victim Taka (who lost his parents,
home, job), and a black musician. Looking at Oleksander’s sketches, she realizes
“I want to do something” to which he responds, “who is stopping you?” making
her realize that once she is determined, nobody can stop her. She remembers
about the economic independence that was denied to her by Vijay, “I won’t let
you die of hunger, don’t you trust me? Why do you want to work then?” he had
said when she asked him if she could work after marriage. Through her talent and
expertise in culinary skills (which was earlier unnoticed) she wins a competition
in Amsterdam. By placing a golgappa stall in an Italian restaurant, she gains not
only economic independence but also a sense of self worth. Moreover, she
initiates as well as actively participates in and celebrates a “lip to lip kiss” with an
Italian chef, establishing the beginning of her sexual awakening. She drives the
car while men sit back, they roam around singing, dancing, playing, and drinking
on street, visiting sex toys shop as well as lap dancers together. Leaving Vijay
(and her wedding card) behind in an ecstatic moment, she runs to participate in a
rock show with her friends, travelling the whole distance on foot. In fact she is
constantly travelling from one place to another, forever moving high on the
journey of her life, like a river with its ebbs and flows, never to feel stagnant.

On entering Vijay’s personally controlled space, his house, she discards his
mother’s post marriage plan to drink tea, read magazines, and attend kitty parties
when men go to the office. While returning her wedding ring to Vijay, she hugs
him twice (as if to console him) with a big ‘thank you’ and leaves him behind –
head held high. Here is a girl who has overcome her fears, her insecurities,
grabbed what was denied to her, and rejected what was unwanted. People that
entered her life became means, not the end products of her liberation. Vikas Bahl
opens up a myriad of possibilities for her; she can be a homosexual, a
heterosexual, or lead a life of celibacy – ‘it is her choice’.
IV
Fire fails to lend the women protagonists any economic independence as
they leave one male controlled sphere (home) to enter into another (Dargah of
Nizamuddin Aulia). According to Mary E John and Tejaswini Niranjana, the film
suggests that women can be liberated from the repressive social conditions
merely by the assertion of sexual ‘choice’ that ignores the wide range of repressive
patriarchal structures. However, this ‘choice’ is provided at the cost of leaving
one’s religious ethics. While Hindu home is seen as restrictive, Muslim spaces are
open with the emancipatory resonances.It is the Dargah of Nizamuddin Aulia
that provides an unrestrained emotional intimacy to Radha and Sita. The fact
that Aulia had a homoerotic bond with the poet Amir Khusro over determines its
potential as a monument for possibilities. Interestingly, towards the end Radha
and Sita meet at the Dargah. It is only at a picnic at the Qutub Minar, again a
Muslim space, where Radha and sita engage in an implicit lesbian act through the
feet massage.
One is forced to retrace the American ‘Feminist Utopia’ 10 and contemplate
whether the director of Queen had the ‘choice’ to present any other route of
emancipation for his heroine? Can Rani be presented as a replica of Vijaylaxmi or
the lap dancer who works for a good cause? Can her younger brother and father,
who used to ogle at the scantily clad body of Vijaylakshmi , accept Rani in the
same attire? Did she have the ‘choice’ to move beyond a kiss? It seems that both
Bahl and Rani have to exercise their ‘choices’ without letting down the traditional
and the cultural baggage. The moot question is whose ‘choice’ is after all being
depicted through the narrative, the director’s, the actor’s, or the spectators’?
Karen Gabriel in Melodrama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of Bombay
Cinema suggests that the actresses project out the globalized icons of an
enlightened female sexuality, and are yet constrained by the shifting, narrow
nuances of femininity within the subcontinent.
The first multiplex cinema hall in India became operational in the year
1997. However, the mounting up of the multiplexes in the nation was not a
uniform process. They precisely sprang up in the urban metropolitan centers and
remained absent in the small and remote towns. The intention behind infiltrating

the Indian urban cultural matrix with the multiplexes was to re-shape the Indian
cities as ‘global cities’, capable “to bring together flows of international capital”
(Athique and Hill 2). These multiplexes representing the new valuable public
space, aimed at the benefits of the denizens of the new suburbs at the cost of
farmers, industrial workers, and urban poor. The multiplex era “sideline the
proletariat audience and focus on the new middle-classes and the intelligentsia
who now frequent the cinema halls in large numbers” (Nigam, 88). Almost on the
tracks of the ‘reductionist gaze’ of Homi Adjania’s video, My Choice, Fire and
Queen too imbibes the western paradigms and the stereotypes for a handful of
the urban metropolitan elite women, to be modern, western, and progressive. The
discourse of ‘choices’ in both the films turn out to be bourgeois and
individualistic, a successful commercial trait for globalization. Gayatri
Chakravary Spivak argues that a feminist discourse can never locate
emancipation in individualism, but rather has to be essentially embedded with
the notion of solidarity. After making love Sita reminds Radha, “There is no word
in our language that can describe what we are, how we feel for each other”. Radha
instead of eloping from the clutches of a patriarchal society chooses to stay back,
“I need to tell him.” Here, the childless Radha has already given birth to a new
language that has the ability to voice the innermost desires of women, which calls
for both equality as well as solidarity to safeguard every woman’s right to the
freedom of ‘choice’.
Notes :
1 Liberal economy was half-heartedly accepted by Rajiv Gandhi in the late 1980s and
more assertively by Narshima Rao in the early 90s.
2 Crossover films refer to the films representing the varied value systems that get
materialized when the communities cross the cultural margins. Dev Benegal’s
English August (1994), Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996), Nagesh Kuknoor’s Hyderabad
Blues (1998), Revathi’s Mitr: My Friend (2002) and Mira Nair’s The Namesake
(2006) are the emblematic ones by the Indian directors.
3 Commercial blockbusters such as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Pardes
(1997), Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), and several
others marked a distinctive change in the iconography and the mise-en-scenes, and
focused on the theme of preserving the traditional Indian values and principles
amidst the growing western impact in the globalized world.
4 Akin to the three phases of women’s writing put forth by Elaine Showalter in The
New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, 1985.

5 The governments led by Indian National Congress (1991-96), United Front (1996-
98), National Democratic Alliance (1998-2004), and UPA I and UPA II (2004-14).
6 The film received criticism for its open depiction of homosexuality on the screen.
Theatres were burned down and the actors received death threats.
7 Radha an archetype from the Indian epic, The Mahabharata exemplified eternal
suffering for one’s lover. Sita an archetype from the Indian epic, The Ramayana

exemplified an extreme devotion towards one’s husband by being an embodiment

of virtuousness and chastity.
8 “About Deepa Mehta”, Film Distributors Website <http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/
current/fire/firedeepaonfilm.html>
9 The short television video released in 2015 proposed to acknowledge the female
body, subject, voice, and structure in both personal as well as private space, but the
reductionist gaze of Homi Adajania, constructed and appropriated western
paradigms and stereotypes.
10 The word ‘feminist utopia’ was coined in the 1980s. It referred to the reality and
beyond reality of an ideal spirit reflected in the deepest accomplished desires of the
female.
Works Cited :
“About Deepa Mehta.” Film Distributors Website. <http://www.zeitgeistfilms.
com/ current/fire/firedeepaonfilm.html>
Athique, Adrian, and Douglas Hill. The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy
of Urban Leisure. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Bose, Brinda. “The Desiring Subject: Female Pleasures and Feminist Resistance
in Deepa
Mehta’s Fire.” The Phobic and the Erotic. Ed: Brinda Bose and Subhabrata
Bhattacharyya. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007. 437-
50. Print.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Fire. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Perf. Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das. Fire Films
Production, 1996. Film.
Gabriel, Karen. Melodrama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of Bombay
Cinema: 1970-2000. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2010. Print.
Hollinger, Karen. Feminist Film Studies. London and New York: Routledge,
2012. Print.
Kaarsholm, Preben. Introduction. City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban
Experience. Calcutta and New Delhi: Seagull Books, 2004. 1-25. Print.
Mazumdar, Ranjini. Introduction. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City.
Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007. xvii-xxxvii. Print.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen. 16.3. 1975. Print.
My Choice. Dir. Homi Adjania. Perf. Deepika Padukone. Vogue Empower
Productions, 2015. Video.

Nigam, Harshit. “Bharat Nirman and the Aestheticization of Politics.”

Postscriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies.
3.2(2018): 81-92. Web.
Niranjana, Tejaswini and Mary John. “Mirror Politics: Fire, Hindutva, and Indian
Culture.” Economic and Political Weekly. March, 1999. 6-13. Web.
Queen. Dir. Vikas Bahl. Perf. Kangana Ranaut and Rajkummar Rao. Phantom
Productions, 2014. Film.
Showalter, Elaine. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature,
and Theory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London:
Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.
Telmissany, May. “Deterritorialising Desire: Lesbian Passion in Deepa Mehta’s
Fire.” Lesbian Voices: Canada and the World. Ed. Subhash Chandra.
New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2006, pp. 258-73. Print.
Vasudevan, Ravi. The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in
Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007. Print.
Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social
History. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers UP, 2003. Print.

pp. 11-20
REPRESENTING DELHI : A STUDY OF ‘GAZE’

CONSTRUCTION IN SELECT CHAPTERS OF
MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI’S THE DELHI WALLA
(2010) SERIES (HANGOUTS, PORTRAITS,
MONUMENTS AND FOOD +DRINK)
Saurabh Sarmadhikari
Abstract
Delhi is a multicultural potpourri, as for ages the city has been the
kingdom of several dynasties right up to the present times. The city has
been home to myriad peoples with diverse cultures. To represent this
multicultural ethos, numerous attempts, both in fiction and non-fiction,
have been made. The non-fictional guide book series, the delhi walla
(2010) is one such attempt. This paper intends to focus on one
particular feature of Mayank Austen Soofi’s representation—how he
constructs and regulates the ‘gaze’ of his readers as he ‘foregrounds’
various aspects of the city of Delhi. The methodology of the present
study is based on John Urry’s re-interpretation of the Foucauldian
notion of ‘gaze’, in support of the view that the gaze of tourists is
skillfully re-organised/redirected by a host of professionals to construct
‘attractions’ in a tourist destination. This paper shall attempt to apply
Urry’s theorizing of the construction of the tourist ‘gaze’ to some select
chapters in Soofi’s the delhi walla (2010) series (hangouts, portraits,
monuments and food +drink). Just as the ‘gaze’ of a tourist is
re-organized by the designing and/or restoring a tourist destination
(thereby making it ‘attractive’), similarly Soofi ‘constructs/regulates’ the
‘gaze’ of his readers in his narratives. This is achieved primarily by his
selection as individual chapters the ‘mundane’ and ‘grand’ spaces/
objects/ personalities of the Delhi cityscape. But more importantly, the
captions that accompany the chapter-headings and the narratives that
follow produce a unique representation/construction of the city. A
semiotic and discursive analysis of select chapters of the delhi walla
(2010) series would be undertaken in this paper to understand how this
‘gaze’ for the readers is constructed and a unique representation of Delhi
is brought about.
Keywords : representation, Delhi, gaze, construction, travel guide.
In contemporary culture ‘representation’ is the basis of meaning

production. Its position at the core of meaning production process has been
established in the social sciences since the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1970s and the

12 Saurabh Sarmadhikari
subsequent ‘social constructionist approach’. As Stuart Hall in his ‘Introduction’

to his edited volume Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying
Practices (1997) observes :
…since the ‘cultural turn’ in the human and the social sciences, meaning
is thought to be produced—constructed—rather than simply ‘found’.
Consequently, in what has come to be called a ‘social constructionist
approach’, representation is conceived of [as] entering into the very
constitution of things; and thus culture is conceptualized as a primary or
‘constitutive’ process…(5-6)
The same idea is echoed by Paul Cobley in his Narrative (2001), “The
‘constructionist’ approach sees meaning neither in the control of the producer
nor the thing being represented; instead, it identifies the thoroughly social nature
of the construction of meaning.”(3)
This paper is concerned with how the cityscape of Delhi is represented by
Mayank Austen Soofi in his the delhi walla (2010) series. Basically collection of
narrative chapters that highlight the multicultural facets of the city, in the delhi
walla, Soofi subscribes to the basic tenets of narrative representation. In social
constructionist theoretical framework, whatever be the form of a narrative, be it
oral, written or pictorial, language plays a central role in meaning formation. But
again, language is nothing but a conglomeration of signs/codes that stand for
things or ideas an individual wants to express and transmit to other people. Thus,
it is language that acts as a means through which representation is made, as
Stuart Hall in his ‘Introduction’ to his edited volume Representation: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices (1997) says, “Language is one of the
‘media’ through which thoughts, ideas and feelings are represented in a culture.
Representation through language is therefore central to the processes by which
meaning is produced” (1). Elsewhere in the same essay, Hall elaborates on this
relation between language and representation further:
It is by our use of things, and what we say, think and feel about
them- how we represent them - that we give them a meaning...In part,
we give things meaning by how we represent them—the words we use
about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of them we
produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and
conceptualize them, the values we place on them.(3)
This observation of Hall has direct bearing on how narratives are
constructed—through language with the further implication that at a more
fundamental level it is the signs/codes constituting the language that ultimately
determine the representation. As Paul Cobley in his Narrative (2001) says about
narratives, “…narrative is a particular form of representation implementing
signs…” (3).
This definition of narrative by Cobley brings us to the core concern of this
paper—how Soofi represents Delhi in his narratives by ‘implementing signs’. This
implementation of signs is closely related to the process of ‘gaze’ construction

Representing Delhi : A Study of ‘Gaze’ Construction … 13
that finds particular currency in tourism industry and tourism practices. The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines the noun ‘gaze’ as “a fixed
or intent look” (“gaze,” def.). As far as this paper is concerned, it will follow the
Foucauldian concept of ‘gaze’ that has been applied by John Urry and Jonas
Larsen in their proposition of the ‘tourist gaze’. Foucault in his The Birth of the
Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1976) introduces the concept of
the ‘medical gaze’ where he says:
The clinic was probably the first attempt to order a science on the
exercise and decisions of the gaze...the medical gaze was also organised
in a new way. First, it was no longer the gaze of any observer, but that of
a doctor supported and justified by an institution...Moreover, it was a
gaze that was not bound by the narrow grid of structure...but that could
and should grasp colours, variations, tiny anomalies...(quoted in Urry
and Larsen 1).
This Foucauldian notion of ‘gaze’ has been taken up by John Urry and Jonas
Larsen who in their study The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (2011) provide a new paradigm to
the ‘gaze’ of tourists and how this ‘gaze’ is constructed. They observe:
Just like language, one’s eyes are socio-culturally framed and there are
various ‘ways of seeing’…People gaze upon the world through a
particular filter of ideas, skills, desires, and expectations, framed by
social class, gender, nationality, age and education. (2)
But, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is a rather complex
process. Urry and Larsen further note that, “We do not literally ‘see’ things.
Particularly as tourists, we see objects and especially buildings in part constituted
as signs. They stand for something else. When we gaze as tourists what we see are
various signs...” (17).
Given this framework, travel involves ‘gazing’ and to be more precise
‘gazing at the other’ in the places visited. It has been further established by the
theories of Urry and Larsen that tourists encounter this ‘other’ as signs/codes,
and that production of meaning in tourism entails a studied
manipulation/construction of these signs/codes to create touristic experiences.
Soofi’s the delhi walla also [Soofi’s the delhi walla also] follows this basic
principle of meaning construction for its readers. Being a guide book for tourists,
Soofi’s narratives too reveal clear patterns of signs/codes that are carefully
constructed and embedded in them, their principal aim being to enhance the
‘tourist’ experience of his readers. A semiotic and discursive analysis of four of his
narratives (one entry from each of the four books of the delhi walla series) would
be undertaken in this paper to examine this process of ‘gaze construction’ of the
reader towards the city of Delhi. Focus would also be on how the city is
represented in the narratives along with this construction of ‘gaze’.

Café Turtle (‘hangouts’, the delhi walla)

In ‘hangouts’ of the delhi walla series under the category ‘Eat’, there is an
entry on Café Turtle (56-57). The process of ‘gaze’ creation for the readers is
evident from the very beginning of this entry. The sub-heading/caption for the
chapter is ‘Tasteful tranquility’. The use of the words ‘tasteful tranquility’ is a
perfect example of Barthesian myth. Myth, as Barthes conceptualizes it in his
Mythologies (2009/1957), is related to the semiotic process of signification and is
for him “a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the
associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a
signifier of the second.” (137). Barthes calls the first system/ level the level of
‘denotation’ while the second, that of ‘connotation’ or ‘myth’. Stuart Hall, in his
essay ‘The Work of Representation’ (included in Representation: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices (1997)), elaborates on this distinction
between ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’ as:
Denotation is the simple, basic, descriptive level, where consensus is
wide and most people would agree on the meaning…At the second
level—connotation—these signifiers which we have been able to ‘decode’
at a simple level by using our conventional conceptual
classifications…enter a wider, second kind of code…which connects
them to broader themes and meanings, linking them with what, we may
call the wider semantic fields of our culture…the general beliefs,
conceptual frameworks and value systems of society. (38-39)
At the level of denotation then, the words ‘tasteful tranquility’ refer to the tasteful
décor and the tranquil ambience of the restaurant, but at the level of connotation
the same words point towards a hierarchical assumption of clientele in that only
‘refined’ connoisseurs can truly appreciate the ‘tasteful tranquility’ of the place.
Soofi’s use of these words – ‘tasteful tranquility’ – in his narrative/description
‘constructs’ Café Turtle as a niche place for his readers, who are also potential
tourists, but who might venture to visit depending on their own concept of
‘cultural capital’. John Urry and Jonas Larsen have summarized this critical
concept of ‘cultural capital’ (originally coined by Pierre Bourdieu in 1973) as:
“Cultural capital is not just a matter of abstract theoretical knowledge but of the
symbolic competence necessary to appreciate works of ‘art’ or ‘anti-art’ or ‘place’”
(102).
The narrative begins with three signifiers that verily point towards this
‘refined clientele’ with adequate ‘cultural capital’: “Soft jazz, hand-painted
thangkas, and hushed conversations” (56). ‘Jazz’ and ‘thangka’ act as Barthesian
myths, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defining ‘jazz’ as
“music of African-American origin characterized by improvisation, syncopation,
and usu. a regular or forceful rhythm” (“jazz,” def.) and the Collins English
Dictionary defining ‘thangka’ as “(in Tibetan Buddhism) a religious painting on a
scroll” (“thangka”). All this at the level of denotation but these very signifiers
along with the third signifier in the opening sentence ‘hushed conversations’
connote an ambience of refinement because jazz, thangkas and hushed

conversations are accoutrements not usually associated with the hoi polloi and
these signifiers even act as a deterrent to the ‘mass’ that would try to desecrate
the sanctity of the place. The second sentence of the narration too points towards
the niche character of this place: “Every city needs a bubble where you can be
who you want to be” (56). The place is clearly constructed as the ideal place for
the individualistic tourist with high ‘cultural capital’ in search of ‘tasteful
tranquility’ in the bustling multicultural metropolis of Delhi. It is the place where
“The book lovers read. The writers write. The fashionable display their Cartiers
and Armanis.”(56) The signifiers are enough to mark out this place for the elite
tourists.
Apart from using these signifiers (that also act as ‘myths’ in Barthesian
terms), Soofi’s narrative clearly delineates Café Turtle’s position in the
‘intellectual tourist circuit’ of Delhi, “Home to Delhi’s ‘refined’ crowd, Café Turtle
is the coffee shop above the iconic bookstore, Full Circle, at Khan Market.”(56)
Here, we find a fine example of how discourse works within this narrative.
Discourses in order to retain their position of dominance must necessarily
exclude other discourses. As Marianne Jorgensen and Louise J. Phillips say in
their Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method, “A discourse is always
constituted in relation to what it excludes, that is, in relation to the field of
discursivity” (27).The moment Soofi’s narrative posits Café Turtle as ‘Home to
Delhi’s ‘refined’ crowd’ and its location ‘above the ‘iconic’ bookstore, Full Circle,
at Khan Market’, the exclusiveness of the coffee shop becomes ‘established’, as it
becomes the place to visit for any potential tourist with refined sensibilities.
That the narrative is bent on ‘constructing’ Café Turtle as a place of refined
tastes in the otherwise brash Delhi is further accentuated by the mention that
“…the point of this café is not its cakes and coffees. It is something to do with its
character, which is intensely addictive” (56-57). The items that construct this
‘intensely addictive’ character are then carefully outlined thereby indulging in a
‘secondary construction’: “The lightning is soft. The décor is not loud. The
stewards are not intrusive. There are shelves stacked with spiritual books. Black
and white photographs of Jazz artistes adorn the walls” (57). This place,
physically constructed primarily for its clients, in Soofi’s narrative becomes
reconstructed for his readers who might be potential tourists. But] the narrative,
apart from constructing the reader’s ‘gaze’ towards this coffee shop,
simultaneously represents/constructs the city of Delhi also for the readers
obliquely commenting on the social habits of the city. As Soofi says, “Each table
has a bottle in the centre, with tender green stems of money plant sending roots
out into the water. The entire effect is so soothing that the most noisy Delhiites
lose their natural brashness and start speaking in hushed undertones as soon as
they settle down” (57).
The narrative ends with another ‘construct’ emphasizing the niche
character of Café Turtle: “But the Café Turtle experience is incomplete without
exploring its sister concern, the bookstore below. To browse the shelves for an
hour, to buy a novel and then walk up the wooden stairs and settle down to

read—with something as simple as pita bread and hummus—is an experience

almost bordering Proustian tranquility” (57). The name of Proust again connotes
an elegance and exclusiveness beyond the ken of the average reader/tourist. In
fact, this last signifier ‘Proust’ acts both at the semiotic and the discursive level.
As a semiotic signifier it operates as a Barthesian myth and as discourse it acts as
an excluding agent—only the ‘truly’ refined would supposedly find the place
entertaining thereby getting the others discursively excluded.
Nicholson Cemetery (‘monuments’, the delhi walla)

The next narrative that this paper seeks to analyze is the entry on
Nicholson Cemetery (24-25) included in the section ‘Old Delhi’. This narrative is
also a fine specimen of ‘gaze’ construction for the readers/tourists. What attracts
the attention of the readers at the foremost is the layout in the page where the
title of the entry, ‘Nicholson Cemetery’; the caption accompanying the title,
‘Weep not’; and the basic tourist info of the place (like the location of the place,
metro stop, which days it is open and an one-liner significance of Nicholson
Cemetery) are provided. This information is provided as if on an entry ticket to
the Cemetery in which the phrase ‘ADMIT ONE’ is written. This layout constructs
the place as a tourist destination at the very outset. The chief reason of the place’s
claim to prominence is also printed in the layout ticket: “Discover graves of the
British killed in 1857” (24). The caption accompanying the title heading “Weep
not” (24) goes hand in hand with the mournful associations of the place.
The first sentence of the accompanying narrative creates an alternative
gaze for the readers. That this particular place is not on the regular itinerary of
the general tourists and that the delhi walla series is a guide book with an
exception is evident from this observation of the narrator: “It is a mystery why
guidebooks have been indifferent to the (deathly) charms of one of Delhi’s oldest
British cemeteries” (25). The tone is set from the outset that the gazes the
narrative will create for the readers will be a unique one, a clear example of
discursive practice where to establish the primacy of a particular discourse all
other discourses are excluded from the field of contention.
The ambience of the cemetery is presented as a landscape whereby the
reader’s gaze is directed towards the traditional ideas of landscaped gardens,
“Guarded by a cross-shaped gateway, Nicholson Cemetery has a sloping, grassy
landscape dotted with tombstones, some intricately carved, some stark and
simple” (25). The usual tropes of constructing a cemetery for the readers ‘gaze’
then follows, “Neem, date and tamarind trees watch over like sentinels, while
thick bougainvilleas, weighed down with flowers, shed pink petals over the graves
of ‘dearly loved’ children and ‘beloved’ spouses” (25). Reference is made of the
Biblical verses on the tombs, the images of stone angels that dot the place. The
USP of the cemetery, that it houses many graves dating from the 1857 uprising, is
mentioned.

But, alongside the construction of the particular space of ‘Nicholson

Cemetery’, the city of Delhi, where the cemetery is situated, is also constructed
simultaneously. The effect is like this: in Delhi you can find Nicholson Cemetery,
and it is in Nicholson Cemetery you would find the graves of soldiers killed in the
1857 uprising. This tone of exclusiveness in the narrative is again discursive in
essence because it isolates the narrative from the other run of the mill travel
guides. The narrative, being faithful to the genre of travel guides however, points
to the most prominent grave in the cemetery—that of “Brigadier General John
Nicholson, who was nicknamed ‘the Lion of Punjab’” (25). The narrative ends
with the information that “On the far side, towards the Ring Road, marigolds
adorn the new graves of Indian Christians” (25) thereby presenting/constructing
Nicholson Cemetery as a destination where the past cohabits with the present.
Sumanta Roy (‘portraits’, the delhi walla)

Sumanta Roy, who the caption says is a ‘Consumer’ (24), is the subject of
the next narrative this paper seeks to analyze. Even before the narrative proper
starts, a few words of Sumanta Roy are quoted as a teaser that sets off the process
of ‘gaze’ creation at the individual level as well as the level of the city of Delhi:
“Brands can boost your confidence and make you feel 10 feet taller” (24). In fact,
the entire the delhi walla series might be read as a ‘discursive structure’ as it
seems to emphasize that to represent/construct the city of Delhi
comprehensively, a study of its ‘individuals’ has been undertaken which the other
travel guides usually gloss over. As such, these other travel guides and their
constructions are effectively excluded from being considered as authentic.
Indeed, for the readers of the delhi walla series, the city is constructed as being
inhabited by a myriad horde of individuals, some as famous as Khuswant Singh,
the author and some as insignificant as Ram Swaroop Sharma, who is a homeless
man.
The narrative on Sumanta Roy, the ‘consumer’, begins with the name of a
Chinese restaurant in Khan Market, the ‘Sidewok’. The typical Delhi consumer is
presented/ constructed for the readers by his refusal to enter the restaurant until
the doorman opens the door. As the narrative says, “A man of style, he [Sumanta
Roy] is a brand-sensitive consumer who expects good service when he pays for it”
(25). What follows in the narrative is a catalogue of brand names each of which
stands as a signifier for ultimate consumerism: “Dressed in a red Jeffrey Rogers
sweatshirt and Seven jeans, this 29-year -old IT professional walks up the stairs
carrying a brown Juicy couture bag and a Louis Vuitton wallet. His left arm bears
a Chinese tattoo and his right a Guess gold watch studded with Swarovski
crystals” (25). The information that he [Roy] is wearing “white-and-green-striped
Topshop panties” (25), the designer brand that celebrities like Kate Moss loves, in
effect constructs not only a fairly clear-cut picture of an out and out individual
consumer but also of the city of Delhi that houses these consumers.

The narrative contains several quotations from Sumanta Roy that form
part of the narrative strategy to represent/construct the gaze of the readers
regarding the individual. The narrative also offers other details about the
consumer apart from his designer clothes: “He buys his groceries in Khan
Market, holidays in Bali, and attends parties in fashionable south Delhi
restaurants. He also hangs out in PVR Saket shopping complex for its pavement
bookstalls, beer bars and clubs” (25). As with the names of the designer brands,
these activities of Sumanta Roy too act as signifiers that construct a lifestyle of
Delhi’s affluent class as well as the city of Delhi that provides these facilities for
this class to engage with. In this construction of the portrait of Sumanta Roy who
“misses his hometown of Kolkata terribly” (25), Soofi also brings up/constructs/
represents the multicultural facet of the metropolis of Delhi. Roy stays in Delhi
but he rues, “In Kolkata you can party till 7 a.m.; not possible in Delhi. It also has
a rich Anglo-Indian culture and people there grow up on books and music” (25).
The narrative then delves deeper in constructing the portrait of Sumanta Roy,
with his individual traits, for the readers: “Sumanta inherited his passion for
reading from his father, who died of cardiac arrest four years ago. He often
advised his son to have a dictionary as his best friend. After Sumanta’s father was
cremated, he followed the Hindu ritual of shaving his head, despite his relatives
saying that there was no need to do so” (25).
The narrative ends with the mention of his father’s coming to terms with
Sumanta’s ‘alternative lifestyle’. This mention of ‘alternative lifestyle’ (25) again
constructs a particular ‘gaze’ for the readers: at the individual level it is
Sumanta’s adjustment with his father regarding his ‘alternative lifestyle’ and at
the general level of representation of the city of Delhi where people with
‘alternative lifestyles’ are accommodated unlike many smaller cities where they
are stigmatized. The final sentences of this narration/entry from a quotation of
Sumanta Roy points to this conglomeration of gaze construction at the individual
level and at the level of the city of Delhi: “People dream of my kind of life. Tell me
how many people in Delhi own a Louis Vuitton?” (25).In Soofi’s narrative, the
person Sumanta Roy becomes an example of synecdoche, where as an individual
consumer represents a class of consumers, who in turn makes up/constructs the
multicultural avatar of the city of Delhi.
Butter Chicken (‘food+drink’, the delhi walla)

The next analysis is on the narrative of ‘Butter Chicken’ (14-15) included in
the ‘Mains’ section of ‘food+drink’. Soofi’s narrative introduces this particular
food item as one of the signifiers of the city of Delhi itself: “If Delhiites are
sometimes called fat, aggressive and lascivious, then butter chicken must share
part of the blame” (15).What happens here is interesting because narrative
construction of the food item as well as the city happens simultaneously. Butter
chicken is introduced/constructed as “King of gravies” (14) and the narrative
foregrounds the origin of the dish: “It originated in the 1950s at Moti Mahal

restaurant in Daryaganj. Famed for their tandoori chicken, the cooks recycled the
leftover juices in the marinade trays by adding butter and tomato. Tandoor-
cooked chicken pieces were then tossed in this sauce, and butter chicken was
born.” (15). That this dish soon became part of Delhi’s culture which
subsequently got exported elsewhere is part of the narrative design of
constructing the ‘gaze’ of the readers towards a definite cultural symbol of the
city, representing the city nationally and internationally.
“Today, eating butter chicken in Moti Mahal is like reading Shakespeare’s
Hamlet” (15). This particular construction in the narrative again highlights the
confluence of semiotic and discursive elements as far as ‘gaze’ construction of the
readers is concerned. A classic example of Barthesian ‘myth’, here the name of
Hamlet denotes a classic play of Shakespeare, but at the level of connotation the
dish of ‘butter chicken’, because of this comparison, is elevated to the status of a
classic. At the same time, this ‘classical elevation’ works as a discursive structure.
First, Hamlet is a classic, a niche item to be appreciated by connoisseurs only.
Second, comparison of ‘butter chicken’ with Hamlet, apart from making it a
‘classic’, points to the exclusionary character of discursive structures. The
narrative suggests that in order to savour the real taste of ‘butter chicken’ one has
to be as refined and cultivated as one must be to appreciate Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. Moti Mahal’s ‘butter chicken’ might be eaten by all and sundry but can
be appreciated only by the select few.
The narrative then turns the reader’s gaze to the popularity and spread of
the dish outside Daryaganj, where it originated: “The dish has spread from
Daryaganj to every self-respecting non-vegetarian eatery in Delhi, over to the
highway dhabas of north India” (15). Another beautiful instance of ‘gaze’
construction is evident in the way the narrative describes the texture of the dish
and the best way to have it: “Best had with tandoori roti or naan, butter chicken is
extremely creamy, with a thick, red tomato gravy. The sauce percolates so deeply
into the chicken pieces that they become juicy and soft, instantly melting in your
mouth” (15). As stated earlier, representation/construction of the city of Delhi
also goes hand in hand with the construction of ‘butter chicken’ for the ‘gaze’ of
the readers: “The dish is so extravagantly buttery, that to a calorie-conscious
diner, it may seem as gross as the showiness of nouveau riche Delhiites”(15).
The primary function of narratives is representation. But, representation
involves a manipulation of signs/codes as the narrator ‘constructs’ the narrative
for presentation to his/her readers. This ‘construction’ involves ‘foregrounding’
certain elements at the cost of the others. Herein comes the concept of ‘gaze
construction’ because through this process of ‘foregrounding’ and ‘highlighting’,
the narrator regulates the gaze of his readers. The process is similar to the
practices of tourist guides in any place of tourist interest. Just as the tourist guide
points out and ‘constructs’ the tourist place/space for the tourists through his
verbal narrative, the writers of travel books and guides does the same through
written narratives (with pictures accompanying at times). Mayank Austen Soofi,
the author of the tourist guide the delhi walla, indulges in the same practice of

‘gaze construction’ for his readers. The four books in the series have the stated
aim of introducing the city of Delhi at a micro level for tourists, as the back cover
of the books says: “Since 2007 he [Soofi] has written a blog called The Delhi
Walla, in which he documents the minutiae of the city he loves.” Thus, this series
the delhi walla serves a dual function: first, of representing the city of Delhi for
its readers: second, of serving as an example of how ‘gaze’ is constructed for the
readers (who are virtual tourists) through the medium of the narrative.
Works Cited :
“Gaze.” Def. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. 9th ed., Oxford
UP, 1996.
“Jazz.” Def. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. 9th ed., Oxford
UP, 1996.
“Thangka.” Collins English Dictionary, HarperCollins Publishers, 2020,
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/thangka. Accessed 17
April 2020.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Levers, Hill and Wang,
2001.
Cobley, Paul. Narrative. Routledge, 2001.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception.
Translated by A. M. Sheridan. Routledge, 2003.
Hall, Stuart., editor. Representation [ed. Representation] : Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage [Practices. Sage]
Publications Ltd. 1997.
Jorgensen, Marianne and Louise J. Phillips. Discourse Analysis as Theory and
Method. Sage Publications Ltd, 2002.
Mills, Sara. Discourse. Routledge, 2004.
Soofi, Mayank Austen. the delhi walla: food+drink. Collins, 2010.
---. the delhi walla: hangouts. Collins, 2010.
---. the delhi walla: portraits. Collins, 2010.
---. the delhi walla: monuments. Collins, 2010.
Urry, J. and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Sage Publications Ltd., 2011.

pp. 21-30
EXTERIORIZING THE INTERIOR – DISEASED

MINDS, DISEASED BODIES: ILLNESS AS A
TROPE IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S
BODILY HARM
Sangeetha Puthiyedath
Abstract
The distance between the straight jacketing imposed on
women by society and their aspirations is a recurring theme in
Margaret Atwood. Her protagonists, alienated from themselves
as well as society have a complex and troubled relationship with
their own bodies. A woman’s body, is presented by Atwood as
heavily inscribed by culture. Compelled to constantly measure
and judge herself against the proscription that deny acceptance
to a woman’s body if it does not conform to male determined
precepts of beauty, the body becomes an important intermediary
in a woman’s dialogue with society and a tool with which she
negotiates her relationship with the outside society. In Atwood’s
novel Bodily Harm the protagonist Rennie Wilford is diagnosed
with cancer and has to undergo a mastectomy. Her cut off left
breast questions her identity as a woman and forces a rethink
about her subjectivity and her identity as a woman. The threat to
her identity is not merely mounted by a society which insists on
reducing women to erogenous zones. It is also because of the
narrative that places specific diseases like tuberculosis, cancer
and AIDS within the context of religious rhetoric of sin and
punishment. However, Atwood refuses to lay the blame entirely
on society and its patriarchal conventions. My thesis is that
Rennie’s disease is in fact, as an exterior manifestation of an
inner malady.
Keywords : Atwood, identity, interiority, body, mastectomy,
beauty myth, violence, gender.
Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm strives to capture the life of a young

woman, Rennie Wilford, struggling with the emotional trauma post her
mastectomy. Atwood presents her as a woman who leads an existence that is as
superficial as the “lifestyle magazines” that she writes for. Reenie is rudely shaken

22 Sangeetha Puthiyedath
out of her complacency and equable existence when she is diagnosed with breast
cancer. The cataclysmic impact of the diagnosis and the ensuing mastectomy goes
beyond the physical scars left on the body but challenges the very conception of
Rennie’s subjectivity and forces her to reexamine her priorities, her relationship
with men and the world in general. A diagnosis of cancer, one of the scourges of
twentieth century, with its associations of suffering and death would have been a
terrible blow to Rennie, a young woman in her twenties. But, worse still for her, is
the cure prescribed – a mastectomy. As a woman living in a society that insists on
reducing the female to the confines of the body, particularly to her erogenous
zones, the operation has a direct impact on Rennie’s perception of herself as a
desirable woman. Her cut off left breast questions her identity as a woman and
forces a rethink about her subjectivity and her position in society. This paper
seeks to explore the use of cancer by Atwood as a trope to interrogate the malaise
that has beset society and by extension, the individual.
Bodily Harm is a text that explores the multifarious threats faced by a
woman, both external and internal. In the course of the novel Rennie has to
confront multiple psychological challenges as well as physical threats mounted by
voyeurs and perverts, an abusive boyfriend, policemen and jailors. Rennie proves
to be ill-equipped to confront these interrogations. Disguised in the garb of a
travel narrative, with a love story thrown in for good measure, Atwood’s Bodily
Harm brutally parodies travel romance. Rennie’s escape to a Caribbean island
after her surgery and her break-up with her live-in boyfriend Jake, does not
provide her with any escape from her predicament. Instead, she finds herself on
the other side of a symbolic mirror where the dangers she faced in Canada are not
only present, but intensified manifold.
Rennie’s life before her diagnosis of cancer is a constant battle with
superficiality, both acknowledged and unacknowledged. She is confused and lives
a life devoid of self-reflexivity. This is reflected in her attitude to men. She accepts
them uncritically but appears to be afraid of any commitment. Her placid,
insulated existence is punctured when she is diagnosed with cancer. It could have
been a moment of reckoning, and self-reflexivity. Instead she trivializes it by
falling in love with her doctor. Fiona Tolan observes that for Rennie, her
diagnosis of cancer should have functioned as a brutal encounter with reality. But
she dodges the issue by casting her physician in the role of ‘god’ and savior and
choosing to fall in love with him. Even Rennie is aware of the absurdity of the
situation:“Falling in love with your doctor is something that middle-aged women
did, women in the soaps, women in nurse novels and sex-and-scalpel epics”
(Atwood 33). However, her obsession with her doctor opens her eyes to the
reality of her relationship with Jake, her live-in partner. Rennie’s emergent
understanding of the position she occupies for Jake first expresses itself as
discomfiture with his collection of vaguely disturbing photographs of stylised
women. Rennie is troubled by these pictures, “especially when she was lying on
their bed with no clothes on” (Atwood 105). “It is the objectification of these
women, and by extension, her own objectification, that Rennie is unconsciously

Interrogating the Idea of India … 23
troubled by,” observes Tolan. Rennie is cognizant of her objectification and she
tells Jake “Sometimes I feel like a blank sheet of paper. . . . For you to doodle on”
(Atwood 104). Universalizing Rennie’s experience and locating it within the
framework of patriarchy, Brooks J Bouson remarks: “As a blank sheet of paper,
Rennie’s body becomes a cultural text on which Jake inscribes the narrative of
male desire” (115).
Rennie’s choice of profession and her unquestioning acceptance of it
mirror her attitude towards men. She uncritically accepts the viewpoint of her
male editor when he blandly tells her that antipornography feminists miss “the
element of playfulness” in pornography, and asks her to write an article on
“pornography as an art form” as a response to the “antiporno pieces in the more
radical women’s magazines”(Atwood 208). Rennie’s initial reaction to
pornography is “properly” detached and what she considers “sophisticated.” So
when she comes across a male artist who uses life-sized mannequins of naked
women to make table and chair sculptures, she is unable to recognize the violence
involved in those sculptures and tries to shrug off the extreme objectification of
women in pornography in general. Her response to the pornographic videos that
she views at the police station is equally dictated by what society considers
sophisticated and proper: “There were a couple of sex-and-death pieces, women
being strangled or bludgeoned or having their nipples cut off by men dressed up
as Nazis, but Rennie felt it couldn’t possibly be real, it was all done with ketchup”
(210). Her nonchalance and deliberate distancing is shaken only when she sees
the “grand finale.” Watching a rat emerging from a woman’s vagina in the police
video Rennie is suddenly confronted by “a large gap” in what she has been
accustomed “to thinking of as reality” (Atwood 210). Jake her live-in partner and
his sado-sexual fantasies, which he enacts on her body, suddenly acquire a
sinister meaning and she is able to recognise it as a part of the larger
objectification of women. After watching the video Rennie has trouble
“dismissing” Jake’s sadistic sex as a mere game. And although an outraged Jake
protests saying “Come on, don’t confuse me with that sick stuff. You think I’m
some kind of a pervert?” (212), he fails to convince her.
Atwood’s political statements often come packed in humour, which lends it
a critical self-reflexivity. She presents Jake, Rennie’s partner as a professional
packager – one who is only interested in the outer covering. Bouson is right when
she says, “In the sexual economy of their relationship, Jake is the packager aptly,
he is a designer of packages by profession and Rennie the product” (115). Rennie,
conditioned by her desire to please, allows Jake not only to redo her apartment
but even to refashion her. His pictures of women, foregrounding the body,
leaving the face, covered or receding in the background is a pointer to the manner
in which he sees them. For him they are mere objects, their subjectivity totally
undermined by their status as bodies. The subtext of his “inventive” sexual games
is the potential violence that can be enacted on the female body; a potential that
is brutally realized on Lora’s body by the prison guards. When Jake tells Rennie,
“Pretend I just came through the window. Pretend you’re being raped” (Atwood

117) or climbs up the fire escape pretending to be a “lurker” or sends her “obscene
letters composed of words snipped from newspapers, purporting to be from crazy
men” (27) he is enacting out a fantasy of power and violence. Although Rennie
has a dim insight into the power games Jake indulges in, Jake likes “thinking of
sex as something he could win at,” she disregards her instinct: “He would never
do it if it was real, if she really was a beautiful stranger or a slave girl or whatever
it was he wanted her to pretend. So she didn’t have to be afraid of him” (207).
Rennie’s attempts to convince herself that Jake is not actually violent in
spite of evidence to the contrary, results in her giving mixed signals to the reader.
Atwood peppers the text with clues that point to the psychological subordination
he subjects Rennie to, yet she chooses to remain impervious to it. Her sense of
being and selfhood is subjected to severe challenge by his objectification of her
and it is hardly surprising that their relationship cannot withstand the
interrogation of her body by the cancerous cells and the scar it leaves behind. The
pornographic clips with depictions of sadistic mutilation of the female body
which Rennie dismisses as acts done with “ketchup” is actually realized on her
body in the form of a mastectomy. “Deliberately the text associates Rennie’s
breast surgery, which is described as a phallic-sadistic act that causes a severe
narcissistic wound, with the violent attacks enacted on the female body in
particular on eroticized body parts like the female breast in sadomasochistic
pornography,” observes Bouson (118).
The duplication and parodying of disparate events by Atwood heightens
reader awareness and offers a critical commentary that appears to be embedded
in the text. Cancer is presented not merely as a disease but as a powerful trope for
the multi-pronged threat posed by the society to female bodily integrity.It can be
viewed as a symbol of the disease that has beset society. The reduction of women
into sexual objects and the threat of violence that she has to live with are
contended with here. The bodily harm that Rennie has to face is not merely from
Jake, but multiple men. Jake’s actions are diabolically mirrored in the coiled rope
left by a real intruder who breaks into Rennie’s apartment. The forced entry of
the policemen into her house and the discovery of the rope on her bed terrifies
her. The violation of her private space and the implied but unarticulated charge
that she “invited” it upon herself plays out the dominant narrative that women
are responsible for the violence perpetrated upon their bodies. The unseen
intruder, who leaves a menacingly coiled rope on Rennie’s bed, foreshadows the
intruder who later enters her hotel room in St. Antoine and rips open the parcel
under the bed. The two policemen who chase away the intruder from her house is
likewise mirrored in the two policemen who later arrest her at St Antoine.
Intruders who threaten her bodily integrity from without is duplicated in
cancer which intrudes from within. In using cancer as a symbol for the threat that
women face Atwood is drawing on the accepted notion of cancer as an invasive
disease that evokes fear and horror. Cancer is viewed as an attack on the body
and its associated terminology draws heavily from warfare 1, observes Sontag in
her seminal work Illness as Metaphor. Rennie views her disease as a betrayal by

her body. The invasive nature of the disease, the “corrupting” of the flesh from
within engender a feeling in her that her own body has double-crossed her.
Unlike a disease caused by a virus or bacteria like tuberculosis, which involves an
invasion from outside, a cancer patient is made to feel culpable.This sense is
reinforced by society and the narratives built around cancer, which are based on
flawed and unscientific ideas about factors that trigger it.
Cancer also, ironically duplicates society’s recurrent charge of crime
against women and its punishment. Female rape victims are routinely accused of
being responsible for the rape “asking for it” or else “deserving it.”The narrative
of accusation, of implied sin and punishment surrounding cancer is not new.
From ancient times, diseases like leprosy and plague were viewed as marks of
divine wrath.2 When a man or a king transgresses moral boundaries or commits a
sin, punishment is meted out in the form of an epidemic or a disease. A diagnosis
of cancer is still viewed as a judgement. Only the narrative has changed. Now it is
regarded as a disease caused due to bad food habits, indulgences like smoking,
even sexual repression.3 The implied association with sin and transgression
makes the patient feel complicit. A diagnosis of cancer is not only terrifying but
also shameful, something that should be concealed from the world. Sontag
observes that in the United States of America, cancer is the only disease that is
exempt from the law of disclosure:
Since getting cancer can be a scandal that jeopardizes one’s love life,
one’s chance of promotion, even one’s job, patients who know what they
have tend to be extremely prudish, if not outright secretive, about their
disease. And a federal law, the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, cites
“treatment for cancer” in a clause exempting from disclosure matters
whose disclosure “would be an unwarranted invasion of personal
privacy.” It is the only disease mentioned. (Sontag 8)
The invasive nature of the masculine world that appropriates physical and
cultural spaces, that insists on absolute allegiance to its ideology with the threat
of physical and psychological punishment to transgressors, find an apt metaphor
in cancer. Rennie finds her body invaded and mutilated by cancer. Her
disfigurement is foreshadowed in the pornographic clips that she watches as part
of her research. Her condition also bears resemblance to the fate faced by
transgressing females in fairy tales – cut off hands, feet, tongue.
For Rennie, the mutilation of her body is a direct assault on her conception
of self. Given the objectification of women in popular culture, which Rennie
partakes of, and the society’s insistence on reducing the female to a body – a
sexual object, this is hardly surprising. The loss of her breast challenges her
identity as a sexually desirable female because the female’s sexual role is to be the
owner of a sexually desirable body on which the male enacts his desire. His is the
active role, hers the passive, and without a “perfect” body to offer, she is
symbolically “out” of it. Atwood’s epigraph for Bodily Harm, which functions as a
heavily-loaded signal to the meaning of the work supports this reading: “A man’s
presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you. By contrast, a woman’s

presence … defines what can and cannot be done to her” (Berger 47). Berger’s
claim that “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,”
proves to be true for Rennie. Watching her body through the eyes of an outsider
she finds it wanting and rejects it. Ironically for Rennie this takes precedence
even over the fact that she may have a relapse and the cancer might eventually
kill her.
Rennie’s sickness also forces her to confront her own isolation. She has no
relationship with her parents or any strong bonds of friendship either with men
or women. Her past in Griswold instilled in her an unshakable respect for form
and to outer appearances which she holds on to even when she reports on
countercultural fashion. Once deprived of a perfect form (body), Rennie has a
chance to realize how insubstantial outer form and appearances can be. Her
grandmother’s illness and her heartbreaking search for her “misplaced hands”
did not teach Rennie anything about the hollowness of the exterior and the
tragedy of repressing all true feelings for the sake of form. The only lesson Rennie
carries from witnessing her mother’s repressed life and the escape of her father
from the claustrophobic confines of his wife’s house is to physically escape the
issue. Rennie does this firstly by falling in love with her surgeon whom she feels
will be able to accept her body with its imperfections because he was
instrumental to it, and later by travelling to a strange place, the foreignness of
which she believes can liberate and empower her.
Rennie’s journey to the Caribbean island of St. Antoine reveals to her in
stark detail that the forces she sought to escape from is replicated on the island,
in a heightened form. The violence and danger she undergoes on the island
makes the coil of rope on her bed which triggered her flight from Toronto appear
rather innocuous. One of the most political of Atwood’s novels, Bodily Harm
does not merely highlight the sexual politics but the brutal reality of power
politics, between men and women and between the races and classes. Atwood’s
protagonists, white females in a predominantly white environment, are rarely
pitted against a backdrop that rips the mask covering their prejudices. Rennie’s
travel narrative with its overtly surrealistic orientation “systematically confuses
characterization, plot development, setting and even genre,” observes Lorna
Irvine and “[a]lthough the opening sentence implies a specific time (the present)
and a space (here), the novel in fact refuses clarification in favour of a
nightmarish literary landscape that condenses the characters and displaces the
affects” (Irvine 85). The obfuscation of markers that tend to locate the text in a
specific time and context universalizes the experience Rennie undergoes on the
island.
Cancer, which had obliterated boundaries between benign and malignant
for Rennie, also makes her cognizant of the malevolent forces at work in life, like
the faceless man with the coiled rope. The knowledge that she carries death or
cancer cells within her impinges on her consciousness with an urgency that is
hard to ignore. At times she fears that her scar will “split open like a diseased
fruit” (Atwood 60) “It is this irrational fear of splitting open and collapsing

boundaries between inside and outside” which haunts Rennie in her dreams and
in her waking life, transforming even the sight of Lora’s bitten fingernails into a
sight of psychological horror. Coral Ann Howells feels that “Rennie is a woman
on the edge of collapse, for huge gaps have opened up in her imaginative
topography of self and personal relations as she faces the breakdown of all her
fictions of femininity and romance” (114).
Rennie’s refusal to look, her inability to read signs and events correctly
leads her into what she abhors, and has avoided so far – “massive involvement”
(Atwood 34). Her illegal imprisonment, based on mere doubt of her involvement
in the coup, and the violence she is forced to witness in the prison, forces her to
cast off her indifference and become morally involved in the life around her.
“This is emblematized in the phrase ‘massive involvement’ where the meaning
shifts from a specific medical terminology about cancer to becoming a description
of Rennie’s moral position as a socially responsible member of the body politic”
observes Howells (107). Lora’s brutalizing by the guards act as a waking up call
for Rennie and for the first time she recognises that she is not exempt. The savage
violence and anger that puncture the text at regular intervals suddenly coalesces
for her into one frightening possibility. Earlier, when Rennie watched the police
beating up the deaf and dumb man, she had felt detached and mildly ashamed of
her “own fascination.” In fact, partaking of the outsider’s “tourist” gaze she judges
the scene on the scale of “picturesqueness” and dismisses it callously as “this
isn’t.” “Rennie’s desire to see things from the surface and as picturesque reveals
her own implication in the voyeuristic male gaze that looks at but feels
disconnected from the suffering of other,” remarks Bouson (129). Confronted
with “too much” reality, Rennie longs for the familiar comfort of late-night
television and pop-corn, failing which she attempts to escape into the world of
memories only to realize that her former lovers have transformed into
insubstantial ephemeral forms and the only reality is the faceless man with the
rope. “He is the only man who is with her now, he’s followed her, he was here all
along, he was waiting for her” (Atwood 287). Bouson commenting on how
Atwood universalizes the faceless man, remarks:
In Bodily Harm, however, the criminal, the man with the rope, is never
specifically identified; instead, he assumes a variety of identities,
including not only the sadistic island police but also the men Rennie is
romantically involved with. Thus, rather than representing a particular
individual, the faceless stranger comes to represent the latent potential
in all men to brutalize women. His crime is not an aberration but a
direct consequence of patriarchal ideology with its hierarchical and
pathological system of male dominance and female subordination. (114)
Male domination and female subordination is predicated on the power structure
inherent in society. “There’s only people with power and people without power,”
(Atwood 240) Paul tells Rennie bluntly, and in the prison where the demarcation
is starkly drawn, she is forced to conclude that the men with power actually
enjoys wielding it. Rennie observes how the policeman while cutting the hair of

the deaf and dumb man with a bayonet “pulls the head back like a
chicken’s…slices [the hair] with the bayonet. [H]e’s not careful enough, the man
howls, a voice that is not a voice, there are no teeth in his opened mouth, blood is
pouring down his face” (289). Rennie realizes with mounting horror that the man
with the bayonet, is an “an addict,” for whom the scream is a “hard drug and “he
will need more” (289).
Validating Rennie’s persecutory fears is the savage beating Lora endures at
the hands of the prison guards. When Lora learns that the guards have deceived
her and used her, and that her lover was shot during the uprising, she angrily
threatens to retaliate, forgetting her position of absolute helplessness. Rennie
watches as Lora is savagely beaten. “They go for the breasts and the buttocks, the
stomach, the crotch, the head, jumping…” (Atwood 292). Realizing that the
impetus behind the beating was a primitive one, “Morton’s got the gun out and
he’s hitting her with it, he’ll break her so that she’ll never make another sound,”
Rennie does not utter a sound for she is afraid they will see her (293). “Beaten
until she lies motionless, her pulped face no longer a face but a bruise, reduced to
a featureless cipher, Lora is the very emblem of the silenced, victimized woman
and the fragmented body/self,” remarks Bouson (130). Rennie’s action of
clasping Lora and calling out to her registers her decision to move beyond
surfaces and enter a reality which she had so far evaded and she is cognizant of
its import.
[T]here’s an invisible hole in the air, Lora is on the other side of it and
she has to pull her through, she’s gritting her teeth with the effort, she
can hear herself, a moaning, it must be her own voice, this is a gift, this
is the hardest thing she’s ever done….Surely, if she can only try hard
enough, something will move and live again, something will get born.
(Atwood 299)
The text refuses certainties and the reader like Rennie is left unsure whether Lora
lives or dies. However, the text does suggest that when Rennie takes Lora by the
hand, hoping that “something will get born,” she herself undergoes a rebirth
experience and critics like Catherine McLay have insisted that the brutalizing of
Lora turns Rennie “from an observer into an actor, a contributor” (137). No
longer a lifestyles writer focusing on superficialities, a subversive Rennie has
been transformed into a reporter who “will pick her time; then she will report.”
What Rennie sees “has not altered; only the way she sees it” (Atwood 301, 300).
Bodily Harm, like other Atwood novels, defies strict generic categories but
partakes of the elements of a gothic novel, a spy thriller and a travel romance.
Atwood deliberately mixes in disparate elements and then proceeds to subvert
those very elements. So while we find Rennie, the lost heroine imprisoned in a
cellar, the “hero” Paul turns out not to be a hero, but a “danger freak” who
rescues women not out of any goodness but because he enjoys taking risks.
Likewise, the romance Rennie finds on the island is not “a no-hooks, no-strings
vacation romance with a mysterious stranger” (Atwood 222), but a fatuous “fling”
which circumstances conspire to bring about and the ending can be seen as a

satiric take on all these genres. Atwood abandons her heroine to her fate with no
rescuer or no neat denouement in sight. The uncertainty about the eventual fate
of both Lora and Rennie underscore the phantasmal aspect of the ending. This
nightmarish unreality is further buttressed by the dialogic elements. The story
loops around fluctuating between the past and the present and the first person
narrator is displaced by Lora’s narrative which is also in first person. According
to Lorna Irvine “the plots and subplots” of Bodily Harm “intermingle, and the
repetition of both words and images creates a ritualistic pattern that often
suspends movement,” which undergirds the feeling of being inescapably trapped
in a nightmare. “A number of italicized language fragments, seemingly
disembodied, pierce the text, drawing to the reader’s attention the peculiar
balance between first – and third – person narration while, at the same time,
signaling a possible here and now,” (85-86) remarks Irving.
Atwood uses cancer as a trope to force the reader to examine received
notions about women and society. In Bodily Harm, both women and society are
presented as diseased, urgently needing healing. For women, the disease is
definitely internal. Bodily Harm can be said to exteriorize the internal malaise
afflicting the “post-feminist” generation of the eighties, women who felt
discomfited by the assertive brand of second generation feminists. It can be read
as a warning to those who assume gender equality as axiomatic. The freedom to
work coupled with financial freedom blinds people to the insidious demands of a
patriarchal society that seeks to control how a woman looks, dresses, eats, or even
thinks. Appropriating the freedom wrested by women after centuries of
oppression, patriarchy conspires and machinates with capitalist consumerism to
subvert it by making women collude in their own subjugation.
For Atwood, the society is also sick and it is reflected in its approach to
women. The backlash against feminist assertion is evidenced in the “stupendous
upsurge in violent sexual imagery” depicting the abuse of women observes Naomi
Wolf (136). Calling attention to the mainstreaming of “high-class pornographic
photography, such as Playboy’s,” and by the advertising fraternity, Wolf observes
that by the end of the 1970s, sadomasochist images “had ascended from street
fashion to high fashion in the form of studded black leather, wristcuffs, and
spikes,” and that models “adopted from violent pornography the furious pouting
glare of the violated woman” (135, 136). She insists that such imagery serves “to
counterbalance women’s recent self-assertion” (137, 142). Rennie is a woman who
refuses to dialogically engage with the contradictions within herself. Instead, she
tries to ignore or gloss over her psychological ruptures. It is this suppression that
erupts in her as bodily issues. The issue and its manifestation might be different
for different women. The inner malaise might manifest as physical disorder or
psychological problem like anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa. What cannot be
contested is the complicity of a patriarchal society in precipitating such a crisis in
women.

Notes :
1 The “cancer cells do not simply multiply; they are ‘invasive’” they can be ‘malignant’
or ‘benign.’ “Cancer cells “colonize” from the original tumor to far sites in the body”
and remissions might be temporary (Sontag 64). The language of the treatment also
has a military flavor. “Radiotherapy uses the metaphors of aerial warfare; patients are
“bombarded” with toxic rays. And chemotherapy is chemical warfare… [which] aims
to “kill” cancer cells.” (Sontag 65).
2 All popular myths have instances of disease as punishment for moral transgressions.
For example the plague in Book I of the Iliad that Apollo inflicts on the Achaeans in
punishment for Agamemnon’s abduction of Chryses’ daughter; the plague in Oedipus
that strikes Thebes because of the polluting presence of the royal sinner) or to a single
person (the stinking wound in Philoctetes’ foot).
3 As once TB was thought to come from too much passion, afflicting the reckless and
sensual, today many people believe that cancer is a disease of insufficient passion
afflicting those who are sexually repressed, inhibited, unspontaneous, incapable of
expressing anger (Sontag 21). Both the myth about TB and the current myth about
cancer propose that one is responsible for one’s disease. But the cancer imagery is far
more punishing. Given the romantic values in use for judging character and disease,
some glamour attaches to having a disease thought to come from being too full of
passion. But there is mostly shame attached to a disease thought to stem from the
repression of emotion…[t]he view of cancer as a disease of the failure of
expressiveness condemns the cancer patient: expresses pity but also conveys
contempt (Sontag 48).
Works Cited :
Atwood, Margaret. Bodily Harm. London: Vintage, 1996. Print.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. 1972. Print.
Bouson, Brooks J. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and
Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood. Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 1993. Print.
Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1996. Print.
Irvine, Lorna. ‘The Here and Now of Bodily Harm’, Margaret Atwood, Van
Spanckeren and Castro, eds. 85–100. Print.
McLay, Catherine. “The Real Story” Journal of Canadian Fiction (Nos. 34-36)
130-137.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
Print.
Tolan, Fiona. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. New York: Rodopi,
2007. Print.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against
Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. Print.

pp. 31-40
“PICK A STORY AND SEE WHERE IT WILL LEAD

YOU”: RECONFIGURATIONS OF THECULTURAL
NARRATIVES IN SUJATA BHATT’S
SELECTED POEMS
Manika Arora
Abstract
From long-lasting to temporary and fluid ones, from oral to written
ones, the formation of culture includes all varieties of narratives. Folk-
tales, oral storytelling, legends, classical, popular and everyday
narratives together formulate the distinct character of any particular
culture.The paper examines the fundamental engagement between the
aesthetics of the poetry and the debate(s) of culture and its (re)making
with a singular focus on Sujata Bhatt’s poetry. Bhatt is a contemporary
Indian English poet residing in Germany. The poetic tension, between
this rootedness and fluidity, has given an unusual and distinctive idiom
to her work. The paper takes into account the images that delve on the
parameters of cultural belongingness yet look at it from an objective
distance, establishing Sujata Bhatt as a ‘critical insider’. It analyses how
the images in her poetry become a locus of cultural assimilation,
pertaining to the cosmopolitan approach that provides a novel
treatment to the familiar subject. The paper attempts at exploring how
her poetic idiom exposes the hidden and silent narratives, participates
in the reconfigurations and reconsideration of the popular and
established myths, tales, lore and other cultural narratives, and is
implicated in the process of rewriting Indian cultural narratives.
Keywords : Cultural narratives; Cultural memory; Myths; Folk-tales;
Reconfiguration.
Cultural narrative, in very simple terms, is a narrative of the culture, its

people, focusing on certain domains of the culture. The narrative is a way to
organize experience and endow it with meaning. The truths varying within each
religion and its cultural idiom are made understandable, accessible and
persuasive largely through the medium of stories. A story can reinforce as well as
disrupt the conceptions of what the world is about (Narayan 1989). There are
various traditional, folk and community narratives living in a culture. Also, there
are modern and urban narratives. From long-lasting to temporary and fluid ones,
from oral to written ones, the formation of culture includes all varieties of

32 Manika Arora
narratives. Jonardon Ganeri offers the category of ‘cognitive story’ to account for
such wide-ranging prevalence of narratives in the culture. He argues that a
cognitive story is a story that we tell ourselves to make sense out of our beliefs
and to shape our inner life (Ganeri 2012 171-172). It is the story through which we
structure our understanding of the world, a truth about how, when and why we
believe the way we do. It leads us to have our own perceptions of the goings-on of
our minds. That is why we always have an implicated reason about what we
choose to value and how.
Myths occupy an important place in the cultural narratives. Myths are
narratives that are both formative and reflective of social values within a culture.
There are certain aspects of a culture that myths reflect and certain aspects that
myths construct. Folk-tales, oral storytelling, legends, classical, popular and
everyday narratives together formulate the distinct character of any particular
culture. From the tale-telling sessions by the older women feeding the young kids
in the evening in the kitchen, as Ramanujan mentions, to the bedtime stories by
dadi nani, the Indian tradition is rich of stories to be told in each situation
(Ramanujan 468-469).
Since there are stories available for each situation and for each one, stories,
in India have also become a part of the learning process as exemplars and
models. For people in India, understanding comes through imitation, and the
imitation only through understanding. Therefore, stories play an integral role in
creating the grounds where the two connect. Moreover, these stories and legends
that a culture possesses act as a mechanism to preserve its sense of order
(Balagangadhara 82-91). Further, the story-telling in India is a performance,
here, stories are told performatively as part of action other than just the
utterances (Ramanujan 470).
Sujata Bhatt’s poetic idiom reconfigures the already constructed and
circulated narratives from mythology, folklore as well as everyday domain.
Drawing images from her early experiences in India, her poetry becomes a part of
cultural evolution. Driven from Indian cultural ethos, these images are suggestive
of rootedness in her poetic self. However, her position on these narratives is
global. Her poetic images have a cosmopolitan approach that provides a novel
treatment to a familiar subject and becomes a locus of cultural assimilation. The
idiom hints at the fluidity of her poetic self. The poetic tension, between this
rootedness and fluidity, leads to an unusual and distinctive idiom to manifest the
poetic thought. Also, this poetic conflict leads to a reconfiguration of some of the
established cultural aspects.
The poem “A Different Way to Dance” dwells on the popular myth of Shiva
cutting Ganesha’s head unaware of the fact that Ganesha is his own son. He,
later, replaces it with an elephant’s head following his realization of Ganesha
being his own son. This narrative has been an integral part of Indian mythology.
Taking its poetic subject from this popular tale, Bhatt’s poem explores the other
side of this narrative. The image, “sometimes the elephant head of Ganesha/

“Pick a story and see where it will lead you”... 33
dreams of the life among elephants it knew/ before Shiva interfered” (CP 115),
focuses on the unheard aspect of the popular myth. The image gives an entirely
new take on the prevalent narrative. Giving agency to the elephant, the idiom also
brings in various ecological concernsof the present day. As Ramanujan argues
past is not a stable entity rather is always in flux. It keeps changing itself as one
attends to it and gets new meanings every time it is approached. As the saying
goes history does repeat itself and hence, some parts of past knowledge becomes
all the more relevant in the present and provides new parameters for the present
to be studied. In fact, sometimes, the one who studies or observes the past also
becomes a part of it and the new meanings, ironies, paradigms and perspectives
are added in the understanding of the past (Ramanujan185).
The image, powerfully, brings in the anguish and longing of the elephant
that has been dislocated not only from the life it earlier knew but also from its
own body. The repentance of Shiva, thus, becomes his interference in the life of
the mute creature. The life of Ganesha was restored at the cost of that of
elephant’s. But, certainly, this is a story no one talks about. Further, the image of
the elephant yearning for “…the smell of wood- sandalwood, teak/the smell of
tress…the smell of his newly found mate/ the smell of their mounting passion—”
(CP 115) interrogates the redemption of Shiva and the revival of Ganesha’s life
and also hints at the supposed supremacy of human’s life over an animal’s.
Bringing in the yearnings and loss of the animal, the images problematize the
validity of this myth. Also, it indicates that it is not only on the rooted and stable
ideas that culture works on but also through the process of assimilation does
culture really evolve. The acts of revision have, indeed, been an integral part of
culture-making.
In a similar poem, “What Happened to the Elephant?”, a child is imaged
asking this question. The image of “…framed postcard/ of Ganesha on my wall” is
juxtaposed with “…a rotting carcass/ of a beheaded elephant…” (CP 117). This
juxtaposition brings in various important discussions of culture-making through
its prevalent narratives. Whereas the former image is celebrated in our culture,
the latter image has no place in any of the cultural narratives. The rotting carcass,
here, can be perceived as an analogy of some of the cultural violent amputations,
where the survivor is fondly remembered and highly popularized, and the dead is
either idolized as sacrificial goat or is simply forgotten. The juxtaposition of these
two images also brings into the light a poetic conflict within the poetic self. The
familiarity of these images with Indian ethos suggests the position of the poetic
self of being an insider and is indicative of her belongingness to the cultural
sphere of India. Whereas, her interrogating the integral aspects of Indian culture
underlines her position of being an outsider and hints at her objective distance
with the cultural ethos of India. In the poem, reconsideration of the age-old myth
takes place through the eyes of a curious child who asks an innocent yet an
important question “What happened to the elephant?” The child, here, can be
seen as the new cultural stance on the otherwise ‘rotting’ or dying aspects of
culture. The “rotting carcass”, thus, becomes a signifier of the cultural elements

34 Manika Arora
that are declining or need to be brought in the discussion, or reshaped, or simply

need to be getting rid of.
Oral story-telling occupies an integral part of Indian culture. Given the
richness and variety of the epic as well as folklore tradition in India, there has
been an extensive exchange among all these narrative traditions. The folk
narratives have provided a local perspective or regional world view to the
tradition of epic in India, the living interpretation of folk and other oral traditions
has provided a counter-narrative to them in the new social set-up. The study or
examination of the prevalent oral narratives and folklore within the alternative
traditions provides various correctives to them. Such exchanges and
interpretations have added a critical ambivalence in the understanding of these
narrative traditions (Hiltebeitel 1999).
The tales of animals especially monkeys are prevalent too in the various
fables and folk-tales. Developing on the grounds of this critical ambivalence is the
poem “Two Monkeys” that revolves around the image of two monkeys eating
chapatis and conversing with each other. However, the poem opens up another
aspect of such popular fables. The verses “‘Must we behave like monkeys?’…‘Can’t
we learn something else?’” (CP 485) suggest a deep yearning in monkeys to
escape from the human anthropomorphism of animals. The animal narratives
usually employ certain ‘essential’ characteristics to the behaviour of animals.
Attachment of these attributes to them is another kind of captivity. Tired of being
categorized and conforming to human expectations, the monkeys want to get out
of these fables. To ascribe the characteristics and behaviour patterns of human to
animals is a common phenomenon but the ethical conduct that is imagined on
animals is usually specific to culture. Taking into consideration the animals of
Panćatantra, they have already been well-defined within the spectrum of Indian
culture. Monkey, a familiar sight in India, is seen as a playful, but fickle and
foolish creature in the fables (Olivelle 1999).
Chandra Rajan argues that in Panćatantra, the two worlds of human and
non-human come in contact with each other; the relationship between the two is
established by various connecting links in the forms of social or political
organizations. She suggests that it is not possible for us to see who we really are
since we get involved in the everyday acts of living. In fact, one is unable to
perceive any pattern or meaning out of them until it is presented to be happening
to the others. And Panćatantra does this very effectively. This projection, thus,
works by placing the world of animals and nature in the world-view of human,
and by ascribing human characteristics, behaviour, emotions on non-human
entities. This is to define a different or ‘the other’ world on the standards and
parameters of the ‘self’ or to make identification of ‘us’ with the ‘other’ possible.
Thus, the natural world is reduced to function as a metaphor for the human
world (Rajan 2006). Thus, questioning if they must behave like the ‘monkeys’,
monkeys in the poem attempt at freeing themselves from their mythical and
cultural associations. Their desire to learn something else asks for letting loose
the wildness of their being.

Continuing the same discussion, the poem entitled “The First Meeting”
narrates a conversation between the narrator and the King Cobra. The poem
images the snake annoyed with people’s prayers and offerings of numerous bowls
of milk, “Everywhere I go people pester me/ with their prayers, their hundred
bowls of milk a day” (CP 21). Tired of its mythopoeic adoration, the snake
requests the narrator to let it be. The image brings into the question human
imposition of certain behaviour to the animals in general and snakes in
particular. Indian philosophy sees divinity in each being. In fact, it is the spiritual
oneness that connects the entire universe. It is, therefore, a common practice to
worship animals and plants in India. However, the image, here, interrogates this
popular practice creating the new markers for culture. Drawing on the
commonplace image and idea, the poem brings in the novelty of approach from
the given temporal and spatial distance of the poetic self. The poem concludes
with the image of the snake giving a counter-narrative of what should be done
with it. The snake speaks:
I want to live in your garden,
to visit you, especially those nights you sing,
let me join you.
And once in a while, let me lie around your neck
and share a bowl of milk… (CP 22)
Portraying the old and popular image of a snake lying around the neck of
devotees, the image in Bhatt’s poem provides an altogether new viewpoint.
Moving beyond the realm of spirituality, which has, overtly, been associated with
India, the poem “The Kama sutra Retold” (CP 26-28) brings a new Indian
perspective of looking at the Indian life and experiences.
Kāmasūtra is an Indian classical text that acknowledges the sensuality of
an individual. It lays down the sūtras of kāma, desires of an individual. The text
celebrates the eroticism and pleasure of the body. The text itself acts as a counter-
narrative to the disseminated narrative of India being a domain of spirituality. It
is important to note here that the doctrine of caturvarga or four concepts in
Hinduism gives an equal significance to artha, a pursuit to attain wealth,
dharma, religious and moral duties and kāma, the desire of body. According to
this doctrine, moksha, the final release, is the ultimate goal of one’s life. As Bimal
Krishna Matilal argues, by giving equal importance and rank to all three goals of
life, kāma, dharma and artha, this doctrine does, in a way, break the
stereotypical religious and mystic image associated with Hinduism (Matilal 145-
146). Although it is the domain of spiritual that is understood as the ultimate and
final, sensuality as an important part of life has been addressed too in Indian
ethos. Matilal, further, argues that not only that sexual pleasure is accepted as the
highest form of pleasure but also is considered as honourable as well as
prestigious in Indian philosophy. To give evidence to his argument, he quotes
from Brhadārarnyaka Upanisad that puts side by side the transcendental
delight with sensual pleasure.

36 Manika Arora
He did not enjoy himself. Therefore, people do not enjoy (are not happy)
all by them selves, i.e. alone. He wanted a second, a companion. He
became as big as a man and a woman embracing each other. He divided
this body into two. From that, the body of husband and wife was
created. Therefore, said Yajnavalkya, this body is one half of oneself. It
is like one of the two halves of a split pea. Therefore, the empty space is
indeed filled by the woman. He was united with her. From that, people
were born. (Brhadāranyaka, 1.4.3, qtd. in Matilal 146)
Patrick Olivelle’s detailed discussion of the term Ānanda in Indian tradition
underlines the varied connotations of the term (Olivelle 1997). From the feeling
of ultimate bliss that devotees experience in their devotion of God, or mystics
experience in their samādhi to moksha, the final goal of an individual’s life, the
term carries the wide range of meanings in diverse Indian religious traditions. He
observes that in the domain of theology and religion, the term ānanda has been
very prominent since the fifth century C.E. Also, he points out, the term is
connected with the pleasure associated with drinking, dancing, and music as well
as the joyous state of ecstasy. Also, the term ānanda has several sexual
underpinnings.
Similarly, J. A. B. Van Buitenen also argues that the term ānanda is
connected with the joy of drinking the soma or the orgasm begetting a son or
simply, a joyous knowledge of oneself as well as the bliss that is the brahman and
the ātman (van Buitenen 27-36). Exploring in detail about the usage of the term
in religious as well as sensual vocabulary, Olivelle concludes that there exists an
“explicit and unambiguous connection between ānanda as orgasmic rapture and
ānanda as the experience of brahman/ātman” (Olivelle 1997 174). It can, thus,
be established that both sensuality and spirituality are integral in Indian thought
and go hand in hand. Bhatt’s poem, “The Kama Sutra Retold”, however, further
problematizes the perceived understanding of this classical narrative. The poem
images the first spontaneous sexual encounter between the two lovers, where,
“He’s surprised/she wants him/to kiss her…she’s surprised it feels so good” (CP
27). Bringing in the spontaneity of their sensual experience and their surprise at
the newly experienced emotions, the poetic image, provides a counter-narrative
to the laid-out protocols of Kāmasūtra.
Sanjay Gautam explores the relationship between pleasure and identity,
especially gender identity in Kāmasūtra (2013). Kāmasūtra has been established
as a celebratory treatise on pleasure and eroticism in Indian tradition. In popular
discussion, sexual pleasure is perceived as subordinate to one’s gender. How one
could experience pleasure is dependent on one’s identity as a man or as a woman.
While a man was seen as an active agent or subject of pleasure, the woman was
seen to be locus or an object to be enjoyed. This representation was also, it was
argued, in accordance with the teachings of dharma that assigned to wife the
duty to offer pleasure as part of her obedience to her husband. However, it is
interesting to note that within the text of Kāmasūtra, the onset of the pleasure-
wheel (raticakra) marks a loss of the sense of self or one’s identity, an event of

complete ‘de-subjectivization’(Haksar 2011; Gautam 2013). For the one who

enters into the pleasure-wheel, neither knowledge (śāstra) matters nor the order
(krama) (2.2.31). It marks a state of spontaneity where the laid-down protocols
of erotic become totally irrelevant and unnecessary.
Other than the myths and folk stories, the discussion of culture also
includes the intimate and private narratives of its people and their lived
experience. There are stories in a culture that get lost or are silenced, “a story that
gets lost on the way home,/ but the silence burns within the girl.”( PT 2015 77).
Carole S. Vance examines the juxtaposition of pleasure and danger associated
with the female body. She argues, “[t]he tension between sexual danger and
sexual pleasure is a powerful one in women’s lives. Sexuality is simultaneously a
domain of restriction, repression and danger as well as a domain of exploration,
pleasure and agency” (Vance 1). Female body becomes a site for the specifications
of societal suppression, control, violence and the sexual aggression in the form of
rape or molestation. As speaking about such crimes is perceived as a social
stigma, the demonstration of power or control over the body of the female is done
in silence and is endured by the women in silence as well.
The poem, “A Secret”, exposes these secrets and the silences hidden in the
lives of women and their experiences that:
...each daughter forgets
to tell her own daughter –
Or else, the mother speaks in whispers, using other words so the child
thinks it’s only a dream.
And years later, each daughter hides the memory somewhere,
somewhere – where no one will look. (PT 2015)
The poem reveals these hidden narratives through the brutal image of the
daughter who returns home
...smeared with blood
as if she had cradled a dying bird,
as if she had stroked its sticky wings,
its crushed bones –
the redness different from that of seeds or berries… (PT 78)
The image is a reminder of the violent behaviour done to a female body in the
social set-up that perceives it only a source of pleasure. Sexual assault is
dangerous and yet it has become a major part of the social experience of women.
The consent of a woman about her body and sexuality is not considered
important. Where approval of a woman is not seen as necessary, the sexual desire
of the other person is enforced upon her body. In fact, her body, her virginity and
her sexuality are usually treated as a property to be stolen, bought or sold.
Bringing these discussions, Bhatt’s poem presents the violence and danger done
to the female body in the patriarchal culture, where sometimes the victim,
herself, chooses to remain silent.
…as the mother gathers words

38 Manika Arora
to explain – her daughter says, ‘Don’t tell anyone,

don’t tell, please don’t tell. It’s my secret. (PT 79)
When the canon building of literary history was established in 1950s, the
articulations of the women, as they have been in conflict with the discourse of
nationalism, were deliberately excluded from it. The poem, here, is an attempt to
fill those gaps in the inside stories of the women in the living traction of India.
The nationalist narratives have celebrated Gandhi's use of fasting as a tool
or, as he, himself, referred to it, a “weapon" or simply a political strategy that had
been very significant in decolonizing India from the clutches of Britain. Bhatt’s
poem, “Diabetic mellitus”, however, subverts the prevalent ideology and presents
Gandhian theory of fasting in the frameworks of health and body-discipling.
Imagine, if Gandhiji had
had it – the wrong chromosome
perhaps – the inability to metabolise sugar – he would never have been
able
to survive all his fasts –
Like you, he would have gone
quietly, in a coma –
It is interesting to note that diabetic patients are not advised to fast as
fasting can cause their blood sugar level go, dangerously, low and can cause
diabetic coma. Gandhi could survive all his fasts as he didn’t have the wrong
chromosome. Joseph S. Alter discusses how Gandhi establishes the relationship
of his fasting with the ideals of “…sensuality, Truth, self-restraint, and the
production of energy through a kind of self-overcoming…” (32). For Gandhi only
a brute doesn’t know the idea of self-restraint and what makes human a human is
his capability of exercising it (self-restraint). Gandhian fasting is an instance of
his ideal of restraint and discipline. The poem, here, however, brings the ‘quiet’
story of a diabetic patient who in her enthusiasm of following the footsteps of
Gandhi had gone in a coma. The poem destabilises this relationship between self-
restraint, nationalism and Gandhian fasting through the frames of hypothesis
and through imagining a possible alternative reality.
In the similar league, the poem “Hey” punctures the naïve glorification of
religious and moral ethos and the mechanical practice of visiting the places of
worship. The poem addresses to a photograph of a temple and underlines the
missing image of
…that man
with the swollen elephant leg
who sits by the pillar
crawling with gods and flies? (CP 47)
The image points out that the places of worship and the narratives about them
are incomplete without the image of this man. Indian cultural doctrines
emphasize on the inseparable nature of spiritual and ethical values, but there are
various gaps in its practice. Focusing on this variation, the poem images the usual

missing element from the snapshot such a place of worship. The real image
actually remains outside the frames of a clicked photograph and gets a way in
Bhatt’s poem. Encompassing the singularities and particularities of the lived
experiences of people in Indian culture, images in Bhatt’s poetry restructure the
cultural narratives from an objective and detached perspective of the poetic self.
The socio-spatial study of these poetic images underlines a fundamental
engagement between the aesthetics of the poetry and the debate(s) of culture and
its (re)making.
Works Cited :
Alter, Joseph. Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism. U of
Pennsylvania P, 2000.
Balagangadhara, S. N. “Comparative Anthropology and Action Sciences: An
Essay on Knowing to Act and Acting to Know.” Philosophica, vol. 40,
no. 2, 1987, pp. 77-107.
Bhatt, Sujata. Augatora. Carcanet, 2000.
---. Brunizem. Carcanet, 1988.
---.Collected Poems. Carcanet, 2013.
---. A Colour for Solitude. Carcanet, 2002.
---. Freak Waves. Reference West, 1992.
---. Monkey Shadows. Carcanet, 1991.
---. My Mother's Way of Wearing a Sari. Penguin, 2000.
---. Point No Point: Selected Poems. Carcanet, 1997.
---. Poppies in Translation. Carcanet, 2015.
---. Pure Lizard. Carcanet, 2008.
---. The Stinking Rose. Carcanet, 1995.
Ganeri, Jonardon. The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices
of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford UP, 2007.
Gautam, Sanjay. “The Event of Sexual Pleasure as De-subjectivization in Foucault
and the Kāmasūtra”. South Asian Review, 34:3, 2013, 19-34, doi:
10.1080/02759527. 2013.11932938.
Haksar, A. N. D. Translator. Kamasutraby Vatsayana. Penguin Books India,
2011.
Hiltebeitel, Alf. Rethinking India’s Oral and Classical Epics. U of Chicago P,
1999.

40 Manika Arora
Matilal, Bimal Krishna. Collected Essays of Bimal Krishan Matilal, Vol. II: Ethics
and Epics. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri. Oxford UP, 2002.
---. “The East, the Other.” In Matilal 2002, pp. 265-277.
---. Nyaya-Vaisesika, A History of Indian Literature, Vol. 6, Fasc. 2, edited by
Jan Gonda. Harrassowitz, 1977.
---. “Love and Sensuality in the Epics”. In Matilal 2002, pp. 145-153.
Narayan, Kirin. Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narratives in Hindu
Religious Teaching. U of Pennsylvania P, 1989.
Olivelle, Patrick, translator. Panćatantra: The Book of India's Folk Wisdom.
Oxford UP, 1999.
Olivelle, Patrick. “Orgasmic Rapture and Divine Ecstasy: The Semantic History of
Ānanda”. Journal of Indian Philosophy, no.25, 1997, pp.153–180.
Rajan, Chandra, translator. The Panćatantra. Penguin Classics, 2006.
Ramanujan, A. K. Collected Essays. Edited by Vinay Dharwadker. Oxford UP,
2004.
---. Collected Poems. Oxford UP, 1995.
---. Speaking of Siva. Penguin, 1973.
---. The Oxford India Ramanujan, edited by Molly Daniels- Ramanujan. Oxford
UP, 2004.
van Buitenen, J. A. B. “Ānanda, or All Desires Fulﬁlled.” History of Religions, no.
19, 1979, pp. 27–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062420.
Vance, Carol S., editor. Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality.
Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1984.

pp. 41-49
“SERVANT TO HUNGER”: A PANPSYCHIST

READING OF J. M. COETZEE’S LIFE AND
TIMES OF MICHAEL K
Sinjan Goswami
Abstract
For the past four decades, the fiction of South Africa born author J.
M. Coetzee has continued to capture the imagination of readers around
the world for its ethical engagement with alterity. While attention to
Coetzee’s sophisticated, self-reflexive narrative technique has in recent
decades produced critical readings that illuminate Coetzee’s engagement
with alterity, they have not always adequately addressed the importance
of the various material histories—history understood as event, not
discourse—genealogically reconstructed by the novels. Attending
specifically to such material histories that elicit a rethinking of the
ethical and the political, this paper offers a panpsychist reading of
Coetzee’s Life and Times ofMichael K: a reading in which the an-orectic
Michael K’s mysterious hunger is seen as affirming an ethic of
remembrance which honours those deemed as ‘matter out of place’ in
the insidious economy of the South African apartheid.
Keywords : J. M. Coetzee, Panpsychism, alterity, hunger.
Consistently deploying a “rhetoric of simultaneity” (Lin1) that recognizes

the burden of history in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa as
symptomatic of a similar concern in colonial relationships all over the world, the
fiction of J. M. Coetzee has received critical hostility as much as international
accolade over the past four decades. While criticism of a Lukacsian-Marxist
persuasion in South Africa during the ‘80s had often faulted Coetzee for taking
recourse to idealist abstractions that fail to bear witness to the trauma of
apartheid, since the early 1990s, more nuanced approaches to the novels’ formal
aspects have yielded readings that have tried to unpack the utopian dimensions
of Coetzee’s work. Emphasis on the self-reflexive meditations on textuality in
some of these ‘metropolitan’ readings, exemplified best perhaps by Derek
Attridge’s celebrated J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2005), has,
however, occluded the attention due to the specificities of the various material
histories genealogically reconstructed by the novels. Attending precisely to such
particular histories that provoke a rethinking of the ethical and the political, this
paper offers a close-textual reading of Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K: the
story of a homeless gardener’s miraculous survival of apartheid history in the

42 Sinjan Goswami
‘time of war’. In what follows, I argue that K’s mode of resistance in the novel is
glimpsed in the possibilities hunger offers for affirming an ethic of remembrance
that serves to thwart the apartheid state’s imperative to forget the labours of the
non-white South African: a forgetting that translates into a continuous
devaluation and denial of the sensuous dimensions of the body.
In order to proceed with an analysis of the role hunger—and appetite in
general—plays in Michael K’s story, one must first situate Coetzee’s novel in the
context of South Africa’s history of land-alienation: a process that was to alter for
good the relationship between the native South African’s body and his indigenous
conceptions of time. The spectacular diamond discoveries at Griqualand West
(the present day Kimberley) between 1867 and 1876, followed by the discovery of
gold at the Witwaterstand in 1886, “destroyed the strictly agriculturally based
economy [of South Africa] and set it on a course toward industrialization”
(Daniels 331). To bolster the supply of labour for the mines, and to ward off
“competition from natives who continued to buy, lease or squat on crown or
private lands” (332), the white colonial administration in 19 th century South
Africa took a number of measures that made it impossible for native South
Africans to recover from land expropriation in the future. This created a mass of
natives whose criminalization as vagrants soon led to their proletarization as
migrant-labourers compelled to work on the white-owned farms and mines. The
legislative measures put in practice during the years of high apartheid after
1948—laws whose influence was not strictly restricted to the economic aspect of
South African lives—further consolidated the colonialist practice of ‘fixing’ the
location of the native South African.
As Jean and John Comaroff argue, “Not for nothing did the pass become
South Africa’s most infamous icon, rendering Africans legitimate travellers only
by decree of a master and in response to the laws of supply and demand”(204). In
Coetzee’s novel, the association between vagrancy and criminality is spelt out
early as Michael K, alone and adrift after his mother’s death, is picked up by the
police on the outskirts of Worcester and used as a convict labourer: all because he
lacks the ‘permit’ that will lend him a fixed identity (Coetzee 40-42). But the most
graphic dramatization of extracting labour from the native Africans on the
ground of their presumptive criminality occurs in the Jakkalsdriff camp. While
the camp-inmate Robert’s accurate description of colonial paranoia echoes the
narrative of Anglo-Boer War as well as the apartheid government’s conflict with
the ANC guerrillas during the 1980s – “I’ll tell you why they are so quick to pick
us up. They want to stop people from disappearing into the mountains and then
coming back one night to cut their fences and drive their stock away” (Coetzee
80) – the state’s ‘war’ against the inmates of Jakkalsdriff achieves its most violent
expression in the morning after the destruction of the nearby town’s cultural
history museum. Ironically relying on the ‘evidence’ of rumor, Captain
Oosthuzien’s angry outburst neatly crystallizes, in the rhetoric of Colonial
paternalism, the necessity of work as a means of curing the ‘lazy’ African of his
innate criminality:

“Servant to Hunger”: A Panpsychist Reading of … 43
‘What are we keeping here in our back yard!’ he shouted. ‘A nest of

criminals! Criminals and saboteurs and idlers! ...It’s a work camp, man!
It’s a camp to teach lazy people to work! And if they don’t work we close
the camp! We close it down and chase all these vagrants away! Get out
and don’t come back! You’ve had your chance!’ He turned to the group
of men. ‘Yes, you, you ungrateful bastards, you, I’m talking about you!’
he shouted. ‘You appreciate nothing! Who builds houses for you when
you have nowhere to live? Who gives you tents and blankets when you
are shivering with cold? Who nurses you, who takes care of you, who
comes here day after day with food? And how do you repay us? Well,
from now on you can starve!’ (Coetzee 91-92)
The ideology of work espoused by Oosthuzien here evokes the moral dimension
of colonialism’s civilizing mission whose insistence on the capitalization of time
and labour as an antidote to the native African’s laziness is well-documented in
colonial historiographies of South Africa since the earliest discourses on the Cape
Hottentots.1 Justifying the process of land-expropriation in terms of the White
settler’s ‘higher’ use of the land, the moral imperative of colonialism played a key
part in destroying the indigenous ethic of subsistence production: premised on a
relationship to the land in which the refusal to alter and instrumentalize nature
for individual gains meant that cultivation would never yield enough surplus to
generate profit. This moral imperative which advocated propertorial relationship
to the land in lieu of a communal one, managed to elevate ‘work’ to the status of a
‘calling’.
This was, unmistakably, the legacy of Calvinism and the Protestant ethic
imported to South Africa by the Dutch settlers. As Max Weber points out in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2012), Calvinism adopted from the
Puritans an urgent imperative to destroy in man the “spontaneous, impulsive
enjoyment” of the sensual dimensions of life in order to “bring order into the
conduct of its adherents” and turn them towards purposeful, worldly activity
(Weber 73). It is apparent that the call to work in the camps of Michael K hinges
precisely on this ideology that thrives on the creation of a rift between ‘body’ and
‘spirit’. The demonization of (unreproductive) bodily pleasure, indulgence and
excess in this moral economy of work is not only to be seen in the description of
the ‘vagrant’ Michael K as ‘drunk and disorderly’ when he is picked up for the
first time by the state-authorities; it is evident as much in Oosthuzien’s
spectacular destruction of the refrigerator of the guards of Jakkalsdriff who are
subsequently locked in with the inmates for indulging too much in the ‘nice life’
imagined in terms of an unbridled desire for sex and alcohol (Coetzee 92).
Coetzee’s protagonist resists this insidious economy of power not merely by
fleeing Jakkalsdriff—and all the other camps in the novel—but by affirming
through his cultivation of the deserted visagie-farm the survival of a non-dualistic
consciousness of body and spirit indigenous to the native African’s cosmology.
The only space in the novel not devoted to the therapeutic production of souls,
the deserted farm allows Michael a chance of experiencing “a deep joy in his
physical being”: indeed, the very possibility of being both ‘body and spirit’

44 Sinjan Goswami
(Coetzee 59). While in the apartheid economy of power, matter and spirit
remained strictly divided along the lines of a hierarchy in which the latter was
attributed the agency of a subject, and the former was considered as the inert
object, Michael’s organic, reciprocal relationship with the land is premised on a
subject-subject continuum in which matter is seen as imbued with its own
interiority/mentality. Following Freya Matthews, we can call this non-dualistic
consciousness a broadly panpsychist one, where panpsychism denotes the world
view that sees matter animated with its own meaning and spirituality: a meaning
not reducible to the various human needs written onto and extracted from the
‘inert’ materiality of the world. In the following section I argue that Orexis, the
Greek word for both ‘appetite’ and ‘reaching out’ offers us a clue to understanding
why Michael K’s panpsychist awareness and appreciation of the interiority of
matter makes possible not only an erotic relationship with the land , but with
those elements of the past apartheid’s official history would forget and dispose of
as ‘matter out of place’: embodied most vividly in the figure of Michael’s mother
Anna K., whose death remains as invisible as her life as a wage-labourer in the
white economy had always been.
In Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture (2005), Freya
Matthews points out that
Orexis designates a state of desire, in which the desire in question may
be understood appetitively, socially or spiritually—it is simply longing
per se, literally ‘stretching out for’ or ‘stretching out after’. When the
state of desire is not merely appetitive in nature, but is desire for
engagement with another subject, then orexis takes the form of
‘eros’. (118)
Elsewhere, Matthews qualifies the orectic subject as one who experiences ‘the
energization, the brimming sense of plentitude’ once his/her appetitive
promptings are ‘adapted in the light of panpsychist awareness’ to make possible
an intersubjective contact with the world (Matthews For Love of Matter 60).
Matthews’ model of the orectic subject’s encounter with the world is surely
Platonic in origin, since in Plato it is the erotic encounter with the other person’s
divinity that leads the self to discover something similar to what Matthews calls a
‘brimming sense of plentitude’ in his/her relation to the world. Since in Michael
K the ground of this mutual awakening of subjectivities is the earth itself,
Matthews contention that the panpsychist self is an emplaced self for whom place
may function as a ‘potential primary other’ is crucial for our understanding of the
role played by the deserted Visagie farm in Coetzee’s novel. The importance of
expansiveness and ‘a brimming sense of plentitude’—two features Matthews
deems characteristic of the self that has achieved its orectic potentiation—to
Michael K’s journey can only be gauged in the context of the novel’s dialectical
treatment of freedom and bondage.
Formed in the crucible of the ‘time of war’, Coetzee’s depiction of
unfreedom in the novel is realized in the space of the camp as well as the curfew
in Cape Town which impedes Michael and his mother’s journey to the farm on

which her childhood had been “a time of warmth and plenty”: a place in which
she hopes to die “under blue skies”, and not amidst “the sirens in the night, the
curfew” (Coetzee 4) and the heavily cramped and divided spaces in which she had
to eke out her living as a domestic worker. On the other hand, K’s comparison of
the curfew—epitomizing the state’s regulation of the time and space in which
bodies could move freely—to the punishment meted out to him as a child at the
Huis Norenius reformatory suggests a way of reclaiming confinement itself as
freedom2: for the stillness of the posture he was forced to sit in gradually “lost its
meaning as punishment and became an avenue of reverie” (68). Nevertheless,
Michael K’s experience of “bliss” on the deserted farm, a state in which time
seems to “pour out upon him…in an unending stream” (102), suggests that
freedom in this novel is also imagined in terms of a temporality out of kilter with
the ‘time of war’ which the displaced, dispossessed South Africans in this novel
experience in terms of anxiety, hopeless waiting and interruption of their bodily
rhythms. Pointing out how the idea of time ‘as an abstract continuum punctuated
with no earthly significance’ was constructed in early modern Europe and
imported later to Africa to bolster the ideology of work, historian Paul S. Landau
argues convincingly that ‘Time was (and perhaps among a very few rural South
Africans still is) a matter of experiential duration and predicted cycles.
Scattering and gathering opened and closed communities, whereas
transhuman cycles and plantings and harvests (and hunger) “structured
experience” (Landau 438). In Coetzee’s novel, Michael K’s desire to live according
to the ‘cycles of the heavens’ seems to answer in the affirmative the question
Landau poses regarding the consciousness of time for native South Africans: “Can
we speak of an embodied past, a sense of cyclical timeliness?” (Landau 439).
What underpins the fertility ritual for K’s cultivation of the deserted farm is
nothing but the promptings of this embodied, embedded time. K’s belief that the
scattered ashes of his mother on the farm now ‘makes the plants grow’ signals a
faith in the ‘cyclical timeliness’ of an ‘embodied past’ whose filiations with the
future prepare for what the novel at one point calls ‘resurrection eternal out of
the earth’. As Freya Matthews explains,
In the process underlying fertility, the germ of the new takes shape in
the depths of the already given and preserves the essence, the “spirit”, of
the given. The already given then grows old and decomposes into the
mulch from which the new will grow, but the new carries the
essence….into the future. Continuity of form is thus preserved through
time and change (Matthews Reinhabiting 94).
Since fertility-rituals thus create ‘a thread of storied or poetic identity linking past
to future’, it affirms an idea of resurrection shorn of any particular religio-
mystical affiliations. This idea of resurrection in the novel thus turns K’s
cultivation into an act of remembrance which fulfills the Coetzeean ethical
imperative to honour the memory of apartheid’s disposable dead, as well as the
duty to honour one’s ancestors rooted in the tradition of pietas: an idea central to
Virgil’s Aeneid, one of the key intertexts for Michael K. Freya Matthews’

46 Sinjan Goswami
contention that appetite “may be seen as a craving for pervasion with the rich
materiality of the real” – a craving transformed into Eros by a “panpsychist
appreciation of the rich interiority of matter” – seems to be corroborated in
Coetzee’s novel through K’s realization that “his waking life [was] bound tightly
to the patch of earth he had begun to cultivate and the seeds he planted there”
(Coetzee 59). K’s belief that the ‘cord of tenderness’ which binds him “to the
patch of the earth beside the dam” could only be cut so many times “before it
would not grow again” (66) suggests the novel’s implicit endorsement of the
principle of continuity key to the idea of fertility: an idea K preserves by
protecting his pack of pumpkin-seeds through the many ordeals he comes to face
in the camps and in the Kenilworth hospital where his resistance to food offered
by the benevolent doctor translates into an act of guarding ‘the story’ of his past
the authorities try to squeeze out of him.
The novel that recounts the story of Michael’s past can hardly be
disengaged from the materiality of the ground in which his mother now lies
buried. Consecrated by Anna K’s ashes, the ground at the Visagie-farm turns into
an ancestral abode for Michael, for whom the earth there functions as the
nourishing surrogate for the mother’s body he had missed all his life: “the two
low hills” near which K “settles” is compared to “two plump breasts, curved
towards each other” (100). Simultaneously, the earth turns K himself into a
mother – he believes he belongs to a line of children without fathers and has
himself “no desire to father” (104) – who thinks of the pumpkins and melons he
plants as his ‘children’ whose seeds he must preserve by planting them in the
ground after he has eaten the fruits. K’s belief that “from one seed” comes “a
whole handful” (118) reveals his intuitive understanding of the principle of
continuity key to the idea of fertility: K’s dead mother’s ‘story’ is continued in the
ripened pumpkins which must be eaten so that their seeds may be resurrected
“another year…another summer” (112). That K attributes the very possibility of
this continuation to ‘the bounty of the earth’ suggests that he is a native self
whose ‘hallmark…is grace’ since he ‘dwells within the parameters of the given’
and does not require external testimonials based on the perceptions of others for
the grounding of his own subjectivity (Matthews Reinhabiting 128-29).
The sense of religiosity implicit in the concept of grace finds its most poetic
expression in K’s reflections on the underground sources of water that endlessly
replenish the earth and prepare it for his cultivation. Congealing K’s sense of
wonder before the source of a givenness he must acknowledge and protect –
“every time he released the brake and the wheel spun and water came, it seemed
to him a miracle” (Coetzee 35) – Coetzee’s description of the underground waters
taps into the indigenous symbolic scheme in which water plays an important role
as a transformative agent of healing and inspiration. In this symbolic scheme of
things, water is repeatedly associated with a materialized form of spiritual power
–“‘moya’; breath/life rather than modimo, a distant, disembodied supernatural
force” – that serves to “dissolve form and usurp space, constituting a medium
within which categorical relations can be reformed and physical and social

boundaries redrawn” (Jean Comaroff 200-201). Bypassing “the progressive

separation of matter and spirit that was central to the mission church and the
industrial workplace” (200-201), the materialization of spirit in the indigenous
symbolic scheme provided the possibility of a unity that “cuts across the social
and physical discontinuities of the neocolonial world” (201). K’s ability to divine
this very unity as the grace of powers that lie underground—in the cradle of his
mother/earth—is made apparent in Coetzee’s lyrical evocation of his
protagonist’s sense of gratitude once he encounters the ripening of the ‘first
pumpkin’ from the seeds he planted:
Then came the evening when the first pumpkin was ripe enough to cut.
It had grown earlier and faster than the others, in the very centre of the
field; K had marked it out as the first fruit, the firstborn. The shell was
soft, the knife sank in without a struggle. The flesh, though still rimmed
with green, was a deep orange. On the wire grid he had made he laid
strips of pumpkin over a bed of coals that glowed brighter and brighter
as the dark came on. The fragrance of the burning flesh rose into the
sky. Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer
upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: ‘for what we are
about to receive make us truly thankful’. With two wire-skewers he
turned the strips, and in mid-act felt his heart suddenly flow over like a
gush of warm water. Now it is completed, he said to himself. All that
remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating the food that
my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a
tender of the soil… (113).
In a ritual reminiscent of the traditional first fruits ceremony, Michael K’s act of
thanksgiving here reinforces the idea that for the natives of South Africa, the
spiritual and the sacred were only comprehensible through their material
manifestations. Directed toward the earth, not ‘upward’ to the deity of Christian
heaven, K’s thanksgiving indicates the survival in him of the indigenous African
belief in the spiritual power of the ancestors: a power embodied by the ashes of
K’s dead mother, whose remains fertilized the Visagie-farm in the first place.
As David Chidester points out in The Religions of South Africa (1992),
central to African rituals of ancestor-worship—which included rites of
thanksgiving like the one performed by Michael K—was the act of sacrifice, and
“the point of the sacrifice [was] a communal meal shared among the living and
the dead” (12). The religious undertone in Coetzee’s description of Michael K’s
ritual suggests that the pumpkins—described in the novel as K’s ‘children’ more
than once—serve as the sacrificial burnt offering in this rite of thanksgiving
through which he honours his dead mother as well as the land which, while
turning him into a mother, simultaneously acts as mother itself by providing him
with necessary nourishment. Chidester goes on to point out that while
“historically, ancestor religion has operated as a force of conservatism … [it]
emerged as a medium of political resistance” (Chidester 12) for many displaced,
dispossessed South Africans whose lands were expropriated by their capitalist-
colonialist masters. The ancestors provided “a frame of reference that could

48 Sinjan Goswami
discount the white, colonial presence in South Africa… Identified with the
homestead, the land and a specific locality, the ancestors might have become
even more crucial as a spiritual anchor that tied people to places that were being
threatened and destabilized by European colonial encroachment” (13).
Chidester’s observations here help us understand the radical aspect of K’s unique
idiom of resistance in the novel. K finds all camp food ‘tasteless’ since, in the
name of disciplining the deviant, the camps perpetuate the colonial process of
alienating the natives from the fruits of their own labour. K understands all too
well that only by rejecting camp-food he can hope to thwart the apartheid state’s
desire to colonize his body by subjecting it to regimes of reformation and
discipline: a programme at the end of which, notes the medical officer, the
inmates of Kenilworth camp are “certified cleansed and pack[ed] … off to labour
battalions to carry water and dig latrines” (Coetzee 134). On the other hand, food
grown on the Visagie-farm, K believes, will help “recover [his] appetite for it will
have savour” (101). This is so because, thanks to K’s cultivation, the land on the
deserted farm embodies not only the spirit of his dead mother but Michael K’s
own primal, orectic impulse to reach out to the world and achieve self-realization
through this “craving for pervasion with the rich materiality of the real”
(Matthews 59). Freya Matthews points out that “concepts such as those of
appetite and desire have, in the Western tradition, tended to privilege an autoic
(self-regarding) orientation over an alteric (other-regarding) one” (Matthews For
love of Matter 59). The effect of the autoic assumption, Matthews points out, “is
subtly to instrumentalize and subordinate the world to the self.”
In Michael K, both the state and its warring other could be seen engaged in
fulfilling the autoic idea of self-realization in their willingness to ‘instrumentalize
and subordinate’ nature in order to achieve power and gain control over the
inhabitants of a war-stricken country In prioritizing his desire to protect the
pumpkin-seeds over the elemental desire for self-preservation, Michael K, on the
contrary, seems to follow the alteric impulse for self-realization: a desire for
other(s) recognizable in “the impulse to plant [that] had been reawaken in
[Michael K]” by the “patch of earth he had begun to cultivate” (Coetzee 59). Here
as well as elsewhere in his description of Michael K’s gardening, Coetzee’s
language implicitly acknowledges a debt to the Platonic conception of Eros as
mutualistic and reciprocal desire: the land awakens Michael K to his true
‘nature’—that of a ‘gardener’—even as his cultivation reanimates a deserted farm
in the time of war. The Visagie-farm may or may not have been Anna K’s “natal
earth” (57), but by restoring her body’s organic relationship with the land,
Michael K’s labour of love ensures her an after-life in the form of his dear
pumpkins and melons—thereby defeating the apartheid state’s desire to forget
the anonymous architects of its walled cities. And because Anna k. lies buried on
the Visagie-farm, the land there certainly does turn into Michael K’s ‘natal earth’:
whose act of honouring his dead mother in remembrance transforms that very
earth into the ‘spiritual anchor’—to borrow David Chidester’s phrase—that serves
as an instrument of political resistance in the face of “(neo) colonial
encroachment” upon the native South African’s places and spaces.

Notes :
1 See J. M. Coetzee’s “Idleness in South Africa” for an overview of these discourses.
2 I am indebted for this insight to Rita Barnard’s chapter on Coetzee, “Dream
Topographies”, in her Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the
Politics of Place (2007).
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event.
U of Chicago P, 2005.
Barnard, Rita. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of
Place. Oxford UP, 2007.
Chidester, David. The Religions of South Africa. Routledge, 1992.
Coetzee, J. M. “Idleness in South Africa”. Social Dynamics,Vol. 8, No.1,
1982.pp.1-13.
---. Life and Times of Michael K.Vintage, 1998.
Comaroff, Jean. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of
a South African People. The U of Chicago P, 1985.
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John. Of Revelations and Revolutions: The
Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier.Vol.2. T he U of
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pp. 50-65
DIASPORIC CHARACTERS’ DESIRE TO TAKE A

‘U-TURN’ IN SELECTED PUNJABI SHORT
STORIES
Sumneet Kaur
Abstract
As the movement of people across borders has become a norm
rather than an exception, diaspora has come to assume enormous
significance in the literary studies of our time.Many postcolonial texts
from decolonised countries and diasporic communities interrogate and
expose, and give voice to the subaltern’s experience of being alienated
and obscured. Generally, the works written in regional languages or not
written in internationally acclaimed languages and by the writers
holding a position away from the centrality remain absent from the
dominant canon. Therefore, a few non-canonical Punjabi short stories
have been chosen to be analysed in the present paper and the diasporic
characters in the selected stories are subjected to a myriad of
experiences. The present paper gives space to the characters who see the
geographical movement as emancipatory and analyses how and why
these voluntary diasporic characters have to grapple with a strong desire
to take a ‘U-turn’ towards their homeland. The paper shows that divided
between the persistent pull of the two centres, the immigrant minds are
simultaneously subjected to contrary emotions and desires —
progression and retreat, euphoria and despair, a desire to reclaim the
past yet revolt against it, the yearning to go back forestalled by the
inability to move out and the urge to show solidarity to the homeland
but an unwillingness to threaten relations with the host country.
Keywords : Diaspora, Postcolonial, Canon, Geographical movement,
Immigrant, Emotions and desires, Homeland, Host land,
Yearning, Nostalgia, Emancipation.
Migration is not a recent phenomenon. The dominant metaphor to

describe the migratory experience has been botanical, that of uprooting and
transplantation. Migration and relocation have been conceptualised as cases of
rupture and disjunctive crisis. The new comer faces the need to survive the
cataplexy of uprooting and the shock of arrival. This is followed by an incessant
struggle to surmount the obstacles to one’s assimilation into, or compatible
adaptation to the new environment. When the once colonised or exploited gate-
crash their way into metropolitan centres of the once glorious imperium, it gives
rise to diasporic border zones that are rife with a wide range of problems, issues

Diasporic Characters’ Desire to Take a ‘U-Turn’ in … 51
and concerns like the agony of dislocation from familiar environs and the
necessity of relocation, adjustment on unfamiliar shores and the titanic
differences between the two cultures, which causes cultural-shock and gives birth
to memory, nostalgia and the feeling of homelessness. It has been observed that
the diasporic psyche is necessarily marked by a double consciousness. Having
known two worlds, it is the migrant’s fate to never find concrete moorings in
anything unitary again. Doomed or blessed, the migrant is destined to constantly
oscillate (most of the times psychologically and sometimes physically) between
two cultures, two worldviews, two languages, two mind-sets and two different
kinds of experiences.
As the movement of people across borders has become a norm rather than
an exception, diaspora has come to assume enormous significance in the literary
studies of our time. Many postcolonial texts from decolonised countries and
diasporic communities interrogate and expose, and give voice to the subaltern’s
experience of being alienated, obscured and peripheralised. It has generally been
observed that “with the global literature publishing, distributing, establishing and
canonizing industry shifting its focus somewhat from the European/white ‘centre’
to the ‘margins’ consisting of former colonies, an increasing number of authors
and literary works, originally published or translated into colonial/neo colonial
languages like English and French are gaining audience, recognition and
appreciation in many parts of the world” (Romana 86). But the case becomes
problematic when the migrant writers like Naipaul, Rushdie or Sidhwa “often
earn most of literary reputation and celebrity status by writing about the
countries left behind and, consciously or unconsciously, targeting as consumers
of their work the reading public of their adopted countries and continents” (88).
Therefore, the works written in regional languages or not written in
internationally acclaimed languages and by the writers holding a position away
from the centrality remain absent from the dominant canon.
Sometimes, the works and writers on the margins or periphery are brought
into the centre, “by the hegemonic publishing and establishing industry [which
has] its own economic and political agenda” (87). The hegemonic literary
industry may not give relevance to the “aesthetic/thematic orientation or
ideological/political significance” of the works by non-canonical writers in the
“socio-cultural contexts”, yet they have “an appeal and significance in concrete
socio-cultural environment they portray” (87).A few non-canonical Punjabi short
stories have been chosen to be analysed in the present paper since it cannot be
forgotten that “all cultural identities differ from one another in one way or the
other[,] every perspective consciousness is rooted in its own socio-cultural, racial,
class and gender identity [and the] ‘marginalised’ cultures tend to be further
marginalised or ignored altogether with the governing interests determining what
should be read and how” (90-91).We will see that the diasporic characters in the
selected stories are subjected to a myriad of experiences. The difference can be
located in the reasons for migration, in linguistic and caste affiliations, in varied
levels of education, economic status, gender, age, employability in terms of value

52 Sumneet Kaur
to the host culture and personal compulsions and sensibilities. And these
different variables render each individual’s experience unique. The present paper
gives space to the characters who see the geographical movement as
emancipatory and analyses how and why these voluntary diasporic characters
have to grapple with a strong desire to take a ‘U-turn’ towards their homeland.
The term diaspora, derived from the Greek word diaspirein, meaning to
disperse, and applied since the nineteenth century to the worldwide scattering of
Jews, in more recent times is used to describe the numerous racial and ethnic
groups living distant from their traditional homelands for whatever reasons.
When we speak of the Indian diaspora, we generally refer to persons of Indian
birth or ethnicity living abroad since earlier times, often as a result of induced
indenture. In more recent decades emigration is usually by free choice and often
for economic, artistic and/or social advantage. The Indian diaspora is the largest,
with around 20 million Indians settled in different parts of the world. It began
during the colonial period when the British Empire had spread its tentacles
around the globe. Initially Indian labourers and then entrepreneurs followed the
Union Jack from the Caribbean islands to Fiji and from Canada to South Africa.
Thus, were established little Indias now inhabited by successive generations of
the first migrants whom the Indian Government has today labelled as Pravasi
Bharatis (Non-resident Indians). Among this group are also the diasporics of
more recent postcolonial origins. There are millions of Pravasi Bharatis
scattered around the world. They have considerable economic and political clout,
and an awareness of this has probably led to the official recognition of this
phenomenon and the offer of dual citizenship to Indians in diaspora. Postcolonial
migration re-establishes the link between the colonizer and the colonized and is
particularly intriguing and pregnant with unprecedented potential for academic
exploration and research.
Migrants’ encounter with ‘the other’ may result in intercultural friendships
and/or relationships or force racial discrimination and rejection upon him. The
newcomers, usually, either succumb to the assimilationist pressures to merge in
the mainstream culture or desperately attempt to preserve their ethnicity through
ethnic-community formation. They are all seen struggling to grapple with bi-
cultural pulls, coping and coalescing with the influences of the land of their birth
and country of their choice, so that the central point at which their narratives
meet is the double consciousness which assumes different shades and nuances.
Living across boundaries may not be associated with the negative feelings of
estrangement or the positive feelings of multilocality; but in either case, living
across boundaries does not occlude the attendant anxieties and agonies of
dislocation and relocation. Racked by the necessity to forge a new hyphenated
identity, face bicultural pulls and meet the compulsion to perform tight rope
walking and balancing between two diametrically opposite cultures; most
migrants end up as victims of the in-between syndrome. Few are able to meet the
ideals, yet complex demand of taking from diametrically opposite cultures and

negotiating a new hybrid self over and above unitary or essentialist identities
always looms large in their lives.
The diasporic/migrants’ belonging is split between the culture of origin and
the culture of current location. The outcome of this interaction between the past
and the present is the reworking of cultural identity, which is at once plural and
partial. Diasporic populations inhabit interstitial spaces and their inter-subjective
and intercultural experiences constitute them as hyphenated-hybrid subjects. A
diasporic subject cannot opt for one extremity of total identification with his own
country or the other of total acceptance of the alien country. Figures that are bi-
focal and bi-local, deterritorialised or having complex and multiple belongings,
necessarily live through difference. They have to develop tolerance for
contradictions and ambiguities and in so doing acquire a plural personality.
Radhakrishnan supports this project of “dwelling rigorously and passionately in
the hyphen without succumbing to total integration on either side of ethnic
hyphenation, i.e. sustaining along multiple axis without totalization”
(Radhakrishnan 65).
The diasporic subjects can also be classified on the basis of age-group,
gender, and their differential orientation towards motherland as well as the
adopted other-land among many others. A major categorisation of immigrants
depends upon whether they belong to the first, or second and third generation of
migrants. Those who are born in one country and migrate to another as adults
fall in the category of the first generation immigrants. The successive generations
of these migrants that are born and bred in the new land, constitute the second
and third generation immigrants. Placed alongside the first generation of
immigrants who may tell the tale of loss, nostalgia and oppression and may yet be
leading an ambiguous life of uncertain domicile; the second and third
generations are comparatively at home in the country of their birth, despite the
cultural hybridity, dual identity and mixed loyalty that have been foisted upon
them. The first generation migrants display a strong sense of affiliation with the
lost culture and resist assimilation in the host culture; and the second and third
generation immigrants welcome the prospect of acculturation in the new soil
rather than looking back longingly. Generally observed, the members of the first
generation are underprivileged at home, they are forced to migrate by the fear of
unemployment and starvation and for whom return, for the same reason,
remains a remote possibility. Being professionally unskilled they merely manage
to secure a working class status abroad and face racial abuse and rejection at the
hands of the host society. They build a cocoon around themselves as a recluse
from cultural dilemmas and from the experienced hostility in the new country.
Faced with rejection, they cling to their ethnic identity. But their successive
generations relate more positively to the culture of their adoption and seek a
meaningful role in its political and cultural lives.
For the first generation women immigrants, the element of choice in the
fact of migration is limited since they often arrive in the West as appendages of
men. Acceptance in the culture of adoption often necessitates a change in dress

54 Sumneet Kaur
code and lifestyles which may attack their sense of identity. But since these add-
ons have always been the preservers of traditions, they are expected to act as “a
vital link in the continuation of the culture of the sending society” (Pandurang
90). They have not only to remember and hold on to their past but to reproduce it
too. A strict moral code defines their area of freedom even abroad, since unlike
men who are to negotiate with the external world, the women are to act as
custodians of traditional culture even in the alien lands.
In another variation on the theme of exile, sometimes migration is viewed
as an escape from the stranglehold of tradition, orthodoxy of religion and
oppression in societal systems of the land of birth. For well educated,
professionally successful and financially secure immigrants, movement is not an
irrevocable act. Their better economic status allows them access to
communication networks, enabling them to shuttle between continents rather
than having to burn bridges with the past. It is also noticeable that these category
of immigrants exhibit an urge to move away from (not necessarily giving up) their
land, origins, filiations and connections. They embrace multiple locations,
attempt to become transcultural and transnational denizens of the new world
order, mooring themselves within the concept of a meta-home in a borderless
state of existence. Likewise, this geographical movement into the first world also
gives women an opportunity to go beyond her marginalised gender status and
explore the possibility of the “agentive new woman” (Pandurang 90).
Bachni, the protagonist of Kailash Puri’s story with the same name, and
Mira, a minor character in Vijay Lakshmi’s story “Mannequins” are marginalised,
trapped in patriarchy and burdened with the responsibility of maintaining
cultural traditions. The illiterate, working-class rural woman, Bachni, welcomes
the opportunity to accompany her husband to England as a source of
emancipation, an escape from destitution and a relief from the compulsions of
living in a joint family syndrome. She sees this new place as an arena that does
not lack personal space and where the submergence of the individual into larger
social constructs that control and manipulate women like Bachni, and for that
matter Pal Kaur in “The Twin Shores”, does not take place. When Pakhar Singh
seems to have resolved his dilemma in favour of settling down in India, which he
thinks is a “thousand times better” than a life of “insults” and “ignominy” on the
alien shores; he has to face strong protests from his wife Pal Kaur (Neelgiri 18).
Pal Kaur, discontent with the drudgery of household chores and field work, is
“itching to go to England” in search of “a better life” (18).
Women live in such a different economic, cultural and social world from
that of men that their reactions towards every other phenomenon, including
migration and a diasporic existence, are markedly different from those of their
male counterparts. Pal Kaur belongs to the class of Indian women who
experience a double marginalization in their native location; one economic and
the other gender based. Such women often look at migration as a means of
liberation from economic dependence and gender oppression thrust upon them
by the South-Asian patriarchal order. Immigration to an unorthodox western

society allows them a better standard of living, social independence and a more
central role in shaping their lives. Pal Kaur is understandably weary of her
circumscribed existence. She is not prepared to be a “farmer’s spouse” and “load
a basket of roties on (her) head” for the rest of her life (Neelgiri 15). She covets
personal freedom and economic independence through relocation abroad. Apart
from this reason, it is her refusal to lead a segregated marital life any more, which
culminates in her insistence that the whole family be united via migration to
England.
And, why not? Why would Pal Kaur not have such dreams of independence,
emancipation and happiness when in “Bachni” we see the protagonist, who could
be termed as the ego-ideal of Pal Kaur, spends quality time in decking herself up
every morning. Before taking the bus, Bachni takes “great delight in dressing up
with an eye on detail” (Puri 17). Savouring every bit of freedom that a life of self-
employment in America offers against an innocuous and debilitating homebound
existence in the village, she dons herself in “a close fitting shirt … high heels, and
a scarf around her head” (17). She leads a liberated life that Pal Kaur dreams of.
Bachni is independent and has no constraints of living in an extended family with
her mother-in-law and other relatives. She feels more in control of her home and
experiences a sense of empowerment that was culturally denied to her in the
homeland.
Like Pakhar Singh’s stubble, Bachni’s “big and round bindi” and “a bun on
top of her head” are the obvious markers of hybridity. Such a fusion and retaining
of cultural markers signify the precarious balance created by migrants between
honouring and breaking traditions. Bachni retains her culture in feminine values,
while assimilating the western culture visibly in her dress and in her adoption of
western ideals of freedom and individuality. She is one of those immigrants who
“carve their own (hybrid) routes” while trying to enjoy the best of both cultures
beyond the binary fixities of home/abroad instead of “lamenting over the lost
roots”, and hence, there is seemingly no desire to take a ‘U-turn’ (Kaur 47).
Pakhar Singh and Bachni belong to that category of hybrids who give up some of
the cultural identity markers and, according to Narang,
they acquire corresponding category of markers from the mainstream of
the society they are migrating into. These denote, in a way, the cultural
visa stamp for entry into society. Some of these tokens, the immigrants
are ready to shed easily and without much fuss while there are some
others they give up only reluctantly . . .” (26-27)
Bachni finds the task of migration relatively easier since the average Indian
woman located within the geographical space of the Indian nation-state already
belongs simultaneously to a diversity of cultures. Spivak believes that women
“carry internalised the lesson of exchangeability of home, as the basis of identity”
(Spivak 252). The initiation of women into a multicultural society begins with
their attempt to assimilate. The post-migration re-formation of the self in case of
women is generally a working out of an intentional hybridity, an outcome of a
conscious negotiation with and a contestation between the intersecting cultures

56 Sumneet Kaur
rather than an imposed hybridity formed in line with the hegemonic ideologies of
the adopted first-world.
Vijay Lakshmi’s “Mannequins” deals with the issue of female self-
determination in the postcolonial metropolitan centre. The protagonist glosses
over her frustration before her children with a smile when she is told by her
teenage daughter that she could not go to the PTA meet in a sari, “No way …
you’ll have to dress differently Ma. I haven’t seen anybody’s mom in a sari at
school” (Lakshmi 79). To her surprise, her little son had also interjected in her
sister’s support, stammering, “it looks so odd … cons- cons- conspicuous”
(Lakshmi 79). The children’s coaxing their mother to dress like an average
American betrays a sense of apology at their being Indian but the mother also
cannot help admitting to herself that “though (she) despised the idea of
masquerading in an alien garb, (she) had begun to feel uncomfortable in a sari”
(Lakshmi 80). In order to be accepted as a part of her foster society, to rule out
rejection, to become inconspicuous in the crowd; we find the protagonist
rummaging through a busy American bazaar. Her secret visits to the city centre
have accelerated of late as the desire to transform herself to suit her environs has
intensified. Her sari, the signifier of culture in the motherland is identified as
cultural-marker itself in the other land.
It can also not be ignored that an average American in the street notices the
protagonist’s “mascaraed eyes”, “red fingernails”, “soft glow on the face” and a
“carefully groomed figure”(Lakshmi 180-81). She seems to have perfectly
replicated her archetypes — fashion models, Barbie dolls or the mannequin in the
city centre that has a “blue emerald gaze”, a “glazed smile”, and a “flawless figure”
(180-81). The American ways of appearance and attire have been portrayed as
liberating. To the protagonist, her body in a sari seems “plain … nor sleek, nor
sophisticated”, while the mannequins in the western garb are “slim, elegant,
sophisticated” (180).The sari is “coiled around her” and she pines to “move and
flow … feel free and uninhibited” by adopting the American dressing (180). The
protagonist’s discomfort in the sari and her desire to feel freedom in the western
clothes is half forced and half willed which may with time become a completely
willed desire like her cousin Mira’s who illustrates the subaltern’s notion of willed
hybridity.
Mira re-invents herself on her own terms and uses to her own advantage
the choices offered to her by a multicultural society. After great coaxing she
comes to visit her only daughter in the States. But once she is here, she decides to
stay on and even finds herself a job. Mira, an old destitute widow, is economically
dependent and vulnerable in traditional Indian society. Like Bachni, she sees her
dislocation as advantageous and undergoes the narrative of personal recovery
and rehabilitation. Therefore, for Mira, identity transformation is not a cause of
crisis. Thinking about Mira, the protagonist wonders :
In ten months my cousin Mira has learnt more about the American way
of life than I have in three years … Plain, mousy Mira who had taken to

wearing white saris, after she was widowed, flaunts all colours of
peacock’s plume now. The woman who hardly opened her mouth,
chatters with the children about the movies and basketball, even
discusses stock market with Govind. (Lakshmi 180-81).
Mira exudes a remarkable sense of confidence in reinscribing and celebrating her
identity and like Bachni she too does not show any desire to take a ‘U-turn’, while
her cousin, the protagonist who finds herself “grappling with some obscure knots
that never untangle” passes by the ‘U-turn’ half-heartedly and keeps turning her
neck towards it intermittently (181). Mira takes like fish to water to the new
location that lends sustenance to her individuality, whereas the protagonist, who
still cherishes the self within, is trying to subsume her individuality to a sense of
acculturation within the mainstream culture.
A desire to pass-by, avoid and ignore the ‘U-turn’ is very common in the
second and third generation immigrants. They wish to relate more with the other
culture and outgrow that of their parents who belong to the first generation. The
culture at home, the food, the language, the moral values, attitudes towards sex
and marriage, kinship patterns are all strikingly different from the culture
abroad. The culture into which they are born is seen better and they are intensely
involved in the process of going to the school with the children from the country
of their birth and in negotiating the pressures of the peer group and relating to a
different neighbourhood. The children born to immigrant parents enjoy better
settlement and space in the country of their birth and that is why they do not
want to retain a “sense of identity borne from living in a diasporic community
(which) is influenced by the past migrant history of their parents” (McLeod 207).
Immigrant parents, generally partial towards their ethnic cultural heritage,
are desirous of transmitting it to their next generation and to cushion them from
the so-called corrupting influences of a decadent culture outside home. Parents
insist that their wards follow their ethnic culture and most parents also want to
help their children integrate into the larger mainstream society. Hence, generally
the highly-educated or professionally well-settled parents who have made
bargains with their pasts and future and who do not strongly desire a ‘U-turn’
allow some liberties like choice of dress, food habits, language spoken at home
and even career choice and movement,to their children to aid their participation
in the social life outside home.
The parents, Inder Singh and his wife, in Ravinder Ravi’s “The Road to
Marriage”, wary of corrupting western liberties bring up their children solely in
Punjabi way forcing upon them an unnatural alienation from larger western
society. Like Bachni and Mira, both the parents are leading a happy and
contented life for their children grow up to be exemplary children in the eyes of
the Punjabi Community in Canada. They “learnt Punjabi, visited the Gurudwara
… studied our culture … watched Hindi and Punjabi movies and brought special
colour to the cultural gatherings of Bhangra, Gidda and folk songs” (Ravi 60-61).
The Punjabi Community in Canada “encouraged their children to look up to

58 Sumneet Kaur
Sohan and Mohini as role models” (60-61). Sohan and Mohini qualify as special
children because they are untouched by the culture of their adopted country of
domicile while the other Punjabi children in the West “took to smoking tobacco
and experimenting with drugs. They swayed to the rhythm of western dances.
They indulged in practices, which Punjabi culture deemed to be shameful and
immoral” (55). In case of Inder Singh and his wife the over romanticisation of the
past and a self-imposed ghettoization do not force them to look for a ‘U-turn’ to
their roots since they see the same roots in their successive generation.
The parents in “The Free Society” by Swaran Chandan are cognizant of the
fact that hybridity, impurity, intermingling and the transformation that comes
with the new and unexpected combinations of human beings, culture and ideas
are inevitable and inescapable in diasporic situation. Hence, they do not force
their teenage daughter Seema to have an essentialist ethnic identity like Sohan
and Mohini in Ravi’s “The Road to Marriage”. Mrs. and Mr. Dhillon rather allow
their daughter to maintain a polymorphous self because it seems that Seema’s
parents understand that the immigrants of the next generation are culturally
closer to the mainstream; having being a part of the same system of education,
speaking the same language in a similar accent, having similar dress codes and
food habits, similar hopes and fears, similar aspirations and trepidations as
members of what Edward Said calls the imposing centre. Their pride on having
permitted their daughter exceptional liberties — she could cut her hair short, don
modern dresses and also visit discos with her parents’ consent — is a reason
enough not to think of returning home or taking the ‘U-turn’.
But the polymorphous self of Seema, however, is expected to operate
within the boundaries of Indian codes of morality. Whereas Mohini demonstrates
exceptional obedience and begins to appreciate some of the codes of Punjabi life,
Seema does not budge from obsessively watching midnight movies even after her
parents’ dire warnings and coaxing. The first generation parents, who
immigrated primarily in search of better opportunities, place a high premium on
scholastic success and good professions so that their children are less vulnerable
to prejudices and discriminations. Seema’s interest in the movies is the direct
influence of her peer group and she cannot afford to be left out of the animated
discussions about the films. The inter-generational gap begins to widen when the
hermetically sealed world of her parents is unable to respond to, or even
understand her need. The removal of television from the house brings in Mills
and Boons romances, an erotic novel by Harold Robbins and a variety of
pornographic magazines. When under pressure Seema returns the erotic reading
material, she starts spending all the time in her room — sulking, studying or
sleeping — and later she begins to return late from her school. One fine day, Mr.
Dhillon, who goes out in search of her since she had got very late, is flabbergasted
to find her walking with her boyfriend who assures her that her father could not
force her at all. Because of unreasonable pressure, restrictions, a desire to belong
and to be a part of a group, Seema attempts to stave off her Indian influences to
get assimilated seamlessly into the local white world or her host culture. The

parents have hardly come to terms with the shocking discovery of their
daughter’s boyfriend, when the next day Mrs. Ahuja, who as a responsible
member of the Indian community considers it her duty to set aside the code of
doctor-patient confidentiality, reveals that Seema “wants to be on the pill”
(Chandan 85-87). The nightmarish revelation suffocates Mrs. Dhillon so much
that she suffers a mild first heart attack.
Similarly and shockingly, the otherwise obedient Mohini refuses to get
married to a stranger from India who would be chosen for her by her parents.
One day she tells her father how she and her brother pine to participate in and be
accepted by the mainstream life outside, how they wish to do “everything that the
majority of children in this country do” (Ravi 59-60). She tries to tell her father,
who lives by a rigid, ritualistic observance of Indian ways and neither chooses to
assimilate into nor to integrate with the host society, that they never tried to
connect with her. She says:
Canada is a multi-lingual and multi-cultural country. People from every
country of the world have made it their home. Each immigrant has a
separate and distinct identity. Nevertheless, as Canadians they also have
a collective identity. You have never tried to see us as part of this
collective consciousness. We were born in this country. We grew up and
studied here. The larger circle of life in Canada is a part of our individual
lives. (Ravi 60-61)
Mohini asserts her right to “marry the man of her choice”, and Inder Singh, still
living by antiquated Punjabi ethics, cannot accept the low-caste Joginder Singh
as his son-in-law (59).
Joginder’s father, Sunder Singh is a liberal and sensitive individual who
voices the writer in denouncing Inder Singh’s attitude. He represents the few
immigrants who are never forced in any manner to take the ‘U-turn’ for they do
not reject an alien way of life, display respect for difference, refuse to make
hopeless attempts at keeping an old self intact and are open to the intake of
positives from an unknown culture. Inder Singh is traumatized when he is caught
up in the confrontation between the deep-seated eastern ideal of communal
honour and western values of individual freedom and personal happiness. He is
completely devastated when he loses his daughter who undertakes with Joginder
the fertility test (customary for couple prior to their marriage in some Kenyan
tribes, to test whether the prospective bride can bear children) of some Kenyan
tribes. Inder Singh, the man, who in fourteen years had not taken leave of
absence from his job for even one day, gives up work and out of sheer
despondency and a sense of shame “becomes a captive in his own house” when he
learns that his daughter had lost virginity and become pregnant before marriage
(Ravi 54).
Generally, the diasporic journeys of the first generation create narratives of
dislocation, displacement and uprooting. Their expatriation is a complex state of
mind and emotion which results in a wistful longing for the past. Even after re-

60 Sumneet Kaur
location, Inder Singh and Mr. Dhillon stubbornly hold on to their home-grown
code and thus, their mental space remains unaltered. Inder Singh’s wife and Mrs.
Dhillon are also inept to connect with their respective daughters and are unable
to understand that home for the second generation immigrants is where they are
born which widens the drift between the first and the second generation and
increases the desolation of the first generation immigrants and they would soon
look forward to a ‘U-turn’. Likewise, the other diasporic women characters
discussed above to whom the multicultural world seems to offer a range of
choices and privileged positions are often smitten by a sense of alienation and
despair.
We notice that Bachni is willing to bond with the land to which her
husband has brought her and can love both homelands, but conflict and
confusion are inevitable to a bicultural existence. We see her suffering ineluctable
disruption as for the last couple of days her “heart was heavy” and her body felt
“battered” and “bruised” and the “tension in her mind had increased manifold”
(Puri 22). The racist invectives hurled at her by her white colleagues at the factory
and “Enoch Powell’s speeches” against immigrants, directing them to “go back to
their own countries” (24) had “settled into the innermost recesses of her heart”
(34). The British government was unable to curb racial, ethnic and gender
discriminations against immigrants despite its official policy to promote
multiculturalism, and Bachni feels, “men and women looked at immigrants in the
workplace with such hostility as every morsel in their mouths was the rightful
share of an Englishman or woman” (24).
If globalisation has facilitated the diasporic exodus of the black or the non-
white populations to the developed world, it is only to serve ever-increasing
variable needs of industrial capitalism. Be it the phenomenon of colonisation or
the reverse, present inflow of migrants into the western metropolis, economic
exploitation of the subaltern and the social ignominy flung at them have
remained constant. Bachni argues logically, “the whites kill us with murderous
looks. They behave as if we have no right to the money we have earned through
hard labour” (Puri 26). She is accosted by the possibility that “they might have to
sell their house in England and return to their village in India” (34). A beautiful
house lush with all modern comforts, fat pay packets earned by the couple with
only two small children to look after, have made life in England so handsome that
it was, “time to be happy, to feast and to enjoy” (Puri). The prospect of returning
to her village appears harrowing:
Living in the village was worse than living in hell … she remembered …
dressed in loose and oversized clothes, hidden behind long ghund … the
endless chores of the household that tied her down to the hearth and the
home. (Puri 25-26).
Bachni shudders to imagine how would she “bridge the gap between the person
she was in England and the person she will have to become in the village” (26).
But, if her return to her roots entails an identity crisis and a cloistered existence

in poverty, it is also the only escape-route from the senses of hate and insult
suffered in an alien country:
At least the village will have no Enoch Powell, Rosemary or Eileen to
look at me with their sullen and angry eyes. How proud and self-
respecting are the people of my village and my country. (26)
Rekindled by racial abuse, her national consciousness resurfaces to disrupt her
happy acceptance of the foreign land, leaving Bachni in the divided state that is
home to the diasporic psyche.
Similarly, the craving of the protagonist of “Mannequin” to refashion
herself and shun the ethnic identity would amount to transformation that the
protagonist is determined to achieve today by selecting a western dress and
taking her family by surprise:
I want to see the wonder on my children’s faces and admiration in my
husband’s eyes as I walk into the room and stand before them like a
mannequin — slim, elegant, and sophisticated — totally transformed. I
want to show them that I too can cast off the old wrappings and become
a brand-new person like my cousin Mira. (Lakshmi 180)
The protagonist’s desire to accept change is an extraneous imposition. Unlike
Bachni, it is not a self-designing — the promise American deceptively holds for
the newcomer (for the truth is “you can’t live in America and not dress like the
American”) — but an act of postcolonial mimicry on one hand, and a surrender to
an imposed hybridity on the other. The woman wishes to ape the average
American lady in the street (“to be like the thousands of women who are walking
down the streets at this very instant”) or the mannequin (which is an
embodiment of American beauty) or her cousin Mira (who has taken to the
American of life with ease and alacrity). Apart from the pressures to pursue these
feminine idols, the demands of the male gaze dictate her to re-design herself. Her
husband, Govind’s, persistent admiration for Mira (“Mira’s quite a woman …. She
seems to have adjusted so well to this part of the world”) also goads her on to
westernise herself (Lakshmi 181-82). The protagonist thus, is subjected to a
compounding censure of the male gaze and the racist stare (Rai 204-06). The
coloured protagonist is colonised twice over — by both imperial and patriarchal
ideologies since her performance of hybridity is not a conscious fusion of the
negotiating cultures and on the contrary requires a complete erasure of her past.
All the characters analysed above seem to be suffering the same dilemma
and trauma as Pakhar Singh in “The Twin Shores” by Tarsem Singh Neelgiri and
Kuldip in “Disowned” by Shivcharan Gill are. Pakhar Singh a member of the
rustic, farming Punjabi community is tempted out of his home by better
economic prospects abroad. But disrupted by the feelings of loneliness and
nostalgia, and victimised by social discrimination and racial abuse, he is forced to
take a ‘U-turn’. Consequently, he ends up leading an ambivalent life of
settledness and unsettledness like the other protagonists. On entering his village
after “nine years of captivity in England”, Pakhar Singh thoughtfully runs his

62 Sumneet Kaur
hand over his stubble, “you were the first causality of the assault by the English”
(Neelgiri 2). Immigrants, who refuse to shed their cultural-identity markers like
headgear and long beard especially in case of Sikhs, are unable to assimilate and
homogenise fully into the mainstream culture. The memory of the gory incident,
which accelerated his return to his homeland, time and again flashes back in his
mind when, “two months back … going home after a late night shift in the bakery,
two skinheads had waylaid him and ripped his stomach apart without reason or
provocation (9). The racial, the socio-political and even the community based
antagonism between migrants and natives in the metropolitan West is one of the
most incendiary issues in the process of adjustment in today’s mixed, multi-racial
reality of existence.
For Pakhar Singh, unlike Bachni who did not want to return to her village
at all, “it was the finest day of his life … the urge to return to his roots was at last
fulfilled … a weight upon his heart lifted” (Neelgiri 2-3). For the marooned,
unanchored and misplaced Pakhar Singh who yearned “to eat a meal cooked
especially for him by his wife”, and for whom “there was nothing but scrambled
eggs to eat, saag was certainly out of the question”, memory and nostalgia often
acted as asylum (7). A migrant’s life is defined by dual pulls – alien and
indigenous – and while anticipating return, Pakhar Singh wonders if he can
embrace, against a life of material well-being but social indignity in England, a
dignified existence coupled with labour, poverty and hunger at home. Though
rent apart within himself, he is unable to transfer his knowledge to his
unreceptive family, which is overwhelmed by the prospect of settling abroad. As
the story approaches its end, we find Pakhar Singh racked, on one hand, by his
wish to settle down anew in his village and on the other, by his family’s passion to
fly to England. Split into a man hanging between two contrary prospects, Pakhar
Singh gives out a cry of deep anguish:
I cannot just live in England but the future of Ginda and Nimma (his sons)
doesn’t let me live in India. There is also Bapu’s hunger for the better life.
What should I do? Where should I go? (Neelgiri 18)
Caught between the compulsive (primarily economic) demands of his family and
the nightmarish experience of fulfilling them in another land, Pakhar Singh easily
typifies the sense of in-betweenness that characterizes the life-situation of
hundreds of immigrants.
Like many professional Indians who “in the waves of the early 60s” went
abroad “as part of the brain drain”, Kuldip Singh, in the story “The Diasowned”
by Shiv Charan Gill, goes to England in pursuit of higher studies and the prospect
of settling down with security and respect. He rejects “thirty fertile acres of best
land” and “a government job” in hiscountry and becomes “an officer in the pantry
division of British Airways” (Gill 92).
Being in a position of agency, Kuldip does not experience racismor non-
acceptance at the hands of the white society. He is held in awe by his white
colleagues and juniors who not only carry gifts for him but also seem to recognise

the worth of this “Black Englishman” (Gill 90). Whereas Kuldip is addressed as
Sir, Pakhar Singh is assaulted as “Bastard Paki”, “Bloody Nigger”, andBachni is
ridiculed for being racially different. Interestingly,Kuldip is not addressed as an
“Englishman” but as a “Black Englishman” because the host society may accept
him as ‘an almost white’ but never ‘a white’ (Neelgiri 18, Gill 90). Owing to the
inter-racial marriage of the protagonist, the postcolonial encounter between the
immigrant and the native, restricted to the social sphere in the other stories
analysed here, enters the familial domain in the present one. But during the
course of the story one realises that the harmony worked out between two
individuals of two continents is fragile.
As opposed to Kuldip and Marriane whose home is disrupted by “no peace”
and a “tense atmosphere”, the couple in “The Twin Shores” is bonded by a deep
sense of attachment despite enormous barriers of time and space (Gill 92). The
situation that develops with the arrival of Kuldip’s father, Joginder a retired
Revenue Officer who has an unconscious grudge against the English, affords a
glimpse into the clichéd East-West encounter involving conflicts such as tradition
versus modernity, Indian conservatism versus liberal West, spiritualism versus
rationalism and their alarming effects. In cross-cultural encounters, the apparent
order created by individual adjustments often turns into chaos because of familial
intrusion. An exasperated Joginder, who refuses to budge from his obstinate
stance and becomes a source of complication, psychological tension and
interference in the life of Kuldip’s wife and children, returns to his village and
then keeps sending disconsolate letters to his son asking him to get rid of his
white family and return to start anew. Kuldip’s relations with Marianne who no
longer loves him and his kids,who are ashamed of a “black father”, grow sour and
before Kuldip can decide, both the parties disown him (96). His father in India
bequeaths his land and property to a distant relative and his wife divorces him.
The story ends with his painful cry that succinctly sums up the Trishanku state of
diasporic individual, “disowned, everybody disowned, you disowned, I disowned
too” (99).
One may, thus, say that the immigrant experiences of almost all the
diasporic characters in the stories analysed, despite individual differences, neatly
fall under either of the two categories. The characters are either on their way
towards a ‘U-turn’ if they have yet not succeeded in simultaneously belonging to
both worlds; or they have a strong desire to bypass the turn and belong wholly to
one world. Bicultural pulls and the psychological movement from one state of
mind to another causes dilemmas and nostalgia; and a sense of displacement and
loss. The diasporic subject is on the one hand haunted by the memory of his past,
and on the other, traumatised by his confrontation with a chaotic present which
is pregnant with hard realities of discrimination and exploitation. For an
immigrant neither dislocation nor absorption is complete. Many a time, it is
observed that despite specificities and peculiarities in every immigrant’s
bicultural experience, a similarity lies within the bounds of the double
mindedness that characteristics the immigrant psyche. The feeling of “not-at-

64 Sumneet Kaur
homeness tends to be seen as characteristic feeling of a non-acceptance or

alienation within the host society. At-homeness, in turn, is tied up with the
continued identification with the ancestral society, whether it is through
memories of the actual homeland, or through a range of evocative ‘objects,
fragments of narratives that keep in their heads or in their suitcases’” (Mishra
68). The strain of the loss of home and the past; and the absence and the
nostalgia always pull the migrants to the same past and the flustered characters
then abide by communal identity to exist in the metaphorical national boundaries
constructed in foreign lands.
Men enjoy a privileged position in the phallocentric Indian set-up and so
the impact of racial discrimination is more acutely registered on men than on
women. Almost all prominent male characters illustrate the hanging man or
Trishankustate of the diasporic subject while women and the young second
generation immigrant characters come close to becoming multi-culturally
evolved global citizens who endeavour to live embracing their alternate realities.
At times, migrants, especially women, may find themselves ill at ease in the
native culture as well as the alien one or attempt the tightrope challenges to
embrace both worlds. They may belong neither here nor there or try to become
universalised citizens soaring above and beyond fixed boundaries. Divided
between the persistent pull of the two centres, the immigrant minds are
simultaneously subjected to contrary emotions and desires — progression and
retreat, euphoria and despair, a desire to reclaim the past yet revolt against it, the
yearning to go back forestalled by the inability to move out and the urge to show
solidarity to the homeland but an unwillingness to threaten relations with the
host country. This results in the much talked about double vision of the
diasporics. Sunder Singh, a minor character in “The Road to Marriage”, stands
out as an exception. He adeptly reconciles his twin allegiances and strides the two
worlds successfully. His instance confirms that if being placed on the isthmus of a
middle state can be expensive, it can be empowering too; if transnationalism
results in negative feelings of estrangement, it can also lead to positive
experiences of multi-locality. He possesses the mestizo consciousness that
implies the development of a hybrid identity or culture as a result of
synchronization of the inherited and the adopted culture, without privileging
either side of the hyphen. His case provesthat the idea of a universalised migrant
who lives everywhere, soars beyond all traditions and resides in the spaces
between culture and nations isn’t really a myth after all.
Works Cited :
Chandan, Swaran. “The Free Society.” Between Two Worlds. Ed. S. P. Singh.
Amritsar: GNDU Press, 2004.
Gill, Shiv Charan.“The Disowned.” Between Two Worlds. Ed. S. P. Singh.

Kaur, Tejinder. “Cultural Dillemmas and Displacements in JhumpaLahiri’s The

Namesake.” Emerging Modes and Metaphors: Perspectives on Indian
English Fiction. Ed. Kulbhushan Kushal and N. K. Neb. Jalandhar:
Nirman, 2004, 38-50.
Lakshmi, Vijay. “Mannequins.” Pomegranate Dreams and Other Stories. New
Delhi: Indialog, 2002.
McLeod, John. Beginning Theory. New York: Manchester UP, 2000.
Mishra, Vijay. “New lamps for old: diasporas, migrancy, border.” Interrogating
Post-Colonialism:Theory, Text and Context. Eds. Harish Trivedi and
Meenakshi Mukherjee. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 67-
68, 1996.
Narang, Harish. “Of Beards and Backpacks (Globalisation, Diaspora and Cultural
Identity).” Diasporic Studies: Theory and Literature. Ed. Gurupdesh
Singh. Amritsar : GNDU Press, 2007, 23-36.
Neelgiri, Tarsem Singh. “The Twin Shores.” Between Two Worlds. Ed. S. P.
Singh. Amritsar : GNDU Press, 2004.
Pandurang, Mala. “Conceptualizing Emigrant Indian Female Subjectivity:
Possible Entry Points.” South Asian Women in the Diaspora. Eds.
Nirmal Puwar and Parvati Raghuram. New York: Berg, 2003, 87-95.
Puri, Kailash. “Bachni.” Between Two Worlds. Ed. S. P. Singh. Amritsar: GNDU
Press, 2004.
Radhakrishnan, R. Theory in an Uneven world. Malden: Backwell, 2004.
Rai, Sudha. “Not White and Also Women: Race, Gender and Multiculturalism in
South Asian Canadian Women’s Poetry.” Dislocations and
Multiculturalisms. Ed. Jasbir Jain. Jaipur: Rawat, 2004, 203-213.
Ravi, Ravinder. “The Road to Marriage.” Between Two Worlds. Ed. S. P. Singh.
Romana, Paramjit Singh. “Marginality and Literary/Critical Canon.” Diasporic
Studies: Theory and Literature. Ed. Gurupdesh Singh. Amritsar: GNDU
Press, 2007, 84-101.
Spivak, Gayatri C. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routeldge, 1993.

pp. 66-82
NATURE IN NUREMBERG: A STUDY OF W G

SEBALD'S AFTER NATURE
Chandan Kumar Panda
Abstract
W. G. Sebald discusses the Nuremberg tragedy during the Second World
War in his book After Nature. This paper makes an attempt to study
Sebald’s perception of the disaster inflicted technologically on
Nuremberg destroying the natural beauty of the said city. The disturbed
geopolitics between England and Germany resulted in damaging nature.
Their technological prowess and scientific might were engaged in
crippling nature. The growing rivalry between two nations led to
legitimizing violence as the befitting medium to settle their antagonism.
This legitimization of violence upon nature seems to have its root in
modern science and its promotion of instrumental rationality. The
scientific degradation of nature corroborates with the Biblical
permissiveness towards an exclusively anthropocentric creation. The
European perception of ecology is coloured by the Biblical and scientific
reification of nature. This study therefore tries to trace the root of the
European historical negligence of nature. The Biblical anthropocentrism
and the Cartesian mechanistic rationality inspired by the progressive
success of science seem to have uprooted the human organic faith in
nature.
Keywords : Nature, history, Cartesianism, instrumental rationality,
Biblical anthropocentrism, science, violence.
Introduction
It was in the night of August 28, 1943 Nuremberg experienced a terrible
conflagration which devoured the large city as 582 British aircrafts orchestrated
the most dangerous blitzkrieg to subdue the enemy nation by resorting to
retaliatory reaction . Nature, though never a party to the vested human interest,
got crushed in the crossfire of history. It may be said that human enmity
victimized nature. It disfigured nature with an intention to foreground the
European r national animosity and empire building desire. The human, primarily
European and decisively post-Enlightenment, expansionist and tyrannizing
tendencies forced nature to undergo its dystopic vicissitudes. Gruesomeness
replaced grace and barrenness bliss. Sebald nostalgically recollects the beauty of
Nuremberg, primarily of its sublime natural surroundings. But the tragic

Nature in Nuremberg: A Study of W G Sebald's After Nature 67
intervention of war inspired by the European sinister zeal of flexing each other’s
territorial muscles seems to have found its viciously glaring manifestation in
Nuremberg. The beauty of Nuremberg became mere memory. Therefore, Sebald
writes in After Nature, “The date is August 26 1943. On the 27 th Father’s
departure for Dresden, of whose beauty his memory, as he remarks when I
question him, retains no trace. During the night of the 28th 582 aircraft flew in to
attack Nuremberg” (85-86). The gruesomeness and barrenness is the disfigured
suffix that the air raid has attached to the scenic landscape of Nuremberg.
Looking at such a tragic trajectory Sebald in After Nature anticipates the possible
consequences.
His anticipatory apocalypse gets well-articulated in his statement that
borders on a dystopic prophecy, “In the future death lies at our feet” (84). In the
vicious geopolitics of the modern predatory power-seekers nature found itself in
the position of a prey. Nature in Nuremberg experienced a demonic example of
human mechanical notoriety. The human diabolism deformed nature. Machine
surprised nature with its invasive intervention. The human conceit enslaved
science to enlarge the degree of devastation to immeasurable amplitude. This
paper therefore intends to explore the destructive dimensions embedded in the
human capacity for invention and innovation captured through the literary lens
of Sebald. Moreover, this paper begins with a diachronic study of the western
ecological thinking determined by the Biblical prescription of anthropological
dominance over nature, the Enlightenment philosophy of instrumental
rationality and the mathematically configured mechanistic logic of modern
science. The thesis that this paper attempts to establish is that the Nuremberg
technological massacre on nature is a product of the dominating streak
embedded in the western ecological thinking. The snowball effect of
anthropological dominance over nature found its most aggressive manifestation
in Nuremberg in particular and the Second World War in general. Therefore,
before venturing into the specifics of Sebald’s After Nature and his argument of
disproportionate devastation of nature owing to war interventionism, it seems
pertinent to examine the genealogy of western ecological thinking which
precipitated the large scale damage on nature during the Second World War.
Modernity and Nature

The urgency for modernity and the concomitant desire for territorial
expansionism and political supremacy have made nature suffer extensively. The
human progress happens in nature not outside it. There is nothing called outside.
Beyond nature human civilization is impossible. In fact there is nothing human
beyond the boundary of nature. Nature is the embryonic envelop in which the
human civilization comfortably advances. In other wards, it is both the shell and
the substance. The human blindness to the above facts of nature seems to have
turned them astray. In the name of progress the gradual destruction of nature is
legitimized. The gaze that is thrown upon nature is very objective in nature. Profit

68 Chandan Kumar Panda
is its core aspiration. The human oblivion towards the realities of nature has put
nature in the most hazardous conditions. Time and again with human
development nature has received the maximum hit. The human disfavor towards
nature suggests degeneration. Such a dangerous adventurism does not need to be
condoned for the sake of the grand bandwagon of being modern. The triumph of
technology should not be exhibited in the domain of nature or at the cost of
nature. There persists a grand illusion that wilderness is nature’s habitat. The
human civilization has a distinct existence apart from nature and outside nature.
They seem to have become oblivious of the fact that not only the wilderness is a
constituent of nature but also the human civilization. The human civilization is
cultural evolution in nature.
Nature’s infinite patience is taken to be its helplessness. With the maniacal
advance of modernity and the corresponding technological notoriety, nature has
experienced the unregulated and irrational human atrocity. In the Nuremberg
episode, modernity, an aspect of human history, manifested its violent visage
against nature as it treated the latter as a theatre for experiments and
explorations Bringing nature to laboratories and conducting insane experiments
seems to be the trends adopted in the post-Enligtenment period. The pursuit of
similar trends and beyond with competitive rigour and more scientifically
sophisticated manner finds its dramatic surge in the contemporary time. Here
the nature contra human position is not argued. The scientific methods and its
unregulated and in conscientious deployment in nature to maximize human
achievements seem to have exacerbated nature-human cohesiveness. The
distance between the two never proved healthy for none. The myth of success by
using or bruising nature seems to have misled humanity towards its annihilation.
The anthropological triumphalism over nature is modern delirium. In Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno argues, “Enlightenment understood in the
wider sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human
beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth
is radiant with triumphant calamity” (1). Europe, the self-declared rational
master of the globe and its aspiration to colonise the latter by whatever means is
a product of Enlightenment tutelage. The liberated race became the master race
and legitimized its rational superiority. Adorno and Max Herkimer criticized
these dialectical tendencies of the Enlightenment. The birth of modern science
corroborated with the European domination of the globe. Therefore, the
progressive decline of the importance of nature in human scheme of things traces
its genesis to the development of the scientific doctrine of rationalism during the
Enlightenment period
Heidegger and Technology

Much of Martin Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology is a product
of his deep understanding of the time. Being a modern philosopher, modern
history helps him to construct many of his philosophical concepts. Technology

offers tools to penetrate the depth of nature. Heidegger strongly claims that the
technological method of revealing the nature of nature is partial and
impoverished. This monstrous method increases the possibility of ‘devastation of
the earth’. What Sebald witnesses in Nuremberg is Heidegger’s precise suggestion
of the devastation when technology replaces the organic human interaction with
nature. To substantiate this theoretical argument Sebald’s take on technology
needs to be mentioned, “Cities phosphorescent on the riverbank, industry’s
glowing piles waiting beneath the smoke trails like ocean giants for the siren’s
blare, the twitching lights of rail and motorways, the murmur of the manifold
proliferating molluses, woodlice and leeches, the cold putrefaction, the groan in
the rocky ribs, the mercury shine, the clouds that chased through the towers of
Frankfurt, time stretched out and time speeded up, all this raced through my
mind and was already so near the end that every breath of made my face
shudder” (112-13). This is what is the visage of the modern city of Frankfurt.
Industry paints the city with soot and smoke. Much of contemporary distress as
understood by Heidegger is a matter of alarming ascendancy of faith in
technology. He wrote “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology,
whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (4). The overwhelming pervasiveness
of technology, and the contemporary vigour that informs it, dwindles the
importance of the fundamental and essential human conception of nature . Here
the fundamental difference between tool and technology needs to be highlighted.
Tool pertains to the useful equipment which facilitates the daily human activity.
The daily human activity constitutes human interaction with nature. The
basic human ends and needs are fulfilled because of the daily human interaction
with nature. For instance a piece of plough, it is made of timber. For the
production of one tool many tools are used efficiently by the skillful hands of a
few artisans. These tools are used to produce something for human consumption
from nature. Tools stand between human and nature. Tools evolve human beings
from state of nature to culture or from the stage of raw to the cooked. But the
tool-human-nature symbiosis got ruptured owing to the intervention of
technology. A tool can be a piece of technology but technology is not just a tool. It
is beyond the features and functionalities of a tool. Technology, as Heidegger
understood and in the modern parlance, is a sophisticated method or a piece of
mechanistic engineering which is used in order to disturb peace of nature. For
instance, mining technology is not just a tool but a whole set of apparatus to
disembowel the earth causing extreme unease to the structure of the earth. Tools
facilitate human efforts to interact with nature in order to make a living. But
technology on the contrary reveals the nature of nature by applying force. This
application of force is a form of violence. That disturbs the organic human
interaction with nature. Here begins domination. Heidegger quite rightly
mentioned in his “The origin of Work of Art” that the nature of nature is to
conceal. In the Second World War it became obvious how nature was used
against inflicting injury upon nature. The argument that is foregrounded here is
that of the in-conscientious use of technology primarily in the 20 th century to
wreak havoc on nature. The European expansionist aspiration and the

schizophrenic redefinition of nation-state along the line of racial uniformity

bound technology to obtain these ends.
Heidegger suggests that technology not only alters the organic and
primordial human conception of nature but also makes human beings oblivious
of the fact of the existence of such a conception in human history. The temporal
break from the organic civilization towards the technological one may have
started when the rational and scientific world view promoted by the
Enlightenment became convincingly the cardinal civilizational ethos in Europe.
Therefore, to counter such a mechanistic and methodical conception of reality
there emerged the romantic reactionary thinking. If that organic bonding with
nature had not ruptured, another retaliatory epistemic movement would not have
emerged. Much of modern derangement springs from this forgetfulness. This
oblivion destroys the intimate human companionship with nature.In Heidegger’s
view in Being and Time, the question of meaning of being is forgotten by the
western philosophical tradition, and also it has forgotten the fact of forgetting, “...
the question of the meaning of being was not only unresolved, not only
inadequately formulated,but in spite of all interest in "metaphysics" has even
been forgotten” (19). The same oblivion of the importance of syncretic nature-
human relation seems to have fallen upon the technologically empowered
humanity. As conceived by Heidegger, the asymmetry that the intervention of
technology causes poses the supreme danger to the prevalent symbiotic structure
of the nature-human relations. This technological conception of nature is
derivative and secondary which further complicates the prevalent primordial
perception of nature and facilitates faster forgetting. The transition in the human
thinking from the organic to the technological seems to have occurred because of
the triumphalistic tendencies of science and technology. Modern technology
offered the most surprising results. It enhanced human comfort. It reduced
human efforts. The ease with which it functions and the comforts that it provides,
though at a certain cost, attracts human attention.
The instrumental conception of technology engages technology as a means
to an end. The increasing circulation of the instrumental notion of technology
coinciding with the outbreak of the Second World War seems to have replaced
the anthropological definition of technology. Technology as a human activity and
not just a means to achieve some utilitarian or malicious ends seems to have lost
its conceptual and empirical relevance. It sounds more alarming that the
technology serves as the medium to encourage the will to mastery. Therefore,
Heidegger points out, “The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more
technology threatens to slip from human control” (5). The deployment of
technology and its instrumental makeover during the Second World War serve
the human will to mastery. . Heidegger concludes the essay with a great deal of
optimism obtained from the prophetic pronouncement of Hölderlin, who wrote
in “Patmos”, “But where danger is, grows the saving power also” (54). The
optimism of Heidegger as enshrined in the concluding passage of his essay
“Question Concerning Technology” is not Sebald’s reality, “The closer we come to

the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine
and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought”
(35). Sebald does not emphasise on the recovery aspect in the post-disaster
temporality. He demonstrates the finality of loss. This sense of finality is well
explained in his statement, “In the future death lies at our feet” (84). The ‘piety of
thought’ as a consolatory conclusion or a mystical compensation for Heidegger
does not corroborate with Sebald’s line of narrative demonstration. For Sebald,
Dresden is disfigured. The English technological prowess has left its sinister
imprint on the landscape of Dresden which can never be recovered. Its beauty is
reduced to memory. Therefore, Sebald makes it evident in his statement,
“...Dresden, of whose beauty his memory...” (85).
The notion of the world as material substance meant to aid and advance
human activity is precisely, in Heidegger’s understanding, a teleological
assumption. Nothing in nature exists without a purpose. Existence implies
purpose in the teleological sense of things. Therefore, in the same logic, nature
has purpose. It is, as it is commonly understood, to serve and sustain the species.
The human species being the superior to all other entertains this misconception
that nature serves the human. Such an assumption supersedes the primordial
and organic consciousness of the world. The human instrumental reason that
promotes the above assumption replaces the human intuitive anchorage with
nature. But with this replacement there occurs the human self-divorce from the
biotic unity with nature. The technological perception equimentalises nature and
applies utilitarian gaze into it. Nature is defined by its use value not by the life-
giving potentiality and actuality that it naturally is.
Cartesian Mechanistic Naturalism

The modern positioning of nature as mere commodity destroys the human-
nature balance. In the absence of that indispensable balance the human-nature
relation suffers. The Nuremberg incident is the most violent demonstration of
this altered attitude towards the human relation with nature. The diabolic
exhibition of technological terror in the skies of Nuremberg defines the British
technological ego and the retaliatory rampage against the Duetsche air raid in
England. In this section an attempt is made to study the Cartesian rational
philosophy which develops a rational ecosystem. This rational ecosystem stands
in opposition to nature. It promotes rational individualism. Nature therefore
seems conquerable by application of human reason. The Enlightenment
epistemological foregrounding of supremacy of human reason seems to have
offered the necessary stimulus for the emergence of modern mechanistic science.
It is therefore argued here that Nuremberg technological notoriety seems to be
the effect of Cartesian rationalist absolutism and rational individualism. Such a
massacre was committed with impunity and without hurting the collective moral
architecture of Europe. Therefore, it leaves enough space for retrospection as to
why such a massacre happened. It not only happened once but continues to

happen. It seems there is no end to it. The trail of terror and the production of the
resources of terror find no moral boundary in Europe.
The absence of moral scruple or ethical compunction against the mindless
application of technology to wreak havoc is presumed to have its origin in the
Cartesian dialectical thinking. The European civilization owes substantially its
epistemological inheritance to the Cartesian model of thinking. Therefore,
Nuremberg tragedy reflects the European commitment to the Cartesian
rationalist paradigm. This attitude is a consequence of the human acceptance of
the indifferent modern Cartesian conception of nature which militates against the
primordial Greek conception of nature as ‘self-blossoming’ physis. The divorce
from the Greek conception of nature which emphasizes on the human essential
relation with nature deranges humanity to objectify nature for pure profit. Nature
is taken to be the storehouse of profit. It is through the application of technology
more profit can be made. The human greed for more and more destroys nature.
The irrational and insensitive adherence to the Cartesian thinking in modern
times engages human beings to introduce machines in order to confront nature
and if needed to destroy it. The Cartesian foregrounding of reason and doubt
seems to have deconstructed the theory of divine inherence in nature. The
process of objectification of nature corroborates with the human alienation from
the organic unity with nature. The technological massacre in Nuremberg is a
mere miniature in comparison to the mammoth in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
notion of objectified Cartesian construction of nature leaves no apprehension or
remorse to stop the injury doggedly inflicted upon nature. The human aspiration
for disclosing the untouched depth of nature happens to have been the cause for
the invention of technology.
However, here no attempt is made to question the historical and
epistemological importance of Cartesianism. It is in fact a monumental milestone
in the evolution of the European critical thinking. It is arguably the most
formidable intellectual tradition that has given rise to many socio-political and
philosophical theories. But what seems problematic here is that of the Cartesian
claim of the absolutism of reason and rational paradigms. That which is humanly
impossible is made possible through the sinister machine. The human
intelligence invents technology that is precise and clinical and rigorous to
percolate the anonymous interiority of nature. With the relative success of
technology the human monstrosity seems to have been heaped upon nature in
order to multiply their gain. Nuremberg is just one such tragic case of
technological terror. The world has seen many more technological assault from
the beginning of the 20th century. The human instinctual need for violence
received more sophistication and depth with technology. The technology here
pertains to the weaponry which holds potentiality for massive and mass
destruction. A retrospective look at the 20th century offers enough demonstration
of human monstrosity with the aid of technology. The trail of that monstrosity
seemingly gains prominence in the contemporary time too. And technology has
also evolved into extremely precise and more sophisticated stage. Sebald

disturbed by the fact of human predilection for violence downpours his

disappointment in the line, “What is this being called human? A beast, shrouded
on deep mourning, in a black coat lined with black fur” (57).
The mysterious process of physis which made the ‘blossoming forth’
possible becomes progressively redundant because of the introduction of
technology and the Cartesian tools. The radical methodological change that René
Descartes employed to understand nature seems to have metamorphosed the
very existing approaches to study nature. For Descartes there is nothing that we
know without doubt. So, it is doubt that makes us know what we know. The
existing approaches to nature are doubted. With Descartes and Bacon the
mechanistic and scientific naturalism as the system of approaching nature is not
only introduced but also is reincarnated in the subsequent centuries of studying
nature. The Baconian dictum ‘knowledge is power’ seems to have applied on
nature to know its processes and programmes in order to control and use it. The
objective empirical science strives to disclose nature not just for the human desire
for knowing in the Aristotelian sense but to use as and when needed. The modern
mechanical science is characterized by its instrumental value. It does not search
for truth. It accumulates knowledge. With the unbridled advancement of
technology, the green cover on the earth is reduced to the wastelands of industrial
and concrete districts. The uncontrolled atrocity of technology on nature has
dimmed down its beauty and exuberance. Technology guarantees nature’s
subservience to science. Therefore, much of modern decadence and human
degeneration seem to have happened due to the contemporary vigour and flair
for technology. Technology does not blossom forth as does a phenomenon of
nature in the domain of nature. In the field of nature, the events of nature
blossom forth. Nature does not act compulsively. There is inherence of design
which governs the events of nature. Nature does not have design. It itself is that
design. Spontaneity is nature’s nature. It does not have that subject-object
taxonomy. It is what it is. A rose blossom because it blossoms. It knows no why
and no because. It is its nature to blossom.
But in the domain of science there are many causes and ‘becauses’. Science
is not governed by the character of spontaneity. There is always a human design
involved in it. There has to have a hypothesis or a problem. In the absence of a
hypothesis or problem, science loses its mileage to move. Nature does not involve
itself in hypothesis-making or problem-solving pursuits. Things happen in nature
as they happen. There is no normative prefix or suffix attached to it. But the
domain of science stands completely contrary to nature. Science is a study of
nature to know nature’s nature. By virtue of the knowledge of nature’s nature, the
forces of nature are used for human development. Science offers methods to use
the vast field of forces that is nature. But forces of nature can only used by sheer
obedience to the nature of those forces. For instance, constructing a dam across a
river requires the construction of outlets to allow the force of water to pass when
in excess. This urgency of obedience seems to have been forgotten. The
technology-driven civilization seems to have accepted this misconception that by

the deployment of technology nature can be tamed. The over-emphasis on

modern pragmatism diminishes the significance of human reverential perception
of nature. With the popularity of modern instrumental science, the scientific and
the natural fail to complement each other. They stand contrary to each other. Not
complementarity but contradiction becomes the underlying reality of their
relation. A pure instrumental and technological gaze is thrown at nature. It is a
kind of gaze that hides the will to power.
The essential and theoretical underpinnings of the scientific and the
natural militate against each other. The former is determined to reveal whereas
the latter seeks to hide. Much of human awe and indebtedness towards the
vastness and variety of nature by virtue of commonsense and convention seem to
have mitigated with the universality of the scientific view of nature. The deep
human attachment with nature as one integrated and organic unity gets radically
replaced by the objectified supposition of nature and the detached spectatorship
of nature reducing it to tourism, and adventure. The concretized and
technologized contemporary civilization has pushed nature to the margins of city
boundaries or even further. Visiting nature seems to be a contemporary pastime.
Here nature is understood as rivers, mountains, seas etc.. It stays away from the
city-dwellers. Those places of nature have been highly commercialized.
Commercial interests have also destroyed the beautiful scenic grandeur of those
places. The tired city-dwellers make seasonal tours to the hill stations or sea-side
beaches. Nature- human companionship is intersected by commercial
considerations.
Science and Instrumental Rationality

Science is indubitably indispensable for the rational development of human
history but not the science that dominates. For a syncretic civilization attention
must be given towards the preservation of biodiversity and respect for nature is a
minimum necessity. The modern tendency to proliferate the likes of Nuremberg
would reduce human civilization to empty burial fields. What seems to be
advancement in modern human history with the success of science may prove in
the long run a mere human regression. Through the monstrous means human
history would never move towards a safe future. It would move, as it inevitably
moves, with apprehension and pretension. A pretentious advancement, which is
otherwise called the metonymy of success in the modern idiom, seems to be a
necessary signifier for the movement towards a technological tragedy. The
Cartesian scientific picture of nature deludes humanity to nurture an imagination
of nature being controlled, noosed and triumphed over. But to develop trust in
that awkward imaginative conception of nature peddled by science would be a
disastrous decision for the human beings ever to take. Its consequence would
require the Herculean energy to bear the burdens of human miscalculation.

The ‘revealing’ that is done by technology, as Heidegger suggests in

Question Concerning Technology, is of a partial kind. Technology cannot reveal
the being of nature. It is a set of structures and each has certain specific function
to perform. They may merely scratch the surface but do not have that infinite
potentiality to disclose the depth of nature. Technology seems to have disclosed
certain aspects of nature which remained unknown to the pre-technological
people. The term ‘pre-technological’ is perhaps not the right expression because
the person who invented wheel is as much an engineer as his modern
counterpart. Therefore, Levi Strauss in Structural Anthropology writes, “… man
has always been thinking equally well; …” (31) The terms such as ‘pre-modern,
pre-scientific’, ‘pre-technological’ and ‘pre-logical’ are the coinages made by the
moderns to declare their superiority over the ancients. But such categorizations
or nomenclatures are absolutely reductionist. Such reductionism is not the
outcome of a proper evaluation but mere conjectures.
To give credit to science for inventing the most sophisticated tools to reveal
the essence of nature seems to be a dangerous move. Science is a human attempt
through tools and clinical observations to understand nature. But to consider this
attempt a potential instance of human victory over nature is pure puerility. To
take this fallacy for truth and to resort to blind experiments on nature based on
this truism engenders sinister consequences. Such a scientific reality seems to be
the mood of time. The modern scientific tendency towards the objectification of
nature creates the Nuremberg situations. Nuremberg is the consequence of the
human acceptance of the objectified view of nature. The scientific advance into
the depth of nature seems to have tampered the ethical or spiritual content of
nature. In the absence of the ethical and mystical underpinning in the world of
nature, nature gets isolated and reduced to mere physical reality. The
technological triumphalism is the outcome of human abstinence from the
perennial perception of nature as the manifested divinity. Not only such a
perception has been compromised but also there is seen alienation in the human
symbiotic relation with nature. This alienation springs from the forgetfulness of
the organic human-nature unity as one totality. Human beings as microcosm are
a micro reality of the greater reality that is nature. Owing to the increasing
human reliance upon the instrumental rationality, the human beings have
gradually alienated themselves from the constitutive and integrated nature-
human perennial self. The oneness with nature seems to have ceased to exist. The
syncretism does not work anymore as the increasing distance between them
seems unbridgeable. Human beings are inseparable from nature because they are
one necessary aspect of nature and not necessarily the most exclusive. The sense
of exclusivity springs from the fact of human forgetfulness of the inevitable unity.
Nuremburg: Its Final Cry

The increasing adherence to the instrumental nature of human rationality
seems to have disturbed the constitutive oneness with nature. In the absence of

that primordial bonding and creative anchorage between nature and human
beings, the crisis becomes evidently visible. Nuremberg happened owing to the
human refusal of the significance and indispensability of that bond. Nuremberg is
the expression of human separation from the benediction of and federation with
nature. Looking at such a tragic trajectory of human greed and uncalled for
adventurism Sebald perceives of an impending disaster, “In the future death lies
at our feet…” (84). The contemporary humanity deluded by the sheer
technological power breaks the limit.
Sebald describes the city of Dresden whose unparalleled natural beauty
attracted many. The exciting curvature of Elbe River and its scenic mountains
and forts and the grandeur of nature experienced a shocking devastation by the
British Air Force in order to weaken the neurotic advance of Hitler. The
unstoppable militaristic juggernaut of Hitler brought disaster to his nation. The
British retaliatory action against Hitler hit Nuremberg until its last cry. Nature
suffered irreparably in the clash of egos between Churchill and Hitler. The British
sinister exhibition of its technological prowess in terms of causing massive
decimation in Dresden cautioned the world of its technological superiority. In
other words, to prove itself as technologically powerful England used the
opportunity provided by Hitler. The most primitive human proclivity for power
struggle was thus realized, and nature, Sebald notes, received the brunt of this.
The underlying parody of the ego battle was indicative of human ignorance. The
competitive exhibitionism destroyed nature.
The need for a protective attention towards nature was forgotten. With the
technological sophistication the ethical urgency towards a syncretic existence was
neglected. Much of modern competition for being technologically superior seems
to have promoted the human aspiration towards producing, procuring and
proliferating weapons of mass destruction. In the name of civilizational growth,
nature is destroyed. The human technological creativity is invested towards
making preparation for destruction. Nuremberg is the expression of such a
consistent human preparedness to pour terror if provoked. Therefore, Sebald
seems shocked by the greyness of the sky and its expansive visibility and writes,
“… this sky so grey? So unremittingly grey and so low, as no sky I have seen
before” (109-110). For Sebald’s father who left Dresden on 7 th August 1943, the
exuberant city with its breath-taking and picturesque natural envelop remained
just a memory or a dream. The following day of his departure the city seemed
skeletal and was reduced to swirling smoke, charred stumps, and the human
cries. Such an infernal appearance of the city was being technologically painted
by the British imperial ego and Hitler’s obsession for absolutism. Both Hitler and
Churchill employed technology to destroy each other. In the battle between a
neurotic and a maverick, nature got crushed. Sebald, therefore, rightly suggests
in After Nature that after nature is death. Without the immediate reparatory or
restorative attention towards nature, nothing can avert destruction.

Sebald refers to the painting of Altdorfer which hangs against the wall in the
Vienna art historical museum. It expresses the image of the burning city. The
painting attempts a pictorial depiction of the burning city:
On the horizon a terrible conflagration blazes, devouring a large city.
Smoke ascends from the site, the flames rise to the sky and in the blood-
red reflection one sees the blackened facades of houses. In the middle
ground there is a strip of idyllic green landscape, and closest to the
beholder’s eye the new generation of Moabites is conceived. (86)
With the aid of militaristic machine, human beings could expand the length
and duration of devastation unimaginable in human terms and capacities. The
destructive streak ingrained in human instinct seems to have reincarnated in
modern times under the auspices of technology. The new-found trust in
technology seems to have restrained human beings not to rely on dialogues to
resolve conflict but to resort unconscientiously to the instrumental intimidation.
This modern method of conflict resolution victimizes nature.
Churchill found the retaliatory air raid against Hitler appropriate. Nature
therefore suffered the most. The military confrontations during the Second World
War bruised nature pitilessly. The decision to drop atomic bomb and the
subsequent execution of the same devastated nature though it was directed
against the Japanese people and Japanese imperial ambition. But nature was
crushed in the crossfire of history. The methods of conflict resolution always
inflicted injury on nature. The moderns weaken the protective gear of nature in
order to prove their technological heroism. This kind of accomplishment invites
danger not only to nature but paradoxically to them. The underlying
contradiction of such deluded heroism is that human beings do not realize that
harming nature is equal to harming themselves. Ironically it is an attempt to
break the foundation on which one stands with solidity. The human race cannot
exist outside the protective envelop of nature. The Nuremberg incident is
therefore the triumph of human ignorance.
Human creativity is not engaged in inventing the constructive procedures
of peace or enduring possibilities of arriving at the mature and permanent
mutual agreements through open-hearted discussions. Such time-tested methods
of resolving human conflict is substituted by the silent preparation for
destruction of enemy territory and people through the manufacture of lethal
weapons. The uncanny aspects of modern modalities of addressing the human
conflict emerge inarguably out of the persuasiveness towards war and
destruction. At Nuremberg humanity experienced the similar human predilection
for extermination. The unscrupulous application of scientific and instrumental
rationality on nature in order to be a part of modernising venture seems to have
invited more trouble for nature. The earth, the only planetary home where life
exists is perennially characterized by fullness, profusion and variety. But the
asymmetry that we see today on the earth is caused by the human greed. The
desire for accumulating more beyond the human needs and the tendency to prove
the human and national superiority seem to have decimated the balance in the

biosphere. The ecological crisis that we experience today seems to have been
engendered by the technologically fanatic and exploitative experiments. The
schizophrenic situations that humanity has arrived at by seriously abusing nature
beyond the tolerable limit is owing to the utter disregard towards nature.
Paradoxically such a human adventurism seems to have ruined the home that
shelters. To break the house that shelters is to expose oneself to the known as
well as the anonymous dangers. If this be called progress, it is mere reverie. By
breaking the eco-system that protects, no progress of any sort can be attained.
The awakening from the arrogance of ignorance should not be deferred. The
speed with which the disintegrating mechanism is at work, it is not that far to
witness the retaliation from nature. Ecological awareness need to be dawned
upon the humanity before the ongoing technological damage reaches the
irreparable height.
To diagnose the underlying causes that altered the human perception and
treatment of nature is to arrive at certitude that the objectifying and deductive
methodologies of modernity seem to have imparted enough confidence to alter
the perennial ethical imperatives embedded in the world of nature. This ethical
clearance helped science to hurl assault on nature. The anthropological invasion
into the domain of nature aided by the instrumental rationality seems to have
disturbed the balance in the biosphere. The growing acceptance of the objectified
view of nature promoted by modernism may have ensured the shift of perception
and understanding of nature. The Nuremberg technological pogrom appears to
have engendered from that obsessive adherence to the doctrines of modernism.
The contemporary ecological crisis is anthropogenic in nature. The Nuremberg
massacre of the human civilization and nature is a not a feat orchestrated by any
supernatural agency. It is a deliberate and organized human misconduct. The
intent is apparent. It is to dominate. Much of western attitude towards nature is
conditioned by the Biblical command to dominate and to multiply as enshrined
in the Book of Genesis. The western ethos is much influenced by this theological
injunction which is overtly anti-nature. In the western thinking asymmetry in the
eco-system is theologically sanctioned. Such a theological permissiveness seems
to have abandoned nature as mere protective envelop designed to serve the
higher species. Therefore, the Semitic or Abrahamic religions scarcely promote
nature worship. Animism is heresy. The monotheistic faiths of the Abrahamic
parentage hardly sanctify the cultural viability of animism. Therefore, the pre-
Judeo-Christian faith systems are looked down upon and declared primitive.
Such an underlying theological normative principle seems to have determined the
western thinking. The Cartesian doubt and the nihilistic streak of modernism are
the effect of prolonged association with such a structure of thinking. The ruthless
and systematic assault on nature by modern science does not surprise them as
their theology proscribes the possibility of divine immanence in nature. The
Nuremberg tragedy seems to be just the fulfillment of the Biblical injunction.
The clinical rigour with which modern science advances into the domain of
nature makes it evident that the underlying impetus behind such a reckless

advance is nonetheless the western thinking. The monotheistic belief in the

transcendental world neglects the phenomenal world. The western mind due to
its firm anchorage in the theological doctrines seems to have treated nature
inferior in comparison to the superiority of the transcendental home. The
Platonism embedded in the Christian theology appears to have transformed the
western thinking towards transcendentalism. The ecological woe that we
experience today is a result of the consistent attempt made by the western
scientific tradition to demystify nature. The modernism of the west, which is so
characteristically scientific, has given rise to three distinctive principles, which
add woe to nature, as suggested by Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam in The
Philosophical Roots of the Ecological Crisis – ‘an exaggerated anthropocentrism’,
‘a mechanistic conception of the world’ and ‘the metaphysical dualism between
humanity and the rest of the physical world’. (5) Such tripartite foundations of
modernism seem to have impacted adversely the ecology.
The Modern Anthropocentrism

The modern anthropocentrism, which prioritizes the subject, relegates
nature to secondary position. It establishes the notion of nature as the physical
and objectified other. In the process of othering the human beings have alienated
themselves notionally from their physical environment. To arrive at scientific
certitude, reason is the tool. In the process the human cerebral function is
instrumentalised. In the Cartesian system this aspect of human constitution is
declared superior. It becomes the engine of human system. And it is declared to
be the most essential and indispensable. In its absence the human system is
reduced to mere bestiality. The Cartesian identification of subject on the matrix
of rationality may have promoted the dualism between mind and matter. The
Cartesian assumption of exploring the unexplored depth of nature through
reason appears to have given the latter the instrumental character. Such a
philosophical assumption seems to have encouraged asymmetry in the human
approach and association of things and events in the world of nature. With the
renewed conceptualization of the world of nature much human sagacity with
nature has been lost. The use of mechanical modalities to study nature seems to
have been encouraged.
The mechanistic worldview peddled by the western model of modernism
practices reductionism. It reduces nature to mere physical phenomenon and the
field and object of experiments. Descartes, being the precursor of such a world
view in the field of philosophy and much of his philosophical precepts and
mathematical deductions are absorbed in the early science, seems to have
removed the immanence of the intrinsic teleology from matter. In the absence of
the teleological inherence, matter becomes inert. The western science embodies
certain methodological and conceptual characteristics from the Cartesian
epistemology. The extension of disenchanted and instrumental notion of nature
designed for human consumption demystifies nature and promotes

inattentiveness towards the essential nature of nature. Animism is replaced by

mechanism.
The shadow of Descartes extends from the early modern period to the high
modern and pervades the contemporary outlook towards nature. The deliberate
and the ever-increasing human divorce from the organic nature-human
continuum may have been inspired by the increasing allegiance to the Cartesian
theoretical and mechanistic knowledge system. The ramifications of such
Cartesian theoretical postulations around the nature of nature are felt in the
contemporary time in the form of Nuremberg tragedy. The extent of exploitation
has crossed the bearable limit in the recent times. The human innovation and
progress has happened resorting to savage brutality on nature. In the absence of
any immediate retaliatory response from nature seems to have encouraged the
experimenters to maximize the extent of exploitation. This kind of human naivety
with regard to the consequent repercussions of dangerous experiments may
prove lethal in the long run. .The infinite patience of nature need not be confused
as nature’s passivity. No act of human cognition can determine the nature of
nature. All that human deductionisms are mere assumptions. No speculative
theory is exhaustive and true.
The exploitative and aggressive human parading into the depth of nature in
order to exercise human hubris seems to have been materialized at the cost of
causing injury to nature. The theological and Cartesian license and scientific
motivation to objectify nature have steered humanity towards derangement by
imposing the cleavage between the pre-Christian notion of nature and the
scientific notion. The Biblical injunction of human domination over other species
and the subsequent corroborative philosophical and scientific rejoinder to the
exploitative promotional has resulted in the most horrendous human savagery on
nature. In the Book of Genesis (KJV) 1:26 it is written as the revealed voice of
God, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let
them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over
the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth
upon the earth.” In 1:28 of the Book of Genesis the anthropocentric ascendancy
over nature is reiterated, “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing
that moveth upon the earth.” This divine sanctification of human dominance over
other nature appears to have influenced the modern science. The European
ecological psychology seems to have been determined by the theological
permissiveness of dominance.
Nuremberg is one such story that caught Sebald’s attention. The modern
delusion that centralizes human subject and reason over and above other
considerations has pushed nature to the margins of negligence and
unimportance. With the birth of modern subject, that is scientific and rational,
nature is subjugated and delinked. The significance that it had had in the human
scheme of things seems to have lost. It is no more that inevitable other not to be

dispensed with but the other to be utilized in order to fulfill human needs.
Reason is inarguably the most indispensable aspect of human cognitive field, but
its diabolism and insensitivity emanate from the human over-indulgence in its
embedded instrumental characteristic.
Sebald therefore tries to show the devastation that Nuremberg experienced
owing to the ego-battle to prove the territorial or national superiority over the
competing and rival nations. What Churchill did to Germany was proportionately
responded with the similar scale of violence by Hitler upon England. In the ego-
clash between the two enemy nations nature had to bear the brunt. They spewed
their venom on nature. The technological rampage into nature was brutally
conducted with impunity. The patient and silent nature experienced its own
paralysis owing to this atrociously unethical and unnecessary technological
invasion. The narrow and limited territorial nationalism failed to acknowledge
the importance of the grace of nature for human existence. With the modern
definition of territory or nation-state boundaries there emerged the will to
expansion and annexation through force and control. The virtue of oneness of
nature and with nature was forgotten. The meaningless territorial battles were
fought. The massive manufacturing industries for producing arms and
ammunitions were established in order to confirm human superiority. But
paradoxically, from a vantage point and through a neutral lens all these petty
human efforts to exercise the will to power through destruction appear to be pure
human travesty and the primitivism of the so called enlightened. Therefore, the
Nuremberg tragedy was a consequence of the absence of the ethical underpinning
in the structure of the human-nature relation. The ethical undercurrent is not
only absent but tragically its need is forgotten. The human myopia not to
acknowledge the necessity of that ethical deep structure in the nature-human
relation seems to have encouraged the Nuremberg tragedy.
Works Cited :
Adorno, Theodor W and Max Horkheimer. (2002) Dialectic of
Enlightenment.Trans. Edmund Jephcott. California: Stanford UP.
The Bible. (1998) King James Version. New York: OUP.
Descartes, Rene. (2010) Meditations. Trans. Desmond M. Clarke. London:
Penguin.
Heidegger, Martin. (1996) Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York:
State U of New York P.
--- (1977) Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William
Lovitt. New York: Garland Publishing.
--- (2002) “The Origin of Work of Art”. Off the Beaten Track.Trans. K Haynes.
UK: Cambridge UP.

Holderlin, Friedrich. (1996) Selected Poems. Trans. David Constantine. New

Castle: Bloodaxe Books LTD.
Kureethadam, Joshtrom Isaac. (2017) The Philosophical Roots of the Ecological
Crisis. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Levi Strauss, Claude.(1974) Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and
Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.
Sebald, W. G. (2013) After Nature. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York:
Penguin.
Wiseman, Boris, ed. (2009) The Cambridge Companion to Levi Strauss. New
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Zagorin, Perez. (1998) Francis Bacon. Princeton: Princeton UP.

pp. 83-94
FREEING EVERY LAST MAN OF SHAWSHANK: A

READING OF FRANK DARABONT’S THE
SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay
Abstract
Prison films depicting the escape of victims of erroneous judgement
have gained a notable popularity amongst the move-watching audience.
Majority of these films seem to be emphasizing that apart from the
wronged protagonist, the rest of the inmates are unfit for a life beyond
the prison. Such films, therefore, seem to follow a binarism that
designates the hero as ‘self’ and the abhorrent rest as ‘other’, thereby
justifying the brutal treatment or the lasting effect of imprisonment on
the prisoners in general. This paper will attempt to study the film The
Shawshank Redemption’s countering and problematization of the
aforementioned discourse or politics of the generic prison films.
Through close-reading of relevant and iconic portions of the film this
paper will attempt to highlight how this widely popular film presents an
ideal prison for serving Rehabilitative Justice and draws attention to the
issue of institutionalization of a prisoner, as a response to the generic
templates of the Prison films as well as the contemporary prison policies
of America . While the paper will have The Shawshank Redemption as
its prime focus, references to the typical contents of Prison films will
also be made in order to trace the genealogy as well as the uniqueness of
this exceptional film of Frank Darabont that does not simply offer a
thrilling account of escape of an individual but the redemption of
prisoners in general.
Keywords: Prison Films, The Shawshank Redemption, Close-Reading,
Rehabilitative Justice, Institutionalization, Departure from
Generic Templates, Contemporary Prison Policies of
America.
Frank Darabont’s film The Shawshank Redemption (1994) is distinctive for

its focus on a collective redemption of the incarcerated both before and after their
release from incarceration. This paper will explore the strategies and politics that
make this film a departure from other prison films. Though much of the film’s

84 Debaditya Mukhopadhyay
success may lie with its depiction of the struggle and final escape of its hero Andy
Dufresne, when studied as a part of the genre it represents, that is, the genre of
Incarceration films, the film offers more than an inspiring tale about an
exceptional individual. This film’s uniqueness lies in its amalgamation of generic
and individual elements. If its depiction of a misjudged person’s sufferings in the
hostile atmosphere created by a number of incarcerated people and corrupt
administration is generic, its focus on the transformation of a whole prison and
the portrayal of the post-prison life of prisoners are nothing short of unique. The
paper will study these unique aspects of the film and explore the factors which
contributed to the developing of these distinctive qualities of the film. In doing
so, the paper will delineate the influence of both the pre-existing templates of the
genre and the reflection of the contemporary developments in the prison policies
of America on this film. Before focusing on this film itself, the paper will offer an
overview of the pre-existing politics of the genre of Incarceration films in general
in order to highlight the difference between the prevalent discourses of the genre
and the subversive elements of this film.
An Incarceration film of course uses prison as its chief setting. These films
mostly give a Dantesque view of these prisons, to borrow the analogy of the
layered hierarchical structure of prisons. Such a depiction has a significant
cultural history. Prisons have chiefly represented environments where people are
sent only to suffer in the worst possible way. They were certainly not places for
corrections at first. Instead they represented a hellish place which was supposed
to terrify prospective law-offenders. The history of prisons’ usage indicates that
the society did not actually believe in rehabilitating its criminals for a long time.
During the Elizabethan age for instance, criminal law offenders were publicly
executed in brutal ways. Prisons were for civil law offenders. These places were
“full, and rife with disease” (Picard 2016). Prisons became correctional places
only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Protests against public
executions (Foucault 73) and the rise of institutionalization as an effective
solution to the problem of crime in the place of punishing the criminals, brought
about this change during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Mathiesen 19).
This methodical change had a cultural implication as well. Explaining the
methods of punishment that prisons of this era put into use, Mathiesen suggests
that many of the new penitentiaries were designed to subject its inhabitants to a
“radical isolation” (19-20). It is this new emphasis on having the convicts isolated
that triggered a general curiosity in the public mind about prisons which initiated
the trend of offering fictional or semi-fictional accounts of the lives of criminals
in prison.
With the rise of the film industry, a better scope for catering to the demand
for giving an insider’s view of prisons was found. The American filmmakers took
little time to respond to it and hence the trend of making films about prison is
found to exist right from the beginning of motion pictures in America(McShane
1996 337). Since these films intended to offer what the audience wanted to see,
their makers preferred to stereotype prisons. Jeffrey Ian Ross, while talking

Freeing Every Last Man of Shawshank: A Reading of… 85
about Prison Voyeurism describes how the general public through the ages
celebrated public executions by attending them with their family members (2015
400). According to him, the culture of Prison Voyeurism had Schadenfreude at
its heart, that is, “taking pleasure in someone else’s pain and suffering”(2015
400). Therefore, showing the prisoners’ discomfort and degradation soon became
essential for a generic prison film. Films of this kind did not only entertain the
public but also influenced the public opinion about prisons to a great extent. It is
important to refer to the observations made by Paul Mason in his essay “Prison
Decayed Cinematic Penal Discourse and Populism 1995–2005” for an
understanding of this impact. He observes “Successive sweeps of the British
Crime Survey have revealed that the public are unacquainted with numerous
aspects of the criminal justice system and rely on the media for their
information” (609) and more importantly “the Survey reported that just six per
cent of the public considered their principal source of information to be
inaccurate” (609). According to him, prison films are “symbolically powerful
practice that can shape public opinion about the aims, role and nature of prison
in society” (609).
Empathetic and meaningful use of the impact of these films could have
evoked serious attention to penal world but for that a proper departure from the
limitations created by the hackneyed and apparently popular templates was
necessary. The narrative pattern formed by these templates chiefly consisted of a
misjudged or framed hero, brutal co-prisoners, corrupt or incapable wardens,
and a final escape of the protagonist from the hostile prison. Films, specifically
from Hollywood, like The Running Man (1987), Lock Up (1989), or Tango and
Cash (1989), are examples of this kind. Films of this kind do have moments that
critique the flaws in penal system, as is to be found in the case of Frank Leone of
Lock Up, who is basically imprisoned for defending his foster father and then
handed over to a sadist of a Warden as a punishment for that. These appear
inadequate as instead of exploring the plight of the prisoners in general, such
films focus only on the sufferings of the protagonist who is basically shown to be
innocent. The focus on the protagonist of this particular kind is the chief reason
behind these films’ limitations. As their protagonists are mostly framed or
misjudged, these films never display the problems of actual prisoners when they
show the suffering of their protagonists. These narratives never engage with the
plight of actual prisoners as they focus on the depiction of an individual whose
very stay in the prison is unjust. In order to rectify this unjust punishment,
therefore, these narratives are compelled to end with the downfall of the
torturing Warden and/or the escape of the wronged protagonist. Though this
pattern makes these films akin to the all-time favourite genre of inspirational
tales, where the underdog achieves his/her/ their goal despite all the
impediments, it leaves a number of important questions about the penal world
unanswered.
The escape of the misjudged or framed hero is justified no doubt but in
every prison across the globe there are also people who are serving their terms for

actually committing crimes. The portrayal of prisoners of this kind by the type of
films described above seems problematic for a number of reasons. Neither can
these films afford to be unrealistic and depict a mass escape of these prisoners in
general, as that is morally unacceptable, nor can it explain how these convicts
who are incarcerated for a justified reason, are supposed to endure the hostile
atmosphere of the jail. Moreover, these films are marked by negligence about the
effects of institutionalization on a convict in his life post-release. In these films
little to none attention is paid to the possible difficulties a prisoner might face
after coming back to society subsequent to the serving of the term. It is implied
by this negligence that no convict, barring the protagonist, who was never a
criminal in the first place, is supposed to have a life at the end of their terms. In
short, apart from stereotyping the prisons, these films rely on stereotyping of the
prisoners at a large scale. On the one hand they have the wronged hero,
representing the lone individual, the underdog, who is to pull the plot to its
resolution through his or her struggle and ultimate escape. On the other hand,
there are the other prisoners, who are actual convicts and are not supposed to
escape or even released during the plot development as the focus of the film is
escape of a wronged individual, not the transformation of a prisoner or prisoners
in general, or the prison itself.
On the basis of the observations offered above it seems justified to state
that the key feature of the generic prison movies is the portrayal of both prison
and prisoners in a reductionist manner. The prisons of America ideally had
become places for rehabilitation since the early twentieth century (Alschuler 1)
but these films ignore this aspect. Prisoners on the other hand are shown through
binarism. The protagonist, who will escape at the end, is shown to be innocent,
kind, and heroic and the other prisoners, who are to remain in the prison, are
violent, abusive, and beastly. Paul Mason, while commenting on this difference,
points to this portrayal of “the rest of the prison population as dehumanised
monsters and animals, and consequently as “other” ” (2006 616). While many
prison films released before and after, follow the generic scheme explained above,
Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption stands as a sui generis film for its
departure from this stereotypical pattern. It is certainly a film that has
successfully “challenged, contested or changed” the “dominant regime of
representation”(Hall 1997 269) of the generic prison films. The subsequent
portion of this paper will now focus on this film’ s subversive content and attempt
to trace the factors that inspired the same.
Darabont’s film tells a tale of redemption of not just the protagonist but all
the prisoners and the prison itself which, as mentioned before, is rarely
attempted in this genre. In fact the subtle difference in title between Stephen
King’s novella and the film reflects this difference too. King titled his work Rita
Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption which, through its mentioning of Rita’s
poster, which plays a pivotal role in Andy’s escape, limits the emphasis only on
his escape. The film, however, seems to focus more on the “redemption” part
which is done not through his escape but through his activities inside Shawshank.

Despite presenting Andy as a messianic figure, the plot does not really attempt to
portray Shawshank prison as an epitome of bleakness before Andy’s arrival.
Instead, it shows Shawshank as a place where discipline and loopholes co-exist.
None of the dwellers of Shawshank appear to be wretched. In fact, they look quite
relaxed and at ease with the life inside, particularly when they bet on the newly
arriving convicts. Red or Ellis Boyd Redding and as mentioned in the film, a few
others, kept the supply of various items associated to a “normal” life coming to
their inmates for a slightly enhanced price. As Red says:
There must be a con like me in every prison in America. I’m the guy who
can get it for you. Cigarettes, a bag of reefer -- if that’s your thing -- a
bottle of brandy to celebrate your kid’s high-school graduation. Damn
near anything, within reason. Yes, sir. I’m a regular Sears and Roebuck.
(Redemption 08:33-08:49)
The way the inmates are not legally allowed to possess basic items like these,
seem to reflect the policy of equating punishment with deprivation from basic
amenities in prisons. In Invisible Punishment Jeremy Travis describes how
increase of supervision on the criminals led to the expansion of the rules that
deprived a prisoner from rights and privileges ( 30). This strictness certainly
ensured that prisoners feel discomfort but to what extent that discomfort actually
helped the system in rectifying the prisoners is debatable.
By beginning the account of Shawshank prison with Red’ s pre-parole
interview, the film makes its engagement with the issue of rectification and
subsequent rehabilitation of prisoners clear right from the beginning. In the
interview, Red, after having served a long term in Shawshank is asked whether he
feels that he has been rehabilitated. He replies, “Oh, yes, sir. Absolutely, sir. I
mean, I learned my lesson. I can honestly say...I’m a changed man. I’m no longer
a danger to society. That’s God’s honest truth.” (Redemption 07:14-07:32) Red
speaks all these clearly enough but in his face one can clearly detect a confusion
and a lack of conviction. Red gets rejected and immediately after that his “role” in
the prison is depicted through his words about himself, quoted above. There is
nothing objectionable about Red’s way of serving others. Nor is his getting
rejected an extremely odd thing but by showing these two sequences
consecutively, the narrative hints at the existence of loopholes in the apparently
sound system of Shawshank. Red would be facing success in his third interview
and in between the first and last of these three interviews there happens the
arrival of Andy which leads to a thorough change in the Shawshank prison.
Clearly, there is something about the changes Andy brings to the place that
makes Red appear ready for rehabilitation to the board. Samuel Norton, the
Warden, establishes himself as a strict administrator right from his first
appearance and his reliance on discipline and the Bible, which shows he is a
Puritan at heart. But when one remembers Red’s rejection that precedes this
scene, doubts about the effectiveness of Norton’s policies are naturally raised.
Norton and Byron Hadley, the merciless captain of guards, seem to believe in
reducing the convicts to the level of machines which is shown by Hadley’s answer

to the query of a new prisoner who came along with Andy. The prisoner only
wanted to know about the time of eating and to this Hadley shouts: “You eat
when we say you eat! You shit when we say you shit, and you piss when we say
you piss”(Redemption 13:33-13:47).Rehabilitation was apparently the ultimate
aim of Shawshank but Norton was not really using a proper method for it. A look
at Thomas Mathiesen’s insightful paper on rehabilitation helps to understand
what exactly was wrong with Shawshank.
Mathiesen observes that rehabilitation of a prisoner was not very different
from what rehabilitation of old houses, living politicians, and dead politicians
meant. According to him, rehabilitation of the prisoner must bring him back to
the state before committing the crime and bring the prisoner his “dignity” back
(2006 27).The treatment offered to dwellers of Shawshank by Norton and Hadley
was not even remotely close to any of these. The duo basically had been using a
system of rehabilitation that was based on manipulating the ideal methods for
rehabilitation of convicts. For a detailed exploration of this, reference to
Mathiesen’s work seems relevant. He opines that the crux of the rehabilitation
ideology has not at all gone through a sea change at all and it had four chief aims.
According to him these are “work, school, moral influence and discipline”
(32).The administrators of Shawshank were using the first, third, and fourth
component in a twisted way for having their vested interests served and they had
not paid attention to the second at all. For them, converting these convicts into
robotic slaves was the main agenda. Ideally, engagement in work was supposed to
lead to the development of the prison house itself but in the film Norton himself
does not take any initiative for Shawshank’s development. He only orders them to
“repair” the roof of the license-plate factory nearby and launches his “inside out”
initiative, which, to quote him was: a genuine, progressive advance in corrections
and rehabilitation. Our inmates, properly supervised, will be put to work outside
these walls, performing all manner of public service. (Redemption 01:18:28-
01:18:43)
Norton was interested in sending the men outside because it brought him a
lot of money. He was not at all interested in making the prisoners develop the
prison itself. In fact, whatever Andy did for it, the library in particular had no
importance to him. He simply allowed Andy to pursue his projects because he
believed in baiting his workers. He baited everyone for the repairing of the
factory by reminding them that this would allow them to have a temporary escape
from the walls of the cell, which made hundreds of people apply for it. He did the
same with Andy. He knew Andy would work more, would earn more, if he was
happy, and to make him happy he allowed him to develop the library. How little
Norton valued the library becomes evident when he threatens Andy saying: “And
the library? Gone. Sealed off, brick by brick. We’ll have us a little book barbecue
in the yard. They’ll see the flames for miles. We’ll dance around it like wild
Injuns” (Redemption 01:39:44-01:39:58).Norton’s choice of simile shows how
barbaric he was deep down and it explains why Shawshank was a failure in
making convicts like Red ready for rehabilitation.

Moral influence, according to Mathiesen, was chiefly injected into the

prisoners by making them pray repeatedly. He quotes Selin for giving an insight
to this which reads “every effort was made to give a strong religious cast to the
discipline in order to make the prisoners God-fearing people”(36). The ideology
seems problematic for its emphasis on evoking fear of the Lord. In fact Norton
wanted these convicts to equate him with the Lord and fear both, which is
betrayed when Andy, during Norton’s surprise visit to his cell quotes a passage
from the Bible. Andy quotes the verse “Watch ye, therefore, for ye know not when
the master of the house cometh” (Redemption 49:39-49:44)..The context, the
situation clearly makes it a use of subtle irony from Andy’s part but Norton seems
to like it and recites his favourite passage, which is “I’m the light of the world. He
that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life”
(Redemption 49:51-49:57).The passage brings out Norton’s desire to have all the
convicts obey him. Norton certainly made use of the fourth component
Mathiesen mentions and this too, rather than being intimately linked with
rehabilitation, had very different purposes in Shawshank. According to
Mathiesen
in contrast to the former three components, it seems as if the latter
component to a large extent and for a long time was implemented in
actual practice. Whether its implementation was actually followed by
rehabilitation, a “return to competence”, is another matter. (37)
All the four components are brought to Shawshank by Andy’s activities. He
made his inmates work with happiness for developing the Brooks Hatlen
Memorial Library. As Red describes it:
The rest of us did our best to pitch in when and where we could. By the
year Kennedy was shot, Andy had transformed a storage room smelling
of rat turds and turpentine into the best prison library in New England,
complete with a fine selection of Hank Williams. (Redemption 01:17:47-
01:18:02)
It shows that Andy made the convicts work for making their residence better, not
for the desire to be temporarily out for a while. Andy’s emphasis on the
importance of schooling is shown by his mentoring of Tommy. It is symbolically
significant that Tommy, who ultimately is declared qualified in his examination,
is shot dead by the torturous duo of Shawshank who would recklessly damage the
growth Andy brought about any moment for blackmailing Andy or elongating his
stay in Shawshank. Though Andy does not directly instil morality and discipline
per se in the mind of his inmates, his presence has a notable positive influence on
them. They appear effortlessly well-disciplined while sitting in the library. They
are not shown to be ragging the new prisoners anymore when Tommy and his lot
arrive. Besides, they work together for collecting rocks for Andy and seem to have
developed honest empathy for Andy, signs of significant improvement. Brian
Jarvis, while analysing the film, has pointed out how Andy gradually started
playing the role of a proper warden in Shawshank. Jarvis opines that Andy’s
activities in Shawshank help the film to highlight the effectiveness of a

rehabilitative penal system. He also adds that portions of the film that show Andy
encouraging his inmates to participate in positive activities help the film to rise
above films that only critique the administration of prisons (197-198). The
positive energy that Andy circulates is effective because it enables the prisoners to
realize their capabilities and makes them feel an important part of the whole
setup. What Norton did could either numb or harden a prisoner but Andy purged
the prisoners by making them responsible and self-respectful.
The film appears to be a unique one for its depiction of Andy’s escape and
its effects as well. While most other narratives end up glorifying the escape itself,
this film has a plot that intimately imbricates the downfall of Norton- Hadley
with Andy’s escape and the purification of the whole prison. He had not only
planned his escape but also had taken the proof against Norton with him. This
decision shows how much of importance he had given to saving the balance he
had brought to Shawshank. Andy’s unmasking of Norton does not exclusively
avenge the wrongs Norton committed against Andy. Rather it ensures the
survival and further development of the rehabilitative setup Andy had created
with his co-workers. The film does make use of stereotypes of torturing and
tormenting administrators but it carefully avoids stereotyping the prison itself
and its inhabitants. The inhabitants of Shawshank are mixture of good and bad
but none of them are made ugly through otherizing. Moreover, the film
emotionally engages the audience not only to the innocent protagonist who gets
justice through escape but also to at least two people who are criminals and who
continue to bear the ramification of institutionalization .Apart from breaking
stereotypes about actual prisoners, this also problematizes institutionalization
which contributes to the film’s distinction in the genre.
The resolution of the plot shows the film’s engagement with the problems
prisoners were likely to face during their paroles. Apart from Red’s release (and
the escape) the film shows only the release of Brooks Hatlen. In this emotional
sequence, Brooks’ suffering is delineated with great care. He was out of the prison
but certainly not rehabilitated. Shawshank had not made him self-dependant. It
had only made him lose all importance in the world outside due to his prolonged
stay. Brooks, in his letter to his old friends of Shawshank writes “Maybe I should
get me a gun and rob the Foodway, so they’d send me home” (Redemption
01:03:35-01:03:44),which shows how miserably Shawshank had failed and his
last lines “I doubt they’ll kick up any fuss. Not for an old crook like me”
(Redemption 01:04:11-01:04:16) clearly shows that fifty years of punishment
could not make him feel he had changed at all. He still considered himself just a
criminal. Towards the end of the film, Red starts facing nearly the same
problems. He had spent forty years in Shawshank and though he was at ease
compared to Brooks, he too started thinking of breaking his parole because he
lacked friendship, lacked a purpose. Finally he was saved which shows how
effective Andy’s influence on his fellow prisoners was.
Though the film does not offer what Andy did for Red as the ultimate
solution to the problem of prolonged stay in prison, it certainly underscores the

pitfalls of such prolonged punishments. Andy was given two consecutive life-
sentences, Red stays in the prison for forty years, and Brooks for fifty. Tommy
stayed in the prison during a period when it was functioning properly for a very
brief period compared to the other three instances and had reformed quite
significantly. Even Brooks or Red seem to have changed only because of the
influence of a properly-run prison to a significant extent. Brooks spares Heywood
only because Andy reminds him of who he was and makes him feel a changed
man, at least for a while. Red, as mentioned before, is rejected twice and though
his second rejection was during Andy’s stay in Shawshank , it occurred before he
could start working for developing the library and many other significant
moments that changed him. The ultimate impact of the changed atmosphere of
the prison on Red gets visible when he appeared for third interview. In this third
interview Red asserts with confidence:
There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here or
because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then. A young...
stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I wanna talk to him. I
wanna try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I
can’t. (Redemption 02:07:10-02:07:42)
Such lines clearly show how changed Red was and such a change was possible
only once Shawshank started running properly, not because of the length of his
sentence. In fact the longer sentences seem to only create problems for the
convicts. As Red himself says, while discussing with Andy and the rest what is
likely to happen to Brooks:
The man’s been in here 50 years, Heywood. 50 years. This is all he
knows. In here, he’s an important man. He’s an educated man. Outside,
he’s nothing. Just a used-up con with arthritis in both hands. Probably
couldn’t get a library card if he tried. You know what I’m trying to say?
… I’m telling you, these walls are funny. First you hate ’em, then you get
used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on ’em. That’s
institutionalized. (Redemption 59:19-01:00:06)
The film questions the validity of the method of giving prolonged sentences
to convicts in these sections and that certainly is an important part of its politics.
The film attests the effectiveness of rehabilitative policies that developed only
when prisons gave importance to institutionalizing a prisoner instead of
punishing them but along with it the film also shows the ramifications of
institutionalizing a convict for too long. Derral Cheatwood speaks of there being
four basic elements of prison films confinement, justice, authority, and release.
According to him, the difference between the four eras of prison films is a result
of the respective era’s way of handling the four elements. Darabont’s film is
considered as a very interesting exception by Cheatwood. He suggests that The
Shawshank Redemption is notably eclectic. It has elements of the Rehabilitation
Era Prison films along with elements of Confinement era (226). Even more
significant is the film’s deviation from its contemporary prison films. The
Fortress (1992) and No Escape (1994), both of which depict futuristic prisons.

Instead of dealing with real issues like rehabilitation or effects of

institutionalization, they mainly offered spectacles. Darabont’s film consciously
avoids that.
As mentioned before, an attempt to link the politics of the film with its
contemporary prison policies will now be made. It is significant that this film,
released in 1994,emphasises the problems of a prolonged stay in the prison. A
paper of the book The Growth of Incarceration in the United States Exploring
Causes and Consequences reads
In the 1980s and 1990s, state and federal legislators passed and
governors and presidents signed laws intended to ensure that more of
those convicted would be imprisoned and that prison terms for many
offenses would be longer than in earlier periods.(70)
In fact the year of the film’s release, 1994, was a year that saw a vital law passed
in this regard. The article “Tough on Crime How the United States Packed Its
Own Prisons” reads
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, supported
by both Democrats and Republicans, established even more federal aid
for local law enforcement, offered grants to states willing to adopt TIS
laws, set more mandatory minimum penalties, and restricted the federal
appeals process for death row inmates. (Curtley n.p.)
Though the increased crime rate of this era was certainly a reason behind
such developments but at the same time this policy of getting tougher on the
prisoners had to be questioned and the film The Shawshank Redemption does
that covertly by attempting to remind that getting tougher is not necessarily
connected with make proper rehabilitation take place. Prisons could offer that
scope because it offers ample time to its dwellers. As Red explains:
Prison time is slow time. So you do what you can to keep going. Some
fellas collect stamps. Others build matchstick houses. Andy built a
library. Now he needed a new project. Tommy was it. It was the same
reason he spent years, shaping and polishing those rocks. The same
reason he hung his fantasy girlies on the wall. In prison, a man will do
most anything to keep his mind occupied. (Redemption 01:27:31-
01:28:02)
The lines above indicate how the seclusion created by prison can be used
positively. It is almost like taking a man back to the basics, the days of beginning
from the scratch. Doing things that the man never did follow naturally and
through those he or she can realize his/her true worth, differentiate his criminal
nature from his/her creative nature and change in the true sense. Even this
process however should not be stretched too far. When it is carried for too long,
as in the case of Brooks, incarceration takes away the opportunity of returning to
normal life. In such a state, the burnt-out convict is very likely to commit further
crime, or ultimately put an end to his/her own life out of depression. Therefore,
incarceration needs to ensure that rehabilitation of a convict is achieved within a

reasonable period, so that the rehabilitated person can successfully find a

position in the society. It is in this way and for these reasons, the film rises above
the generic limitations of prison films and becomes a narrative of collective
redemption.
Works Cited :
Alschuler, Albert. “The Changing Purposes of Criminal Punishment: A
Retrospective on the Last Century and Some Thoughts about the Next.”
The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 70, no. 1, Winter 2003, 1-22,
doi: 10.2307/1600541.
Cheatwood, Derral. “Prison Movies Films about Adult, Male, Civilian Prisons
1929-1995.” Popular Culture, Crime, and Justice, edited by Frankie Y.
Bailey and Donna C. Hale, Wadsworth Publishing Company,1997, 209-
231.
Curley, Caitlin. “Tough on Crime How the United States Packed Its Own Prisons”,
GenFKD,2015. http://www.genfkd.org/tough-on-crime-united-states-
packed-prisons.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Vintage
Books,1975.
Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the “Other”. ” Representation Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practises, Sage Publications,1997, 223-
290.
Ian Ross, Jeffrey. “Varieties of Prison Voyeurism: An Analytic/ Interpretive
Framework.” The Prison Journal, vol. 95, no.3, 2015, 397-417, doi:
10.1177/0032885515587473.
Jarvis, Brian. Cruel and Unusual Punishment and US Culture, Pluto Press, 2004.
Mason, Paul. “Prison Decayed Cinematic Penal Discourse and Populism 1995-
2005.” Social Semiotics vol. 16, no.4, 2006, 607-26, doi:
10.1080/10350330601019975.
Mathiesen, Thomas. Prison on Trial, 3rd Edition, Waterside Press, 2006.
McShane, Marilyn D. “Films.” Encyclopedia of American Prisons, edited by
Marilyn D.McShane & Frank P.Williams III, Garland Publishing, 1996,
337.

Picard, Liza. “Crime and punishment in Elizabethan England.” British Library,

2016. https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/crime-and-punishment-
in-elizabethan-england.
The Shawshank Redemption. Directed by Frank Darabont, performance by Tim
Robbins, Columbia Pictures, 10 September, 1994. Amazon Prime,
https://www.amazon.com/Shawshank-Redemption-Tim-Robbins/
dp/B001EBV0OY.
Travis, Jeremy. “Invisible Punishment an Instrument of Social Exclusion.”
Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass
Imprisonment, The New Press, 15-36, 2002.
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the United States Exploring Causes and Consequences, 2014.
https://www.nap.edu/read/18613/paper/5.

pp. 95-107
THE MOTHER OF THE VAISHNAV NATION IN

BANKIM CHANDRA CHATTERJEE’S
ANANDAMATH : CONSTRUCTION AND
WORSHIP
Nakul Kundra
Abstract
The first part of the article takes into account some prominent
scholars’ opinions about the origin of the deification of one’s land of
birth and briefly studies how this sanctification acts as an emotive
metanarrative that arouses and strengthens the sentiment of
nationalism in Anandamath, which is called a fable by Tagore (Anand
12). In the novel, collective faith in the godly Mother fosters psycho-
spiritual unity and fraternity among the devotees/Children of the
Mother, and these religious-minded Children from varying social strata
form a Vaishnav nation. The second part of the article touches on the
controversial journey of “Vande Mataram”, a song in praise of the
Mother, since its publication in Anandamath. The phrase ‘Vande
Mataram’, credited to the Children’s song in Anandamath, inspired
many an Indian to join the freedom struggle in the twentieth century,
though the idea of the collective consciousness of all Indians is missing
in the song and its source novel.
Key Words : Vaishnav nation, goddess, Bengali nation
In Anandamath1, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee constructs an ethnic

nation2 which is grounded in the metanarrative of the Mother. The
Vaishnavs3 consider themselves to be the Children of the motherland, “the very
essence of Vishnu’s earthly form” (Chatterjee 169), in the novel, and they have
such a strong relationship with the divine Mother4 that her safety becomes the
prime motive of their lives. The hermit nationalists “recognize no other mother”
(145) and make a nation based on their ethnic understanding and common
collective cause.
The Mother
Carl Gustav Jung opines that the archetypal mother is a part of the
collective unconscious of all human beings (81). The mother archetype like other
archetypes can appear under an almost infinite variety of forms and facets. It is
often associated with the things and places that stand for fertility and

96 Nakul Kundra
fruitfulness. It can be personified in a figurative sense also. The primordial image

of the generative and sustaining mother figure is a source of emotional support
and spiritual nourishment. Various Jungian students such as Erich Newmann
have claimed that such mother imagery makes the basis of many mythologies and
precedes the image of the paternal ‘father’. This archetypal mother recurs in
different forms in literature, and the divine Mother in Anandamath is a
characteristic example of this mother archetype.
In the Indian context, Bankim was not the first one to conceive and express
the idea of one’s land of birth as the great Mother. Many scholars have attempted
to trace the roots of the concept that probably dates back to the time period
when The Ramayana was composed. Pradip Bhattacharya in his article “The
Problem of Janani Janmabhumischa in Anand Math” throws light on the history
of the glorification of and correlation between the land and the mother. He says
that the occurrence of the Sanskrit Shloka- ‘Janani Janmabhumischa svargadapi
gariyasi (One’s mother and birthland are greater than heaven itself)’ is usually
attributed to The Ramayana5. But, he argues, none of our epics shows any
evidence of the concept of motherland. This attribution of the saying to Rama is
“anachronistic and apocryphal”, as any clear-cut and indubitable reference to the
origin of the concept is not traceable. He leaves the argument open-ended: “Is it
then a folk memory of an anonymously composed masterpiece of a Shloka born
of patriotic fervor?” However, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya asserts that the saying
‘Janani Janmabhumischa svargadapi gariyasi’ “occurred in the version of
Valmiki’s Ramayana current in Bengal” (78).
According to Amiya P. Sen, the personification of the native land as the
Mother/the goddess lies buried in far older Hindu philosophical concepts and
imagery. In classical Indian literature, comparisons “had been commonly drawn
between the procreative woman and fertile, bountiful nature” (99). He adds,
“There are even glimpses of a ‘Bharat Mata’ in Sanskrit texts going back to the
fifth-sixth century C.E.” (99). He further writes that “Prior to Bankim, the
reference to one’s place of birth as the Mother occurs in at least two poems of
Madhusudan Dutt - Banga Bhumir Proti (An Ode to the Land of Bengal)
and Birbahu Kavya (The Saga of Birbahu), published in 1862 and 1864,
respectively” (100). Tanika Sarkar draws our attention to a play
named Bharatmata of 1873. In this play, a dejected, pale and broken woman,
who is stripped of all her possessions, is presented. This woman, symbolically the
Motherland, weeps and dejectedly speaks her mind. Some white men abuse and
kick her while her sons keep on sleeping. In the ending, a good sahib appears and
“promises her that another Mother, the British Queen, would bring her woes to
an end” (3965). Sarkar says, “What Anandamath does is to dramatize and
transfigure the image of abjection into a lustrous, powerful deity” (3965).
S. K. Bose says that the productive and plentiful earth is often linked to “the
quality of Motherland in the ancient texts” (79). But Bankim, perhaps, has moved
a step ahead by conceiving the idea of mother in the form of goddess Durga and
“in terms of modern patriotic spirit” (79). Before the publication of Anandamath,

The Mother of the Vaishnav Nation in Bankim Chandra … 97
it was perhaps Satyendra Nath Tagore, elder brother of Rabindra Nath Tagore,
who adumbrated a similar idea in the song (1867) which begins as- “Children of
India, sing together and in complete unison the glory that India is”. In this song,
India is described as ‘Mother of Heroes’. Bose adds:
The rudiments of the composition might have been present in some
other contemporary compositions as well. But all these were apparently
in vague and general terms without the inspiring, exhilarating, quality of
the tangible, perceptible, image-making of the Mother of Bankim’s
conception. (79-80)
Julius Lipner says, “[T]he concept of ‘motherland’ may be fairly recent one, but
that of ‘birthland’ is not. For instance, the expression occurs in the Harivamsa,
an important and lengthy appendix to the other great Sanskrit epic,
the Mahabharata (ca. 400 BCE-400 CE)” (242). According to S. C. Sengupta, the
portrayal of the Mother in Bankim’s novel might have been inspired by the
Delphic Priesthood6, a secret society that strove for the independence and
unification of Italy in the early nineteenth century (55).
In the novel, Satyananda Thakur shows an enchanting figure in the lap of
Vishnu to Mahendra and then leads him inside the Anandamath. There are three
images of the Mother in the abbey. These images depict the Mother’s past,
present and future. The Mother-as-she-was:
There he (Mahendra) saw a beautiful image of the Goddess as Bearer of
the earth, perfectly formed and decorated with every ornament.
Satyananda says, “She who subdued the wild beasts such as the elephant
and lion underfoot and set up her lotus throne in their dwelling place.
She was happy and beautiful, adorned with every ornament, radiant as
the risen sun and full of majesty. Prostrate yourself before her.”
(Chatterjee 149-150)
The Mother-as-she-is:
“Yes Kali”, said the monk. “Blackened and shrouded in darkness. She
has been robbed off everything; that is why she is naked. And because
the whole land is burning-ground, she is garlanded with skulls. And
she’s crushing her own gracious Lord7 underfoot. Alas, dear mother.”
The tears streamed down the monk’s face. Mahendra asked, “Why has
she a club8 and begging-bowl in her hands?”
“We are her Children, and that’s all we could put in her hands as
weapons”, said the monk. (150)
The Mother-as-she-will be:
Mahendra saw a golden ten-armed image of the Goddess in a large
marble shrine glistening and smiling in the early morning rays.
Prostrating himself, the monk said, “And this is the Mother-as-she-will-
be. Her ten arms reach out in ten directions, adorned with various
powers in the form of the different weapons she holds, the enemy

98 Nakul Kundra
crushed at her feet, while the mighty lion who has taken refuge there is
engaged in destroying the foe. Behold her whose arms are the
directions”— here Satyananda’s voice broke down and he began to
weep— “whose arms are the directions, who holds various weapons and
crushes the enemy and roams on the lordly lion’s back, who has
Lakshmi personifying good fortune on her right, and the goddess of
speech who bestows wisdom and learning on her left, with Kartikeya
signifying strength and Ganesh good success, in attendance! Come, let
us prostrate ourselves before the Mother”. (150)
Then with folded hands and upturned faces both cried out in unison:
“You who are blessed above all good things, the gracious one, who bring
all things to fruition, our refuge— Trymbaka, Gauri, Narayani—
salutations to you.”9 (150-151)
The female figure in the lap of Vishnu is a representation of the Mother.
The Mother in the past is “Jagaddhatri, the goddess of agriculture, who cleared
the forests and tamed wild beasts. Kali, the second goddess, denoted the lapse
from production and civilization, she marked the time of reversion to the jungles”
(Sarkar 3966). She sprang from Durga’s head and defeated Durga's
enemy Mahishasura. The Mother in the form of Kali is naked and garlanded with
skulls because the earth is impoverished under the chaotic rule and has become a
cremation ground. The Mother-as-she-will be, the third image, is Durga.
In Hinduism, Durga represents the empowering and protective nature of
motherhood. Her ten arms are well-weaponed and spread in ten directions; they
indicate her strong influence. With the lion as her steed, she is engaged in
demolishing Asura or the demon representing the forces of evil. Lakshmi and
Saraswati, her two daughters, represent wealth and learning respectively, and
Ganesha and Kartikeya, her two sons, symbolize success and strength
respectively. Thus, the image of Durga represents a happy and prosperous
people. The images of the goddesses bestow divinity upon the land through its
deification and the bond between the land and its inhabitants is the one between
a mother and her children, and a goddess and her devotees. It is a befitting
example of how a national culture is often “invented” 10 (Hobsbawm and Ranger)
and how a nation is, as Benedict Anderson put it, “imagined”.
The narrative of one’s birthland as the Mother is an emotive
construct11, and such a metanarrative “can play an extremely important role vis-à-
vis the establishment of a particular ideological position in a work of fiction”
(Hawthorn 208). The Children in the novel have developed a psycho-spiritual
connection with one another and the land through the discourse of the Vaishnav
Bengali nationalism. When Bhabananda sings the song in praise of the Mother
and refers to the land as his Mother, Mahendra casts doubt: “But that’s our land,
not a mother!” (Chatterjee 145). Later on, Satyananda shows three images of the
Mother to Mahendra, and these images arouse emotions in Mahendra. The
religious colours given to the Mother— “on Vishnu’s lap sat an enchanting image”
(149) – appeal to his traditional mindset, which is shaped or conditioned in a
society in which religion, gods and goddesses are a ‘supernatural’ reality. In the

novel, conditioning plays a significant role in the construction of nationalism

through “a self-designating shared belief” (Grosby 10).
People of different castes and classes may hail from the same land, but the
Children, who are essentially Vaishnav, believe that only they are the Children of
the Mother embodied in the land. On the other hand, the land is just a physical or
material entity for the Muslims in the novel. Besides, the Muslim king is cruel
and oppressive. Bhabananda asks rhetorically, “[B]ut does our Muslim king
protect us?” (147).Thus the Mother, the province of Bengal, is to be freed from
the Muslims, who are non-conformists and against whom a collective
consciousness among the Children is raised through the “cultural practice” of
“worshipping” “at Vishnu’s lotus-feet” (Chatterjee 188). The novel is focused on
the sentiment of nationalism which has taken birth out of the Children’s keen
desire of making Bengal a Vaishnav nation by eradicating the Muslims and
uniting all Vaishnav “brothers”.
…Jnanananda cried out in a loud voice, ‘For a long time we have been
wanting to smash the nest of these weaver-birds, to raze the city of these
Muslim foreigners, and throw it into the river- to burn the enclosure of
these swine and purify Mother Earth again! Brothers, that day has
come! (169)
The identification of “feeling of togetherness” or “collective self-consciousness”12
among the Children outlines the psycho-spiritual concept of the Vaishnav Bengali
nation, which differentiates “us” from “them” (Grosby 10), i.e. the Vaishnavs
from the Muslims of Bengal in the novel. Notably, religion and regime are
interlinked to develop the theme of nationalism in the novel.
The desire of making Bengal a state of the Bengali Vaishnav nation
conforms to the view that “nations are not just unified by culture; they are unified
by a sense of purpose: controlling the territory that the members of the group
believe to be theirs” (Barrington 713). After winning the battle, Satyananda says,
“So proclaim santan13 rule in Barendrabhumi, collect taxes from our subjects and
assemble an army to conquer the city. When people hear that Hindus are ruling,
many soldiers will gather under the santan’s banner” (Chatterjee 212). And
“[e]veryone said that the Muslims had been defeated and the land was the
Hindus’ once more! Let all cry “Hari” freely now!” (214). The Bengali Muslims
also make a claim to the nation-state of Bengal; although the northern Bengal is
not now under the Muslim control, yet none of the Muslims admits it (219). Thus,
the claim on a nation-state is not only physical but also psychological. This
reminds us of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Saadat Hasan Manto’s
“Toba Tek Singh”.
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee always used writing for social purpose and
his Anandamath is its characteristic example. The novel is “no ordinary novel; it
is a novel with a purpose” (Bose 76). The image of the Mother in the novel puts
across the message of “the deliverance of the Motherland” (76). Thus, the Mother
with her divine attributes is not only a creation but also a construction by the

100 Nakul Kundra
author. Tagore has beautifully differentiated ‘construction’ from ‘creation’ in the

following words: “Construction is for a purpose, it expresses our wants; but
creation is for itself, it expresses our very being. We make a vessel because water
has to be fetched. It must answer the question why. But when we take infinite
trouble to give it a beautiful form, no reason has to be assigned” (471). The
Mother as a construction exemplifies ‘art for society’s sake’.
Vande Mataram14
The phrase ‘Vande Mataram’ (‘Hail the Mother’/ ‘Mother, I bow to thee!’),
attributed to the Children’s song in Anandamath, acted as a clarion call to
Indians to join the freedom struggle in the twentieth century; it is said that
“Bankim’s contribution to Indian nationalism was not so much by way of a
virulent anti-British/anti-colonial sentiment as by making fellow Bengalis and
generally, all Indians, more self-conscious as a people” (Sen 93-4). However, in
the novel, Bankim’s focus is not on a pan-India identity15 but the Vaishnav nation
in Bengal16; the song “Vande Mataram” originally carried provincial 17 sentiments.
Sri Aurobindo described the song as ‘the national anthem of Bengal’ and Henry
Cotton, an ex-member of the Bengal Civil Service, pointed out that the song was
essentially a hymn to Bengal as the mother (Das 222-3). “…[T]he opening lines of
Bande Mataram describe the green cornfields of Bengal and not the sandy and
mountainous regions of Rajasthan or that it refers to seven crores of Bengalis
rather than to thirty or forty crores of Indians” (Sengupta 35).
“Vande Mataram” is an invocation to the Mother, a personification of the
motherland, who gives “joy and gifts in plenty” (Chatterjee 145). The Mother is
blessed with the beauties and bounties of nature- “Rich in waters”, “Rich in fruit”,
“Cooled by the southern airs”, “Verdant with the harvest fair”, “With nights that
thrill in the light of the moon” and “Radiant with foliage and flowers in bloom”
(145-6). She has all the gifts which are necessary for a people to be happy and
prosperous. Bankim pays homage to the land as the Mother and glorifies not only
her feminine attributes of beauty and productivity but also her defensive
strength. He says that the Mother’s power lies in her “Seventy million” Children
with “sharpened swords” (145). The Mother and the Children are identified with
each other; the Mother is the “wisdom”, “law”, “heart”, “soul”, “breath” and
“strength” of her Children (145). She is allegorically represented as Durga and
Lakshmi; she symbolizes virulent strength, beauty and prosperity. The mixed
Bengali and Sanskrit diction of “Vande Mataram” makes the song enchanting and
enthralling. The rhythmic quality of the composition leaves an everlasting
impression on the mind; its intense music soothes as well as inspires.
In Anandamath, the song acts as an effective tool of arousing the sentiment
of nationalism among the Children; its lyrical aspect makes it more appealing and
emotional. The Children have been psychologically conditioned to place their
faith in the “self-designating shared belief” (Grosby 10); they feel a sense of unity

through the idea of the “collective” Mother. It is a befitting example of how a

nation is “imagined” (Anderson) on the basis of “ethnicity” (Smith). In the novel,
as it has already been stated, Bankim’s idea of the Mother is confined to the
province of Bengal, as the Mother’s strength lies with “Seventy Millions” (Sapta
Koti), the approximate population of the then Bengal (Malkani 44); it further
enfolds only the Vaishnavs if its meaning is not symbolically deciphered.
“Vande Mataram” was originally written to fill up a blank page
of Bangadarshan around 1875, but “a cold and adverse observation of the
proofreader so annoyed” (Das 214) Bankim that he refrained from publishing it at
that time and incorporated it into Anandamath after some years. It is notable
that neither Anandamath nor “Vande Mataram” gained currency during the life-
time of Bankim, who once disappointedly said, “Of what use is my
writing Anandamath or even your attempting to understand its underlying
message…I see no future for a self-seeking and greatly disunited people such as
Bengali. Instead of the slogan ‘Vande Mataram’ (‘I bow to thee Mother’), let us
cry ‘Vande Udaram’ (‘Glory to the Belly’)” (qtd. in Sen 105-6). Although the song
attracted the attention of several writers and critics, yet it failed to receive
extraordinary appreciation during the life-time of Bankim.
It inspired a picture of Mother India by Harishchandra Haldar which
was printed in 1885 in a journal called Balak. In 1886 Hemchandra
Banerji wrote a poem, ‘Rakhi Bandhan’, wherein he included the first
two stanzas of Vandemataram. Hemchandra hailed it as the song of the
people of India. (Das 215)
However, the song became popular suddenly around 1905.
The song was sung at the Congress sessions twice, first by Rabindranath
Tagore in 1896 and subsequently by his niece Sarala Debi Chaudhurani in 1905.
In October 1905, a society named ‘Vandemataram Samprasay’ was founded in
Calcutta. It organized several processions in which the song was sung by
hundreds of young men (217). Its branches in Dacca and Navadwip helped the
song spread far and wide. “All of a sudden the word ‘Vandemataram’ became
prestigious and captivating; it was chosen as title of books and newspapers and
organizations. In September 1905 appeared Vandemataram, a collection of
patriotic songs, and in August 1906 the famous English daily Vandemataram,
under the editorship of Aurobindo” (217). In 1908, when Vinayak Damodar
Sarkar (1883-1966), the first Indian revolutionary to give a nationalist
interpretation of the armed revolt of 1857, and Hardayal, a Delhi born
revolutionary, organized the golden jubilee celebration of the 1857 revolt in
London, they printed the phrase ‘Vandemataram’ on the invitation cards and the
function was inaugurated with the song “Vande Mataram” (218). During Gandhi’s
non-cooperation movement, there was an upsurge in the popularity of the song
(220). The slogan ‘Vandemataram’ became a rallying cry during the freedom
struggle of India. Many people were enthusiastically ready to sacrifice their lives
in the name of ‘Vandemataram’.

102 Nakul Kundra
On the whole, the Muslims in India are antagonistic towards “Vande

Mataram”, as Anandamath in which the song appeared is said to carry an anti-
Muslim spirit and the references to the goddesses in the song are against Islam’s
doctrine of monotheism.
Urging the Muslims not to use ‘Vandemataram’ as a slogan, a handout
called ‘Lal Istahar’ (The Red Pamphlet) was issued during a riot in East Bengal in
1906-7 (220). The following opinion was expressed in a Bengali journal
named Islam Darshan in 1920: “‘The only and supreme Allah’s kalima Allah-o-
Akbar when combined with the Hindus’ anthem to mother India, Vande
Mataram’ was found objectionable- it was ‘pushing the Muslims towards idolatry
(kaufr)’” (qtd. in S. Bhattacharya 28). In the Calcutta riots of 1921,
‘Vandemataram’ was used as a slogan by the Hindus, probably for the first time,
against the Muslim rioters and from this time onwards ‘Vandemataram’ began to
be used as the war-cry of the Hindu fanatics (Das 220). Chiefly due to the Muslim
resistance to the song, the working committee of the Indian National Congress
selected a sub-committee including Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Nehru, Subhash
Chandra Bose and Narendra Dev to survey all the current national songs and “to
seek the advice of Tagore in finally selecting a song as the national anthem” (221).
Tagore was aware that the references to the goddess Durga in the song
could offend monotheists. So, only the first two stanzas were acceptable to him.
Tagore could not sympathize with the sentiments in the latter stanzas. Thus, he
was in favour of singing the first two stanzas of “Vande Mataram”. He wrote:
To me the spirit of tenderness and devotion expressed in its (the song’s)
first portion, the emphasis it gave to the beautiful and beneficial aspects
of our motherland made special appeal so much so that I found no
difficulty in dissociating from the rest of the poem, and from those
portions of the book of which it is a part. (qtd. 221)
Apparently with a view to setting the controversy at rest, the committee, after
much deliberations on the issue, recommended “the singing of the first two
stanzas only of the Vande Mataram song” in 1937 (Bose 88). It is said that the
song was given considerable importance because it was associated with and used
by freedom fighters, such as Bismil, Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh and
Ashfaqullah Khan, and not because of its incidental association
with Anandamath. In 1938, Mohammad Ali Jinnah demanded that the song
must be given up by the Congress. He wrote to Nehru: “Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru
cannot be unaware that Muslims all over have refused to accept the Vande
Mataram or any expurgated edition of the anti-Muslim song as a binding
National Anthem” (qtd. in S. Bhattacharya 39).
At the same time, many monotheists were of the opinion that the song was
neither idolatrous nor anti-Muslim. Mr. Rezaul Karim, a veteran writer and
Congress leader of Bengal, strongly refuted the allegation that Bankim despised
the Muslims and that “Vande Mataram” itself was idolatrous (Bose 88).
According to him, the song did not signify what was known in Arabic

as Ebadat or the worship of God but the worship of the motherland. Islam, in his
views, did not bar conceiving one’s motherland as the Mother, the image which
had already been portrayed by several Arabic and Persian poets (88). Besides,
Ramananda Chatterjee, a Brahmo by faith, was a monotheist and against
idolatry. He also found the song to be “neither idolatrous nor anti-Muslim” (S.
Bhattacharya 38). However, there is no denying that the Muslim League
persistently opposed the song till the division of India into India and Pakistan.
Ray suggests that the goddess imagery in the song is symbolic of certain
qualities-‘pursuit of creative energy, wealth and prosperity, knowledge and
enlightenment, devotion and dedication, and so on’- Bankim wanted his
countrymen to inculcate. Bankim’s idea of ‘Anushilan Dharma’ also carries the
spirit of humanism. On the other side, Irfan Ahmed criticizes the anti-Muslim
spirit of Anandamath and finds fault with the spirit of nationalism in it. He says,
“A nationalism which deliberately stigmatizes Muslims as ‘swine’ and ‘the other’
can by no means be an inclusive nationalism uniting under its fold the diverse
communities that inhabit this country” (30).
In 2006, Maulana Mahmood Madani (the general secretary of Jamiat
Ulama-i-Hind, an important Islamic organization in India) said, “No Muslim can
sing ‘Vande Mataram’ if he considers himself to be a true believer.” Then in 2009,
the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind issued a fatwa against the singing of Vande Mataram in
Deoband. In July 2017, the Madras High Court ordered that the “Vande
Mataram” song must be played and sung once a week in all educational
institutions and once a month in all other institutions, including workplaces like
factories and offices in Tamil Nadu. The high court’s ruling raised protests from
many circles. In July 2019, the Delhi High Court dismissed a plea seeking a
direction to the Centre to treat “Vande Mataram” on a par with “Jana Gana
Mana”, the national anthem of India.
Notes :
1 For the present study, I have chosen the Oxford edition of Anandamath, translated by
Julius J. Lipner. All subsequent references from this source will include the writer’s
surname and page number.
2 Nation is a tightly knit large group of people who are psychologically united with one
another through some homogeneity of their culture. “In Bankim’s conception, Santan
resistance has some mass appeal, for, in one of the several encounters with the
Yavanas, they are shown to have the support of no less than ten thousand men” (Sen
60). Another similar example of this is the fair: “Usually more than a lakh of people
gathered at the fair. However, since this was now the Vaishnav’s domain, surely they
would attend with great show” (Chatterjee 219). In the battlefield, “twenty five
thousand santans like the torrent of an ocean” fought. (225)
3 Vaishnavs worship the Hindu god Vishnu in his various forms and incarnations.

104 Nakul Kundra
4 Against the European rationalism.

5 “After conquering Lanka, Rama was supposed to have been asked by his half-brother,
Laksmana, to stay on and rule the island. Rama answered: ‘I would not want to,
Laksmana, even if Lanka were made of gold. One’s mother and birthland are greater
than heaven itself’” (Lipner 241).
6 “The Delphic Priest, the patriotic priest, the priest militant, spoke thus: ‘My mother
has the sea for her mantle, high mountains for her sceptre,’ and when asked who his
mother was, replied: ‘The lady with the dark tresses, whose gifts are beauty, wisdom,
and formerly, strength; whose dowry is a flourishing garden, full of fragrant flowers,
where bloom the olive and the vine, and who now groans, stabbed to the heart’.
(The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries by C. W. Heckethorn, London, 1897,
Vol. II. P. 188)” (Sengupta 55).
7 “The god Shiva, in familiar iconic form. But this can also be translated, ‘well-being’”
(Lipner 150).
8 “Probably in the shape of a skull” (Lipner 150).
9 “The Goddess, as Shakti or inherent power of the Godhead; here she transcends
sectarian divisions” (Lipner 151).
10 The Mother ‘invented’ by Chatterjee was inspired by the writer’s socio-cultural
contexts. The first mother in Bankim’s sequence is Jagaddhatri and “the annual
worship of Jagaddhatri had been introduced in Bengal as late as the 18th century by
the leading conservative Hindu King Krishanchandra Raya of Krishnagore” (Sarkar
3966). Besides, the manifestations of Durga and Kali, the concrete images of the
Mother, have roots in the Shiv-Shakti model of Hinduism. Indian Philosophy consists
of three organic models of man-woman relationship: 1. The Brahma- Maya Model 2.
The Purusha-Prakriti Model 3. The Shiva-Shakti Model. The Shiva-Shakti Model of
Shakta philosophy refers to a form of life where woman’s position is strong and
pronounced (Agrawal 50). The central thesis is that the world is produced by the
female element. Shiva is also considered as the form of Shakti. Here woman is
considered the mother of everything. She is neither inert nor like an animal but living
and intelligent. She is not an object of enjoyment but like a man, she is an enjoyer, an
agent (51). She is not an obstruction to liberation, but an aid in liberating the self.
11 “The child’s body is made of flesh and blood of the mother, likewise grains, water, air,
and vegetation produced in the motherland create the bodies of its inhabitants.
Therefore, it is natural for the inhabitants to deem their country as the
motherland” (Chaubey 50).
12 Grosby opines that the mind of the individual develops within various socio-cultural
contexts, such as family and educational institutions. One attains an understanding of
‘self’ amid such contexts. For example, a child learns its native language and
participates in ‘the same evolving tradition’. When such traditions “that make up part
of one’s self-conception are shared by other individuals as part of their self-
conception, one is then both related to those other individuals, and aware of the
relation. The relation itself, for example living in the same geographical area or
speaking a common language, is what is meant by the term ‘collective consciousness’”
(9).
13 ‘Santan’ means ‘The Children’ in Hindi.
14 ‘Bande Mataram’ according to Bengali script.

15 It is indirectly shown that India was not a nation at that time as the English employed
“the highly trained, well-equipped and very powerful Indian and foreign Company
troops” (Chatterjee 190) against the Children of Bengal. In the novel, the idea of
collective consciousness is confined to only Bengali Vaishnavs.
16 The territory of the then-Bengal included modern West Bengal, Bangladesh and parts
of Assam, Odissa, Bihar and Jharkhand.
17 It doesn’t mean that Bankim was essentially provincial in his outlook. S.K. Bose tells
us that Bankim had a “keen all-India awareness” (102). “Consciousness of India as a
whole burns bright many of his works. The essay ‘Bharat Kalanka’ (Vividha
Prabandha I) may be said to represent the gist of his thinking on the matter. Herein
he attributes the country’s downfall to the absence of the ideas of nationalism and
political independence in India…In another essay, Bangadarshaner Patra Suchana,
he stresses the urgency of uniting mind and effort among the great variety of races
and language groups constituting India…In a letter written to S. C. Mukherji in 1872
he says: ‘There is no hope for India until the Bengali and the Punjabi understand and
influence each other and can bring their joint influence to bear upon the
Englishman’… Historical studies being the most effective means of stirring up
national consciousness, Bankim regrets the lack of a correct history of India, that is,
Indian history from the Indian point of view, as much as he regrets the lack of a true
history of Bengal…In Dharmatattwa (Chapter 24) the preceptor warns that India
must not imitate the aggressive patriotism of the west but balance patriotism with
universalism...” (102-3).
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pp. 108-122
MIGRATION AND MEMORY IN JAMES WELCH’S

THE HEARTSONG OF CHARGING ELK : A
POSTCOLONIAL STUDY
Issa Omotosho Garuba
Abstract
It is an observable phenomenon in every immigrant globally that, at
some points in their sojourn in a foreign land, they are often
overwhelmed in varying degrees with the memory of home, especially
when they have to deal fundamentally with the novel or alien culture to
which they have been exposed. Individual immigrant found in this state
is perceivable as being indeed torn between two cultural realities. In
migration literature, this condition is termed ‘ambivalence’. On the
other hand, the immigrant’s ability to adjust and adapt to the new
culture and build a new hybrid life, amidst such cultural ambivalence, is
regarded as ‘adjustment’. In this study, this experience of ambivalence
and adjustment is being ascertained in a culturally displaced Native
American protagonist of James Welch’s novel The Heartsong of
Charging Elk, who is found an immigrant in France in the nineteenth-
century. To this end, the experience is revealed in the study as
constituting the underlying narrative essence of the novel. Specifically,
the significance of this methodology is anchored on two cardinal points:
one, it constructs the novel as a significant work of migration literature
in the Native American literary canon, thereby further justifying a post-
colonial discursivity in the canon in general. Two, it also critically
locates the discourse of contemporary Native American identity in the
United States within the context of hybridity and difference in the novel.
Keywords : Post-colonial Discourse, Migration, Ambivalence and
Adjustment, Memory, Native American Literature.
Introduction
By the term ‘migrant literature’, what immediately comes to the mind is
that reference is being made to a literary canon of a category of writers who are
writing in nations or geographical locations other than their original nationalities
as migrant individuals. Indeed, thematically, what underscores the rudiment of
migrant literature will corroborate this assertion. According to Anna Nasilowska,
migrant literature encompasses:

Migration and Memory in James Welch’s The Heartsong … 109
intercultural relations, including the juxtaposition between a person’s

own cultural baggage– their behavior and stereotypes brought over from
their birthplace – and their new environment, as well the problems that
emerge when attempting to adapt to new location, to forge a new self
and a detached attitude towards any permanent definitions. (6)
However, within the post-colonial critical context, what is central to this literary
genre is more of the narrative experience in the text than the writer’s status as an
immigrant in another cultural setting. In this regard, taking a holistic view of the
concept, it would refer to “the whole range of migrant experiences, exilic or
diasporic, faced by immigrants, refugees, expatriates and all other travelling
individuals” (Naguib 22). This, thus, presupposes that a non-immigrant writer’s
work could also be characterised as migrant literature provided the
aforementioned major preoccupation of this genre constitutes the focus of such a
work. In other words, according to Fatemeh Pourjafari and Abdoali Vahidpour, a
writer “can be accounted as a migrant artist in his homeland, because what
distinguish the migrant writers from the non-migrant is not the geographical
borders and places, but the hybrid nature of their works” (687).
It is within the above context that the novel The Heartsong of Charging
Elk by a Native American, James Welch, who is a non-migrant writer, is being
considered in this study as work of migrant literature premised on its narrative
content which bothers on the colonisation of the American Indians and its
specific consequence of migration, among others. The novel narrates the
experience of cultural crossing of a Native American, Charging Elk who joins
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show on a performance tour to Europe in the nineteenth-
century as a way of escaping the unpleasant life on the reservation. This being a
development against the backdrop of the European invasion and subsequent
settlement on the Native American land, and the eventual uprooting and
confinement of the native people to various reservations put in place for them
against their wills. Maria Brave Heart and Lemy DeBryun offer an overview of the
atmosphere following the European invasion and settlement on the Native land:
Armed conflict and removal of tribes from traditional lands became the
norm. Numerous tribes faced “long walks” where many, if mot the
majority, died from disease, fatigue, and starvation. As the reservation
system developed, tribal groups were often forced to live together in
restricted areas. When lands were found to be valuable to the
government and Whites, more often than not, ways were found to take
them and resettle Natives elsewhere. (62-63)
Left in a hospital in Marseille by the Wild West show when he sustains an
injury, Charging Elk is, against the failure of every measure to repatriate him,
forced to remake his life in a strange land. Meanwhile, with the ensuing
experience, he is constantly bedeviled with strong memory of home; his culture,
land and people. This initially triggers an ambivalent atmosphere that is later
weathered by the protagonist’s ability to adjust and adapt to the new culture. To
this end, therefore, the feeling of ambivalence and adjustment exhibited by a

110 Issa Omotosho Garuba
culturally displaced individual is conceived in this study as constituting the

underlying narrative essence of the novel, thereby making it a significant work of
migration literature of Native American literary canon.
Migration in the Postcolonial Context

The term ‘post-colonial’ is used to refer to “all the cultures affected by the
imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Ashcroft,
Tiffin and Griffiths 2). What makes the literatures of these cultures distinct,
“beyond their special and distinctive characteristics”, is attributed to their
emergence “out of the experience of colonization” and the assertion of themselves
by “foregrounding the tension with imperial power, and by emphasizing their
differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre” (2). This fundamental
ideology presupposes that “post-colonial theory has its roots in the frustration of
the colonized and the tensions and clashes between their culture and that of the
dominant group” (Pourjafari andVahidpour683). To this end, several concepts
have evolved out of the post-colonial theory and condition, dealing with specific
aspects of colonialism and its effects on the colonized in the post-colonial era.
These range from hybridity, hegemony, alienation, exile, diaspora and migration,
among others.
The last in the above continuum, migration, which is said to be a relatively
recent tenet in post-colonial theory (Pourjafari andVahidpour685), constitutes
the major focus in this study. Prominently, it has been employed in post-colonial
theory as “a metaphor for movement and dislocation” (Naguib 22) with a view to
enhancing its understanding as “a site for interrogating fixity in identity” (22).
Homi Bhabha and Salmon Rushdie are its major proponents who have indeed
metaphorically conceptualized it in their respective post-colonial theories. In
Homi Bhabha’s conception, it is argued that:
Metaphor, as the etymology of the word suggests, transfers the meaning
of home and belonging, across the ‘middle passage’, or the central
European steppes, across those distances, and cultural differences, that
span the imagined community of the nation people. (139-140)
By imagined community above, Bhabha suggests a collective
imagination of a nation by a people – migrants or metropolitans –
whose belief or imagination translates to a set of shared commonalities
(141). Assmaa M. Naguib posits that Bhabha’s argument in this context
is that “the migrant possesses the power to offer imaginations different
from that of the nation”. (23)
Similarly, Salman Rushdie conceives migrants as “metaphorical beings”. This is
premised on the connotative notion of metaphor which suggests “the migration of
ideas into images” (278). In his view, the social dislocation and disruption of
home place, which often characterizes migration, enable migrants to realize that
“reality is an artifact” (280). The relativity with which things appear to the
migrant, upon the exposure to a different culture, aids his/her resistance to all

“absolute forms of knowledge” (280). It is, therefore, on this basis of theoretical

metaphorization that, according to Assmaa M. Naguib, both Homi Bhabha and
Salman Rushdie “introduce migration as a site of empowerment where the
experience of pain or loss is diminished and where the privilege of unique insight
is highlighted” (23).
Andrew Smith makes a justification for migration as a significant concept
in post-colonial theories by summarizing its inherent potentiality as that which
underlies the keen interest of post-colonial scholars in it: “Fundamental to
postcolonial criticism has been the puzzle of how aspects of life and experience in
one social context are impacting on worlds that are geographically and culturally
distant” (244). Hence, the figure of the migrant writer assumes “a forerunner in a
new type of politics in which groups no longer mobilize on the basis of the old
dichotomies of opposition, but move together in and through hybridity and
difference” (249). In this way, with reference to the conceptual metaphorizations
of Homi Bhabha and Salman Rushdie, it is posited that literature of migration
assumes “a kind of metaphor, a symbol that catches many of the shared
understanding and assumptions which give postcolonial studies its parameters
and shape” (250).
According to Fatemeh Pourjafari and Abdolali Vahidpour, there are three
general sub-concepts that are of relevance to migration literature (685). These
are hybridity, ambivalence and adjustment, and abandonment and return.
Meanwhile, for the purpose of this study, the workings of ambivalence and
adjustment in post-colonial experience are discussed as a sub-framework.
Ambivalence in migration literature is described as “the character’s reaction
towards any complex, confusing or emotionally charged social phenomenon”
(Pourjafari and Vahidpour 687). In this way, “the migrant character’s experiences
are analyzed in the light of ambivalence as either an enduring emotion, a
situational, specific attitude, or even as a permanent life condition” (687-688).
These complexities create two opposing affections visible in the migrant’s typical
life experiences, hence a character is portrayed amidst these complexities as a
migrant who “move between identities, experiencing the exile’s desire to retain
cultural roots, whilst at the same time, being drawn to the acceptance of and
integration to the new to the new culture” (688). On the other hand, adjustment
comes to play in the character’s experiences as a resolution to his ambivalent
struggles. This is achieved when the migrant character “willingly adjusts himself
to the new environment, forgetting the either roles and choosing the third space:
the hybrid in-betweeness” (688). Critically, in all of the above; from the general
post-colonial literature to migration literature and to the sub-tenet of
ambivalence and adjustment, it is apparent that the role of memory in this
complex web of identity and/or cultural location and dislocation is significantly
presupposed, given that a migrant character is portrayed as being embattled with
the image of home which constantly finds its way into his/her psyche in the face
of new cultural realities.

Synopsis of the Novel

Based on historical events, Welch narrates the story of a Native American
(an Oglala Sioux) deserted in Marseille, France, having travelled a wide and
cultural distance from a familiar tribal life in Black Hills of South Dakota to a
strange existence on the streets of Marseille. Prior this, following the futile years
of fighting resistibly with the American government, the Oglalas have finally
surrendered and begun to live on Pine Ridge Reservation. As a young boy,
Charging Elk witnesses the heavy struggle between the Natives and the US
government. Meanwhile, determined to be free, he takes preference in living in
the old ways on the Stronghold, other than on reservation. With his skills, he is
attracted to Buffalo Bill, the leader of a Wild West show, a performance troupe
which travels across the capitals of Europe for various performance shows. In
Marseille, Charging Elk is injured and during his convalescence, the show moves
on, leaving him behind without making any provision for his wellbeing. He
escapes from the hospital and, at the time, he can neither speak French nor
English. He finds himself in the hands of the authorities led by the American vice
consul to France, Franklin Bell, who tries but fails to get him repatriated. Thus,
his life in France is lonely and filled with confusion and longing as well as being
haunted by sad dreams of his family and homeland. He falls into series of events
including living with a fishmonger, Rene, a love affair with a prostitute (Marie)
and a shocking murder of a despicable man (a gay) that turns his life around
utterly beyond his imagination. Following his prolonged trial; with extenuating
circumstances considered, he is sentenced to life imprisonment, instead of death
penalty. He spends almost ten years in prison before his release on morality
ground. He eventually marries and settles in Marseille, given no consideration for
returning home anymore.
Displacement and Cultural Recovery in Native American Narratives:

The Import of Memory
Many accounts of the Indian/white contact have revealed that the
European invasion of America during the colonisation era and the subsequent
forced removal of the so-called indigenous people from their ‘sacred’ territories
largely subjected the native people to a condition of displacement as well as huge
cultural loss. This is because territory, in this context, is not defined solely in
geographical term; it encompasses such sociological terms as community,
culture, and identity. For the Native Americans, “land, plants, and animals are
considered sacred relatives, far beyond a concept of property. Their loss became a
source of grief” (Brave Heart and DeBruyn 62). This, in a way, recognises the
inseparability of the geographical and psychological realities. Thus, the novel
under study is seen as being informative of the psychosocial effects of removal of
one from one’s consecrated community and land. The psychosocial effect is often
engendered by what is termed ‘recovery’ in the criticism of Native American
literature. This recovery process is being significantly enhanced by ‘memory’,
which is a peculiar concept that is associated with post-colonial narratives.

In the introduction to Other Destinies: Understanding Native American

Narratives (1992), Louis Owens posits that ‘recovery’ is central to the study of
American Indian fiction, specifically the recovery of indigenous identity (5). He
explains that one of the fundamental questions of this genre and its criticism –
what is an Indian? – “comprehends centuries of colonial and postcolonial
displacement” (4). Thus, “for writers who identify as Native Americans”, in the
context of such displacement, the novel represents “a process of reconstruction of
self-discovery and cultural recovery” (5). The recovery process largely depends on
the memory of place as well as community. In the narrative of The Heartsong,
the protagonist, Charging Elk is critically pictured in this psychosocial realm of
recovery, leading to question of cultural ambivalence and adjustment, through
constant memory of an ideal home, from territorial (geographical, cultural and
identity) displacement.
Migration, Memory and Ambivalence in the Novel

Assmaa M. Naguib defines migration as “a journey away from home in the
sense that it places the person in a setting that is previously unfamiliar, away
from ‘the home’s mundane realities’” (31). In this regard, if home seems
unavailable, a person could turn to its memory as a compensation or recovery
strategy (Porter 304). As a migrant who finds himself in an environment where
the realities of home are no longer ideal or shared collectively, the more this
awareness hits him, the more attempts he displays to preserve his idea of ‘home’.
Indeed, one of the routes to this is ‘memory’. The immigrant Charging Elk is
caught up in the grip of these idealized memories and the uncertainty of a return
to his homeland.
According to the modern usage of the term, migration refers to “the trend
of displacement and movement made by individuals with the hope to find more
personal convenience or better their material or social conditions” (Pourjafari
andVahidpour680-681). In the instance of Charging Elk, he indeed joins the Wild
West show on the European tour with a view to finding a better social condition
from that of the life on reservations as a result of having been displaced from
their original territories and confined to these reservations by the whites. The
process that leads to his eventual migration with the Show begins when, at the
age of thirteen and having spent a year on the reservation, he and a fellow tribe,
Strikes Plenty run away from white man’s school at which they have been placed
by the white’s authority. In their condition as the colonised, it is such a move that
could be described as an unconscious resistance or defense mechanism in the
psyches of such little individual American Indians against white’s cultural
colonisation. The duo continue to move from one place to another so as to avoid
being caught by the white officials, especially when they become aware of their
threat to get them, as well others who have followed suit, back onto reservations.
Their sojourn away from the white man’s territory lasts for a period of nine years
before individuals in their camp go their separate ways:

…Later they would move again, when the wasichus threatened to come
get them, along with other children. They moved to a place in the
badlands called the stronghold, along tall grassy butte with sheer cliffs
on three sides that could be easily defended. But the white men, soldiers
and settlers alike, were afraid of the stronghold. The Indians out there
were considered bad Indians, even by their own people who had settled
at the agency and the surrounding communities. Charging Elk and
Strikes Plenty lived off and on at the Stronghold for the next nine years,
hunting game, exploring, learning and continuing the old ways with the
help of two old medicine people. (Heartsong14)
For Charging Elk, joining Buffalo Bill’s show was an option at a point in
time in the past. But, now that what has led him to his present state of loneliness
in a foreign land is being attributed to it, he recalls it regrettably: “For the first
time in his life, he wished he had stayed in school and learn the brown suit’s
language. “Buffalo Bill,” he said, without hope. “Wild West.” (14). In view of
these, it suffices therefore to assert that he leaves his native land in a desperate
bid to escape confinement and explore greener pasture following the occupation
of their land by the white colonisers, which is equally one of the circumstances
identified as underlying migration (Pourjafari and Vahidpour). Indeed, according
to John Gamber, the novel portrays a young, male Native protagonist who
eventually becomes a migrant in a novel geographical setting as a result of his
sheer resistance to:
the physical stasis mandated by US governmental requirements of
Indian people broadly – that they be bound to reservations not only
(historically) as a form of containment if not outright incarceration, but
also (more recently) in order to conform to a discourse of Native
authenticity by which only reservation Indians count as “real
Indians” (97)
Finding his way from their territory with the Wild West show to France as a
performer, he becomes ill in Marseille and eventually faints in the course of
attempting to perform. He recuperates in a hospital from which he flees
afterwards. Subsequent to his convalescence and escape from the hospital, and
the realization that the troupe has left him behind, Charging Elk is doomed to
exile coupled with the series of events which unfold thereafter. In the light of this,
he is found as being territorially displaced. This is justifiable as the overall sense
of geographical, cultural and communal displacement begins to set in
overwhelmingly on him with the memory of home, right from the very moment
he wakes up in the hospital as he regains his consciousness:
He was surprised to see many beds, maybe a hundred of them, virtually
all of them occupied. As he surveyed the room, he suddenly remembered
Featherman. The night he had come to the sickhouse, Featherman had
been in the next bed. Now there was a wasichu with a waxy face and
thick sandy hair in the bed. But where was Featherman? Had he really
been there? Had he been a dream? Charging Elk’s heart fell down as he
remembered the dull, flat eyes. Yes, he had been there. And now he was

dead. But perhaps there were other Buffalo Bill Indians in the other
beds. His heart lifted again and he thought he might shout “All my
relatives!” in Lakota… (Heartsong19)
Upon the above realisation that he is dreadfully lost in the wilderness of the
‘other’, what vigorously runs through his mind as he moves around the streets of
Marseille is the recovery from the loss, which can only be enhanced by a kind of
re-union between him and his familiar territory, his native land. This is
understandable considering Douglas. J. Porteous’ view that home can only be
comprehended from a migrants’ perspective, whose temporary loss of the feeling
of home pushes them to attempt to recreate it (387). In the instance of this
migrant protagonist, that recreation of home is only feasible in his memory.
The street Charging Elk walks along is crowded with people and noisy, and
the way he is strangely looked at everywhere causes him a sudden remembrance
of how different from these people he is. Even in his native land the whites are a
different race that looks upon them as wild savages, which is also one of the
grounds on which his people are being confined to reservations. Nevertheless, he
has his people there and, indeed, it is a familiar and free world that is quite
incomparable with the present one he has found himself. This “feeling of
community”, which appears to have been disrupted by migration, is what
Charging Elk tries to rebuild in his memory. This is because, to a migrant,
thoughts of home assume “an act of remembering” (Ahmed343). Thus, he grows
tensed, and the psychosocial import this has on him is substantially of the
recovery process as it is being played out in his memory:
But he felt obliged to follow up on his slim chance. As he crossed the
field to the street that led to the station, he noticed that his fuzzy
slippers had become wet with dew. He almost chuckled at this latest
problem. Wakan Tanka was not content with just the hunger and
weakness of his pitiful child – now he was given him cold feet. Charging
Elk looked up at the sky to beseech the Great Mystery and he rain clouds
where once had been sun. Nevertheless, he stood at the edge of the field
and sang a song of pity and prayed with all his heart that Wakan Tanka
would guild him home to his people, to his own land. (Heartsong49)
The above mental state is both definitive and suggestive of the world of
racial difference, occasioned by the whites colonizing system as a result of which
Charging Elk is found a migrant. As a Native American, Charging Elk is seen in
the process of individual and cultural preservation and recovery. It is a
“continued agony” which Frantz Fanon claimed was the ultimate objective of the
colonizing system. On this note, the reader realizes that, at that point in time, the
character of Charging Elk is in an unconscious state, hence he can perceptibly
steps out of his body and fly to the country of his people, regarded as the real
world, in a gratifying and comforting condition. The act of his leaning
momentarily against a building with his eyes closed to shut out the world around
is a pointer to this journey into the unconscious perception. By the time he opens
his eyes, he has returned to the conscious state, and thus realizes that he has only

travelled home through his memory but still at the very same world of the
‘others’.
Oblivious of the fact that he is in an unconscious state of mind in his
momentary trip to his country, it appears to him that his country home is now
empty of people by the time he regains his consciousness. This makes him to
experience more loneliness and estrangement. Subsequently he is overwhelmed
with good memories of home until he later relapses into dreams, both day and
night, largely premonitory ones that point to imminent extinction of his people
back home:
One night Charging Elk dreamed. He had wanted to dream of the girl,
because in dreams many things happen that one desires. But this dram
was not a happy one; nor was it about the girl in the blue robe. In his
dream he was standing on one of the sheer cliffs of the Stronghold.
Something was wrong and he was weeping. He wanted to jump off the
cliff, but every time he tried, a big gust of wind blew him back. He tried
four times… but each time the wind pushed him back, until he was
exhausted from his labours. But the next time he approached the cliff,
too weak to even attempt to jump, he looked down he saw his people
lying in a heap at the bottom. They lay in all positions and directions –
men, women and children, even old ones. They lay like buffalos that had
been driven over the cliffs by hunters, and Charging Elk understood why
he had been weeping. As stood and looked down at his people, he heard
the wind roared in his ears like a thousand running buffaloes, but in the
roar, he heard a voice, a familiar voice, a Lakota voice, and it said, “You
are my only son.” And when he turned back to his village at Stronghold,
there was nothing there – no people, no horses or lodges, not even the
rings of rock that held the lodge covers down – not even one smoldering
fire pit. Everything was gone. (Heartsong235)
On the foregoing, since his country home is empty of his people, and
having thus resigned to fate, he takes to enjoying life in the so-called foreign land
that initially appears horrible. Between these processes of ambivalence and
adjustment, memory plays a significant role in that his constant remembering of
home, which initially places him in-between the two worlds, eventually
precipitates his adjustment to settle for life in the current world, having imagined
in his memory the likely calamity of swinging into extinction that will have
befallen his people. At this point, he seems to be getting out of his moments of
ambivalence, thereby paving way for the process of adjustment and/or
adaptation into the new cultural setting.
Charging Elk and the Process of Adjustment

The atmosphere or process of adjustment begins to play out in Charging
Elk’s mind the moment he is taking in by a fishmonger family, Rene and
Madeleine, to live with them following the failed attempt of the American vice
consul in France, Franklin Bell to get him repatriated on account that “he lacks

any documentation and is not a citizen of the United States (citizenship not being
conferred upon most Native people until 1924)” (Gerald 98). In view of this, the
vice consul hands him over to the fishmonger to live with them for sometimes till
the process of his repatriation is finally in place. Charging Elk lives and work with
them happily and, more or less, like a family.
Nevertheless, the horror of the dream about the extinction of his people
and homeland never ceases to haunt him. This indeed is an enduring situation of
ambivalence and adjustment being demonstrated by the migrant protagonist.
The complexities surrounding his state of two opposing affections (of his far away
native land and the currently inhabited white world) are what Fatemeh Pourjafari
and Abdolali Vahidpour regard as “the complexities of the migrants who move
between identities, experiencing the exile’s desire to retain cultural roots, whilst
at the same time, being drawn to the acceptance of and integration to the new
culture” (688). This critical dimension can be further corroborated in John
Gamber’s reading of the novel alongside another Native American narrative,
Gerard Vizenor’s Blue Ravens within the context of what is described as a
peculiar narrative frame in Native American narratives – homing plot. In his
study, a specific insight is offered on the frame of ambivalent in which Charging
Elk’s situation could be contextualised:
Charging Elk’s (the protagonist of Welch’s novel) adaptation to France is
often read as extremely positive. However, as I will demonstrate, his
transition is in fact quite complicated, and I argue, ambivalent at best.
Such an ambivalence is fitting, when one considers that these moves out
of settler colonial spaces are also moves in to colonizing metropoles;
these indigenous characters cannot simply cast off the colony or
colonization. Specifically, Charging Elk represents an always-ready
(temporally) diasporic subject, removed from what he perceives to be
home not in space but also in time-even when he dwells in the Oglala
Stronghold. (97-98)
Charging Elk’s encounter with a prostitute, Marie, marks another turn of event in
his life. Over time, he becomes obsessed with her to the extent of nursing the idea
of getting her married despite that he knows she is not only a whore but also a
white. The significance of this obsession with Marie is seen within the contexts of
what Fatemeh Pourjafari and Abdolali Vahidpour conceive as the situation
whereby the migrant character “willingly adjusts himself to the new environment,
forgetting either roles and choosing the third space: the hybrid in-betweeness”
(688). This presupposes that if the marital proposal pushes through, the question
of cultural hybridity would automatically set in.
However gratifying the imaginative development could be to Charging Elk,
Marie seems to be unaffected by any form of emotion, which is understandably
intrinsic to her personality as a prostitute. Her inability to reciprocate Charging
Elk’s affection for her not only turns out chaotic but also highlights a strand of
the discrepancies between the two cultures – the question of same sex

intercourse which is absolutely alien to a typical American Indian who had not
hitherto left the shores of their territory.
Upon the obsession with Marie, Charging Elk is now frequent in her room.
But on a fateful day, a gay man, Arman Breteuil, conspired with Marie to drug
Charging Elk in her room so that he can access him sexually; a deal for which
Marie is paid the sum of twenty francs. In the process the man ends up being
killed by Charging Elk. Although the details of the episode is not offered in the
narrative, it is deductible from the age-long warring separation and enmity
between their race and the white settlers from Europe, reminiscent of the build
up to and the actual Battle of Little Bighorn narrated in another James Welch’s
novel Killing Custer, that such an act could have been done furiously, considering
the nature of such utterly alien assault on his personality. This is because no
matter how happy and friendly he is while he finds himself among them, the
racial discrepancy and the ensued atmosphere of enmity is at constant operation
in his unconscious mind, and thus anything of such horribly alien assault could
affectively trigger it, which could equally result to sheer damage to the other
party.
The above is similar to the story of Michael Adonis, a young coloured South
African and the protagonist of a famous apartheid narrative, Alex La Guma’s A
Walk in the Night. In his encounter with a white man, Mr. Doughty, an argument
ensues between them over a bottle of wine. And, as a personality who is already
burning with sheer anger over his disengagement from his job for daring to speak
back at his white boss, coupled also with the various points of disadvantages the
racialised society pushes them to as blacks, he kills Doughty. This, indeed, is
unconsciously consequential of the similar racialised social formation in
apartheid South Africa. On this line of thought, the prosecuting counsel’s
observation in the court during Charging Elk’s trial is keenly informative. The
counsel affirmatively says that he lives happily like a family with Rene and
Madeleine, yet he leaves them, and eventually finding life in a despicable home of
prostitutes and smokers alike:
“Ah! He finds the true Frenchmen, the God-fearing natives of this soil,
not to his liking?” the prosecutor had directed his question to the jury.
There was not a dark face among them. The hawk-faced advocate
objected, and the chief magistrate agreed that question was
inflammatory. The prosecutor explained that he was mere trying to
establish a pattern that began when the defendant left a fine French
family and went to live in an area of the city where the morals of the
inhabitants left much to be desired. (Heartsong329)
By inference from the above, therefore, it means that his counsel holds
vehemently to the view that the realities of this unconscious mind are beginning
to set in, to overtake his consciousness. And, indeed, if it does, definitely there
will be gradual withdrawal of the ‘self’ from the ‘other’. Hence, regardless of the
comfort and happiness with which Charging Elk lives in their midst, he is

susceptible to withdrawing to himself whenever his unconscious relates to his

consciousness his status of racially inferior difference from the whites.
Again, in the above, his memory is significant in the shaping of that phase
in his sojourn in Marseille as a migrant, taking into cognizance his counsel’s
argument at his trial which suggests that Charging Elk has, all along, been in a
state of mental imbalance. In this context, moreover, Charging Elk’s mental
imbalance can be construed as the frame of ambivalence operating in his psyche.
Hence, what appears to be a relief from this psychical trouble is the adjustment
process that takes over him and makes him to imaging the possibility of a
comfortable life well in the white world, noting that one of the reasons for which
he runs away from their reservation is the possibility of a cohabitation and/or
dealing with the whites in their school. Indeed, according to Fatemeh Pourjafari
and Abdolali Vahidpour, that state in which Charging Elk is pictured “acts as a
passage which should be crossed by the migrant character to reach the more
secure coast of adjustment” (688).
Although the adjustment process indeed creates some considerable relief
for him, if he could imaging settling down for life in Marseille and also getting
married to a white (a supposed enemy figure in his native land), it is however
apparently short-lived. Thus, his adjustment can be considered as being a
truncated process, initially, in a migrant because he is unable to fulfill it on a full
scale, obviously owing to the insincerity on the part of Marie, what is described as
the migrant character’s process of becoming “successful in contacting with
diverse cultures within a created hybrid space” (688). This means that if Marie
had reciprocated Charging Elk’s affection for her, it would have, at this point,
translated to a whole embrace of life over there and, thus, his experience of
alienation would be drastically abated.
Nevertheless, eventually, he is able to attain the process fully following his
release from incarceration, rather than being overwhelmed with homesickness or
thoughts of returning to his native land, considering the circumstance of alien
assault surrounding his imprisonment. Largely because the situation at hand is
quite overpowering on him, he falls in love with another young white girl,
Nathalie, the daughter of a man, Vincent Gazier on whose farm he now works.
After a period of amorous relationship between him and Nathalie, and having
spent considerable period of time with them and found his relationship with the
family worthwhile, he moves to Nathalie’s father to get her married: “I wish to
take your daughter to be my wife,” he said, now looking up. “It would be an honor
to me” (394). From the man’s body language and response, an insight is gleaned
on the unimaginability or inconceivability of such move or request by an Indian
man to take a white woman as a wife, as pointed out earlier in the case of Marie:
Vincent looked into Charging Elk’s face. He didn’t know where to begin.
He wasn’t angry; he was too dumbfounded to be angry. He just saw the
impossibility of such a request. There was no reason in the world to
make such a request, much less grant it. Surely the savage would
understand that. But in the back of his mind Vincent wondered if the

Indians of America just decided to take a wife, no matter who or

why. (394)
In view of this, it can be established that the move further justifies the fact that,
truly, the atmosphere is describable as a process by which a migrant is strongly
willing to adjust and adapt to the new cultural reality and/or setting.
This idea is further reinforced after they have got married and returned to
Marseille. It is in an encounter with some fellow Lakota family who are part of
the Wild West show upon the show’s return to Marseille. In this encounter,
Charging Elk inquires after his parents, and one of them, Joseph, tells him that
his mother, Double Strike Woman, “still lives at Pine Ridge Agency. She has little
cabin. She is well” (430). However, his father “died three winters ago. Influenza. I
didn’t know him well, but there was a big ceremony at the church, then at the
community hall. Everybody went” (431). While Joseph queries Charging Elks’
failure to be home for his father’s burial, being an important man in the
community, he adds further that his mother lives alone and would be extremely
glad to see him home again. Ordinarily, the subject of their conversations as well
as the persuasions by Joseph, ought to constitute plausible grounds for Charging
Elk to consider returning home, yet he replies him:
“This is my home now, Joseph. I have a wife. Soon I will have a child,
the Moon of Frost in the Tipi.” Charging Elk stopped as he realized how
improbable this must have sounded to Joseph. Then he said, in a wistful
voice, “I am the young man who came to this country so long ago. I was
just about your age and I thought of it all as a great adventure. But now
here I am, a man of thirty-seven winters. I load and unload ships. I
speak the language of these people. My wife is one of them and my heart
is her heart. She is my life now and soon we will have another life and
the same heart will sing in all of us.” (437)
It is obvious from the above that Charging Elk has deeply adjusted to the new
culture. Hence, unlike when the culture is still new to him and is thus torn
between homesickness and adaptation, he now finds it unthinkable to return
home anymore, not even for his mother’s sake: “She will be all right,” he said.
“She will be better off without me. By now, she thinks I am dead for sixteen years.
Let her remember me with a loving heart” (437).
The study has constructed the substance of the narrative experience in the
novel as typical of a work of migration literature in spite of the author’s
geographical status as a non-immigrant Native American writer. It relies on the
theoretical construct of Fatemeh Pourjafari and Abdolali Vahidpour which
conceives the subject of migration literature as unrestricted to authorial
geographical location and rather places emphasis on the narrative content or
experience of a literary work as the major determinant. The foregoing is primarily
conceived against the backdrop of the historical European invasion, on a
colonising mission, of the Native American territory which is said to have
accounted for the displacement of multitudes of them, as in the case of Charging
Elk, from their various sacred territories. It is a colonial condition of the Native

Americans which has arguably generated in the modern time what is conceivable
as post-colonial reflections and traces in their writing. Hence, James Welch’s
narrative of a Native American migration to Europe during their colonisation is a
manifestation of Assmaa Mohamed Naguib’s assertion that both Homi Bhabha
and Salman Rushdie “introduce migration as a site of empowerment where the
experience of pain or loss is diminished and where the privilege of unique insight
is highlighted” (23). That is, to the Native American novelist, on the one hand,
the migration narrative provides a significant insight into the ‘nativity’ of the
Native Americans; their strong cultural affiliations and resistance to externalities
that are capable of disrupting their collective existence and identity as a people.
On the other hand, owing to this insight, the inherent experience of pain or loss is
thus being caused to diminish in the face of the strong self-assertion which
underlies the narrative.
In view of the above, as a migrant narrative, the discourse in the novel
ultimately assumes what Andrew Smith considers as “a forerunner in a new type
of politics in which groups no longer mobilize on the basis of the old dichotomies
of opposition, but move together in and through hybridity and difference” (249).
This endpoint of hybridity and difference, as opposed to the old dichotomy of
white and red, is apparently what the protagonist eventually demonstrated by
insisting on not returning home and yet cherishes his identity as an American
Indian. To this end, another American Indian with the Wild West show alongside
Joseph, Andrew says to Charging Elk against his decision not to return home:
“You are not a stranger. You are Lakota, wherever you might go. You are one of us
always” (435-436). This means that though Charging Elk is no longer that raw
American Indian he used to be; being now a hybrid of two cultures, yet he would
forever be different as a Lakota man.
Critically, the above assertion is highly fundamental to the identity of
Native Americans in the contemporary period because it foregrounds the fact
that, in the present day United States ethnic or racial formation, this
phenomenon of hybridity and difference indeed characterises the identity of the
Native Americans. Examining contemporary Native American identity, Perry G.
Horse provides a self-reflexive insight into this:
…We emulate their ways. We are educated in their schooling system. We
can speak and write like them. We have adopted their form of
government. […]. We attend mainstream universities. In many ways we
have assimilated into the dominant culture. On the surface it seems we
are indeed like them.
Be that as it may, we are still the original Native people of North
America. We are Kiowa, Navajo, Comanche, Apache, Wichita, and so on
down the list of five hundred or more Indian tribes. We cling to that
distinction consciously and unconsciously. That realization, that
consciousness is where Native American identity begins…. (61)
Given the above, thus, the novel inevitably assumes a significant site for the
discourse of Native American identity in the contemporary period.

Works Cited :
Ahmed, Sara. “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement.”
International Journal of Cultural Studies. Vol. 2, No. 3, 1999, pp. 329-
347.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Hellen Tiffin. (2nded.).The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature. Routledge, 1989.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Brave Heart, Maria Y. H. and Lemyra M. DeBryun. “The American Indian
Holocaust: Healing Historical Unresolved Grief.” American Indian and
Alaska Native Mental Health Research. Centers for American Indian
and Alaska Native Health, Colorado School of Public Health, University
of Colorado, n.d. www.ucdenver.edu/caianh.
Gamber, John. “In the Master’s Maison: Mobile Indigeneity in The Heartsong of
Charging Elk and Blue Ravens.” Transmotion, Vol 2, Nos. 1 & 2, 2016,
pp. 96-119.
Horse, Perry. G. “Native American Identity.” New Directions for Students
Services, No. 9 (Spring), 2005, pp. 61-68.
Naguib, Assmaa M. “Representations of ‘Home’ from the Setting of ‘Exile’: Novels
by Arab Migrant Writers” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Exeter, 2011).
Nasilowski, Anna. “Introduction: Emigration and Migration.” Teksty Drugie:
Migrant Literature, No. 1, 2018, pp. 5-8.
Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. U of
Oklahoma P, 1992.
Porteous, Douglas J. “Literature and Human Geography.” Area, Vol. 17, No. 2,
1985, pp. 117-122.
Porter, Richard. J. “Autobiography, Exile, Home: The Egyptian Memoirs of Gini
Alhadeff, Andre Aciman, and Edward Said.” Biography,Vol. 24, No. 1,
2001, pp. 302-313.
Pourjafari, Fatemeh and Abdolali Vahidpour. “Migration Literature: A
Theoretical Perspective.” The Dawn Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2014, pp. 679-
692.
Rushdie, Salman. “Step across this Line.” Step across this Line: Collected Non-
fiction 1992-2002. Vintage, 2002, pp. 406-442.
Smith, Andrew. “Migrancy, Hybridity and Postcolonial Literary Studies.” The
Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, edited by N. Lazarus.
Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 241-261.

pp. 123-132
ITALIAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES ON INDIA :

TRANSLATION IN THE POLITICS OF BRITISH
IMPERIALISM
Jitamanyu Das
Abstract
Late Nineteenth century and early Twentieth century English
publications saw a large number of translations from other European
languages, of works belonging to the genre of “travel writing” and
exclusively focusing on the Indian subcontinent. This new canon in
English was a clandestine attempt at historically pointing to the need of
submission of the Indian populace to the British rule in order for the
former to develop culturally. Two things of importance are to be noted
here, the systematic omission of facts and careful substitution in the
narrative with fabricated information suiting the Raj. Similarly, their
publication in English coincided with the rising emotions of Indian
Freedom Movement, and was an effort at nullifying the support that the
opposition to British rule was amassing. At the same time this could
very well place the “White man’s burden” sentiment and justify the need
for it in British Imperialism. While dissecting the politics of this canon
formation on India through the gaze of non-English, of the pre-Raj
Mughal era, my paper analyses a few “non-English” travel-writings
written in Italian and seeks to underline the politics of translation into
English and their subsequent publication both in Great Britain and
India.
Keywords: British Imperialism, Italian travel literature, translation,
memoirs, history, Post-colonialism studies, Orientalism.
The premise of the British Imperialism depended on the intellectual

presentations upon the inherent flaws on the subjects of Hindoostan or India1
and fairly large portion of those works came out in Great Britain authored by the
English to establish the need for “White man’s burden” to continue with the
occupation and rule of India. However, with the increasing dissent and early
signs of uprising among the Indian subjects against the ‘foreign’ rule, a need was
felt to educate the populace, both Indian as well as English about the ‘real’ status
of the Indians. This would establish their need to be civilised through the
imposition of a ‘superior’ culture and compel the British rule of law over the
natives.

124 Jitamanyu Das
Prime instruments in this politics became the personal notes and

travelogues of noted European travellers, which had to be translated from other
European languages into English. The reasons for their choices were simple, to
draw on the similar cultures which Europe shared at large, and therefore the
similar viewpoint with which the Indian culture and its practices were accessed.
Also, by choosing historically established texts the English could claim sanctity of
their experiences and in the removal of the author figure, they could ideally
re-model the narrative according their needs.
The selection made was interesting as it was both from other colonial
powers as well as of individuals from countries which did not have any other
relation with India apart from trade, thus they could claim a variety of insight.
However, it is interesting to note here is that most of such accounts of European
travellers to India were of people who had close affinity with the rulership of the
native empires, or had substantial understanding of cultural practices of the
region.
Admittedly, there are a lot more of English narratives on India, which have
been influential in determining the choice of the European narratives. But those
accounts, mostly of Englishmen associated directly with the East-India Company,
were not free of bias and thus after Queen Victoria’s inclusion of India within the
crown, needed newer narratives. Detailed accounts of the early English line of
narratives can be found in Roy Moxham’s The Theft of India: The European
Conquest of India 1498-1765(2016)and Jonathan Gil-Harris’ The First
Firangis(2015) leading us to understand the way in which India was portrayed in
the West through many of such writings. These remarkable studies elucidate in
simple language the complications of approaching the Western knowledge
production about India, and the complex manner in which the knowledge was
utilised by the colonial machinery. Incidentally, Moxham’s work focuses on the
aspects of “theft of India”, which also alludes to the usurpation of local knowledge
and making it a part of the Western discourses. Both Moxham and Harris
emphasise on the importance of narratives as well as their centrality in defining
India as a physical space and making inroads into its customs. These narratives
come together to explain the rivalry between the early colonisers ‘exploring’ India
and figuring out their prospects, but also show the way they were co-opted in
their use together well into the 20th century to draw a cultural map of the India
and determine the weaknesses through which it could be exploited.
One can curiously note the number of books that came out in Europe about
India, many of which were in fact based on the writings of others. Doctor Giulio
Ferrario in his thesis published as Il Costume Antico e Moderno (1829) starts out
with a list.2 The list runs for pages although it only included the important books
published and which were in circulation. The increase in the number of books in
the 18th century and later is quite clear from the list, and so are their titles
sensationalising the topics about India. One might also alarmingly notice the
reductionist approach becoming more prevalent in the later centuries, as the
simple titles with travel narratives are soon replaced with studies of Indian

Italian Travel Narratives on India : Translation in … 125
cultures and societies. This shift lent a credible proof to the ‘scientific’
determination of the Indian space as opposed to the personal narratives of the
earlier travelogues, by claiming an inherent objectivity of the titles and their
studies.
It is in fact the basis of Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s theorising this politics in
the use of such narratives in Europe’s India (2017) as he moves to acknowledge
transition to knowledge production of Europe based on the local narratives of
India in a self-explanatorily titled chapter “Transition to colonial knowledge” in
his book. However, Subrahmanyam largely restricts himself to the English
writings and their institutionalisation within the politics of imperialism.
Establishing the British writings’ direct influence upon the Crown rule is easier
and is significant in the attitude towards the “native” cultures. It is also of prime
importance in relation to the Indian history vis-à-vis postcolonial criticism.
Subrahmanyam’s work is a seminal study into the process through which India’s
colonial history progressed that saw the culmination of narratives written in
different languages and different periods being put to use to strengthen the
British claim of having “studied” and “known” India. The establishment of an
institutionalised way of translating knowledge on India is highlighted by
Subrahmanyam as he leads the readers to see how “India” was “created” by
Europe as an antithetical image suited for the creation of its own self-identity and
as a way of “self-criticism”, as well as becoming a way to continue the
consumption of Indian resources by claiming legitimacy for it.
The politics of writing about India depended on earlier knowledge that
reached Europe as translation of Original Indian works or were observations
from the narratives of continental European travelogues about the East. In fact,
the reality was that most of the British works adapted and borrowed largely from
the contemporary writings of other European works on India. Several works in
English on India published as ‘real’ depiction of India were in fact false narratives
as their authors never ventured beyond their own countries and plagiarised non-
English narratives for the sensational view that they wanted to present to the
audience. These narratives were thus screened and adapted to suit the British
imperialist agenda with an immediate translation highlighting the cultural
differences and the implicit need for Western rule over the Indian subcontinent
and its populace.
Through a re-reading of the differences in translated editions between the
original texts and the adapted/translated editions, one can easily understand the
epistemic shift and the power centre(s) that archived such a strong retelling of
historical cultural exchanges. The awareness towards cultural anthropology and
the need to separate the later addition from the original body of the text is the
first step in approaching these power centres to understand their complex
machinations. If looked at a few specific examples, this use of non-English
European literature for political reasons becomes clear to us. The Said-ian
understanding of the politics of Orientalism can be applied to understand the
basis of such proliferation of English literature on India.

126 Jitamanyu Das
The publication of India in the Fifteenth Century(1857) edited by R. H.

Major, is telling of the British imperial agenda on India and remains one of the
most striking examples and definitely one that exposes the British method of
utilising knowledge to retain colonial control completely. Translated and
published by the Haklyut society with members noted for their involvement
personally or belonging to family with interest in the colony of India, it included
four narratives on India. One can note that all four of them are from nations with
no apparent ‘colonial’ activity in India at any point in history: of a Persian, a
Russian, a Venetian, and a Genoese, the last two being from two Early-modern
city-states of Italy. Similarly, the narratives chosen from the 15th century would
appear to be scandalous to the Victorian readers. Not only would it enforce the
need to civilise the “natives”, but also the supremacy of Western education and
culture.
The Venetian narrative belongs to Nicolò dei Conti (1395-1469). Nicolò dei
Conti had travelled through Indochina for 25 years between 1414 and 1439.
Unlike most other previous travellers, Conti ventured inland and wrote about
custom and traditions of the people in details. In fact, noted Italian Orientalist
Professor Guiseppe Tucci comments about the narrative of Conti and says in his
book India and Italy (1974) that “Nicolò’s memoirs were as of then the best
description of India and its people in existence.” The narrative of Conti was pretty
descriptive as it explained in ample details nature and people of an alien country
since he had narrated his entire travel to Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) who has
published it as part of his De varietate Fortunae (1447) probably attempting to
draw the attention of Italians towards the wonders of India and the East. Thus,
Conti had emphasised upon the traditions and practices of the people and
compared them with that of Italy. Conti had travelled through Malabar and into
the Deccan plateau, to the Coromandel coast and to Chennai, then going to the
Ganges delta and moving upstream using the river, and returning to Malabar
after having been to Gujarat. His extensive travel though India made him realise
the difference among the people and the various customs in existence in all these
places.
The depiction of spiritual practices as well as the funeral customs is a
testament to the fact. But apart from these, in following the tradition of Marco
Polo, Conti depicted in detail the flora and fauna and their rich diversity. It is
almost no surprise that Conti’s mention of the Eastern Christian church and the
presence of Nestorians all over India finds no mention in the English translation
published by the Haklyut society. Conti’s work also alluded to the trade relation
between Venice and Calicut with circulation of Venetian ducats being quite
regular, a detail that also was omitted to deny cultural (and trade) relations
existing between India and other European nations.
It would not be in vain to mention here that Conti’s work was immediately
translated from Latin to Portuguese under the orders of the King of Portugal
himself, who had realised its cartographical and cultural value in the Portugal’s
ambition for a colonial presence in India. Clearly, there is a difference in the

prioritisation at the way in which such a text was read in Italy and in Portugal,
while in Italy it did little more than to fancy a lot of minds in the aspiration to
know more of the world of India, for Portugal it became a guide to the colonial
mission. Within the colonising West thus remained a visible, but often
comfortably forgotten, cultural filter. The view that Nicolò dei Conti had of India,
would in fact enrage a lot of colonisers since it does not fit with their popular
belief of the “White man’s burden” and portraying the native as the savage as he
stated in his work describing the Indians as– “They live very civilly and without
cruelty of any kind, do not lead the inhuman life of barbarouspeoples, and are
gentle, benign and merciful”, possibly hinting at the other civilisations pretending
to be civil in the cover of temporal and religious jurisprudence while being
otherwise in reality. It was this detailed narrative that was translated into English
to represent an objective view by carefully omitting the personal references of
Conti as much as possible.
The English rendering of the Genoese traveller Hieronimo di Santo
Stefano, on the other hand, focuses a lot on cultural differences, and the influence
of religion on it. Being very limited in content as the accounts were included in a
letter sent from Tripoli on 1st September 1499, the narrative centred around the
strange aspects of Indian culture. However, the narrative is equally interesting to
note as it contains description of the places of trade and the products of the
particular places which were sold or had commercial value to the Europeans. The
letter also had a significant insight into the differences between the various
communities across the places he had visited. But, one of the prime reasons for
its inclusion in the anthology could have been the almost blasphemous remarks
on the marriage customs and the absence of civil laws in India. His views about
India were primarily that of a trader, but at the same time was that of an
astonished traveller. The translation of his narrative largely reduced the aspect of
a surprised traveller and depended on the extremity of the portrayal of Indian
practices in their differences to the European Christian norms. Both Conti and
Stefano had also depended heavily on portraying the benevolence of the Christian
God in their survival through the journey through the miseries of the Orient, a
narrative structure that imitated the Jesuit narratives closely to show the journey
as a test of faith.
Consider the English publication of the travels of Pietro Della Valle (1553-
1652) in 1845, which took place for a publisher based out of Brighton whereas
Della Valle had travelled to India in 1623 and had stayed until November 1624.
The original Italian publication of Della Valle’s travels to India had taken place
more than one hundred eighty years before the English translation, in 1663. The
communiques to Mario Schipano established his position as an explorer and
ethnographer with portions of his travels to India translated in English by 1665.
But it was his description of India, seemingly problematic in nature, as opposed
to the idea of the ‘normative’ in terms of the Western culture which was pounced
upon and required English rendering. Commentaries on religion as well as social
differences are central themes in Della Valle’s letters which Schipano

128 Jitamanyu Das
narrativised. Della Valle’s experiences in the Middle East occupy most of the
printed works attributed to him, however, the year-long travel in Surat, Goa, and
South of India gain prominence in their English translation for the apparent
“authenticity” of the words of a man of letters and science like Della Valle.
For a significant amount of time, it was the only noted historical record of
the period about the mentioned regions. In fact, Della Valle’s image as an
ethnographer had been formulated to give credibility to his travel narrative, and
distance it from the genre of travel to that of study of the Indian space and
people. Pietro Della Valle’s position as a nobility in Italy contributed largely to the
acceptance of his narrative. Della Valle’s views on India are interesting to note as
they undergo a clear shift where the first few sections highlight the fantasy of
exploring an unknown space, but the later sections displaying a hostility towards
the same unknown space. The conflicts engulfing India due to the colonial
ventures and the desire to control trade and the shipping lanes are also narrated
to an extent. Pietro Della Valle’s narrative marks the shift within the early Italian
travel narratives about India where it is conscious to a large extent about the
needs pertaining to the colonial missions, especially those of Portuguese and
Dutch, and the subversive ways in which India was narrated in reports and fiction
to represent it as culturally being extreme opposite to the developing
commonalities of the South European culture.
In both the cases the translated narratives were primarily meant for the
consumption of the British readers in the 19th and 20th century. In order to
sensationalise the narrative and leave a lasting impression, there were addition of
notes and more importantly certain careful omissions. These changes within the
text would not have been evident to the readers unaware of the original
narratives and there would be no pressing need to justify such changes as well.
However, these changes would enable a complete epistemic shift to support the
British colonial project and its claim of civilising the natives of India.
However, the most damning narrative prepared in a similar fashion was
that of Niccolao Manucci (1638-1717). Manucci’s entire memoirs were published
in five-parts by 1731. The first two parts of Manucci’s travel narratives were
published by François Catrou under his name in French, to whom Manucci had
sent them initially for publishing in Europe. Catrou made significant changes to
Manucci’s version. This became almost like a separate text, and was widely
canonised and used for historical analysis of Shah Jahan’s rule and till
Aurangazeb’s accession to the throne in the Mughal empire to a large extent.
Most of the translations of Manucci in other languages were dependant on this
particular version. But this version was itself incomplete. In 1907, however,
William Irvine, an Orientalist and a “revered” expert on India, a member of the
Royal Asiatic society, and a retired Civil Servant in Bengal for the British Crown
brought out a translated version Storia do Mogor (1907) where he reduced the
original five volumes to four. He also made contribution to the narrative in the
form of changes and adding notes to alter the voice of the narrative. These
extensive notes and illustrations added to the original of Manucci defined the

narrative in a particular way with Manucci’s perspective made critical of the

Indian culture and society.
Similarly, notwithstanding Manucci’s own limitations as well as his
cunning treacheries throughout his life, he is made to be an objective observer – a
detailed scribe of his contemporary Indian society and its moral follies compared
to the West. This change of narrative voice was achieved in the systematic
approach that was made with the English version of William Irvine as opposed to
the voice of the personal memoir that was in the original Manucci’s writing.
Margaret L. Irvine, his daughter, came out with an abridged edition named
A Pepys of Mogul India (1913) where she further reduced the entire narrative
into a single volume of only the important section or the “cream of Manucci’s
work” (H. B., 1914).3 While William Irvine’s translation omitted the issues
Manucci pointed out with the presence of other Europeans in India and his
strong aversion of the Jesuits following his fallout with François Catrou over the
publication of his manuscripts, Margaret Irvine’s abridged edition completely
gets rid of all suggestions of criticism of the West, and to a large extent the
praises by Manucci of India. Therefore, the narrative is completely turned into
objective and factual, to imitate history rather than remaining a memoir of an
Italian in India.
Manucci’s representation of India is contrasted with the writing of Francois
Bernier by Gil Harris as he explains the difference in approach towards the
experience by the two different travellers. Bernier’s attempt is seen as a narrative
which essentially fits the British/French imperial agenda. Manucci on the other
hand remains descriptive, and often repetitive, of the experiences he had. The
flexibility of his narrative comes with the use of “Storia” as his title, which stands
for both history and fiction in Italian. He also uses this position to include stories
and records he heard from others or Mughal court documents which he has the
privilege of accessing.
The “translation” of Manucci appears to omit such instances to carefully
bring it to the same status as that of Bernier encapsulating a historical account.
The notes of W. Irvine are usefully employed to provide the text authenticity in
historical terms. This text plays the role of being a discursive aid to the
reductionist representation of India done in Britain in the first decades of the 20 th
century. One can ponder about the timing of the publication as it coincides with
the Indian call for “Home-rule”, and attempts to draw a negative portrayal of the
Indian socio-cultural setup historically from the safety of the perspective offered
by an Italian traveller not involved in the colonial establishment and removed
historically. This double advantage is something that separates the Italian travel
narratives on India from other European non-fiction about India, as Italy (or any
of its city-states) did not possess colonial ambition or the requisite institution
supported by military administration. The British colonial project of
“Orientalism” caught on to these benefits and utilised many of the existing

130 Jitamanyu Das
narratives, some already well-known in Europe, to strengthen their views on

India.
The publication of the Manucci took place serially as part of a series
propagated at Indian “educated” audience about the history of the previous era
before the arrival of the British to make them aware of the cultural developments
and social changes at hand. With no way of comparing the available texts to the
original MSS only available in Venice, Paris, and Berlin, and divided across
Italian, Persian, French, and Portuguese, the readers would be severely
handicapped to believing the printed words in an apparent display of
logocentrism in the Modern world.
The English translations, of Conti, Santo Stefano, Della Valle, and most
importantly that of Manucci, all appear to play their roles in the same politics of
forming a tradition of supporting the British imperialism through the depiction
of India in absolutely Orientalist terms and making its re-presentation as the crux
of the post-Industrial Western view of India.4 Hence, we can perceive how the
Italian travel narratives on India were utilised in their English rendering as
vehicles of the politics of Orientalism and contributing to its epistemic body. A
particular re-analysis of the politics of translation and publication of non-English
European books in English exposes the British control over the entire process of
knowledge generation and its use in the defining of India and the canonisation of
its history articulated exclusively through a Western mode. The seemingly
innocuous knowledge produced over the course of almost four centuries was
altered through translation to fit into the narrative of “Orientalism” within the
project supporting the British colonisation of India. Personal narratives were
transformed into ethnographic studies with the addition of notes and
illustrations, as well as carefully omitting large parts of authorial experiences as
well as beliefs from the texts. The relationship of Power and Knowledge
appearing by the way of such translations to reach to a common identity of India,
a view so critical that it offered very less chances of redemption without the
intervention of the British masters which they were glad to offer in exchange for
their continuing presence.
Notes :
1 The Identification of the geo-political space as “Hindoostan”, “Indostan”, or
“India”, is one example of knowledge production in English writing about the
Orient as means of establishing authority over India through a semiotic process. It
identifies the entire space with a name giving it an identity as a whole, while
seemingly ignoring the regional identities as well as the local names.
2 The list is titled “Catalogo de’ principali autori e viaggiatori che hanno scritto di
cose appartenenti all’ Indostan” (A catalogue of important authors and travellers
who have written about India and its objects) and runs for 13 pages and contains

over 200 titles. This underlines the massive interest towards India in contemporary
Europe in general and Italy in particular.
3 The April 1914 review of A Pepys of Mogul India by a Mr. H. B. in The Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Irelandmakes for an interesting read
as it gives us the reasons for the abridged edition as well as the notable omissions
and the ‘intellectual’ “English” view about it. This aids in our understanding of the
political motive which had affected the translation works of Manucci in the first
place.
4 Noted Italian Orientalist Professor Giuseppe Tucci presents short introductions to
the narratives of the Italian travellers to India in his book India and Italy (1974).
They offer an impartial alternative to the English translations in showing the stark
contrast in which the translation into English were made. Professor Tucci’s
formulation about prior historical connection between India and Italy must be
made here, as he thought that a relationship of mutual respect existed between the
cultures and was one major reason why Italy had no colonial venture for India.
Works Cited :
Basham, A. L. (Arthur Llewellyn). The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the
Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent before the Coming of the Muslims.
Picador, 2004.
Collis, Maurice. Marco Polo. Faber, 1959.
Bernier, François. Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668. Translated and
edited by Archibald Constable. OUP, 1916.
Das, Indrani. “Multi exchanges between India and Italy”. Lectures on cultural
history and background of Europe for Hons. in Modern European
Languages, Literature, and
Cultures, Bhasha Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University.
Valle, Pietro Della, G Havers, and Edward Grey. The Travels of Pietro Della Valle
in India. B. Franklin, 1967.
Valle, Pietro Della. Viaggi di Pietro Della Valle: Il Pellegrino. G. Gancia, 1845.
Ferario, Giulia. Il Costume Antico e Moderno. 1829.
H. B. “Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.” Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1914, pp. 470–
472. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25189178.
Harris, Jonathan Gil. The First Firangis. Aleph Book Company, 2015.
Major, R. H. India in the Fifteenth Century. Forgotten Books, 2018.

132 Jitamanyu Das
Manucci, Niccolao. Storia do Mogor or Mogul India 1653-1708. (Translated by

W. Irvine). John Murray, 1907.
Moxham, Roy. The Theft of India: The European Conquests of India, 1498-1765.
Harper Collins India, 2012.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Europe’s India: Words, People. Empires, 1500-1800.
HUP, 2017.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay.Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the
Early Modern World. Brandeis UP, 2011.
Tucci, G. India and Italy. ISMEO, 1974.

pp. 133-139
FORMS OF SOCIAL TRANSMISSION AND THE

MAKING OF THE PUBLIC SELF IN JOSE
SARAMAGO’S THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF
RICARDO REIS
Khalida Ahmed
Abstract
Jose Saramago’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
(1984) offers interesting insights into the way the individual self
interacts in and with public space, not through responses alone, but by
means of the exploration of the possibility of relating the heteronymic
selves that the Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)
released in the early twentieth century. The novel also presents different
dimensions relating to the functioning of media in the contemporary
world by placing the figure of Ricardo within that publicly discernible
space so as to contextualize the forms of social transmission that took
place. Saramago’s narrative is both playful and probing in the manner in
which the representation moves across the realistic and the imaginary
planes. This paper looks at the nature of this interaction between the
selves and examines the ways of reading how such configurations are
opened up for reception in society.
Keywords: Public Space, Heteronymic Selves, Identity, Social
Transmission, Media.
Situated in the time-track of the 1930s, Jose Saramago’s The Year of the
Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) takes on the processes of self-making and social
formation through the figure of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) who was one of the
greatest writers to emerge from Portugal in the twentieth century. Pessoa is
known to have experimented with the construction of ‘social selves’, a process
through which he constructed individuals with clearly defined personal
histories– each figure having a specific background and personality. This was not
confined to the individual– Ricardo Reis is such a ‘construction’ whose visibility
in the social media of Portugal in the 1930s was a reality– and he was
programmed by Pessoa to operate independently with a very different time chart
and operative mechanism.

134 Khalida Ahmed
The 1930s also saw a lot of turbulence in Portugal, which was not merely
political, but deeply embedded in the social fabric of the time. The creation of a
figure such as Ricardo was not only an exercise in the process of making a
doppelganger – a veritable double – but also a simultaneous exercise in
exploring ways of understanding public reception in relation to how one is seen
or perceived in society. We can see this to be part of a normalizing mechanism in
today’s Internet-driven ethos where multiple accounts across different social
media platforms are taken for granted. Having Facebook and Instagram accounts
where the similarity index is authenticated through the means of difference
insofar as that the same self appears to possess alternative dimensions depending
on the platform one is situated in. The different ‘selves’ that Pessoa created in the
public space were not, in his estimation, unreal characters, they were people
whose situations were independently governed by who they were. Pessoa refused
to submit to the view that the figure of Ricardo Reis was just another name he
adopted: he contended that Ricardo was a wholly realized individual self with his
own history and space in public space and memory. In the representation of
Ricardo, Saramago follows this pattern created by Pessoa to articulate questions
of identity and space. As Mary J. Daniel points out in her assessment of the
narrative design of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis:
Throughout the novel there emerges a pattern of searching for a
definitive sense of place as Ricardo Reis, the wandering Lusitanian who
has at last returned home, readapts to the changing context of the city
he left so many years before. (Daniel 36)
The examination of the circumstances is important here. Saramago makes
Ricardo appear in Lisbon following the ‘biography’ of this Pessoan figure, but
does so in a way that enables him to look at both the author and the heteronym
on the same spatial plane. Ricardo comes to Lisbon to experience the ways of the
city after a period of sixteen years which makes him conscious of the gaps that
exist between his understanding and contemporary reality. In looking at the
various dimensions of this identity equation, Saramago makes use of the
platforms of media to address the circumstances in which his characters are
placed. In this configuration of Reis in the public space, Saramago draws on the
nature of the imagination with which Pessoa created each of these heteronymic
selves. In this context, the elucidation of George Mahr sheds light on the matter:
“Pessoa’s story illustrates the importance, and even the benefits, dissociation may
have for creative experience....For Pessoa, then, heteronyms solved the problems
that modernist self-awareness posed, by allowing him to write traditional,
sensual verse that was nevertheless ironically self-aware” (Mahr 34). Configured
to represent Ricardo as a man occupying the public imagination, Saramago
places him in a world where he is part of the larger social fabric. Social media in
the 1930s was constituted by the newspaper, and that is where we can find this
process being played out so well.
Of the many challenges that The Year of the Death of Reis pose, perhaps
the one most striking is that of inaccessibility, and it is not quite denial that

Forms of Social Transmission and the Making of … 135
blunts attempts to ‘know’, it is the configuration scheme where the chain of

discourse binds each one – Ricardo Reis, Fernando Pessoa and Jose Saramago –
in a dialogic matrix where the interpenetration is never completed, something
that remains in process. If the non-materiality of Ricardo as a historical figure is
considered as a frame he cannot free himself from, Saramago does not clarify
such boundaries in water-tight markers. At the height of the European crisis of
the 1930s, and the Spanish Civil War impacting the entire Hispanic world,
Ricardo shuts himself off, or rather aspires to, but as Saramago chronicles it, that
does not quite happen: “The world’s threats are universal, like the sun, but
Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow, What I do not wish to know
does not exist, the only real problem is how to play the queen’s knight. But
reading the newspapers, he forces himself to worry a little, Europe is seething
and perhaps will boil over, and there is no place for a poet to rest his head”
(Saramago 319-20).
This act of reading the newspaper is what is used by Saramago to place the
heteronymic conundrum square upon its head early on in the narrative:
Ricardo Reis goes to the newspaper archives, where everyone must go
to…The unexpected death of Fernando Pessoa caused much sadness in
intellectual circles…In his poetry he was not only Fernando Pessoa but
also Alvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, and Ricardo Reis. There you are,
an error caused by not paying attention, by writing what one misheard,
because we know very well that Ricardo Reis is this man who is reading
the newspaper with his own open and living eyes, a doctor forty-eight
years of age, one year older than Fernando Pessoa when his eyes were
closed, eyes that were dead beyond a shadow of doubt. (Saramago 24)
The narrator of Saramago takes this long telescopic view of history addressing
both experiences of reading the newspaper with the shadow as a hovering
presence in the scheme of things.
How is this to addressed? One critic has referred to it as Pessoa’s “theatre
of the self” (Zenith 47) so as to accommodate the modes of understanding the
presence of Ricardo in the public world. It is necessary to see that these figures
that Pessoa creates acquire validity through the process of public documentation
in the social media of that time. In a poem written in 1926, ‘Ricardo’ contends
that it is the very process of navigating the mediated world which creates
problems for man in society:
How great a sadness and bitterness
Drowns our tiny lives in chaos
How often adversity
Cruelly overwhelms us!
Happy the animal, anonymous

Which grazes in green fields and enters
Death as if it were home;

136 Khalida Ahmed
Or the learned man who, lost
In science, raises his futile, ascetic

Life above our own, like smoke
Which lifts its disintegrating arms
To the non-existent heavens. (Reis 300)
The circulation of poems like these in the socially inscribed space creates the
possibility of approaching the figure of Ricardo Reis as an individual. These lines
from the poem appropriately draw attention to the difficulty of navigating
through social media with the anonymity of the animal or the isolation of the
recluse. In spite of the fact that the configuration of Ricardo was done in the
1930s, Pessoa anticipates much of the activities and interpenetrations of the
digitally determined world today where the idea of the self is under the constant
glare of social media.
Helena Kaufman comments on how Ricardo’s situation suggests a wider
paradigm at work, something that addresses vital questions of identity and social
presence in modern Portuguese history. In this context, Kaufman writes how
perceptions “are characterized by an internal logic and ‘realism’ of presentation
and constitute alongside myths and legends, also evoked throughout Saramago’s
texts, one more form of recuperating the minor within history” (Kaufman 178). It
is important to situate and contextualize the figure of Ricardo in the Pessoan
scheme for the critical placement of his priorities. Helena Carvalhao Buescu
rightly points out that the orientation of Ricardo is that of a Classicist: “Reis was
a classicist formally trained as a physician, and all his poems incessantly repeat
the typical crossing between Epicureanism and Stoicism that Horace’s odes, from
whom Reis draws so deeply, displayed” (Buescu 75). The manner in which
Ricardo is projected as having interest in newspapers is fascinatingly evoked in
Saramago’s narrative. The opening pages of the novel shed light on the process of
characterization that Saramago employs in The Year of the Death of Ricardo
Reis. When Ricardo arrives in Lisbon from Brazil after a long gap of sixteen years
at the very end of 1935, the newspaper serves to span out developments that
present more than the previous day’s events.
The narrator’s historically attuned eye traces the information in print as a
visibly tired Ricardo moves across planes of personal memory and social history
to mark out a frame of reference for which the newspapers serve as the veritable
index. In the narrative, the newspaper facilitates a chain of recollections which
cover the social landscape of the times very well. Saramago’s narrative process
encompasses a wide variety of cultural registers in the course of the
representation. The attention given to history and the lateral placement of
contemporary developments alongside Ricardo’s playful erasure of the self may
appear surreal but the frame of realism is consistently maintained. It is important
to consider the opening sequence of the novel to place the representation of
newspapers in the scheme of things, especially in the way it plays a part in the

subsequent characterization of Ricardo Reis. As he settles down in the hotel room

during his first night in Lisbon on his return from Brazil, Ricardo’s responds to
the newspapers not just as them being documents of events that had taken place
the previous day; he also sees in them the possibility of connecting his experience
of the place and time which enables him to examine the social and cultural
dimensions of Lisbon with fresh eyes:
These are the newspapers of my native Portugal, they inform me that
the Head of State has inaugurated an exhibition in honour of Mousinho
de Albuquerque at the Colonial Office, one is not spared imperial
commemorations or allowed to forget imperial personages...The fifth
national contest for beautiful babies, half a page of photographs of
infants, stark naked, their rolls of puppy fat bulging, nourished on
powdered milk. Some of these babies will grow up to become criminals,
vagabonds, and prostitutes, after being photographed like this, at such a
tender age, before the lewd eyes of those who have no respect for
innocence….At the Coliseu they are showing The Last Wonder with
Vanise Meireles, a statuesque figure clad in silver, a Brazilian celebrity.
Funny, I must have missed her in Brazil, my fault. Here in Lisbon one
can get a seat in the gallery for three escudos, a seat in the stalls costs
five escudos and up, and there are performances daily and matinees on
Sundays. (Saramago 17-18)
The survey and the sweep of the newspapers by Ricardo opens up diverse
platforms – from photographic displays that document a contest for babies to the
performances that occupy the public imagination at that time. What is
noteworthy here is the attendant commentary that Ricardo places alongside the
news that he faces; he speculates about the nature of the future that awaits the
‘babies’ as they move ahead in life, imposing upon them the possibility of
following the general pattern of human behaviour and growth. It is interesting to
see that Ricardo takes a long view of things, which may have to do with his
Classical orientation. But Ricardo the poet and the person are not conceived as
being unanimous in the way they perceive things. That is why this distinction
between the two selves of Ricardo becomes so strikingly apparent. The poet who
drew his inspiration from Classical writers such as Horace in the shaping of his
craft was not really objective in approaching the world. This point is repeatedly
made by Saramago in the course of the novel. The manner in which the
newspapers offer the documentary information about the 1930s in Lisbon is
supplemented by Ricardo’s process of appraisal. This means that Ricardo was
aware of the complexities of locating the nature of information in contemporary
media. There is a slant through which news is presented and filtered, and though
this is something that is taken for granted, it is Ricardo’s observations that make
the narrative so interesting. Saramago does not use quotations of any kind in his
narrative to distinguish between the subjectivity of Ricardo and the reportage
that makes up content of the newspapers. Moreover, the narrator seamlessly
moves across the mental consciousness of Ricardo along with the situations he is
placed in without indicating the transition. This creates an interesting effect
which is seen in the way the flow of the narrative takes the different

138 Khalida Ahmed
circumstances, both personal and public, placing them alongside each other. This
does not take away from the fact that the characterization of Ricardo is done to
show his peculiarity as an individual in the novel.
The mystery surrounding his personality notwithstanding, Ricardo is
presented as someone who is incapable of cultivating the ‘objective’ point of view.
This is very much in keeping with the figure of Ricardo that Pessoa created in his
world of heteronyms. As Steffen Dix has argued, the element of objectivity was
not part of the Pessoan representation of Ricardo Reis:
Although Reis never explicitly describes what he himself understood to
be the concept of objectivity, one can presume that it involves a certain
inability to form abstract ideas or imagine a ‘whole.’ Reis is fully aware
that this incapacity to form abstract ideas would quickly appear an
absurdity given that it is impossible to think or communicate without
abstract concepts. (Dix 80)
This is an important point in the context of the novel. The individualization
of Ricardo is one of the necessary narrative strategies that Saramago employs for
the purpose of situating him in the world of 1930s Portugal. Without this process
of individualization, Ricardo’s presence would not have been distinctive in the
narrative. Newspapers and social media, especially the responses of Ricardo to
them, occupy an important part in the novel. As is evident in the opening
sequence of the narrative, Ricardo does not respond equally to all news reports,
but picks them in accordance with his personal preferences. This is not about the
news that he has access to or is familiar with, but it has a bearing on those items
that he feels he would like to comment upon. In Saramago’s configuration,
Ricardo’s responses are not always articulated in words or presented as part of
his stated position regarding the different issues. What happens in the course of
the narrative shows the importance of the interplay of the self with society with
the platforms of different media playing their part in shaping the readers’
perceptions. In his novel dealing with the play of these multiple selves in
conversation in public space Saramago visits not just the public memory that
presents the social world of Portugal, he also looks at the contours of cultural life
whose continuity is enhanced and marked by the relationship between the self
and society, especially through the social media of the time.
Works Cited :
Buescu, Helena Caravalhao. “Pessoa’s Unmodernity: Ricardo Reis”, in Fernando
Pessoa’ Modernity without Frontiers: Influences, Dialogues and
Responses ed. Mariana Gray de
Castro, Woodbridge, Tamesis, 2013, pp. 75-86.

Dix, Steffen. “The Plurality of Gods and Man, or ‘The Aesthetic Attitude in All Its
Pagan Splendor’ in Fernando Pessoa”, in The Pluralist, Vol. 5, No. 1,
2010, pp. 73-93.
Kaufman, Helena. “Is The Minor Essential?: Contemporary Portuguese Fiction
and Questions of Identity”, symploke, Vol. 5, No. 1/2, 1997, pp. 167-182.
Mahr, Greg. “Pessoa, Life Narrative, and the Dissociative Process” Biography,
Vol. 21, No. 1, 1998, pp. 24-35.
Reis, Ricardo. “Don’t Clap Your Hands Before Beauty” trans. Richard Zenith, The
Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, No. 2, 1996, pp. 299-300.
Saramago, Jose. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, [1984] trans. Giovanni
Pontiero, London: Vintage, 2018.
Zenith, Richard. “Fernando Pessoa and the Theatre of His Self” Performing Arts
Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 47-49.

pp. 140-154
THE POSSIBILITY OF ‘COUNTER TRAVEL’ IN

THE AGE OF ‘BELATED TRAVELERS’: TAHIR
SHAH AS A COUNTER TRAVELER IN
SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
Rima Barua
Abstract
Travel Writing as a genre has received critical attention only
recently. The growing popularity of the genre among the reading public
led to an increase in its commercial success and academic interest.
However, the commercial success and popularity enjoyed by the genre
served as the cause of its disapproval by various critics who discarded it
as a morally dubious literary form. The popularity of travel writing is
believed to come from its ability to promote racial and cultural
superiority even in the present global world and for maintaining the
rigid divisions between home and abroad, occident and orient, center
and periphery. It was for this ability that travel writing became a
primary tool in the hands of the European colonizers for the
propagation of imperial designs. The use of the genre in Empire building
during the imperial period and its complicity with imperialism is an
important topic in Travel Writing Studies. What however, this paper
seeks to analyze is the present scenario of travel writing which highlights
that travel writing is still entangled in its imperial past. This has led to
its critique as a genre which rather than paying attention to
contemporary realities of the world, tries to escape from it. Gripped by a
nostalgia for the days of Empire, where differences between people and
places were more prominent, contemporary travelers have turned into
‘belated travelers’ who still knowingly or unknowingly serve to secure
the practices of Empire. But what is interesting to note is that if
contemporary travel writing is filled with ‘belated travelers’, there are
also ‘counter travelers’ trying to come to terms and negotiate with the
tainted past of travel writing looking for ways and means to revitalize
the genre. If globalization has caused travel writers to believe that there
is nothing new left to talk about the world, it has also paved the way for
new patterns of travel and new travelling subjects who have
problematized the fixed definitions of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, ‘insider’ and
‘outsider,’ self and other and thus have provided a renewed look at the
very act of border crossing. Diasporic travelers or travelers with complex
hyphenated identities have contributed new inputs to the area of travel
writing. Such travelers being aware of their complex backgrounds defy

The Possibility of ‘Counter Travel’ in the Age of … 141
settled generic categories like borders, self, other, home, abroad etc. The
paper thus seeks to deal with the British Afghan travel writer, Tahir
Shah whose works have attained popularity for providing alternative
ways of approaching cultures and people. His works present a
departure from stereotypical ways of dealing with the self and the other
and clarify that though travel writing is enmeshed in the history of
Empire, yet the present global setup facilitates various ways of
negotiating with the past. The paper will try to highlight the major
aspects of Shah’s writings with reference to one of his popular texts, The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The novel traces Shah’s journey to India and thus
serves as an interesting site for analyzing a diasporic travel writer’s
representation of encounters, cultural clashes, and interpretation of
differences and familiarity in a country which was a former British
colony.
Keywords : Travel, Nostalgia, Belated Travelers, Counter Travelers,
Globalization
Introduction
Travelers mostly see the world and communicate their observation through
an interpretive framework or through the discourses provided by their cultures.
Travel writing is identified by many as a mode of colonialist discourse that
continues to deploy imperialist tendencies even after the end of the days of
empire. Travel writing is enmeshed in the history of empire and thus the role of
empire in the production of travel literature is irrefutable.It is a cultural form
steeped in imperialist attitudes and imagery. Both colonization and travel writing
function on the logic of ‘othering’ people and cultures. Carl Thomson observes
that there are two ways by which the process of othering works:
In a weaker, more general sense, ‘othering’ simply denotes the
process by which the members of one culture identify and highlight the
differences between themselves and the members of another culture. In
a stronger sense, however it has come to refer more specifically to the
process and strategies by which one culture depicts another culture as
not only different but also inferior to itself. (Thomson 132-133)
It is the second sense that relates travel writing to Western Imperialism
because the tendency of travel writers to portray other cultures as patronizing
served the primary purpose of imperialism as a justification for dominance and
colonization. Travelling accounts of colonial travelers thus not only helped them
to present their community as superior over the others they describe but also
provided a moral justification for their intervention in these places. The
connection of imperialism and travel writing during the imperial period can thus
be well understood. But the question is why is the genre not able to come out of
its connections to imperialist attitudes, myths and prejudices even in
contemporary times?

142 Rima Barua
In the period of globalization, travel writing is assumed to change its tone and
depart from the ways and power structures that existed in the imperial period but
that does not seem to be the case. Debbie Lisle in her book, The Global Politics of
Contemporary Travel Writing (2006) has argued that though contemporary
travel writers have incorporated a cosmopolitan approach in their writings
whereby differences are celebrated and encounters with the other are shown in a
more positive way yet this approach is “not as emancipatory as it claims to be;
rather, it is underscored by the remnants of Orientalism, colonialism and
Empire” ( Lisle 5). Such an approach though might be preferable is nevertheless a
palatable means of articulating and reproducing the same hierarchical relations
as universal standards of viewing ‘other’ cultures. This is done by a celebration of
differences whereby those differences are not judged as better or worse but are
simply accepted. Thus, contemporary travel narratives continue to function on
the logic of difference by sustaining the privileged position of the traveler and his
readers waiting to consume images of the ‘other’ that assure them of their
superiority. There however lies an important cause behind this tendency on the
part of the travel writers to fall back upon their colonial precursors even in
contemporary times. An analysis of this problem will help in understanding Tahir
Shah’s approach to travel writing which do not necessarily use the guise of
cosmopolitanism, tolerance and equality to produce accounts of otherness. Lisle
also clarifies that be it colonial or cosmopolitan travel narratives, both categories
“rely on stable geographical borders to locate difference and secure identity” (
Lisle 9). Shah on the other hand addresses the ambiguities and intricacies
brought about by the very act of border crossing which question the stability of
geopolitical borders as markers of difference. He in fact shows not just the
mobility of people but the mobility of cultures and most importantly the shift and
transgression of borders of the mind formed during the imperial period which is
still being secured by travel writers.
A troubling question that haunts travel writing in the contemporary times
is regarding the relevance and future of travel writing. The map of the world is
almost definite at this stage with its blank spaces filled and writers assume that
there are no new spaces left to be explored. Globalization on the other hand had
made travel banal and common place and no longer a risk and a challenge.
Besides the access to the internet and google maps have paved the way for virtual
travel and made the existence of travel writing problematic. Modern travel
writing thus is believed to be belated devoid of providing authentic experiences
that can cater to the needs of the readers. As such contemporary travel writers
fall prey to what anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has termed as “Imperialist
Nostalgia” is “a particular kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism,
where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed” (69).
The most significant aspect of Imperialist Nostalgia is that ituses “a pose of
innocent yearning” to make “racial domination appear innocent and pure” (68;
70). Through this the writer and the reader mourn the passing of a world, they
themselves have altered and engage in wistful reminiscences of the simpler ways
of life. Contemporary travel writers use this technique to conceal or to mystify

their economic motives. Travel Narratives governed by Imperialist Nostalgia

become demonstrations of what Rojek and Urry call, “the performativity of
reminiscences”, a process by which objects lose their original essence and get
layered with secondary images, values and associations” (14).Secondly instead of
being located in the space and time of the present, such travel narratives take the
readers back to the days of empire neglecting the need to grapple with present
issues. Imperialist Nostalgia thus has made travel writing outdated, redundant
and highly clichéd. Travel writers who indulge in Imperialist Nostalgia are
referred to as ‘Belated Travelers’, a term used by Ali Behdad in his book, Belated
Travelers in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (1994).Such travelers experience a
sense of nostalgic desire to explore and discover the Orient which has long
captured their imagination but unfortunately, they collide with a sense of
displacement, both in time and place, after witnessing the complete
disappearance of the Orient’s glamour and enchantment because of globalization.
As such they engage in Imperialist Nostalgia, moving back in time, trying to make
sense of places not in accordance to the present realities but through a former
discourse (colonialist or orientalist) set as a rule for approaching the Orient.
However, writers like Carl Thomson, Pattrick Holland and Graham Huggan
are of the view that not all travel writers are alike. While Holland and Huggan
point out that “ it would be as foolish to claim of travel writing that it is uniformly
imperialistic as it would be to defend travel writers as being harmless
entertainers” (9), Carl Thomson similarly highlights a “surge of travelogues by
individuals from formerly colonized cultures or, alternatively, by western
travelers descendants of formerly subject, ‘subaltern’ peoples” which highlight
the presence of other voices and other perspectives on the world (163). These
writers seek to challenge western stereotypes and attitudes and are seen to
engage in a counter discourse as opposed to the colonialist discourse. As such
their travel narratives can to be referred to as “Counter travel writing” a term
used by Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan in their seminal work, Tourists
with Typewriters to refer to those contemporary travel narratives that run on a
counter discourse, in opposition to the dominant tendency of the travel writing
genre (50). Counter Travel Writing not only combats centuries of European
prejudice that has wholly consumed the genre but also encourages readers to
adjust their attitudes and perceptions to the contemporary cultural climate.
These travel narratives not only inspire crossing physical boundaries but also
mental boundaries as they prefer flexibility, resilience to rigidity and stillness. A
special characteristic of counter travel writing is that every obstacle that
threatens or would have threatened the existence of travel literature is converted
into a strength. Such narratives question the boundaries between experience and
imagination, movement and immobility, the virtual world and the real world, self
and the other, home and abroad. They also question the relevance of the
definitions that are given to the basic components of a travel narrative:
movement, space and experience. These texts are difficult to grasp as they
encompass different types of writing such as novels. Poems, diaries, pictures,
fiction, non-fiction, etc. Thus, counter travel writing push boundaries, are open to

144 Rima Barua
change and are challenging to approach. As a diasporic travelling subject, Tahir

Shah’s subject position is complicated owing to his hyphenated identity and his
exposure to cultural diversity. He is a migrant who has never visited his ancestral
homeland, but he frequently visited Morocco which was told to be similar to his
homeland (Afghanistan) in many respects by his father. In 2003, Shah uprooted
himself and his family to Morocco. The mixed cultural backgrounds, and complex
hyphenated identities of diasporic travelers such as Shah make them more
conscious of the complex legacies of Empire carried by the genre and networks of
power and trade that connect the world today. Their connections with several
cultures produce dialectics of attachment and detachment and present ways of
inhabiting a space between individual privilege and responsibility. Migration thus
facilitates in the production of counter travel narratives that challenge colonialist
capitalist discourses and thereby to a greater extent helps in resisting imperialist
nostalgia. Besides Carl Thomson has mentioned that these writers with
hyphenated identities whose origins are not in the west have some common
experience of imperial subjugation or possess knowledge of how it felt to be
dominated and viewed as weak. As such they were less inclined to vilify or
patronize other cultures though at present they are in some way related to the
west (163-164). Shah’s works therefore contribute towards reversing travel
writing’s traditional focus on the West.
At the same time however it is also made clear that even travel writers
aiming to reveal cultural and historical perspectives which has otherwise been
overlooked and suppressed because of the dominance of colonial ideas, must
struggle to convey their views through a genre that is in many ways antithetical to
such views of flexibility and novelty. This is because travel writing thrives on
otherness, is a product of the consumer culture and relies on the most familiar of
western myths for its existence. Travel writers thus try to conceal the economic
motive though they try to fulfill it through various strategies and means, either by
reproducing the same stereotypes and essentialist views directly or by presenting
those same views differently from those of earlier times and places. Keeping in
view the complexities and problematics of utilizing a genre like travel writing the
article aims to showcase Tahir Shah’s struggles with it and his attempts at
utilizing the genre keeping in view its limitations to present his new perspectives
on the world. He does this by challenging the readers and adjusting their gaze not
to the former stereotypical views and hegemonic ideas but to the contemporary
climate.
Estrangement and Defamiliarization

Sorcerer’s Apprentice like most of Tahir Shah’s works raises the
expectations of his readers by introducing a romantic motive for travel. Shah
visits India in search of the conjuror Hafiz Jan in order to learn magic. Hafiz Jan
was not just a conjuror but the guardian of the mausoleum of Shah’s ancestor Jan
Fishan Khan, an Afghan warlord. Hafiz Jan visits Shah’s family in England when
Shah was a child. Shah develops a closeness with Hafiz Jan who introduces him

to the world of magic during his short stay in Shah’s house. From then Shah
develops a keen interest in magic. Though he goes to India with the motive of
learning magic from Hafiz Jan, Shah ends up being an apprentice of the
renowned conjuror, Hakim Feroze. The very motive of travelling to India to learn
magic seems to set the groundwork for exoticism and romance. The motive of
travel along with the title of the novel raises the expectations of the readers just
like any travel narrative governed by a colonialist discourse to provide an escape
(from the monotony of modern living) into the world of magic and sorcery, to a
former British colony where the former glories of Empire can be revived. The
motive provides the necessary backdrop against which the traveler can present
himself as an intrepid adventurer and the place he visits as a playground for the
readers also to engage in thrilling adventures. The motive and the beginning of
the novel appears to be similar to a travel narrative governed by a colonialist
discourse providing complacency to its readers with the promise of taking them
through a land of magic and romance. However,the promise of romance,
adventure and exoticism provided through the motive and through the initial
accounts of Shah’s arrival in India gradually begins to come in striking contrast to
the present scenario of India struggling to support itself after the plunder and
destruction caused by British colonization.
The documentation of the present realities of India not only de-
romanticizes the place but also discards any attempt on the part of the writer to
take the readers back in time and space to glorify the days of colonization in
India. This is particularly evident in the sights of crumbling British architecture
and algae stained walls of the British mansions which symbolize the death of the
raj in India. This also suggests the country’s gradual disentanglement from the
past of British dominance. The pictures of present-day India though include the
ravages of empire yet they also seem to mock the herculean efforts of the British
colonizers to turn India into a replica of their motherland. This is foregrounded
by the observations put forward by a British traveler whom Shah meets in
Calcutta:
We British doted on a city which didn’t really exist… We put up
monuments to our heroes, whitewashed everything in sight, enjoyed our
liveried servants and our airy bungalows on the banks of the Hoogly. We
got everyone speaking English, and saluting our kings and queens: all in
a desperation to create Kensington in West Bengal. But as soon as we
steamed away, after Independence, Calcutta the real city- began to
burgeon forth. (55-56)
In present day India the opulence and majesty of the British architecture is seen
as a striking contrast to the pictures of hardships and struggles of people living in
India. What Shah observes is the uselessness of such opulent structures for a
common Indian whose only reality is the daily struggle for survival. An important
element of imperialist nostalgia is to escape from and avoid the descriptions of
the political, economic and social hardships faced by the people of the former
colonies. Romanticized depictions of former colonies by travel writers is a

146 Rima Barua
common trait of imperialist nostalgia and are made with the aim of presenting
the place as pristine, unspoiled and most importantly as being in a state of
historical stasis.
Contemporary travelers usually in order to mark the difference between
himself and the people of the place represent places as being stuck in an earlier
historical phase which the west has supposedly outgrown. This temporal distance
not only helps to highlight differences but also allows the traveler to go back in
time, encountering a former colony which has not yet been able to come out of its
British past. In Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the pictures of the crumbling British
colonnades, decay of the imposing British palaces and mansions, the use of the
classical pavilions at present for billboards, and the country with its own “agenda
of survival” all discard any possibility of the place being in a state of historical
stasis (Shah 59). What becomes gradually more prominent through the
descriptions are the economic, hardships and the material currently being faced
by the people of India rather than a glorification of the former glories of British
empire in India. India is not presented as an infantile, uncorrupted place
nostalgically looking back to a time when it was an esteemed colonial outpost. By
de-romanticizing India, Shah breaks the expectations of the readers waiting to
consume images of otherness that assure them of their superiority by taking them
back to the former colonies to speak of the former glories of Empire. Shah
therefore is seen to utilize the troupe ofestrangement in order to discard
imperialist nostalgia. Through estrangement and defamiliarization Shah
questions the frivolous role of travel writing to merely entertain the white readers
by supplying images of exciting otherness of foreign cultures to rejuvenate a
world of domestic culture which their own cultures cannot provide. He thus
renders the otherness of the foreign place as ordinary. Elements of excitement
and romance associated with the strangeness and the difference of the other are
dismantled. The focus of the narrative is more on presenting the immediate
reality of the place rather than lapsing into nostalgia for the past. The narrative
does not set up a space for the readers to act out their private fantasises and
thereby resists such escapist fantasies of particularly the western readers who
read travel writing to temporarily escape into a world romance and adventure.
The Wonders of the Global world

Modern travel writing is regarded to be a literature of disappointment.
“Disappointment, disenchantment, disillusionment, belatedness, nostalgia: these
are some of the most recurrent terms in the discussion of contemporary travel
and its writings” (Cooke 2). As such there lies a dearth of the element of wonder
in contemporary travel writing with there being nothing novel to present. There
however lies responses to such assumptions.In the book, Travellers’ Tales of
Wonder, Simon Cooke highlights the reductionist nature of such assumptions
and states that such assumptions express “a highly encultured interpretation of
travel and Travel Writing” (25). The problem of contemporary travel writing is
that it attaches the idea of wonder to the discovery of new territories but fails to

address the wonder that can arise from the various encounters that takes place in
a world of global movements. Such assumptions also fail to consider the various
perspectives that arises due to cultural clashes in the postmodern, globalized
world. Shah provides a challenge to such reductionist assumptions of thinking
the world as too well known. Simon Cooke in this regard makes a major point
that wonder in contemporary travel writing has become more prominent because
of the engagement of travel writing with the very issues that threaten its
existence. As mentioned earlier, one of the characteristics of Counter travel
writing is to transform the very obstacles of modern travel writing into strengths.
Globalization which has an important hand in turning travel and travel writing
into something that is banal and commonplace, has also paved the way for
elements of wonder in modern travel. Shah recreates wonder in Sorcerer’s
Apprentice by focussing on the changes that globalization has caused in the
contemporary world.
In Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Shah primarily highlights people and their tactics
of survival in the midst of hardships rather than observing places. Sorcerer’s
Apprentice is a travel account that pays tribute to the ingenuity of humans in
finding techniques and strategies of survival in the modern world. Modern day
India is devastated by problems of over population, poverty, superstition along
with natural calamities like draught, flood etc. The cause of most of the social
problems is unemployment. But people in India as described by Shah are seen to
have developed strategies to deal with the problem of employment. Shah gets to
know about unique forms of trade in India that shows that money can be made
from nothing. Here in lies the wonder of modern existence. Shah does not limit
himself in presenting India as a victim of colonization and as a place devastated
by the ravages of Empire but as a country which ingeniously struggles to restore
itself from the devastations of colonization and its own social problems. It is
while describing the various trade secrets, business strategies of the lower
sections of society that Shah attaches the element of surprise and wonder to the
varied ways in which sources of living are created in India. Wonder unlike
colonial travel narratives is not aroused by the discovery of new places but by the
discovery of new and unique tactics of survival, by highlighting the harsh realities
of living in the modern times and the ability to survive under hostile conditions.
What Shah gets to see in India are unique forms of trade like gold recycling,
organizing of weddings in Metro stations, Garbage Banquet, Skeleton Dealing,
etc. which not only demonstrate unique ways of survival but also highlight the
ingenuity of the Indian people. As asked by Hakim Feroze, Shah sets out to find
insider information regarding the place and the people there and is struck with
amazement to see ingenious systems of making money. He is amazed to see how
the arrangement of hiring a cow from the owner for a day can serve as a source of
income for many. Observing the genius of the arrangement Shah states:
Where else could you find such an ingenious system? The milkman
milks the cow and then, instead of looking after it all day, gives it to a
woman who pays him for the privilege of looking after the animal . . . the

148 Rima Barua
women charges people to feed the creature a few strands of grass. In

turn, the cow’s devotees attain a sense of inner calm from their charity.
The woman sells the dung to fuel -brick makers as a profitable side
line. (132)
Shah is equally mesmerized to see the army of gold scroungers who sweep
up the workshops of the jewelers and collect every grain of dust meticulously and
then takes away the dirt for recycling in order to finally get a tiny nugget of gold.
Gold sweeping in India thus not only exemplifies the exalted heights to which
recycling can be taken but also sets the best example to make money out of
nothing. Shah also gets to meet an impressive entrepreneur, ‘the wedding man’
who hires metro platforms by offering some tips to the station manager to allow
him to use the platform for organizing weddings.
The platform solves the problem of finding a clean and a large space for a
wedding along with the required facilities of toilets, televisions and speakers.In
his search for insider information, Shah also gets to eat in a restaurant that serves
various delicacies prepared from refuse or leftover food and in this way caters to
the food cravings of the people who cannot afford to go to a restaurant. The
restaurant serves as the best example of Garbage Banquet. At the same time Shah
clarifies that though on one hand unemployment forces people to device such
unique forms of trade, it also forces people to resort to even more unique but
fraudulent and illegal ways of earning money. Shah gets to learn about the trade
secrets of the illegal business of the skeleton dealers who collect unclaimed
corpses and take them to the skeleton processing factory to process them into
medical skeletons which are then exported to other countries. Among these
fraudulent ways, the most popular and the extraordinary strategy of survival is
undertaken by the Godmen of India. These so-called godmen are well acquainted
with the science behind magical feats. They are nothing but illusionists who excel
in magical science. They use this skill to rise themselves to the stature of god and
present the illusions as miracles. They are experts in their field, well equipped
and have mastered feats of illusion in such a way that unless a person is himself
an expert in the field of magic, he cannot find loopholes in the performance to
prove that it is science not magic. Although these godmen, sadhus, sages, fortune
tellers, healers are nothing but con-artists, yet Shah cannot resist from admiring
their extraordinary talents, imagination and resourcefulness that they deploy in
order to survive. The unique ways of using the power of science for survival by
Indian godmen is an evidence of the wonder associated with the reality of life.
Wonder is also aroused through the representation of the workings of a
global world where “cultures get remade as a result of the flows of people, objects
and images across national borders…” (Bhabha, Clifford and Gilroy qtd. in Rojek
and Urry 11).The present world is of course a world of anxieties and pressures
brought about by late modernity but it is also the time where easy mobility has
filled the world with hordes of exchanges of people and ideas. The representation
of such exchanges is in itself a new challenge and such presentations
automatically remove banality and recreate the sense of wonder associated with

travel.Diasporic writers like Shah reflect on a global diasporic world and can
easily identify with the instabilities prevalent in the contemporary world. The
incessant flow of people and products has brought about new changes in the
world. This flow has not only produced people with hyphenated identities but has
also resulted in the emergence of hybrid cultural forms. Shah in order to
demonstrate the workings of a global world talks about the consumer culture in
India and India’s response to cultural imperialism.
In India, Shah comes across various salesmen who reveals to Shah their
unique products advertising them with new business strategies. Indian markets
are not just filled with imported products but most interestingly with
‘indigenized’ products that are adopted and adapted to suit the Indian market.
These products actually provide a counterthrust to the west providing a mirror
that reflects the west in new angles and forms. Shah thus states that India’s
commercial strategies in fact make it presently one of the biggest capitalistic
nations on Earth. By referring to the process of indigenization Shah’s highlights
India’s response to cultural imperialism. Not only does India produce Indian
versions of foreign products but also advertises itself and its products for the
western consumers. From the profitable wig business in Tirupati, to marketing
itself as a place where one can receive spiritual enlightenment, India nurtures its
peculiarities and markets them. The representation of such developments and
changes brought about by globalization regenerates wonder in travelling and
travel writing. Globalization thus no longer remains an obstacle for travel writing
rather it provides opportunities for travel writing to look at places and people
with renewed perspectives.
Encounters with the Travelee and the Conflicts of the Contact Zone
One of the markers of travel narratives governed by colonial discourse is to
ignore interpersonal encounters and the moments and spaces of contacts known
as the contact zone between the traveler and the travelee. According to Mary
Louise Pratt, Contact Zones are important because, “the contact zone is an
attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously
separated by geographical and historical disjunctures and whose trajectories now
intersect” (6-7).The subjects mentioned here are the traveler and the travelee
both of which are not shown as separate but as interacting in the contact zones.
The term ‘travelee’ was used by Mary Louise Pratt in her book Beyond
Imperial Eyes to mean “a person travelled to (or on) by the traveler, receptors of
travel” (6). According to Catherine Mee, the word ‘travelee’ does not merely
designate the inhabitants of a place but “encompasses everyone that comes into
contact with the traveler, regardless of his identity” (4). The term ‘travelee’ can be
seen as being synonymous to the term ‘other’ but unlike the term ‘other’, travelee
does not carry exotic and mystical connotations. Travel Writing usually presents
a traveler who is at the center of the text and whose perspective provides
glimpses of the other. The traveler is seen to act on this passive travelee,

150 Rima Barua
photographing them, conversing with them and commenting on them. In the

relation between the traveler and the travelee, the travelee is always assumed to
play a passive role as the existence of the travelee is conditional to his /her
encounter with the traveler and his representation of those encounters in the
text. But Mee in her book, Interpersonal Encounters points out that encounters
are reciprocal and the role of the travelee is far from being passive. The travelee
can have an active role in not only influencing the traveller but also transforming
him in his journey. Studies of the contact zones and the encounters between the
traveler and travelee have questioned the passive character of the travelee. Such
encounters demonstrate the capacity of the travelee to challenge and dismantle
the self-sufficiency of the traveler thereby questioning the conventional role of
the traveler and the travelee. Yet even in the midst of this the travelee in various
travel narratives of conquest and domination is silenced as inhabitants of the
periphery.
Observing the difficulty in prioritizing people over places in travel
narratives, Mee points out, “People have minds of their own, they do not always
conform to expectations, they can be awkward or intimidating, they can answer
back” (6). As such travelers prefer to present places over people and resist from
representing encounters with the travelee. The need to prioritize such encounters
of conflict within travel narratives is a matter of the writer’s discretion and as
such in narratives of domination, the travelee is denied agency. But Pratt talks
about the possibility of studying travel from the perspective of those who
participate on the receiving end of travel. This is clear in Pratt’s observation,
If one studied only what the Europeans saw and said one reproduces the
monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the imperial enterprise
sought. This is a huge distortion because of course that monopoly did
not exist. People on the receiving end of European imperialism did their
own knowing and interpreting sometimes … using the Europeans own
tools. (7)
In Sorcerer’s Apprentice Tahir Shah primarily focuses on such encounters of
conflict thereby providing the readers an opportunity to view the place through
the travelee’s eyes. India is thus seen not only through the eyes of Tahir Shah but
also through the eyes of various travelee that he encounters. It is important to
note that most of these encounters question and challenge Shah’s initial views of
India.
Shah however chooses to represent such encounters of conflict in his novel
and this is what makes his work different. In the initial chapters of the novel Shah
is seen to focus on the sordid aspects of India: the frenzied traffic, the crumbling
British architecture, the pot holes in the streets etc. When he arrives in Calcutta,
he deciphers the place as utterly chaotic. But in striking contrast to Shah’s
observation is placed the observation of a fellow traveler or a travelee who
presents a completely different picture of Calcutta. Stressing on the need to look
beyond the city’s day to day routine and the need to open the mind to the wider
picture of a place, he sees system even in the midst of chaos. He states that

Calcutta has a way of arranging systems. These systems are everywhere and that
once those systems are deciphered, the utter chaos will reveal itself as
methodical. Another travelee, this time, a resident of Calcutta warns Shah that
when he is in India he should never underestimate what looks simple. Hakim
Feroze, the magician whose apprentice Shah becomes suggests an interesting
view regarding travel. He asks Shah to go on a journey of observation, not to
observe places but people. According to Feroze there is nothing left in observing
places but what is important to observe is people. The reason behind Feroze’s
preference for observing people over places is that people are interesting to
observe as they change all the time. They are the ones who do things and not the
scenery which will be there forever. Hakim Feroze also highlights another way of
travelling: he asks Shah to undertake a journey through India without the aim of
reaching a particular destination thus encouraging the nomadic mode of travel.
Shah faces similar encounters of conflict in Varanasi and other places he visits.
These encounters force Shah to relativize his observations and gradually he
gets more and more affected by the travelee he meets. The focus on such
encounters in the narrative gradually renders the traveler marginal as the voices
of various travelee take the centre.What such encounters highlight is the
reciprocal nature of the traveler-travelee relationships. This reciprocal nature
dismantles the naturalized set of opposed relationships between the traveler and
the ‘other’ established in the past by the colonial travelers and now by the
contemporary travelers suffering from Imperialist Nostalgia. The presence of
such encounters within a travel narrative debunks a unidirectional relationship
between the traveler and the travelee, where the traveler plays the role of a
privileged all-knowing observer, not interested in knowing or giving importance
to the views of the travelee he meets. It also marks a departure from those
narratives where the travelee is either completely silent or even if they are given a
voice, such voices hardly are shown to be important or capable of influencing.
Thus, the cultural hierarchies that govern travel writing get challenged
through such narratives where the traveler chooses to provide space and voice to
the travelee. Binaries such as traveler/travelee, center/ periphery, travel/
dwelling on which travel writing depends all get dismantled and challenged.
Though travel writing thrives on ‘otherness’ and it is the most essential thing on
which travel writing is dependent but in terms of diasporic travel writing the
concept of ‘otherness’ itself becomes questionable. Horace and the suggestions of
other travelee to look at India beyond its obscured appearances is better
understood by Shah during his training under Hakim Feroze. Shah’s training
under Feroze exposes him to the hidden world of magic and the science behind
illusions. His training helps him to see a resemblance between the way people
visualizes the world of magic and theway travelers approach a place. During a
magical performance, the audience see the illusion as reality but fail to see the
reality behind the illusion. Travelers similarly observe the superficial aspects of a
place as the only reality, looking at places through a vision mediated by a cultural
baggage but unable to accept the limitations of a mediated vision nor being able

152 Rima Barua
to see without it. There is always the urge to capture the ‘other’ through the
dominant discourse that the traveler has at its disposal as rewriting the travel
narrative in the model provided by the colonial precursors lends authenticity to
the narrative.
But when travelers guided by oriental knowledge visit India thinking that it
is a land of adventure, they become disillusioned to see the discrepancy between
the reality and the images and ideas made available to them by colonial
narratives. In this regard Shah asks a travelee as to how foreigners who come to
India, react to see the derelict condition of once majestic British architecture and
the day to day routine life of any city in India. The travelee states that the city
“has a strange effect on them… It tends to destabilize them” (55). The word
‘destabilise’ thus refers to the negative effect that the discrepancy between the
images of a phantasmagoric place and the real place has on a traveler. The
present reality of India comes into conflict with the image of the exotic India once
ruled and designed by the Britishers. Behdad in his book, Belated Travelers,
makes a major point in this regard. Pointing out the problems faced by travel
writers driven by a mediated discourse and the resultant effect of it, Behdad
points out that “the fantastic stories of the mediating text, ironically, make the
real experience of the city appear like a dream in which everything is thrown into
an oblique past” (27). Thus, the place appears to be a fallen place and it begins to
lose its presence. The traveler’s relation with the immediate reality becomes
problematic and the traveler’s visions of the place perceived through his earlier
readings gain the status of the real. In the world of such mediated visions former
colonies like India is deciphered not as a place that is moving in time, struggling
to come out of its disrupted state brought about by colonization but as a place
unable to move out of its colonial past, lying with the remains of Empire.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice however is a different text in this regard. In case of
Shah though he also seems to be destabilized by the sordid aspects of India, he
does not choose to present the place in its past or as a fallen place but he takes up
the views of the travelee and is able to see beyond the obscured appearances of
the place. Shah points an observation made by a fellow traveler who states that
“Calcutta has moved on . . . the façade may be crumbling, the streets may be a
mass of pot holes and the traffic a frenzy of heaving buses and suicidal driving…
but this is Calcutta…” (55). This observation discards any possibility of presenting
the place as being in a state of historical stasis. Rather it highlights the changes
that the place and particularly the people of the place are undergoing with time.
Shah’s initial disappointment with the place is replaced soon by his search for
insider information about India which clarifies that the present reality of India
not just lies in the ravages of empire or its sordid aspects but there is more to it.
Shah adopts the suggestions of Horace and Feroze: to decipher India beyond its
superficial reality. Soon Shah observes that India’s unique ways of dealing with
the pressures and demands of modernity and that despites all its economic and
social problems, people here are supporting themselves by getting themselves
employed in different ways and means as available to them. The views of these

travelee which seem to provide renewed ways of approaching a place and their
role in influencing Shah questions the rigid boundary that exists between a
traveler and a travelee. The travelee in Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not just given a
voice and agency but is capable of challenging the traveler’s central role in a
travel narrative.
Shah’s initial position of a foreigner coming to India to study magic, his
highlighting of the unpleasant aspects of the places in the initial chapters and
then gradually making prominent his own limitations as a traveler by
highlighting the views of the travelee he meets, seems to be a strategy. This
strategy highlights the limitations of a colonialist discourse and its irrelevance in
the present times. Also, Shah’s ability to move from one perspective to the other,
seems to be a product of his hyphenated identity. While looking for insider
information Shah traces transnational forces and the interconnectedness of the
consumer culture. As a diasporic writer Shah is able to see these interconnections
and accept the productive result of the clashes that takes place because of
encounters between himself and the travelee.
The flexibility of Shah’s narrative is the flexibility that is actually provided
by border crossing. Shah utilizes this to view the place he visits. The voice and
agency given to the travelee and the acknowledgement of the reciprocal
relationship between the traveller and the travelee, the disruption of the rigid
boundaries between the self and the ‘other’ and other hegemonic divisions, the
creation of estrangement to adjust the gaze of the readers to the contemporary
times, the transformation of the consequences of globalization that threaten the
existence of travel writing into strength and the use of such elements to recreate
wonder in contemporary travel writing, all direct to a counter travel writing that
is possible even in the midst of the limitations of the genre. Though the modern
experience of displacement puts the notion of a stable identity at stake, yet it also
paves the way for new possibilities and perspectives. Of course, the negative
impact of an unstable identity has also been a part of diaspora. However, in
Sorcerer’s Apprentice, one does not get to witness a travel writer who is driven by
a sense of loss, rather Shah’s hyphenated position seems to endow him with a
flexibility to use counter travel writing to revive and restore travel writing from
its redundant, jaded and clichéd position. This contemporary world of
uncertainty and fluidity presents travel writers with diverse scopes to discover the
already discovered world in a new light and is in itself an immense source of
wonder and enchantment. Be it ‘travel’, ‘exploration’ or ‘tourism’, each is
assignable to its own age and each fulfils the demands of its age. This clarifies the
transient nature of the world which will continue to come up with new changes
and developments. The present world is of course a world of anxieties and
pressures brought about by late modernity but it is also the time where easy
mobility has filled the world with varied exchanges of people and ideas. The
representation of such exchanges is in itself a new challenge. The fixed nature of
the travelling subject as a privileged superior knowledgeable observer is no
longer suitable for the present times.

154 Rima Barua
However, there is no dearth of such travelling subjects in contemporary

Travel Writing. The inability to resist the call of Imperialist Nostalgia has resulted
in the continuous production of such travelling subjects. The present global setup
however challenges the stability of such travelling subjects and demands subjects
who can take up the task of representing the complexities and anxieties of the
postmodern world thereby facilitating a counter travel writing in the age of
belated travellers.As a migrant writer Tahir Shah cannot discard the anxieties of
the present world by seeking solace in a mythic past and thereby presenting the
place that he travels to as being outside the present tense of the traveller. The
place rather has to be looked at in relation to its present and the writer’s present.
The cultural encounters that take place between himself and the locals reveal the
problems of regarding Travel Writing as a tool for consolidating stable unitary
ideas. These encounters in fact forces him to question the stable nature of notions
such as identity, nation, class, gender along with the stable binary divisions of
self/ other, home/ abroad, etc. are questioned. Through Sorcerer’s Apprentice
what Shah ultimately suggests is that Travel Writing is not foredoomed to the
limited visions of colonial gaze but that it can aspire to look beyond the it.
Works Cited :
Lisle, Debbie. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing. Cambridge
UP, 2006. PDF Drive <www.pdfdrive.com>.
Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution.
Duke UP, 1994. Google Books <www.books.google.co.in>.
Cooke, Simon. Travellers' Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald.
Edinburgh UP, 2013. Google Books<www.books.google.co.in>.
Holland, Pattrick and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters : Critical
Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. U of Michigan P, 2000.
PDF Drive <www.pdfdrive.com>.
Mee, Catharine. Interpersonal Encounters in Contemporary Travel Writing :
French and Italian Perspectives. Anthem Press, 2015. Google Books
<www.books.google.co.in>.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.
Second. Rotledge, 2008. PDF Drive <www.pdfdrive.com>.
Rojek, Chris and John Urry, editors." Transformations of Travel and Theory."
Touring Cultures. Routledge, 1997. PDF Drive <www.pdfdrive.com>.
Rosaldo, Renato. Culture & Truth : The Remaking of Social Analysis. Beacon
Press, 1993. PDF Drive <www.pdfdrive.com>.
Shah, Tahir. Sorcere's Apprentice. Arcade, 1998.
Thomson, Carl. Travel Writing. Routledge, 2011. PDF Drive
<www.pdfdrive.com>

pp. 155-170
REPRESENTING THE URBAN IN RANA

DASGUPTA’S CAPITAL
Sayan Chaudhuri
Abstract
This paper will conduct a close reading of Capital (2014) by Rana
Dasgupta to examine how the narrative attempts to embody the complex
framing of Delhi as a globalizing city. The study will particularly focus
on Dasgupta's methodology as a chronicler or biographer of the city:
specifically, how he attempts to tease out the mediations between
particular lived experiences and the generalized framings of the urban
imaginary in post-liberalisation India.
Keywords : globalisation; post-liberalisation India; Delhi; urban
studies.
I. Theorising the City

Capital (2014) by Rana Dasgupta follows a rich line of writing on the city in
India. Vinay Lal, in the introduction to the two-volume Oxford Anthology of the
Modern Indian City (2013), notes that although “the city in India is emerging as
the site of great ferment, certainly agitating the minds of the country’s novelists,
filmmakers, entrepreneurs, and policy planners, it is well to recall that the city in
India is as old as Indian civilisation” (Lal xv). Lal’s anthology collects writing
from across disciplines and contexts, providing a sense of the varied imaginings
of the urban. Lal’s attempt is to put together writings on the modern Indian city
which focus on the city “as a site of imagination, as a nodal point for
contestations over modernity, and as a location of specific cultural phenomena”--
writings formally traversing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (Lal xlvi). To begin to
study the city as a crucial trope in post-liberalisation India requires both an
acknowledgment of the primacy of the city in the historical imagining of India
itself as well as an acknowledgment of the diversity of aesthetic forms which have
continually imagined the city. The city in the present inevitably borrows its
energies and anxieties from the city in the past.
Gyan Prakash looks at how the city emerges as a crucial symbol for
modernity in nationalist imagination: although Gandhi’s reclamation of the
village as preserving the essential identity of India as opposed to the city as a
symbol of corrupt Western modernity found resonance in nationalist discourse, it
was eventually forsaken for Nehru’s emphasis on the city as the beacon of the
future (Prakash 3). Prakash argues that such a binary is more complicated than it

156 Sayan Chaudhuri
seems: both Gandhi and Nehru were, in some sense, influenced by the
“refashioning” logic of modernity and produced “cross-hatched” conceptions of
the city and the village (Prakash 4). If Gandhi argued that the ideal village would
foster independence of spirit and not be a backward place where people lived in
“dirt and darkness”, Nehru argued that urbanising villages does not imply luring
people away to towns and cities (Prakash 4-5). The village and the city were
posited as different stages of development in the planning of the nation-state, but
if history is any indication, the idea of stages does not merely consist of spatial
and technological divisions, but is refracted through “power” (Prakash 5). The
narrative of the city, if seen only through the lens of modernization, reductively
foregrounds merely the “theme of development, of transition from tradition to
modernity, as a stage in historical evolution”--how does one articulate the
“experience of the city” within such a template? (Prakash 5). Instead, the city,
according to Prakash, has to be seen through its “practices, memories, and
desires”, through its manifold stagings and articulations, “to bring into view
spaces of power and difference suppressed by the historicist discourse of the
nation” (Prakash 6). This, in part, involves a revised orientation to the frame of
modernity itself.
Narratives of modernity, William Mazzarella argues, frequently lapse into
narratives of disenchantment, inevitably prompting:
a kind of return of the repressed, whether in the form of a grand
revolutionary reversal or a more inconclusive, but no less subversive,
'haunting' of the deathly abstractions of modern knowledge by the
vitally embodied energies they both require and deny…[the] ideological
discourse of modernity not only represses and demonizes the affective
but also romantically fetishizes it - particularly insofar as it can be
located at the receding horizon of a savage disappearing world, an
anthropological other in the classic sense. (Mazzarella 295)
Mazzarella proposes that the study of modernity should be reoriented towards
the thinking of affect--a terrain which is “presubjective without being presocial” -
as it will lead towards a “way of apprehending social life that does not start with
the bounded, intentional subject while at the same time foregrounding
embodiment and sensuous life” (Mazzarella 292). Modernity is constantly
mediated by affect: if, on the other hand, affect is considered as merely produced
through immediacies, as preceding mediation, narratives of modernity inevitably
create a hierarchy between a rationalised, modern, disenchanted order as the
inevitable logic of the future and the ethnic, primitive, rural order as preceding
modernity and thus relegated to the status of an anthropological relic. The
processes through which subjective responses to rational constructions of the
urban are formed involve mediations which are affective and embodied, and
cannot be entirely determined by the logic of planning and development. As
Mazzarella states, the category of the local (such as ethnic identity) and the non-
local (such as citizenship) are distinguishable in discourse, but “politics in
practice always involves...a mediation between, on the one hand, claims to local

Representing the Urban in Rana Dasgupta’s Capital 157
and finite identification and, on the other, an aspiration to universal relevance”

(Mazzarella 305).
The city in post-liberalisation India emerges as a crucial index for
development and growth: the tropes of “consumption” and “modernity” have
been synonymous with the urban (Lal xxxv). Such tropes, as Nandy argues,
invent and imagine the city through certain metaphors: the city as allowing for an
expansion of the self; the city as the alternative to the village; and the city as
haunted by its own contestations (Nandy 298-301). These metaphors contain
both spatial and temporal dimensions: the city as temporally superseding the
rustic, the traditional, the old; the city as extending and organising and
developing space. The articulation of such metaphors is not merely to describe
the urban, but also to imagine the potential of the urban. A fair amount of
contemporary English-language nonfiction has taken on the task of imagining the
city, a task inevitably fraught with the author's personal motivations and biases.
The autobiographical emphasis in recent texts such as Maximum City (2004)by
Suketu Mehta, Calcutta (2013) by Amit Chaudhuri, and the series on short
biographies of cities brought out by Aleph Book Company, perhaps attempt to
self-reflexively foreground the problem: the evaluation of a city is, in part, an
evaluation of the author’s own anxieties, aspirations, and desire to locate herself
within the city. Dasgupta’s narrative of Delhi is distinct in its focus on the
transformation of the city within the frame of economic liberalisation--the focus,
however, broadens to looking at Delhi as produced within global systems of
power. Capital, as a title, is explicitly revealing of the focus of the book. Delhi, as
the political capital of India, serves as an index for larger impulses transforming
India; Delhi, at the same time, is transforming within the logic of global
capitalism.
Dasgupta’s narrative constantly veers from the particular to the general:
most chapters, for instance, begin with details of encounters and interviews, but
gradually move towards theoretical claims attempting to rationalise the details.
The interviews, although distinguishable by content, are represented in a similar
register: earnestly self-justifying, desperately insistent, and slightly unhinged.
Dasgupta is hardly present in the interviews; it is unclear how he encourages
conversation: the interviewees appear surprisingly effusive as a consequence. The
distinctions between specific contexts are offered by the interpretive frames
punctuating the narrative: it is implied that the content of the interviews have
meanings determined by metanarratives of partition, patriarchy, and of course,
global capitalism. This leads to a peculiar incongruity: the details of the narrative
appear richly effusive, suggesting subjective meanings beyond specific
determinations, but the narrative is held together with a set of determinate
conclusions about Delhi as a globalising city. Dasgupta's narrative presents
complicated relations between the particular and the general, the personal and
the impersonal–how are these relations to be understood? It might not be too
far-fetched to consider the narrative as a physical embodiment of the city as
Dasgupta experiences it: in other words, any representation of Delhi in the

158 Sayan Chaudhuri
twenty-first century has to be layered, disturbed, spilling over the edges. The
subtitle of the book--“[a] portrait of twenty-first century Delhi”--gives a sense of
the aesthetic orientation of the narrative: the description of appearances, the
layering of spatial and temporal dimensions of the urban, and the eventual
framing into a whole. In this essay, I will look at two crucial aspects of Dasgupta's
narrative: the interviews, filled with details and digressions, evoking a sense of
the energies and anxieties of those who lay claim to the city in various ways; and
the historical contexts Dasgupta finds lurking behind the idiosyncrasies of the
present.
II. Wealth, Ambition, and Risk

Rana Dasgupta, who grew up in England, arrives in Delhi a decade after
economic liberalisation and in his own estimate, “that decade before [his] arrival
had been devoted mainly to what you could call changes to its ‘software’, while its
‘hardware’ remained relatively untouched” (Dasgupta 36-37). Dasgupta uses such
a metaphor precisely to contrast the past with what was to happen in the
subsequent decade: “the furious tearing-down of all that hardware in the pursuit
of globalism” (Dasgupta 37). By hardware, Dasgupta seems to refer to not just the
architecture of the city, but the structuring of experience in the city. The narrative
is, in part, an exploration of what makes Delhi vulnerable to such a rapid
dismantling of older forms of living--the fragility, the traumas, the heedlessness.
Dasgupta finds Delhi intensely promising on arrival: he finds artists and
intellectuals furiously exploring the potential of the newness Delhi was being
ushered into. There were rich critical debates on how a cosmopolitan public was
to to be imagined, how global capitalism was to be translated and adapted in
Delhi’s context to prevent irresponsible consumption of public resources, how art
and literature were to creatively articulate the possibilities of the city. The
gestating potential, according to Dasgupta, is not just left unrealised, but is
“taken over by more dismal energies” a decade later: “[money] ruled this place as
it did not even the ‘materialistic’ West, and the new lifestyle that we saw
emerging around us was a spiritless, degraded copy of what Western societies
had developed...office blocks, apartment blocks, shopping malls and, all around,
the millions who never entered any of them except, perhaps, to sweep the floors”
(Dasgupta 43). Such an evaluation sounds harsh and absolute, but it provides
Dasgupta an origin for his narrative: what did people have to do with these
changes, how was the city imagined by those living through the reshaping of the
city? As Dasgupta writes, “I resolved to start with them, with the torrent of
Delhi’s inner life, and to seek there the rhythm, the history, the mesh, from which
a city’s lineaments might emerge” (Dasgupta 45).
The city’s lineaments emerges through particular encounters, desires, and
traumas; but Dasgupta also begins to discover that the city is not merely
produced through those it contains, but is mediated through “global systems”:
“indeed, the book I began to write felt like a report from the global future: for it
seemed to be in those ‘emerging’ centres like this, which missed out on

international capitalism’s mid-twentieth-century – its moment of greatest

inclusiveness and hope – that one could best observe the most recent layer of
global time” (Dasgupta 45-46). Globalisation, as Cameron and Palan argue, is
“explicitly a story of temporal change”: the idea that the “world is becoming more
global” is a ruse to rationalise specific policies aimed towards accelerating
capitalist expansion, spatial reorganisation of the city, and consumerist frames
(Cameron and Palan 57). Delhi, Dasgupta begins to discover, is prey to a
determining logic--its impulses are not entirely its own. The global city, as Saskia
Sassen has theorised, are cities which function as “highly concentrated command
points in the organization of the world economy”, “as key locations for finance
and for specialized service firms, which have replaced manufacturing as the
leading economic sectors”, “as sites of production, including the production of
innovations, in these leading industries; and finally, “as markets for the products
and innovations produced” (Sassen 3-4). Such cities, Sassen notes, are cropping
up across asymmetric national frames, across both the first-world and the third-
world, thus consolidating the logic of global systems. Dasgupta throws up a
curious problem: Delhi’s story could be told as a particular account of global
capitalism, but such an account would contain its own idiosyncrasies, its own
anomalies. Dasgupta finds that Delhi, "with its aspiring classes desperately trying
to lift themselves out of the pathetic condition of the city into a more dependable
and self-sufficient world of private electricity supplies and private security” is not
the template of the global city that was either desired or expected (Dasgupta
439). To make sense of such a situation, Dasgupta suggests, is perhaps to
confront a devastating conclusion: that Delhi does not represent “some backward
stage of world history…[instead it] is the world’s future” (Dasgupta 439). How
does Dasgupta begin to make sense of the troubled mediations between global
impulses and particular idiosyncrasies?
Aihwa Ong argues that the emphasis on “globalization” to rationalise urban
impulses across contexts and histories might gloss over particular variations. The
schematic perspective that “there is a single system of capitalist domination, and
a set of unified effects of regular causal factors that can foment nearly identical
problems and responses in different global sites” might fail to “enrich our
understanding of particular challenges and solutions on the ground” (Ong 6-7).
Ong, instead, uses the concept of “worldling”--a set of “projects and practices that
instantiate the world in formation”--to emphasise emergence, uncertainty, and
experimentation (Ong 11). Although Dasgupta begins his narratives with
metaphors of emergence, with a hopeful anticipation of Delhi’s potential
resistance to the repercussions of globalisation, his conclusions are far more
fatalistic. His conclusions, it seems, follows from the kind of evidence he gathers,
the people he interviews: the rich, the ambitious, the power brokers of the city.
The narrative begins with Rakesh, a businessman owning multiple
manufacturing organisations, belonging to a family of traders. Dasgupta's
representational choices are striking. Rakesh is introduced through a highly
suggestive description of his house: “The building is like two space stations, one

160 Sayan Chaudhuri
glass and one stone, crossing over each other. One of them floats free of the earth,
a shining bridge to nowhere, its underside glinting with landing beacons”
(Dasgupta 1). Dasgupta does not merely evoke a sense of magnitude, but the
metaphor of a house as a space station suggests the symbolic separation of such a
building from what is considered worldly and mundane. Such a separation,
however, does not seem to produce a meaningful identity: the “shining bridge to
nowhere” paradoxically evokes a sense of a prominent yet vacuous enterprise.
Rakesh earnestly speaks of his economic ambition, his sense of responsibility,
and draws attention to the magnitude of his business: there is the simultaneous
evocation of work as spectacle and work as vocation. Rakesh finally ends his self-
narration with a seemingly ironic admission: “I'm nice. I'm not ruthless, frankly,
I'm not ruthless. That's probably a drawback I have. I should be ruthless”
(Dasgupta 16). The drive to have a ruthless disposition is prompted by Rakesh’s
ambition to accumulate wealth, control proceedings--the drive, however, has to
counteract values of ‘kindness’ and ‘humility’, intrinsic to Rakesh’s familial
identity. It is unclear what prompts Rakesh to speak with such confidence --
Dasgupta is neither visible as a speaker in the sequence nor does he describe his
observations while listening to Rakesh. Dasgupta seems to be setting up a
template for how the young rich in the city express themselves. The subsequent
interviews in the narrative follow a remarkably similar pattern.
First, these characters construct the past in a certain way--rooted in family
histories, older business cultures–which emphasise their sense of lineage but also
demonstrate the superiority of the present. The past has to be necessarily
acknowledged but provides a redundant vision for the world–the present,
instead, constantly verges towards the future, the modern, the infinitely possible.
Second, these characters display remarkable self-confidence: they do not hesitate
to stake their claims on a futuristic vision of the city, glossing over existing social
contradictions. And third, and perhaps most interestingly, they attempt to
distance themselves from potential caricatures of themselves as ruthless and
heartless–money, for them, produces possibilities for social change.
A striking example of such a character type in the narrative is Rahul, an
inheritor of a large family business, who emphatically justifies his need to make
money using a rather curious argument:
Look at the businessmen around you. Here. They build obscene houses.
[...] Then there will be endless property disputes. And then
what?....What is their vision of life? You make money, then you die. [...]
I'm going to change the world with my money. Which is why I need to
make so much. (Dasgupta 223)
Rahul projects himself as moving beyond self-interest: money is not merely
meant for personal accumulation, but a way to invest in the world, to stake a
claim in the future. Dasgupta frames Rahul’s interview with a tremendous
amount of irony; although Rahul speaks with apparent uninterrupted gusto,
Dasgupta subtly inserts a couple of observational comments to orient the reader.
Rahul, at one point, notes with deliberate self-deprecation how he feels he is

rapidly ageing owing to his immense ambition. Dasgupta’s subsequent

observation is both comical and incisive: “It is as if Rahul feels he has made a
Faustian bargain with his family firm…[it] will suck out all his youth...[but]... it
will give him enormous productive power” (Dasgupta 222). To pursue the
metaphor further, the Faustian bargain is, of course, with the frame of endless
capitalist accumulation. Dasgupta hints at the perplexity of the problem: why
does Rahul want to enter this bargain to begin with? The interview ends with a
sense of contrast. Rahul clarifies that his ambition to change the world is not
necessarily a charitable one, directed towards benefitting those less privileged
than himself, and distinguishes between his personal and professional ethics: “I
did go to a liberal American college, and that’s what I am in my heart. But when
I’m running the company, I’m the stereotypically evil capitalist. I’m like a
character from Hard Times. I order people about” (Dasgupta 223). Dasgupta
mentions that his meeting with Rahul was preceded by a rather bleak experience:
he visited a camp set up for labourers working on the infrastructure for the
Commonwealth Games and found that the labourers and their families are being
forced to survive in unhealthy, dehumanizing conditions of living. In a rare
display of conversational intervention, Dasgupta mentions this experience to
Rahul, who responds with a rather peculiar conviction: “I’m sure if I were to see
that I would feel the same… [but] if I saw those people, I am sure I would also feel
contempt” (Dasgupta 224). The narrative shows how Rahul’s consistency of
capitalist zeal and sense of entitlement ironically results in a profound
inconsistency: his vision of the future and his grand plans for developing society
never move beyond the ambit of self-interest.
The discourse of development in contemporary India, as Aditya Nigam
provocatively argues, is dominantly framed in terms of the desire to consume:
desire in need of constant replenishment, desire which will run into crisis if not
reproduced (Nigam 2-3). The desire to consume is perpetuated through an
“elaborate network of systems, processes, apparatuses and relations that keep
working in order to produce the individual as consumer” (Nigam 3). Economies
do not produce for definable human needs as much as abstract monoliths such as
the ‘Gross Domestic Product’ or ‘Sensex’--the ambition to produce, develop, and
innovate is measured in terms of quantitative data, which are strangely reified
despite not being commonly understood or translated (Nigam 3). Characters such
as Rakesh and Rahul are represented, in their own words, as having a sense of
disproportionate agency to desire, own, and control the development of the city.
However, they paradoxically appear to be automatons within an already created
discourse, merely repeating what is assumed to be self-evident: the desirability of
development. Development in twenty-first century urban India, as Nigam puts it,
“is a story of the production of the 'consumer' so that something called 'the
economy' can flourish -- which, incidentally, has very little to do with people
being fed and clothed” (Nigam 5). Dasgupta’s subtle ironic observations do not
interrupt the strong assertion of such a position by the characters interviewed,
but attempt to draw attention to the cracks in the position: what does the
relentless pursuit of making money do to the emotional, social, and familial lives

162 Sayan Chaudhuri
of such people?
Towards the end of the narrative, Dasgupta interviews Anurag, who puts
on an air of self-importance as he discusses his economic ambitions but is, in fact,
partially living off his father since his own business collapsed. Anurag takes
Dasgupta to a park instead of a restaurant and shares an odd, intimate moment,
displaying a sense of vulnerability:
I’m not so crazy about restaurants [..] I’m more comfortable out here.
There’s a beautiful dog here who comes to see me. Black and white [...]
It used to make me feel better when I had too many problems. Family,
money, girlfriend. (Dasgupta 408)
Anurag comes across as alternately stoic and desperate, speculating on the
numerous economic investments he can possibly benefit from yet never certain
whether such acts are meaningful to begin with. His ambition to earn money is
expectedly justified in terms of value to his immediate society. In his own words,
“I want to change things. I want to show people how to live. That’s why I need
1000 crores”” (Dasgupta 412). Such a seemingly oxymoronic admission--the
desire to improve or reform a money-minded world through more money--
appears commonsensical to Anurag and the rest of the young businessmen
Dasgupta interviews. Dasgupta, although initially perplexed by this position
unanimously held by young entrepreneurs, finally arrives at an evaluation: “Delhi
is obsessed with money, it is the only language it understands, and to buy myself
out of its vulgarity and its money-mindedness, I need lots of money” (Dasgupta
412). It is unclear why such a self-defeating logic continues to systematically
influence the preferences and choices of even those who are undermined by it--
not all enterprising young businessmen have an equally successful trajectory after
all. One of the characters Dasgupta interviews, Puneet, admits to losing out on
the economic possibilities offered by the liberalised frame: he begins to trade
different commodities and make money rapidly, following which his business is
clamped down by the police owing to another businessman conspiratorially
reporting against him, and in the process, his romantic partner leaves him for the
son of a cabinet minister with greater economic and political leverage (Dasgupta
382-83). Although Puneet seems to lament the loss of his economic wealth while
explaining why he could not integrate himself within the power elite of the city,
he admits to finding a spiritual turn in his thinking about aspiration, which
strangely makes him attractive to his colleagues. He describes the shift in his
temperament:
My ego has been broken down. I’m celibate. My rich friends come to me
to find peace. They admire me, because part of them wants to be living
the spiritual life like I am, dude. (Dasgupta 389)
Puneet, in fact, frequently visits a “guru” or a spiritual leader to purify himself
from the corruption of a modern ego-driven world--but, on being prodded by
Dasgupta on what he would do if he managed to reclaim his wealth, unabashedly
asserts, that he would have materialist impulses.

Puneet seems to be oblivious to the contradictory nature of his assertions--

but perhaps, as Dasgupta hints, Puneet’s statements should not be seen as a
contradiction. The quest for the spiritual, in Puneet’s case, is not antithetical to
the quest for the material: both are interpreted as modes of acquiring control
over one’s immediate surroundings. The quest for control is, in part, a reaction to
the ubiquity of risk marking the economic framing of the city. Stories of both
success and failure, in the estimation of the characters themselves, are measured
in terms of investment and returns: there is never any certainty about what really
pays off. There is always risk, potentially destructive.
Ulrich Beck argues that “[in] advanced modernity the social production of
wealth is systematically accompanied by the social production of risk” owing to
the emphatic surge towards greater production and consumption of resources,
unleashing all kinds of fatal hazards and threats, capable of wiping off the human
race itself (Beck 19). Such fatalist logic, however, is kept at bay by the
simultaneous emphasis on the management of risk through various institutional
modes (Beck 19). Risk is both produced and contained within the frame of global
capitalism: Dasgupta’s narrative presents a set of examples of those who are
beneficiaries of risky ventures, resulting in no less than massive consumption of
natural resources and the displacement and exploitation of non-propertied,
socially and economically marginalised peoples--but, much to their dismay, are
never immune to risk themselves. The primacy of risk in the context of Delhi,
however, is not merely attributable to the frame of global capitalism and the
constant need to produce wealth, but also local histories. Delhi has its own
peculiar idiosyncrasies, which Dasgupta begins to unearth in the course of the
narrative.
III. Histories and Traumas

The chapterization of the narrative does not follow any identifiable
temporal or thematic logic: the chapters are abruptly divided, moving from one
set of experiences and observations to another set, giving the sense of an
unwieldy, sprawling narrative. As I have suggested before, the formal
organisation of the narrative is perhaps reflective of the difficulty of representing
the subject matter: Dasgupta’s choice to not neatly divide contexts, but instead
layer different contexts and histories over each other, evokes a sense of Delhi as a
city with no clear edges. It is doubtful, in fact, to ascertain whether Dasgupta has
a clear purpose in mind while navigating through different social spaces. It is as if
he chances upon them, discovers them in a rather revealing state--each context
explicitly reveals itself as Dasgupta wanders around the city and the reader is left
to speculate what kinds of investigation or preparation preceded the discovery of
each context. Even in the evocation of history, Dasgupta does not offer any
systematic account of history: for instance, in the second chapter titled 1991,
referring to the year the economy began to be liberalised, is almost entirely about
Nehruvian socialism and how it both gained and lost popularity over a few
decades. Dasgupta’s framing of the chapter, however, is through an epigraph

164 Sayan Chaudhuri
quoting “Indira, a jewellery designer”:

I’m very proud to be an Indian. When I was a kid and people would ask
me where I was from I would be embarrassed to say I was from India.
But something changed in the nineties. Now I’m very proud to say I’m
from here. In those days there was nothing, you know, and the place was
so dirty. Now we have BMWs on the streets. By the time I’m fifty it will
really have arrived. (Dasgupta 49)
The emphasis on the modern and the contemporary produces a certain simplistic
version of the past, where it is relegated to being embarrassing or undesirable,
deliberately glossing over what the past specifically contained. Dasgupta notes
how the Nehruvian vision of economy, despite its failures, “continued to enjoy an
almost theological prestige” for a large part of the four decades following
independence, owing to its “lofty, Brahminical conception, which disdained
money-making and worldly vanity” and instead constructed the nation itself as
the “proper object of aspiration” (Dasgupta 55). The shift from such a framing of
the nation to the contemporary, although rationalised through shifts in social and
political perceptions, is not as clean a shift as it is made out to be: history lurks
behind the contemporary, springing up despite systematic attempts to repress it.
History, as Dasgupta shows, also has to be excavated and analysed for it to make
sense in the contemporary.
The eighth chapter, for instance, is entirely devoted to the rumination of
Delhi as a city in ruins through history: from the Mughal period to the times of
British colonialism to post-independence India. There have been many shifts of
regime in Delhi, dismantling and renewing Delhi, which produces a peculiar
experience of “living in the aftermath” of an older order--and Dasgupta shows
how such a perception persists despite the contemporary construction of Delhi as
the index of a “fast-growing and dizzyingly populous nation” (Dasgupta 154).
Delhi’s writers, Dasgupta notes, have consistently presented a portrait of
desolation--Delhi has been described as a “city of ruins”--and have “directed their
creativity to expressing that particular spiritual emancipation that comes from
being cut off from one’s past”. This is a particularly ironic statement in the
context of the narrative. Being cut off can have very different resonances, as Deb
suggests: on the one hand, one’s location within a transforming landscape can
provoke an intense imagining of the past, frequently expressed as powerful
nostalgia; on the other hand, the inevitable logic of development might cut one
off from the very possibility of imagining the past. Mirza Ghalib, who was writing
both before and after the siege of Delhi by the British in 1857, particularly
lamented the attack on cultural institutions, the ransacking of libraries and the
physical destruction of books--Urdu literature was at stake, and by extension, a
mode of imagining and representing the world was threatened. Dasgupta does
not consciously locate himself within a tradition of writing responding to loss and
desolation, but the analogy is obvious: even in a single decade of living in Delhi,
he experiences a drastic movement from cultural possibility to the complete
closure of possibility. Although the trajectory of Dasgupta’s narrative follows the

same logic as he ascribes to the historical representation of Delhi, he is alert to

the particularity of his time: the representation of the contemporary in the
twenty-first century, Dasgupta implies, is unable to access even the imagining of
the past. The access to the past is partially through language, and Delhi’s cultural
memory was heavily reliant on the Urdu language: as Sadia Dehlvi, a character in
Dasgupta’s narrative mourns,
How can you expect Delhi to care about its own history when no one can
read the languages it is written in? Its entire history is written in Urdu
and Persian. The government deliberately killed Urdu after 1947
because they treated it as a Muslim language. But Urdu had nothing to
do with religion: it was the language of Delhi, of everyone in Delhi.
(Dasgupta 160)
Sadia Dehlvi, whose family used to run a publishing house, publishing
magazines in Urdu and Hindi, admits to the impossibility of reviving an older
literary ethos and instead chooses to focus on her spiritual goals: “I am not
interested in trying to revive the family business. That era has gone….I am happy
to focus on what is inside me and to write on spirituality, ours is a wonderful city,
a modern city: I don’t want to be negative. But our soul is affected. Something has
snapped. I can’t identify it” (Dasgupta 160). The metaphor of spiritual
emancipation is ironic in the contemporary: emancipation is mediated by loss of
meaning and value, but more enigmatically, by the inability to identify the nature
of such a loss. The contexts of Dehlvi and young aspirational young
entrepreneurs are clearly distinct--the former inhabits a context strongly
mediated by the past and the latter is strongly driven towards the future--but a
rather tenuous, enigmatic similarity emerges: the experience of a visceral loss.
Dasgupta’s narrative attempts a contextualisation of such a loss--whether it is the
imagining of a state premised on socialist ideals, or a cultural ethos exploring
value and meaning in human enterprise, or the imagining of society as
cosmopolitan--but as various characters draw attention to the difficulty of
identifying the exact nature of such a loss, it seems that a crucial problem is with
the absence of a vocabulary to articulate the sense of a loss. Dasgupta, in the
course of the narrative, does not explore the differences in linguistic idioms
through which Delhi might be imagined: his choice to translate and represent
characters across contexts in the same register--a prosaic, earnest, self-justifying
one-- serves to homogenise the characters within a general idiom. This obviously
helps Dasgupta move towards a general conclusion: that Delhi’s reimagining
through global capitalism produces an idiom marked by not just the rhetoric of
economic ambition, but a simultaneous self-renewal and forgetting. The sense of
enigmatic loss, perhaps, suggests a structural disconnect from the material bases
of the past: how does one remember the past in a constantly self-justifying
present? This problem is terribly complex, of course, and Dasgupta’s attempt to
find a categorical conclusion is complicated by the imprecise responses of those
he interviews. Even if global capitalism is the general frame within which a kind
of collective forgetting takes place, Dasgupta draws attention to how there is a
particular historical and psychological condition abetting such a process: the

166 Sayan Chaudhuri
negotiation with trauma.

The tenth chapter, pointing out the centrality of the experience of partition
in the post-independent imagining of India, begins with an offhand observation,
which assumes metaphoric potential as the chapter proceeds:
The car honks merrily as it approaches the main intersection, as if there
were only ten other cars on the streets, as if such signals were not
entirely drowned in the hubbub. Having broadcast its alert, it then
drives serenely, and without looking, into the furious path of 16 million
people and their traffic. (Dasgupta 186)
The car serves as a metaphor for a kind of casual yet devastating presumption:
that one can drive towards one's ambition without taking notice of the plethora of
competing interests scattered across one's path, inviting collisions one is simply
not prepared for. Such collisions might breed violence--violence which is not as
much consciously planned as spontaneously produced. The partition of British
sub-continental territory into two separate nation-states, India and Pakistan, did
not just produce massive communal violence--"Muslims in what became India,
and Hindus and Sikhs in what became Pakistan, were cut down in their houses
and in the streets" -- but also resulted in a logic of segregation influencing the
habitation of the cityspace (Dasgupta 189). Dasgupta notes how it is difficult to
find satisfying reasons to explain the magnitude of such violence--even though
there have always been tensions between religious communities, partially fuelled
by ruling powers, the “overwhelming memory of pre-Partition culture in North
India is not one of enmity…[but] rather of inter-religious respect and harmony”
(Dasgupta 190-91). The violence of partition, analogous to civil wars and
genocides in other parts of the world, can be seen as a fantasy for the annihilation
of communities with unequal claims to the newly constructed nation-state--the
structure of such violence is not just targeted against a community, but also
“against its reproductive potential: not only indiscriminate slaughter but also the
repeated exposure of unborn foetuses, the ceremonial display of castrated
penises...and rape on a colossal scale, whose purpose was genetic subjugation”
(Dasgupta 190). Dasgupta compares such a process to a ritual of infinite
purification to mould oneself to narrow identitarian claims of citizenship and
belonging--infinite because its “true theatre was not external but in the self”
(Dasgupta 191). The loss of an older, shared culture is implicit in this process:
when Hindus killed Muslims, they killed the influence of Islam in their notion of
cultural identity, the “Islam they carried within themselves” (Dasgupta 191).
Dasgupta suggests that the sense of intangible, psychic loss experienced by
people across contemporary contexts is perhaps an inheritance of a post-Partition
consciousness, one marked by the emphasis on survival and the necessary
sacrifice of a love directed towards other communities, a “love which had become,
in the modern world, forbidden” (Dasgupta 191).
It is perhaps contentious to make general claims about a massive
transformative event such as Partition and it is unclear what kind of ethnographic
evidence Dasgupta relies on. His representational style, however, has tremendous

affective resonance: he clearly draws attention to how the murky admission of

loss is partially a problem of belonging to a society. For all the confidence people
have in the primacy of the contemporary or the modern, there are always
unacknowledged anxieties about a past that has been supplanted or hastily
overtaken. The problem is located in the contemporary through the interviews--
not in any straightforward way, but through moments of indecision and
uncertainty puncturing fairly consistent self-justificatory assertions--and the
problem is historicised through a psychological account of how the transition to a
modern state is mired in a violence directed towards not just those who have to
be excluded or forgotten or annihilated, but towards one’s self. Dasgupta argues
that “Partition, more than anything else, marks the birth of what can be
recognised as contemporary Delhi culture” and that “[even] those who were born
long after Partition, even those, such as myself, who arrived in Delhi from other
places and histories, find themselves, before long, taking on the post-traumatic
tics which are so prominent in the city’s behaviour” (Dasgupta 193). Such a claim
is difficult to empirically demonstrate, but Dasgupta’s narrative judges and
expresses the post-traumatic tics in the behaviour of those who inhabit the city:
the narrative suggests that the loss of a sense of history frequently manifests as
the loss of self and language.
To return to the metaphor of the car “serenely” driving into the “furious
path of 16 million people”, it is perhaps a terribly apt metaphor for both the logic
of historical conquest and laying hegemonic claim to demarcated spaces (the city
and the nation-state) as well as the capitalist impulses driving the contemporary.
Dasgupta notes how cars frequently carry the signatures of their users, as words
or messages posted on the back windows of cars, to perhaps resist the
“anonymity of the vehicular ocean”: the signatures range from the personable
(“Sunita and Rakesh”) to the confrontational (“I drive like this to PISS YOU
OFF!) to the symbolic (swords suggesting Sikh martial valour) (Dasgupta 196).
Cars turn into projections of one’s assumed personas or identities, to distinguish
oneself from an unclear and perhaps anonymous sense of community. The car, in
its own way, also lays claim to the city. The private automobile provided the user
with a “mobile, but private space” and a “sense of control” and rapidly began to
transform into “an instrument of domination”: “[sitting] behind the steering
wheel brought out a part of the self that we did not quite know ourselves” (Nigam
8-9). As the need for the automobile begins to appear “natural”, the
consequences get displaced from mainstream narratives of the city: the ruthless
destruction of settlements for the urban poor, the massive environmental
degradation, the physical congestion of the streets. Dasgupta shows how such
distortions of narrative are particularly ironic given how the experience of the city
is drastically different: the recuperation of history and alternative claims to the
city is dependent on the recuperation of experience itself. The narrative, as has
been mentioned before, moves towards rather fatalistic conclusions; but, despite
its own intentions to provide a kind of closure, it prompts an important question:
what does such a recuperation do?

168 Sayan Chaudhuri
IV. Resistance: Possibilities and Limitations

One of the recurrent motifs in the narrative is the need for control within
an economic juggernaut that seems to be perpetually spilling out of control: such
a need, as has been suggested, is tied up with narrow constructions of identity.
The violent assertion and desperate protection of identity is frequently a reaction
to threat: the need to constantly amass wealth in a risky economic terrain, the
need to displace ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities from visible bastions of
power in an increasingly competitive social and political terrain. The most visible
threat to existing structures of power, in Dasgupta’s narrative, emerges from his
interviews of women: women from different ends of the economic spectrum.
Dasgupta draws attention to how the “capital was defined, increasingly, by a
hyper-aggressive masculinity, which seemed to lose all constraint in the years
after 1991” manifesting in an exaggerated sense of one’s sense of entitlement. The
sense of entitlement, although aggravated by global capitalism, emerges from
older structures of domination, particularly patriarchy. In such a context, the
stories of characters such as Sukhvinder, who leaves her husband after years of
abuse and policing, and Meenakshi, who tirelessly works towards improving the
conditions of working-class people living in Bhalswa colony, a slum settlement,
provide important counterpoints to the masculinist bias inflecting everyday
encounters in the city. Sukhvinder, who works in her father’s business, had
liberal expectations from her husband, Dhruv--she wanted to smoke, drink, and
have a social life--and although he initially accepted her terms, both Dhruv and
his mother restricted her mobility, constantly policed her activities, did not allow
her to have possessions which were arbitrarily considered inauspicious in a
Hindu Brahmin house (for instance, an amulet given to Sukhvinder by her
Muslim friend) and even physically abused her. As Sukhvinder herself suggests,
her initial resilience to survive the marriage implied an acceptance of the abusive
terms of the marriage--abuse which is not merely physical in nature, but
regularly experienced through the lack of even basic care:
You know the moment at which I really lost respect for him? [...] One
night I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe and I was panicking. I shook
Dhruv awake and asked him to pass me my inhaler, which was on his
side of the bed. But he refused to get it, and I passed out. After that there
was no going back. (Dasgupta 131-32)
Dasgupta does not attempt to rhetorically portray Sukhvinder in either
sympathetic or glorifying terms--he represents her story through her words and
more importantly, her evaluations. Sukhvinder, after leaving her husband,
chooses to forgive him and not slap a legal case against him--the symbolism of
such a gesture is troubled and ambivalent, and Dasgupta’s suspension of
judgment invites the reader to interpret the gesture. The chapter containing
Sukhvinder’s story abruptly begins with a brief anecdote about how a man told
Dasgupta about how he suspected his wife to be having an affair because she
suspected him of the same--Dasgupta notes how he is entitled to think in such
terms as a “form of revenge” (Dasgupta 115). Sukhvinder’s story responds to this

anecdote, to the presumption that how Sukhvinder, as someone’s wife, thinks and
behaves, is already framed within the idiom of male entitlement.
Meenakshi’s story stands out in the narrative as a distinct alternative to the
imagining of the urban by those who easily or even resignedly accept the
liberalised frame: Meenakshi tirelessly works to mobilise working-class people in
Bhalswa colony, a slum in Delhi. Meenakshi finds pride in the fact that even the
women in Bhalswa colony have fought the police; she earnestly asserts the need
to constantly question and struggle against societal boundaries and hierarchies;
she is certain about how she doesn’t “want to be in a capitalist world, simply
earning money and looking at my life like a bank balance” (Dasgupta 256).
Dasgupta is moved by Meenakshi, but his admiration for her energy and labour is
beset with a slight cynicism: “It refreshes me to hear her talk…[she] reminds me
of what I love in the friends I have here: a fierce intelligence searching for a better
arrangement of the world…[this] too is Delhi culture, but is what you would call
the city’s minor culture. It rarely rises to the surface” (Dasgupta 255). It seems
Dasgupta does not find enough radical or transformative possibility in the city’s
minor culture--it is clear there are practical impediments given the sheer force of
capitalist development, but it remains to be asked whether it is possible to
encourage alternative voices to thrive, bring them to the surface, let them
challenge dominant presumptions of what is desirable or acceptable. Dasgupta’s
narrative, it seems, frequently slips into a tone of defeatism: this is rather
disappointing since the narrative throws up possibilities for critiquing the
presumptions of global capitalism. Perhaps the problem is with Dasgupta’s
vantage-point: although he represents the various characters laying claim to the
city, it is not clear what kinds of material contexts Dasgupta himself inhabits.
There is no pure neutral vantage-point from which one can disinterestedly
ruminate about the character of Delhi--or can one?
Dasgupta’s narrative, interestingly enough, ends with an image of
possibility: the possibility to see beyond narrow material confines. If, on the one
hand, the narrative critiques the logic of economic expansion and exposes the
self-indulgent, hierarchical, and ultimately narrow scope of such a vision; on the
other hand, the narrative throws up the possibility for a different vision of
expansion, an expansion of cosmopolitan community, equality, and the struggle
against hegemonic power. The latter has an aesthetic and utopian dimension
quite contrary to the first kind: it involves the ability to see beyond one’s sense of
material limitation. Towards the end of the narrative, Dasgupta meets Anupam,
who is described as one of the few people who can remain “entirely
unconstrained by how a particular problem has been dealt with before, who can
imagine a myriad of ways in which the world might be differently organised” and
can “transcend the general self-involvement and see immediately, in the adjacent
and particular, the planetary extension” (Dasgupta 421-22). Anupam takes
Dasgupta across stretches of the Yamuna bank, showing how older efficient water
systems have been corrupted by modern urban planning, and finally takes him to

170 Sayan Chaudhuri
a spot where the river is surprisingly “clear and fecund” (Dasgupta 447).
Dasgupta experiences a profound moment of aesthetic reappraisal:
The horizon is open, and it is a relief. I realise how consumed my being
has become by the internal drama of my dense adopted city. I have
forgotten expansiveness. This megapolis, where everything is vast,
somehow offers little opportunity to see further than across the street.
(Dasgupta 448)
The narrative, it seems, ends with an acknowledgement that the imagining of
alternatives and resistance requires a crucial shift in vantage-point: a shift which
involves a simultaneous aesthetic and political reconsideration, but a shift
difficult to identify or experience within the dominant framing of the city.
Dasgupta does not know how such a shift might transpire, so it is perhaps fitting
that Anupam has the final word in the narrative: “I’m glad you could see
this…[now] you realise why Delhi is here. It is one of the beautiful places of the
earth” (Dasgupta 448).
Works Cited :
Cameron, Angus, and Ronen Palan. The Imagined Economies of Globalization.
New Delhi: SAGE, 2004. Print.
Charley, Jonathan. “Time, space, and narrative: reflections of architecture,
literature and modernity”. Writing the Modern City: Literature,
architecture, modernity. Ed. Edwards, Sarah and Jonathan Charley.
Oxon OX: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Dasgupta, Rana. Capital. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2013. Print.
Lal, Vinay. “Introduction: Modern India and the Claims of the City”. The Oxford
Anthology of the Modern Indian City: The City in its Plenitude. Ed.
Vinay Lal. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2013. Delhi: Routledge, 2009. Print.
Mazzarella, William. “Affect: What is it Good for?”. Enchantments of Modernity.
Ed. Saurabh Dube. New Delhi: Routledge, 2009. Print.
Nandy, Ashish. “The City of the Mind: The Darkness and the Shadows”. The
Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City: The City in its Plenitude.
Ed. Vinay Lal. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.
Nigam, Aditya. Desire named development. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. Print.
Ong, Aihwa. Introduction: “Worldling Cities, or the Art of Being Global”.
Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Ed.
Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Print.
Prakash, Gyan. “The Urban Turn”. Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life.
New Delhi: Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies, 2002. Print.
Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. New Jersey:
Princeton UP, 2001. Print.

pp. 171-180
SEXUALITY, SELFHOOD AND SELF-

ANNIHILATION IN WILLIAM BLAKE’S POEMS
Subhasish Guha
Abstract
The following paper looks to explore the ideas of sexuality, selfhood
and self-annihilation in William Blake’s poetry. The discussion has been
formulated by analyses of (or in some cases, parts of it) of poems which
are thought to be fit for the topic. A fair share has been allotted to both
the widely read short poems and the dense/obscure ‘Prophetic Books’ so
that the poems selected can be taken to be representative of Blake’s
oeuvre. The inspiration for the topic of this paper stems from Blake’s
acute insight and portrayal of the human psyche- something remarkably
radical and ahead of its time. The paper first deals with the complex
portrayal of sexuality or sexual development- a development which is
warped and twisted by adult interference. The poems deal with issues
like personal honesty, courage and how people allow themselves to be
bullied by prudish and puritan attitudes towards sexuality- a
phenomenon which ends up driving sex into secrecy. The final result of
all this is darkness, secrecy and hypocrisy that lead to destruction and
sinister, negative forms of ‘love’. The analyses deal with the
psychological truths of hidden hostility and repressed emotion. The
poems taken together show that one of the root causes for all the evil
complexities, as far sexuality and selfhood is concerned, is fear and
selfishness- which leads the original descent into dishonesty- resulting
in hardening a part of oneself against the natural flow of self-expression.
With radical insight Blake exposes how a variety of human behaviours
originate in fear ultimately coalesce into a unified concept and lead to
tyranny. The heroic struggle every individual must undertake to break
the shackles of all this is to destroy the self in a moment of inspired
courage. The creative conflict of ‘Contraries’ must be embraced rather
than shunned out of fear or shame. The individual must continually
destroy and re-destroy the hardening self by seeking moments of vision
and inspiration.
Keywords : Repressed emotion, self- expression, contraries, tyranny,
puritan.
The process of building false ‘selves’ and attempting to fix a ‘self’ beyond
the reach of natural change is seen at work throughout Blake’s poetry. It seems to
spring from a variety of reasons, principle among them being fear. Fear of energy,
fear of change, fear of sex, selfish fear of others, and fear of freedom: all develop

172 Subhasish Guha
fixed delusions which close the personality away from infinity, vision and truth.
Blake repeatedly emphasizes natural impulse, honesty and freedom in love. He
shows us that these fears are everywhere and in everyone. Although he conveys
deep sympathy with the fearful feelings of his characters, he castigates them for
failing to confront and overcome the intimidating appearance of things, for giving
into that fear and allowing that fear to rule their lives. The individual has to force
himself out of this vicious cycle of fear, selfishness, dishonesty and tyranny. What
follows is an exploration of individual consciousness in his works.
The first two poems under consideration are a pair- The Blossom from
Innocence and The Sick Rose from Experience. The Blossom is a beautiful pattern
of words and sound. There is much repetition, typical of Songs of Innocence. It is
evident that this is a very simple song playing on a very limited range of language.
The colour green carries an echo which emphasizes the colour of youth and
innocence. References to a sparrow, a robin and a blossom; a rose and a worm in
a storm make it intriguing to find out the core of the poem. There are clues in the
fact that the sparrow has been likened to an arrow, seeking a cradle narrow near
the speaker’s bosom. Similarly, in The Sick Rose, the traditional phallic symbol of
a snake or worm has dark secret love while the rose herself is on a ‘bed of crimson
joy’. Although some critics have attempted to build unlikely meanings about
‘souls bodies and birth and earth’ (Hirsch 181-84), the stories are clear enough
that it can be safely said that the poems are on physical/sexual consummation.
A brief analysis of the poem The Blossom within the context of Blake’s
system of contraries will serve our purpose. The poem is an account of joyous and
natural sex. ‘Blossom’ and ‘under leaves so green’ firmly establishes the
benevolent, pastoral mode of Innocence, mildly evoking the backdrop of The
Lamb. However, the anxieties evoked by the apparent paradox of ‘merry’ and
‘sobbing’ should be modified by the reminiscence of the extremities of fear and
joy yoked together at the creation of The Tyger and the extreme emotions it
generates – ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’. One of the Proverbs of Hell
specifically reminds that Blake felt extremes of emotional experience as
combining together - a combination (of two extremes) producing a heightened
state of wonder and ecstasy- ‘Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps’ (The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell). All this makes it easier to understand why the
robin in The Blossom is sobbing with joy.
There is a fundamental difference between The Blossom and The Sick Rose,
a poem which describes the sexual act in more explicit and more conventional
symbols. There is a strong contrast between these two poems. The phallic bird,
the ‘sparrow’ compared to an ‘arrow’, is transformed into something foul and
sinister. The worm of the Experience is invisible and flies in darkness. The phrase
‘found out’ might be safely taken to imply that the worm tries to seek satisfaction
against the will of the woman who unsuccessfully attempts to hide from it. The
fact that the woman in this poem is the one who hides her ‘bed of crimson joy’ -
essentially meaning that she hides her own desires, is highly significant. Many
critics have been more specific than this when they have suggested that the rose

Sexuality, Selfhood and Self- Annihilation in … 173
is a traditional symbol of female genitalia- so her bed of crimson joy refers to

masturbation (Paglia 277). The basic argument is that whether the rose’s
sexuality is hidden, or masturbatory or both, does not matter- either way, she
denies and refuses her natural desires, or her pleasure is self-enclosed, exclusive.
The ‘howling storm’ through which the worm flies stands for the materialistic
world of experience. Dishonesty is repeatedly emphasized in his ‘dark secret’ love.
The Sick Rose is then densely packed with sinister, disgusting, and dishonest
sexuality. Following this line of argument, it can be said that the poem gives an
account of selfish male aggression and unwilling female hypocrisy. The effect of
this kind of love (making) – that it ‘does thy life destroy’, is summed up by the
final words of the poem.
Locating these two poems in the context of other Songs would be highly
revealing. There have been frequent references to the idea of natural, uninhibited
sexual development, both as a possibility in the world of Innocence and as
prevented by adult interference. In the development of the second plate of The
Echoing Green, boys are handing down bunches of grapes to girls, but ‘old John
with white hair’ leads some reluctant children away from their games. This can be
related with Lyca’s experience- who, despite her parent’s fears is not frightened of
the lion’s masculine mane or ashamed of her nakedness in The Little Girl Lost.
Blake’s outrage at puritan attitudes to sex has been repeatedly and powerfully
expressed. In the Garden of Love also where the speaker used to play on the
green, there was the Earth’s complaint about ‘That free Love with bondage
bound’ and the deadening effect of ‘Thou shalt not’. The criticism is directed at
how prudish attitudes are binding joys and desires. In A Little Girl Lost
(Experience), the opening stanza acts as a kind of sentence or moral and
expresses Blake’s outrage at the denial and perversion of natural sexuality in a
clear campaigning call:
Children of the future Age,
Reading this indignant page;
Know that in a former time,
Love! sweet Love! Was thought a crime.
(Songs of Innocence and Experience 51)
So, it is quite evident that there is a clear message about personal relationships to
be taken from these poems. Natural sexuality- free from interference by adult
prudery, materialism and hypocrisy and unfettered by oppressive laws, is
positive, possible and fruitful and is an intense form of ecstasy (‘sobbing
sobbing…near my Bosom’). It is not sex itself, but darkness, secrecy and
hypocrisy that lead to destruction and sinister, negative forms of love. The Songs
thus reveal a world where religious and social laws imprisoned natural desire,
and express Blake’s indignation at this state of affairs. The social consequences of
driving sex into secrecy are spelled out in ‘London’:
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse

174 Subhasish Guha
Blasts the new-born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
The personal consequences of dishonesty in relationships and with one’s self are
spelled out in the final lines of The Angel, with their evocation of a wasted life:
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head.
Blake provides us with two pictures of infancy to underline the contrasting
consequences of natural and perverted sexual relationships, and to indicate how
the latter can blight a society as well as an individual- Infant Joy in Innocence
and Infant Sorrow in Experience.
This poem, in its sweetness and simplicity of vision is reminiscent of The
Lamb. What is significant is that although Blake is imitating a child’s simplicity
of language yet the adult adopts simplicity when addressing the child. The poem
is simple, repetitive and childish. The poem does express a ‘happy’ situation,
however limited it might be. The infant is ‘happy’, joy is ‘sweet’; the two speakers
do ‘smile’ and ‘sing’; and perhaps most significantly the adult does accept the
infant’s own choice of name and wish for its happiness to continue: (‘Sweet joy
befall thee’). It is widely known that in Blake’s Innocence, clouds on the horizon
may exist by implication, but they are still elsewhere, and hardly impinge on this
poem’s simple ‘joy’. ‘Infant Sorrow’, however is a very different matter.
The contrast is obvious between Innocence’s benevolent adult and these
parents who ‘groand’ and ‘wept’ at the birth of their infant who is ‘Like a fiend’.
Moreover, there is only a ‘dangerous joy’ in place of the ‘sweet joy’, and the infant
is immediately caught up in a struggle against its father. The child is newborn
‘Helpless, naked, piping loud’; but then confusingly and ominously described as
‘Like a fiend hid in a cloud’. What follows is the struggle against ‘swadling bands’.
These were tight cloth wrappings wound around babies to prevent them from
moving, because it was believed that it would help them to grow straight legs.
Blake depicts the ‘swadling bands’ as a form of imprisonment where the father
fights against and binds the child; and this in turn implies that the description
‘Like a fiend hid in a cloud’ tells us how fearfully the parents view their offspring.
Terrified and miserable (‘groand, wept’) they are impelled to tie up the baby as
soon as it is born, when in reality it is ‘Helpless, naked’.
The parents’ misery and fear is crucial to interpreting this poem. This birth
is not the natural and desired outcome of ‘free love’, like the birth in Infant Joy.
Here, a feared and unwanted child is the product of some ‘dark secret’ or
perverted sexuality such as that evoked in The Sick Rose. The father feels
threatened by his child, and fights to control it. Just as the parents contrast,
similar is the case with the infant. The infant of this poem is very different from
its counterpart in the Innocence. This child is not ‘happy’, but is immediately

caught and bound by its father. Obviously, the infant cannot match its father’s
strength: ‘Bound and weary’, it is defeated. However, this infant has learned a
lesson. With chilling deliberateness, it decides to feed itself (‘To sulk upon my
mothers breast’) to gain strength, so that it can overthrow its father –enemy at
some future time. The implication is clear. Eventually the child will become a
youth and the father will grow old. It is inevitable that the child will overthrow its
father, sooner or later. Acquaintance with Blake’s oeuvre will make it clear that
the frightened and aggressive patriarch is a form of the figure called Urizen. The
infant, only just born and garnering strength for a violent rebellion is already
becoming the revolutionary figure called ‘Orc’. So, Infant Sorrow describes part
of what can be called the Orc Cycle- the first fight between father and son, and
the implication of the violent rebellion to come. This broadens our understanding
of the themes that concern Blake- that attitudes towards sexuality are important
for the individual- from what we have come to know from The Angel and The Sick
Rose, that shame, secrecy and perversions will bring fear, horror and misery.
Infant Sorrow suggests, in addition, that a cleaning of attitudes to sexuality is
also vital for the whole of society. In this poem Blake suggests that the pointless
and repetitive wars of an ‘Orc cycle’, where each generation becomes its own
Urizen, will continue until ‘Love, sweet Love’ is no longer ‘thought a crime’. Just
as in the final three lines of London, the consequences of false attitudes to
sexuality are shown to be a fundamental failure of society.
Before moving on to Blake’s other poems to elaborate the theme at hand, it
is worth remarking Blake’s acute and prophetic psychological insight. The
relationships between infant, father and mother depicted in this poem are
uncannily predictive of the theory of psychosexual development and the ‘Oedipus
Complex’, put forward by Freud more than a century later. Blake’s portrayal
shows that his intuitive formulation of family relationships was extraordinarily
ahead of its time. The four small poems, taken together, then, define Blake’s
understanding of sex very clearly. But it is important to be cautious about being
conditioned in reading them, about not equating our modern paradigms to
equate this with promiscuity. Blake is clearly in favour of what Earth calls ‘free
Love’. The one contrast Blake repeatedly makes is highly significant. On the one
hand there is the ‘dark secret’ perverted sex which is almost pornographic (the
harlot in London), dishonest (the ‘maiden Queen, who hides her ‘heart’s delight’
and is then ‘armd…with ten thousand shields and spears’ in The Angel), and
wastes our ‘winter and night’ in ‘disguise’ (Nurse’s Song). Whereas natural and
open love can bring ‘joy’, the ‘dark secret’ kind with its unwanted and threatening
infant, is a harbinger of future violence and destruction.
The next poem up for analysis is A Poison Tree from Experience – a poem
which focuses on honesty in personal relationships, something that it
straightforwardly recommends. Whatever our feelings towards others they
should be expressed. Hidden feelings and dishonest behavior breeds poison and
destruction. The imagery is typical of Blake, where the abstract performs concrete
actions. So ‘tears’ water the tree and ‘smiles’ sun it, while the tree itself is a

176 Subhasish Guha
concrete manifestation of hidden, growing ‘wrath’. Adding this poem to

analogous imagery in other Songs, and parallel narratives in his poems will
enrich the understanding of this poem and will express how the Songs act
together to express a complex, and fully integrated analysis of human behavior.
It is quite evident that this poem is about hidden hostility and disguised
murder. But what makes things interesting is the fact that the tempting apple and
a special tree, in a garden prove lethal to the speaker’s ‘foe’. The reference to
Eden and the Fall is too obvious to be missed. The figure variously described as
the ‘Holy Word’ walking in the Garden of Eden and the ‘Selfish father of men’ is
used by Blake to propose a subversive and radical reinterpretation of the Bible.
This figure is the type of Urizen. He is hypocritically sad (‘Weeping in the evening
dew’) and overwhelmed by ‘Cruel jealous selfish fear’. As a result, this Old
Testament God oppresses man and woman with vicious punishments and
imprisons them in chains of fear. He is the origin of the dictatorship of ‘Thou
shalt not’- those rigid and unnatural laws that bind ‘free Love’ and ‘joys and
desires’, and responsible for ‘every ban’ which forges the ‘mind forg’d manacles’
of tyranny. Any exploration into trying to decipher the identity of the nature and
role of god in A PoisonTree is illuminating because it takes Blake’s analysis of
tyranny much further. The speaker of the poem owns both garden and apple; and
the victim is both tempted by the fruit (‘my foe beheld it shine’) and knows whose
possession it is (‘he knew that it was mine’). The poem’s speaker is also
responsible for punishing the thief, having poisoned the apple himself- just as
God was responsible for the curses heaped upon Adam and Eve, and binding
Earth in ‘this heavy chain/ That does freeze my bones around’, in Earth’s
Answer.
The poem adds two further shocking implications to Blake’s analysis which
is radically suggestive. First, it suggests that God’s hypocritically hidden hostility
to man carries the blame for the entire story of the Fall. It was God who set the
first ban and demanded the first obedience to law. It was God who placed the
forbidden apple in the garden. The logical conclusion which is unavoidable is
that, it was God who tempted mankind. What could have been the motive behind
all this? To work out hostility he felt but denied all along. But even more
radically- the image of a poison tree implies that God knew what the outcome
would be: he poisoned the tree in advance. What Blake suggests in short is that
the jealous, Urizenic God of the Old Testament set a deceptive trap for mankind,
and anticipated the satisfaction of issuing punishment and feeling self-righteous.
Moreover, he always wanted to use eternal human guilt as a leverage to
manipulate future generations.
The second point relates to how this poem fills out a psychological story.
Unspoken emotion and unacted feeling is the villain of this piece. Here, Blake,
like the true visionary that he was anticipates a dynamic truism of modern
psychology- that suppressed emotion does not go away: instead the more it is
suppressed or prevented from expressing itself, the more it grows and seeks
another outlet. The apple image conveys another truism of modern psychology-

the analysis that repressed urges, when they do show themselves, often come out
in deceptive clothes, pretending to be something different- often the opposite
from what they actually are. Blake is categorical in this statement- the negative
wrath has transformed in appearance into a tempting, ‘bright’ apple containing
the hidden poison of hostility which ultimately allows wrath to fester and infect.
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake calls for the ‘cherub with his flaming
sword to leave his guard at the tree of life’. He argues that this will lead to an
‘improvement of sensual enjoyment’ and will melt ‘apparent surfaces away’. Here
again Blake attacks jealousy, possessiveness and hypocrisy. The passage from the
Marriage also reminds us of what should actually be in the place of the poison of
selfish hypocrisy. A friendship, rather than being ‘finite and corrupt’ should be
‘infinite and holy’. The evil of repression is again emphasized when he asserts
that ‘man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his
cavern’. It is well known that Blake blamed the idea of the separate body and soul
for much of the oppression he saw around him and for the psychological prisons
people fashion for themselves. A Poison Tree highlights another internal division
in operation- repression divides people internally, preventing their natural
emotions from finding an outlet. The speaker’s natural wrath in A Poison Tree
and other natural urges and desires are called ‘Energy’, while the agent of
repression is called ‘Reason’. In the Marriage Blake goes on to say that ‘Good is
the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy’. The
following two Proverbs of Hell further reinforce the importance Blake attaches to
emotional honesty and the danger he sees in its opposite:
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
(The Complete Writings of William Blake 151)
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
(Ibid. 152)
The bright and poisonous apple which is the final outcome of a character–
process in the speaker has a variety of qualities. It is lethally destructive,
tempting, and attractive and selfish. Blake uses the apple as a symbol of what the
character’s original dishonesty has made. The process which grew the tree and its
apple is also clearly given. It is watered with ‘fears’ and sunned by ‘soft deceitful
wiles’.
Let us now take up parts of the Prophetic Books for discussion to examine
how they can illuminate the issues being explored in this paper. The Book of Thel,
a Prophetic poem is a study in fear of life. The speaker Thel is an unborn soul
overwhelmed by thoughts of her future death, and the mutability of things. To
place her in a discourse on Blake and use a familiar context to the one that is
being developed - Thel lives in an undeveloped world of Innocence, the kind of
ironically limited paradise of The Lamb and The Echoing Green. She fears
experience and is unwilling to leave. There is a subtle irony in her refusal to
accept experience. Blake manages to portray Thel, at the same time appealingly
as sympathetic and slightly nauseating. The irony lies in the passage’s hints at

178 Subhasish Guha
Thel’s underlying obstinacy. The happiness Thel feels and refuses to part with is
infantile and so is her pointless complaint which only rejects life without making
any attempt to understand. The range of emotions she chooses for herself-
rainbow, cloud, reflection, shadows, dreams and so on, are significantly
restrictive. They are all vague, evanescent and soft. There is an absence of
solidity: of rocks, mountains and beasts - of solid earth itself.
At the end of the poem Thel is allowed to visit the physical world into which
she refuses to be born. In the interval, Thel has consulted a lily, a cloud, a worm
and a clod of clay; and all of them have advised her. Each of their accounts of life
is limited but they have faith and accept their lot. Although gentle, Blake’s satire
highlights the hard core of selfishness and isolation in his weeping character.
This part of the poem is a reminder that she cannot see clearly in ‘valleys dark’.
Ironically, it seems as if what Thel sees and hears in the real world is only a
reflection of her own lamentation: a shadowed reiteration of her own
insubstantial complaint. At the end, Thel is further terrified by the natural senses
which are open to life and its terrors. With increasingly intense irony, the poem
reiterates her rejecting question ‘why?” before she runs back to her infantile state
‘with a shriek’.
The Book of Thel is a sensitive portrayal of fear of life, then. It is profoundly
revealing because it reveals the origins of Urizenic tyranny and personal
hypocrisy. As Thel looks around her she realizes that all the beauties she sees are
in the same state- doomed to non- existence- and this reinforces her first
impulse, to reject. Rejection is a fundamentally selfish act. It asserts the supreme
importance of preserving ‘I’, and to do so it attempts to isolate ‘I’ and insulate
itself from all challenge or attack. Subtly enough, the fixed self is unwilling to
develop because it wants to protect its dream of permanence. In Thel, the fixed
self only runs; but her alliance with the God of Genesis reveals the vicious
potential that lies in such a fixed self. Urizen is also a fixed self, fighting to survive
unchanged. He tyrannically imposes his own dream of permanence upon the
world around him. This poem thus reveals that the infantile attitude of fear and
rejection unnaturally survives childhood. In Blake’s picture of personality
development, the driving motive behind adult cruelty and error is this self-
preserving fear- an impulse of rejection which can begin at the beginning of life.
This analysis reveals Blake foreshadowing psychoanalytical theory, in that it
suggests that the imbalance and destructiveness of adult personality is caused by
a failure to cope in infancy. Thus the poem explores a story about the early
genesis, in infancy, of the hardened self-protective delusion Blake came to call the
‘Selfhood’. The poem narrates an early phase in its development, when the
heroine fails to overcome her fears, and chooses to run away.
In The First Book of Urizen, the Selfhood is portrayed in a more violent
phase, creating itself in hostility and striking out against life. This paper will deal
with the formation and rise of the Selfhood and Urizen’s first promulgation of the
terrible ‘One law’. The opening section gives a clear indication of Urizen’s state of
mind- ‘dark solitude’ and ‘set apart’ reveal his self- concerned separation from

life. The corollary of such isolation is ‘Hidden’ implying that for all his
boastfulness and ‘stern’ counsels, he hides from fear and failure. The vicious self-
righteousness which is characteristic of Urizen is suggested by ‘holiness’. Just like
what we saw in Thel, the tyrant’s delusion is as facile and equally self-evidently
wrong. He searches for ‘a joy without pain’ and ‘a solid without fluctuation’, both
of which are false dreams in a world in which progress comes through a
dialectical struggle of contraries and where movement and change are principle
governing forces of life. Urizen utters the same pathetic and plaintive question as
Thel- ‘Why will you die, O Eternals?’ This section thus reveals that Urizen’s error
is the same as the infantile Thel’s.
Blake hints that Urizen’s ‘void immense’ which is a ‘deep world within’ is
not the enemy Urizen believes it to be, when it is described as ‘Nature’s wide
womb’. Far from being his enemy, it is Urizen’s own imaginative potential that he
battles to destroy as he tries to make reason supreme. This of course is an error
and carries further errors in its wake. Finally Urizen promulgates his law. The
passage clearly presents the birth of tyranny, and we recognize the Urizenic
character easily. This is the oppressor who supports Albion’s angel in Europe, A
Prophecy. What we have discovered here is that Urizen should not be dismissed
as a mere hate-figure. He is characterized with subtle psychological depth. His
cruelties are firmly rooted in fear and error and Blake’s satire acknowledges that
we can identify with these. The final poem up for discussion is one of the three
longer prophetic poems, Milton, A Poem. Blake sees the seventeenth century poet
returning to earth to correct his mistakes and renew his inspiration. When he
descends to earth into Blake’s cottage garden, Milton still carries his own errors
within himself. A cursory knowledge about the futile battles of Orc and Urizen
and the constant re-creation of a negative, hard shell called the ‘Selfhood’ is well-
known in the realm of Blake studies. As he descends to earth, Milton still carries
all these negative struggles and errors with him in the form of a figure that
represents his Selfhood, which is here called his Spectre, or Satan. When Milton
addresses this Spectre or Satan, he describes the futile struggle between Orc and
Urizen- the destruction of a ‘Selfhood’ by a new ’Selfhood’. This process, just like
the ‘Orc cycle’’ is eternally pointless and brings no change. So, Milton describes it
as continuity: each apparent change is merely Satan under a new covering. He
then proposes something different: a real change and a solution to the endless
conflict, which he calls ‘Self Annihilation’ Milton’s proposed self-annihilation
goes beyond the laws of Urizen/Satan’s ‘false heav’ns’. In this passage self-
annihilation seems to consist of sheer courage: it is to ‘despise death’ in ‘fearless’
majesty, and laughing scorn to all the laws and terrors of Urizen. Milton’s speech
reveals the task each individual must undertake- to destroy the self in a moment
of inspired courage.
This inspiration, imagination and vision occur outside the restrictions of
time. So Blake developed the concept of a ‘moment in which vision occurs and
truth is revealed; and he contrasted this with the limited structure of time itself.
In an inspired moment ‘all’ can be seen in a flash; within time, on the other hand

180 Subhasish Guha
, only little parts of the whole can be seen, each in turn. To use the words of
Northrop Frye, such ‘moments’ can help us achieve ‘fulfilled desire and
unbounded freedom’ (Frye, 26-7). The following lines from Milton beautifully
express this concept:
Every Time than a pulsation of the artery
Is equal in its period and value to Six Thousand Years,
For in this Period the Poet’s Work is Done, and all the Great
Events of Time start forth and are conceiv’d in such a Period,
Within a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery.
(The Complete Writings of William Blake 528)
Milton describes his purpose as to go on, in fearless majesty annihilating the self.
He talks about the selfhood which must be put off and annihilated away- a
painful and agonizing process which will cleanse his spirit by self-examination.
The point is that self-annihilation cannot be a one and done event. The selfhood
constantly rebuilds and re-creates itself. So constant self-examination and self-
annihilation is necessary.
Having arrived at the end of our quest we have discussed the origin, growth
and anatomy of what Blake called the ‘Selfhood’, and identified this as essentially
the same hardening process within a society, or within the personality, that can
be variously called Urizen, Satan or Spectre. Blake calls for a renewal within each
individual, and suggests a solution to obstructions, blindness and divisions
within the personality. His philosophy as a whole applies to individual
consciousness, and urges a renewal on psychological, spiritual and imaginative
levels- a ringing assertion of idealism.
Works Cited :
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes.
London: Rupert Hart- Davis, 1967. Print.
---. The Complete Writings of William Blake. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London:
Oxford U P, 1966. Print.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1947. Print.
Hirsch, E.D. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. New Haven,
CT and London: Yale UP, 1964. Print.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily
Dickinson. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992. Print.

pp. 181-192
HONOUR(ING) EXISTENCE, RESISTING

HONOUR : EXPLORING THE PAKISTANI BRIDE
AS THE TESTAMENT TO ESTABLISH AND
EXERCISE KHUDI1
Pradipta Shyam Chowdhury
Abstract
This paper intends to interpret the concept of ‘Honour’ and how it
affects the life of a woman in an honour-based community focusing on
Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel The Pakistani Bride (1983). The story revolves
around the escape of a Pakistani girl from her in-laws which is
considered a cardinal sin in honour-based societies. But Sidhwa here
foregrounds the idea of self-will or ‘khudi,’ which becomes the nucleus
of the feminist resistance to patriarchal agencies of oppression like the
concept of ‘honour’ and consequently helps the female remain defiant,
and achieve her freedom. This paper also purports to explore Sidhwa’s
deft observation on the honour-based communities and the lived
experience of the struggling women whose primary struggle is for
existence rather than any feminist ideal that is confined to a discursive
liberation.
Keywords : Honour, Khudi, Patriarchal Agency.
This paper starts with citing some newspaper headlines of some incidents
of India and Pakistan and consequently tries to focus on a crucial socio-cultural
problem based on community codes that violate the basic human rights.
1. “Pakistani woman paraded with a blackened face and shaved head for
eloping”. (20 June 2016, NDTV)
2. “Pakistan ‘honour killing’: Karachi teen lovers ‘were electrocuted’”. (14
Sept. 2017, NDTV)
3. “Andhra Man kills daughter allegedly for falling in love with a boy of
other caste”. (4 Feb. 2019, The New Indian Express)
4. “Telangana town tense after murder of Dalit man in front of pregnant
wife”. (19 Nov. 2019, The New Indian Express)
The news of killings cited above have occurred in different places but are
intrinsically connected with the common theme of controlling and punishing the

182 Pradipta Shyam Chowdhury
defiant for disobeying the social codes in the name of ‘honour.’ In reality,
Honour-based violence erases the political and/or religious borders of the
countries and situates them on the same plain ruled by certain patriarchal social
codes. In fact, India and Pakistan both fall within the geo-cultural zone of South
Asia where they share same socio-political and cultural specificities. But, the
concept of ‘Honour’ and honour-based violence is not limited to the socio-
cultural matrix of South Asia. They occur all over the world especially in honour-
based societies and communities.
The concept of ‘honour’ is a construction in accordance with some strict
codes of socio-cultural norms. These codes are religiously maintained and
controlled by the traditions of the community. The binary of honour/shame is
part of community codes. Women who deviate from the codes are stigmatized
and held as source of shame. This ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ dialectic is determined in
terms of power and women are easily susceptible to ‘shame’ or ‘dishonour.’ The
patriarchal imperatives restrict the autonomy of the women through the
discourse of ‘honour.’ The Iranian and Kurdish Women‘s Right Organization
(IKWRO) describes the concept of ‘Honour’ in the following way:
So-called family ‘honour’ is a patriarchal ideology of oppression.
Women, who make autonomous decisions, particularly relating to their
private lives, are believed to have brought ‘shame’ to their family.
‘Honour’ crime is performed with the intent of limiting the psychological
and physical freedom of women. (Qtd. in House of Commons, UK 12)
Thus, honour is imposed over the weaker parts of the societies, mainly the
women, through the application of violence. Women are compelled to remain
disempowered by certain social, religious or political dicta. Patriarchy largely
controls the female body and mind through the concept of honour. In this
context, Jane Haile comments that ‘honour killing’ is a
… practice whereby male members kill a female relative who is
perceived as having damaged family honour. Her death restores the
honour of the family. Honour killing can be triggered by a woman or girl
talking with an unrelated male, consenting to sexual relations outside
marriage, being the victim of rape, or refusing to marry the man chosen
by the family. (8)
Actually, in an honour based society, where honour killing is tolerated or at times
supported, the violence falls upon a woman on the slightest pretext. Here, the
instance of Mukhtar Mai is very pertinent. This peasant woman from Meerwala,
Pakistan, was gangraped by the order of the village tribal council. The family of
the powerful tribal group alleged that her brother‘s relationship (he belonged to a
lower social status) with the girl of the family has resulted in the loss of ‘honour’
for the family. Hence, according to the tribal council, Mukhtar Mai, and not her
brother who allegedly committed the ‘crime,’ must receive the punishment. But
Mukhtar fought back against the act of the council and went to the court. The
news made a sensation all over the world making her act an important milestone
against the honour-based crimes. In the Foreword of the book In the Name of

Honour(ing) Existence, Resisting Honour : Exploring … 183
Honour (2007) Nicholas D. Kristof writes about the background of Mukhtar‘s

protest:
…her young brother was accused (wrongly) of having an affair, and so a
tribal council decided to punish her family by ordering that she be gang
raped. The sentence was carried out then and there, and she was forced
to walk home nearly naked before a jeering crowd. She was meant to
commit suicide, and initially she thought she would but then she
became more angry than humiliated. Instead of killing herself, she
prosecuted her attackers and told her story. (vii-viii)
The sentence on Mukhtar was not directly related to any of her wrong doings, but
something her brother was accused of.
Generally, woman becomes victim of honour killing in the hands of her
husband, but very often the father, brother of a male member of the girl‘s clan kill
them. This act is considered laudable because it supposedly restores the honour
of the community. Here, there is some difference between gender-based violence
by the husband or the lover, and the one by the community. While the former is
commonly known as Crimes of Passion and is primarily the violence perpetrated
by an individual male impulsively, the latter, commonly known as Honour
Killing, is a community-led violence, more planned, and is an expression of
collective anger. But whatever may be the reason, it is the woman who is
stigmatized, punished or erased. Both crimes of passion and honour-based
violence underline the basic patriarchal tendency of considering women as
physically and culturally inferior and reduced to a commodity to be appropriated.
Honour killing as an act of vengeance has various socio-cultural and
religious reasons. Basically, the codes of honour depend upon the ideology of
patrilineal inheritance, which testifies to the legal right of the male member or
the heir to carry on the inheritance of property and the traditional values of their
clan and community. A closer study of the reasons of honour killings will be
found in the recent report of the Centre for Social Cohesion2 on ‘honour’ based
violence in the United Kingdom. The report, enumerating the reasons, finds that
the factors range from defiance of parental authority to extra-marital relations
and gossip on alleged adulteries. Though in most cases women are the worst
sufferers, men too do not escape the punishment, particularly where he belongs
to a lower social structure or to a different religion. Honour and the stigma may
also occur even if the person belongs to the same class and community. The
practice of karo-kari3 in Pakistan is one such.
It is often misinterpreted that the Muslim society or to be more specific the
Islamic nations tolerate and even sometimes sponsor the violent act of honour
killing. But a closer study of the Holy Quran or the Hadith shows that there are
no such instances that sanction such a practice. In reality, Islam puts equal
importance upon men and women. Religion, like other discursive fields, falls an
easy prey to the system of patriarchy which manipulates the religious scriptures
according to its convenience. Precisely, instances of honour killing most often

occur in the honour-based societies, which is why the Muslim majority countries
like Malaysia or Indonesia have less instances of honour-based violence, whereas
the countries of the Middle East, South Asia, the Balkans and Southern
Mediterranean are found to be more affected by it. Honour-based violence is a
burning issue and it needs to be addressed seriously. Awareness about the
enormity of the social evil and some sensitization programmes need to be taken
up. Literary representations are a means to create such awareness. A good many
novels and films and documentaries have been produced in this respect. The
book on the experience of Mukhtar Mai In the Name of Honour4(2007) and a
recent Bollywood film NH105 may be mentioned here. Bapsi Sidhwa‘s The
Pakistani Bride (1983) also foregrounds this issue focusing on the need of
individual courage as a prerequisite for facing barbaric customs and inhuman
torture.
Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride (1983) is the story of Zaitoon, a
Muslim girl from Lahore, married to a man from the Kohistani tribe. Unable to
cope with the strict codes of that honour-based society, she escapes from her
husband’s house. As this act is considered a heinous crime on the part of women,
her in-laws searched for her to kill her and restore the lost honour of not only
their family, but their community. Zaitoon’s escape can be marked as a feminist
revolt against patriarchy that considers the position of women in the context of
‘honour’ and the social structure based on it. But at the end, we see that the
search party gets the news of her death, which is concocted by the Army officials,
who rescued the girl. This imaginary death of the rebellious female figure can be
seen as her discursive erasure from the social text to satisfy the patriarchal ego.
But a deeper study will reveal that Sidhwa is not dealing with the issue from the
perspective of a Third World feminist thinker, but, as a true Third World feminist
activist, who tries to measure the nature of the female cause and the sort of
movement that is required for the specific geographical and social domain. She
makes a more realistic study of the women who live in the labyrinthine dungeons
of the honour-based social matrix of patriarchy and struggle to exist primarily
before thinking of any feminist ideal of liberation.
The novel is based on a real story. In the essay― “Why Do I Write”, Bapsi
Sidhwa says that she heard the story from the Colonel-in-charge, the engineers
and doctors of the army camp located in the remote regions of the Karakoram.
The story is that of a girl who was taken on the other side of the Indus to be
married to a tribal boy. After a few months she ran away. Amidst the rugged
region of the Karakoram the girl survived for fourteen days. She was finally
hunted down by the members of the tribal clan who caught her near a rope
bridge, cut off her head and threw the body into the river. The husband, who
should have protected the girl, participated instead in the act of killing. He took it
as an act of pride because a runaway woman is an irreparable shame for the
community and hence ‘honour killing.’ Sidhwa felt the urge to get the story
recorded in a fictional form. She would give a somewhat different fate to the
woman who will survive, stand back and answer to this violence. Therefore, while

turning it into a story, which later became a novel in full form, she brought in
more complexities. She contextualized the story against the backdrop of the codes
of an honour-based society.
This exercise of artistic freedom has wider ramifications. The single girl
metaphorically turns into many and she becomes the representative of all the
victims. Sidhwa felt the urge to bring the story into the open. In an interview, she
speaks of the urge she felt in transforming the actual incident into a story that
will give vent to her wishes:
When I came back to Lahore, I felt I had to tell her story. I had not
written before… I had a compulsion to write the girl‘s story and the story
of the tribals hidden away in this beautiful part of the world. I started
writing a short story about this girl, without my really being aware of it;
it was developing into a long story. It was an obsession. (Jussawala 209)
The real woman was murdered by her in-laws in the Karakoram region, but
Sidhwa’s Zaitoon got a different fate. She exercised her indomitable self-will,‘the
khudi’6, survived the Partition troubles, grew up in Lahore, got married to the
Kohistani tribesman and ultimately ran away to save herself, instead of
submitting herself to the existing socio-cultural norms based on anti-women
conventions. In the context of Pakistan, Zaitoon‘s survival and the defeat of the
agents of patriarchy have deep feminist resonances.
This oppression of the female subject is not spread all over the country in
the same measure and manner. It is rather condensed in tribal societies or
communities. The light of education has not yet reached there. In such closeted
communities traditional codes of honour still prevail in the strongest possible
form. The novel explores the social dynamics of such a tribal community in
Kohistan, where women are meant to be tamed and their wombs are objects to be
protected for reproductive purpose. Ironically the same society, which is strict in
preserving the purity of the female body, approves its violation in the name of
honour. Sidhwa here foregrounds the body politics of the closeted communities
of Pakistan through the sufferings of Zaitoon. But Sidhwa, as we have already
noted, makes Zaitoon survive all the difficulties not only for championing the
female agenda, but also to establish the basic demand for the right to exist. Here,
she is not just theorizing or interpreting the real politics from the perspective of a
westernized educated feminist activist, but is trying to empathize with the
suffering women in remote parts of the country in the fortresses of patriarchy.
She explains to Feroza Jussawalla :
In the Bride she [Zaitoon] is not killed. The Bride has, as it happened,
two endings. I first ended it where there‘s an illusionary scene, in which
she has a nightmare vision of being killed. That‘s where the book was
supposed to end. But by this time I had a different feeling for the book.
I‘d inhabited this girl‘s body and her emotions for so long that I felt it
was a shame, considering all that she had been put through, that she
should be then killed off. (208)

Here, the thrust is obviously on Zaitoon‘s survival, which in actuality might have
been impossible, and it injects a new, although not dramatic, dimension in the
representation. But Zaitoon is not the female activist standing against the
patriarchal hegemony. She is a docile girl who is compelled to stand against the
system that continuously attacks her body and self-respect. Her decision “to run
away is not due to militant feminism or deliberate defiance of male order. She is
portrayed as a device, affectionate, obedient child. She has become a symbol of all
oppressed and exploited women” (Kalidass and Kirubahar 60).
In The Pakistani Bride,Sidhwa foregrounds the pitiable conditions of
women not only through Zaitoon, but also through a group of other tertiary
female characters. This group consists of Qasim's wife, Afshan, Zaitoon‘s foster
mother, Miriam and her mother-in-law, Hamida. The female characters and their
stories in the novel are loosely knit but they have an intricate connection. The
novelist, according to Makarand Paranjape7, does not want to frame one single
story of Zaitoon with her exclusively personal struggles, but a cluster of many
stories with varied events that observe the issue of gender-based oppression and
its resistance from a broader perspective. These female characters present the
status of women in certain communities of Pakistan. In The Pakistani Bride,
Qasim, Zaitoon’s foster father’s decision to marry her off to Sakhi, his cousin
Misri Khan‘s son clearly points to the status of women in the social space. The
marriage is engineered by his propensity to pay tribute to his roots. Paying no
heed to the consequences of this culturally mismatched marriage, he takes
Zaitoon to the hilly regions of Kohistan.
Sakhi, her newly-wed husband, appears to her as crooked and jealous,
always trying to control her mind and body. Being instigated by the other male
members of the family, he becomes a savage in his behaviour. Sidhwa
meticulously draws Zaitoon‘s first experience after marriage thus:
Sakhi surveyed his diffident wife with mounting excitement. Here was a
woman all his own, he thought with proprietorial lust and pride, a
woman with strangely thick lashes and large black eyes that had flashed
in one look her entire sensuality. But, even as he thought this, the
corroding jealousy of the past few days suddenly surged up in him in a
murderous fusion of hate and fever. He tore the ghoongat from her head
and holding her arms in a cruel grip he panted inarticulate hatred into
her face. (159; emphasis added)
Zaitoon’s different cultural orientation and her openness are very often
misunderstood by Sakhi as her unchaste behaviour, which, according to the tribal
codes of honour, is a serious crime for a woman. Zaitoon’s naïve waving of her
hands at the army people leads to serious incident in her life. Sakhi’s cruelty
towards Zaitoon is deftly narrated by the author:
Skimming the boulders in vast strides, Sakhi seized her. He dragged her
along the crag. ‘You whore,’ he hissed. His fury was so intense she
thought he would kill her.

He cleared his throat and spat full in her face. ‘You dirty, black little
bitch, waving at those pigs…’Gripping her with one hand he waved the
other in a lewd caricature of the girl‘s brief gesture. ‘Waving at the shit-
eating swine. You wanted him to stop and fuck, didn‘t you!’ (185)
These words, unconsciously used at the height of rage, are loaded with
strong socio-cultural implications. Honour codes are closely related to social,
cultural and religious directives. Waving hands by a woman violates these codes.
Moreover, waving hands towards the army personnel, who are personified
masculinity, immediately arouses Sakhi's jealousy. Sakhi uses the abusive term
‘swine’ for his imagined contesters, the army people. This brutality cuts across all
social and familial relationships even filial sanctity. Women, whoever she is,
should be treated as a property— owned, beaten and exchanged. Hamida, Sakhi's
mother, who cuts a sorry figure throughout the story, is badly beaten by the son
for she tries to dissuade him from abusing Zaitoon. Sidhwa shows how the
patriarchal body politics generates Sakhi's lust and greed to appropriate the body
of Zaitoon. The dream of a happy conjugal life that coloured the imagination of
Zaitoon gets shattered. The experience borders on the conjugal rape. She
becomes a gendered figure— a woman to be enjoyed and violated. The atrocity
continues for Zaitoon, as Sidhwa writes:
Zaitoon looked at him wildly, terrified as he dragged her up and roughly
yanked her red satin shirt over her head. Her arms flew to cover her
breasts. He tugged at the cord of her shalwar and the sulk fell to her
ankles. Before she could raise her trousers Sakhi flung her back. He
crouched, lifting her legs free of the silk. Fiercely kicking out, Zaitoon
leapt over the charpoy. She screamed. She backed towards the straw and
mud-plastered wall, and screamed. Leaning against it, covering her
chest and crotch with her hands, she screamed. (160)
Sakhi's violence towards his newly-wed bride is the expression of
conviction of ownership of the female body. Failure to behave in the way he does
will result in a crisis of manhood on which the concept of his honour depends.
Paranjape writes “It would seem that entire code of honour of the tribes rests on
the notions of sexual superiority and possessiveness” (Qtd. in Aprajita12). Thus,
severely tortured by her husband and his lot, Zaitoon decides to flee from her in-
laws knowing well the consequence of the daring act. The women, who are
atrociously treated socially and sexually, are never given the right to move on her
own. The domestic demarcation becomes the borderline, crossing of which is
treated as a sacrilege.
Here, the khudi of Zaitoon becomes instrumental in giving her the power to
fight against the patriarchal imperatives. Sidhwa posits the self-will or khudi of
women to fight against patriarchal hegemony. Sexual superiority of the
patriarchal hegemonic model deals with two sexist issues that control the female
body and the mind. These apparently contrasting issues are coterminous in their
involvement in the female body politics. They are— physical segregation and the
erasure of the female body. Physical segregation of the female body manifests

itself through the female space of zenana8 or the domestic space demarcated for
and allotted to women by patriarchy. The erasure of the female body is practised
through the system of purdah.9 It is associated with the honour codes. According
to this notion, the female body is considered as an emblem of the family and
community which, unless preserved strictly, is exposed to molestation and
appropriation. In the words of Imran Ahmad: “Woman is shown as a territory to
be conquered by men. The relation between one of colonizer-colonized type
wherein the colonizer, as if on an imperial offensive, tries to possess and extend
his powers so as to use and abuse this occupied territory” (3).
The impact of the zenana and the purdah are instrumental in
strengthening the struggles of the women characters of the novel and help them
champion their feminist agenda. Zaitoon became acquainted with the zenana in
Lahore through the mediation of Miriam who taught her to be obedient to
patriarchal dictates. But the same space created in her a sexual vacuum by
segregating her from the opposite sex, the male. She encountered first instance of
male brutality after her marriage. It is a journey from naivety and innocence to
experience and violence. She becomes mature in the process. The abrupt change
made her rebellious. The gender-based segregation is also manifested through
the practices of purdah through the sartorial differntiative politics of burka.
Burkas are generally considered as veils to suppress the identity of a woman. It is
through the issue of burka, Sidhwa brings in the character of Carol with whom
Zaitoon will form a remote but effective female connection.
Carol, the American girl from California, comes to Pakistan to consummate
her relationship with Farukh. But being “a child of the bright Californian sun and
surf,” she “could no more understand the beguiling twilight world of veils and
women‘s quarters” (180). Her emotional bonding with Farukh breaks through the
mediation of the gender apartheid of the Pakistani society. At the beginning Carol
enjoyed the caring attitude of her husband but she slowly experiences that the
over-conservative Pakistani society leaves no room for women to breathe freely;
they are always under the male gaze. Through Carol, Sidhwa problematises the
use of burka. Carol wishes to use one to save herself from the male gaze. Here the
apparently patriarchal instrument used for categorising the women in terms of
undifferentiated womanhood becomes an essentially feminist strategy for
preserving the individual female identity. Women in Pakistan, whatever her
nationality may be, are to be silenced, their identity ignored. They should act and
move according to the male directives. After her emotional break up with Farukh,
she falls into an extra-marital relationship with Major Mushtaq.
She seeks an emotional support from the Major. But it turns out to be futile
as the latter harbours typical sexist attitude towards women. Thus, Carol finds
Mushtaq and Farukh to be the same man with different names. Apparently they
maintain a progressive image in their professional and social spheres and
consider the tribal men as uncouth and uncivilised. But at their heart they are no
different from their tribal counterparts. Actually, Mushtaq has no problem with
his relationship with Carol, for it satisfies his lust and the comfort of a hill

posting, but marrying the American woman is not possible for it will affect his
family. Actually, family, marriage and social bonds are considered to be sacred,
which Carol cannot understand. When she is married to Farukh, she gets entry in
the elite class of Pakistan as a wife of an engineer and army officer. But this social
shifting makes her disempowered and, in turn, vulnerable. The male desire with
its uninhibited and powerful sexist ideology tries to dominate the American girl
by erasing her white identity and equating her with the other women of Pakistan.
She finds no difference between her and the beheaded tribal girl whose head she
sees coming across the rivers. Carol experiences the real position of women at
Mushtaq’s reaction to the incident: “…it happens all the time.” The inert response
of her lover towards a girl in distress makes her comment: “Oh, women get killed
for one reason or another…imagined insults, family honour, infidelity” (223).
The pitiable conditions of women across all classes and communities help
her to conclude on the position of women in the Pakistani society. Carol
completes her experience about the piteous condition of the women of Pakistan
in particular and women throughout the world in general when she comes across
Zaitoon and her condition. Sakhi, her husband considers her more as a female
body to inscribe his manliness and superior control than understanding her
emotions. Slowly, Zaitoon and Carol start realizing that the spatial identity of the
zenana as the world of female bonds and camaraderie is actually a male
demarcated spatial limitation, whereby the women are imprisoned. Both Zaitoon
and Carol try to escape the male demarcated spatial limitations to assert their
individual identities. Zaitoon defies the social codes of her husband‘s community
and escapes to the plains through the rugged wilderness, fully knowing that the
consequence of the act is a death sentence and Carol seeks an emotional support
from Major Mushtaq, who in turn also ditches her. Thus, Zaitoon, Carol, and the
tribal girl with severed head stand at the same plane, at the mercy of the male-
oriented social orders. The respect for woman and the sense of protectiveness
towards them is more a concern for the honour of their family and community
than for the woman herself.
Thus, the two female characters in Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride become
close to each other even in their exploration of the patriarchal social space of
Pakistan. But the real question in this apparently powerful feminist agenda
centres round the future of both the female characters. What happens to Zaitoon
and what was the future of Carol? The plight of Zaitoon ends with her crossing
the bridge. Sakhi and his clan also arrive there but couldn‘t attack the girl for the
mediation of Major Mushtak, who takes control over the whole situation. They
are told that Zaitoon is dead and they returned with the satisfactory news that the
honour of the family is saved. Major Mushtaq, an agent of the army, solves the
crisis; this same man lulls Carol to sleep, when the latter protests against their
social norms and regulations. Thus, the Major appears as the patriarchal deus ex
machina, who tries to put a happy ending to the turbulent situation.
Here also the feminist agenda raised by Zaitoon and Carol from different
levels is calmed down by the presence of the military. Metaphorically also,

Zaitoon‘s protest against the system remains unaddressed. The issue is further
problematized by the fact that her crossing the river does not take her to the
world of freedom, but to another patriarchal plane. She gets respite from Sakhi
only to be rescued by Mushtaq and later to be married to Ashique, the military
car driver. She remains within the periphery of masculinity. Moreover, Sakhi and
his clan come to know that the girl is dead. The ‘honour’ is thus restored to the
Kohistani tribe. Then where is the vital change in attitude towards gender
discrimination?
The novelist erases the existence of Zaitoon from the text, for there is no
further suggestion of her future. The sudden disappearance of Carol also puts an
end to any feminist agenda. The bottom-line remains— defiance of the
patriarchal system tantamount to death physically or discursively. But merely
analyzing The Pakistani Bride from the feminist angle will be a failure to get at
the pulse of the novelist‘s intention. Sidhwa in this novel is trying to measure the
nature of the female struggle. It will help us mapping the kind of movement that
is required in the context of the specific geographical and social domain. Being an
educated Parsi woman and a feminist activist, who has her roots in Pakistan and
workplace in the US, she has a sound idea of the feminist movements of the Third
World women and the firsthand knowledge of the real situation of woman in
Pakistan, India and other Third World countries. Hers is not a theoretical
imagination but a more realistic and grounded study of women who live in the
labyrinthine dungeons of patriarchy. Her protagonist Zaitoon has also no
feminist agenda, but her khudi is directed towards existence. A woman has to
exist first, and then comes the question of social liberation. Sidhwa‘s Zaitoon
champions this credo by celebrating her self-will or khudi.
Notes :
1 This paper partly forms a chapter of my PhD thesis: “Bonding Beyond Barriers:
Search for Female Solidarity in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novels”.
2 Please refer to the report of The Centre for Social Cohesion, Crimes of Community:
Honour-based Violence in UK by James Brandon and Salam Hafez. London: Centre

for Social Cohesion, 2008.
3 The term Karo-kari is related to the honour based violence practised in Pakistan.
Unlike other cases of honour based violence, it is not only acted upon the female
victims only but also on the males involved in the offence. Here, the accused
woman is murdered first while giving the male a chance to flee. But sometimes the
targeted men can escape the sentence of death by paying compensation to the
family of the victim.
4 In The Name of Honour is a book based on the memoirs of Mukhtar Mai, and
written by her in association with Marie-Therese Cuny. It is translated by Linda

Coverdale. Marie Therese Cuny is a Women’s Rights activist, who translated the
thoughts and emotions of Mukhtar who can speak only Saraiki and is illiterate.
Linda Coverdale translated Marie’s work into English. Nicholas D. Kristof and

Sheryl Wudunn wrote Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for
Women Worldwide (2009) dealing with women and gender apartheid. The incident
of Mukhtaran Mai has been discussed in Chapter 4 “ Rule by Rape” of the book.
Mohammed Naqvi made a documentary on Mukhtaran Mai named Shame in 2006.
In 2008 Catherine Ulmer Lopez made a documentary on Mukhtar and focused on
the aftermath of rape in the context of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan.
5 NH10 is a Hindi film on honour killing of both the boy and the girl who dared to get
involved into an affair outside their communities. The film was directed by Navdeep
Singh and was released on March 13, 2015 under the banner of Phantom Films and
Clean Slate Films. Anushka Sharma, Neil Bhoopalam, Deepti Naval starred in the
film.
6 Khudi is an Urdu word which means self-respect or the will power that helps one to
realize his/her individuality. The famous Urdu poet Iqbal used the word Khudi in
his poetry: “Khudi ko kar buland itna...” (Make your will power and self-respect so
powerful…).
7 Please refer to Makarand Paranjape’s articles “The Early Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa”.
The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa, edited by R. K. Dhawan and Novy Kapadia. New
Delhi: Prestige, 1996. Print.
8 Literally, the word zenana refers to women or something pertaining to women. In
the context of spatial discrimination, zenana constitutes a part of the inner

household marked for the women, contrary to the outer part of the house as
mardana. This spatial discrimination is primarily found in those societies, where
the custom of purdah is maintained, especially in South Asia and the Middle East.
The zenana has close association with the female quarters or the harems. The
Hindu counterpart ofzenanais the andarmahal.
9 The word purdah meansa veil or enclosure. The custom of purdah is associated with
the physical and social exclusion of the women from the outer world by means of
clothes, curtains and walls. The custom is enforced by the socially demarcated
women space zenana thatspatially limits the movements of the women. Both
zenana and purdah dictate the women to remain invisible to other men who are not
socially sanctioned to interact with them, thereby secluding or segregating them
from the social mainstream.
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—-. The Pakistani Bride. New Delhi: Penguin, 1982. Print.
---.“Why do I Write.” The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa. Ed. R.K. Dhawan and Novy
Kapadia. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1996. 27-34. Print.

pp. 193-210
RACIAL SUBALTERNITY OF THE ISSEI IN

SELECT JAPANESE NORTH AMERICAN FICTION
Ambika Vishnu Kamat and André Rafael Fernandes
Abstract
After Imperial Japan attacked the Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941,
the resultant internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese
Canadians, as per former US President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive
Order 90661 and former Canadian Prime Minister King’s cabinet-
approved Order-in-Council P.C. 14862 respectively, can be seen as the
culmination of racial discrimination and prejudice in North America
against Japanese North Americans. The war hysteria aggravated the
negative sentiments and prompted the respective governments to
translate long held racial bias into harsh wartime measures (Robinson
n.p.). This paper examines two literary works based on the internment
to understand the dynamics of racial domination and subordination in
this context. It aims at analyzing the Issei, in particular, and the
community, in general, as the racial subalterns in the social hierarchy
during the internment. The texts selected for analysis are Joy Kogawa’s
Obasan, first published in 1981,and Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor
was Divine (2002). The cultural values inherent to the upbringing of the
Issei make it possible for them to sustain through the prevalent status
quo. The Issei held on to their core Japanese values and cultural codes
such as restraint, family obligations, reticence or protective silence,
conflict-avoidance, endurance and resignation even during a
catastrophic disruption like the internment. The restrained response of
the Issei and their withdrawal into protective silence make them racial
subalterns of the society depicted in the respective texts.
Keywords : Racial Subaltern, Internment, Japanese North Americans,
Issei, Second World War.
Introduction
The foreword of Selected Subaltern Studies (1988) edited by Ranajit Guha
and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak highlights that the term “subaltern” has political
as well as intellectual connotations. The opposite of it are the groups in power
which are called “the dominant” or “the elite” or “the hegemonic class”. The term
“subaltern” was coined by Antonio Gramsci who perceived history as a socio-
cultural interplay between the hegemonic class and the subaltern, in his words,

194 Ambika Vishnu Kamat & André Rafael Fernandes
the emergent class which refers to the mass of people kept under control by
repressive and/or ideological apparatuses (vi). Subaltern studies deals with the
roles “agency, subject positions and hegemony… [play in] the ontological
resistance of all varieties of historical determinism, techno-economic or cultural”
(Chaturvedi xiii).
Gyanendra Pandey, in his essay “The Subaltern as Subaltern Citizen”
published in 2006, extends the understanding of the term ‘subaltern’ based on
two parameters. The term ‘subaltern’ for decades, has been used with reference to
the peasants and the working class, inhabiting colonial and postcolonial spaces,
in areas such as subaltern studies and deconstructive historiography (Landry and
MacLean n.p.). Pandey underscores that subaltern is a relative position based on
“dominance and subordination …produced… and altered historically” (4738). He
also argues that difference and subalternity are intertwined as “it is in the
attribution of difference that the logic of dominance and subordination has
always found expression” (4740). Racial difference is at the root cause of the
prejudice and discrimination the Japanese immigrants to North America and
their descendants faced during the Second World War. This paper aims at
examining the Issei3, that is, the first generation of Japanese immigrants to the
continent of North America in select Japanese North American texts as the racial
subalterns in the social hierarchy during the period of internment that followed
the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941. The texts selected for analysis
are Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, first published in 1981,and Julie Otsuka’s When the
Emperor was Divine (2002).
Issei and their Immigration to North America

The Issei immigrated to the U.S. “between 1890 to 1915, before the
immigration Act of 1924 that banned any further immigration” (Houston and
Houston xv). Fugita and Fernandez note that the American Issei initially took up
labour intensive jobs and gradually moved on to entrepreneurial undertakings
after overcoming legal hurdles such as the Alien Land Law which did not allow
Japanese immigrants, who could not be naturalised citizens and thus termed
“aliens”, to own land (8, 17-18). Issei men and their Nisei children had wider
generation gap as the Issei men used to be ten to fifteen years older than their
wives. Language became a barrier to the Issei as they primarily relied on
Japanese as a language of communication. This had personal and social
repercussions for them.
After Imperial Japan attacked the Pearl Harbour on 7 December, 1941, the
internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, as per former US
President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, signed on 19 February
1942, and former Canadian Prime Minister King’s cabinet-approved Order-in-
Council P.C. 1486, passed on 24 February 1942, respectively, can be seen as the
culmination of racial discrimination and prejudice in North America against
Japanese North Americans. In addition to that, there was war hysteria that

Racial Subalternity of the Issei in Select … 195
aggravated the negative sentiments and prompted the respective governments to

translate long held racial bias4 into harsh wartime measures (Robinson n.p.).
Such wartime measures signified the institutionalization of discrimination and
prejudice on racial grounds. Thus, in this analysis, the Japanese North Americans
are seen as racial subalterns during the years of internment.
Around 110,000 to 120,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry were living on
the Pacific coast of the U.S. before the internment. Almost two-thirds of them
were Nisei, the second generation. In spite of being American citizens, they were
incarcerated into interior camps (Fugita and Fernandez 3; Uchida vii). The
summary of Personal justice denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians highlights the fate of the Issei during
internment “The same prohibition applied to the generation of Japanese
immigrants who, pursuant to federal law and despite long residence in the United
States, were not permitted to become American citizens… American citizens and
their alien parents were removed by the Army” (Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians 2).
In Canada, the first Issei arrived in British Columbia in 1877. By 1914,
around 10,000 Japanese, primarily men, were living in Canada (Archived History
Beginning). The first wave of immigration continued till 1928. Unlike in the U.S.,
“about 3,650 Japanese were nationalized in Canada before 1923, after which
Canadian nationality was very difficult for them to obtain. By 1941, the Issei had
spent an average of 30 years working in Canada” primarily in areas such as
agriculture and fishing (The Issei). Over 20,000 to 22,000 Japanese Canadians
were interned during the Second World War (Sunahara, Japanese Canadians;
Robinson; Canada's Japanese Community). Sixty five percent of them were born
in Canada (Robinson n.p.). Having looked at the immigration of the Issei to
North America, it would be useful to understand how they become racial
subalterns given the national policies, the legislative measures and
discrimination on economic as well as socio-cultural grounds due to their race.
Issei as Racial Subaltern

In the introduction to Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial
(2000) Vinayak Chaturvedi remarks that “the emergence of identity politics and
multi-culturalism” made Subaltern Studies a significant critical field in late 1980s
in the U.S. (xii). This was a subsequent development after the Civil Rights,
Feminist and African American movements of the 1960s and 1970s which
brought to the foreground “the inclusion of African Americans, Latino/a
Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and American women in the
culture of critical discourse…[and] focused principally on the exclusions, silences,
and blindnesses of male WASP cultural homogeneity” (West 260). Around this
time, Subaltern Studies moved to investigate culture as an entity with the help of
“textual and discourse analysis, and away from the economic base as the central
zone of power and contestation” (Chaturvedi xii).

A poignant rhetorical question raised in Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) “And that super-European
monstrosity, North America? Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love,
honor, patriotism, and what have you. All this did not prevent us from making
anti-racial speeches” (26) is a powerful statement against the racist mindset
prevalent in the Western world. Though the preface introduces Fanon’s grave and
fierce deliberations about the colonizers and the natives in the French colony of
Algeria, this statement about racial discrimination, prejudice and the white
hypocrisy is quite relevant to the racially subaltern community of Issei.
Throughout the course of history of Japanese in North America we see racial
difference to have played a crucial role in the discriminatory legislations passed
by the U.S. and Canada, and within the popular perceptions, dominated by fear
and anxiety, about the Japanese community.
Ann Gomer Sunahara’s The Politics of Racism : The Uprooting of
Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (2000) and Gary Okihiro’s
The Columbia Guide to Asian American History (2001) provide a comprehensive
historical overview of the legislative measures enacted by Canada and the U.S.
particularly targeting the Japanese immigrants and their descendants in North
America. They also shed light on the struggles faced by the community on the
socio-cultural and economic fronts as a result of the racist policies of the nations.
Sunahara notes that in November 1941, ninety percent of the total population of
Japanese in Canada (23,450 at that time) was concentrated in British Columbia.
Sunahara points out how Thomas Shoyama, editor of the English edition of the
New Canadian, a Nisei newspaper emphasized on the election campaigns of
politicians of British Columbia that “appealed to the fear of economic
competition, fear of social disruption and intermarriage, and fear for personal
and national security” (The Politics of Racism 5-7). This essentially indicates how
the mutual insecurities of the public and the politicians influenced each other to
shape an Anti-Japanese rhetoric.
On the economic front, racist targeting of the Japanese Canadians occurred
on two levels. They were considered inferior on racial grounds and hence not
eligible for equal pay. However, they were accused of undermining the white
interests by working for lower wages. At the same time, they were condemned for
superior productivity and longer working hours. Their dedication was seen as a
part of larger economic conspiracy. The discrimination on the economic front
was supported by socio-cultural claims such as people of Japanese origins are
ethnically and genetically incompatible with the Canadian society as they were
incapable of assimilation. The social, religious, economic and educational
institutions of the Japanese were regarded as evidences of unassimilability
(Sunahara, The Politics of Racism 7). Fugita and Fernandez observe that
Japanese Americans, like their Canadian counterparts, were restricted to being
wage labourers in industries and farms as well as to small restaurants, hotels and
stores in the cities. They “were forced into these small business niches because of

the discrimination they faced in other occupational areas”. Communal solidarity

became crucial for economic survival (9).
Through their rhetoric, the British Columbian racists constructed an image
of Japanese Canadians as spies of Imperial Japan. The fact that Nisei had dual
citizenship of Japan and Canada, the tendency of Issei to send their children to
Japan for a part of their education and also the use of Japanese government
educational material in educational institutions of the community were cited as
proofs of their claims. More than half of the Japanese Canadians of British
Columbia resided in cities, whereas the others were scattered throughout the
Fraser Valley and pursued farming, fishing, lumbering and mining. This was
perceived by the racists as a strategic edge for the Japanese in destroying state
machinery and military assets in the face of war. For Japanese Canadians it was a
vicious cycle given that the economic institutions of and opportunities available
to the white people were largely closed to them, for instance, extremely limited
fishing licences and memberships to trade unions. With such a scenario, the
members of the community had to rely on community institutions to earn their
livelihood, moreover, in order to be a part of the community, the knowledge of
Japanese and attending Japanese schools were essential. Canadian Japanese
Association, primarily a conservative Issei organization, and Japanese Canadian
Citizens’ League, the most active of the many Nisei organisations, were among
the notable community institutions. However, “ideological, cultural and
generational divisions” rendered the community leaderless during the impending
crisis of internment (Sunahara, The Politics of Racism 8-10).
The Gentlemen’s Agreement limited immigration of Japanese to 400 per
year and an eventual revision in 1928 brought the limit down to 150 per year.
Canada excluded Nisei from drafting them into military during the Second World
War effective from 1939 in fear of their claims to voting rights in the future.
Asians were denied voting rights as per a provincial law of 1902. From March
1941 it was mandatory for every Japanese Canadian to register with the
government. The efforts of officials, who supported the cause of Japanese
Canadians, such as Dr. Hugh L. Keenleyside of the Department of External
Affairs, Asst. Comnr. Frederick John Mead in the RCMP, Major General H.G.D.
Crerar, Maj. Gen. Ken Stuart and Lieutenant General Maurice A. Pope in the
military proved to be in vain given the prevalent political climate.
In January 1943, the Government enabled the Custodian of Enemy
Property to sell the properties of Japanese Canadians. This was justified as a
measure to finance the internment, in fact it was primarily to permanently
discourage the Japanese Canadians from returning to the West Coast. In August
1945, around 4,000 people of Japanese origin were deported to Japan for
refusing to move to the eastern part of the country after internment (Sunahara,
Japanese Canadians). Like their Canadian counterparts, in the U.S., Okihiro
notes around half of the Japanese American population lived in concentrated
settlements. “Their race, Old World culture, economic competition, segregated

communities, and uncertain allegiance to the United States” (104) had generated
fear and anxiety among the whites.
A historical overview brings to fore the fact that Anti-Japanese sentiments
had started taking roots in 1906 itself with San Francisco ordering the
segregation of Asian students, followed by the Alien Land Law passed in 1913
which did not allow Issei to own land. The Western states dictated national policy
which culminated into the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 and Oriental
Exclusion Act of 1924. A scenario similar to Canadian British Columbia emerged
in the American region of San Francisco where political interest groups such as
Oriental Exclusion League in 1908 which was succeeded by The California Joint
Immigration Committee in 1924 used the economic insecurities of white
labourers and landowners to advocate removal of Japanese from the West Coast
(Okihiro 104-105).
With the beginning of the Second World War, organizations such as the
Western Growers Protective Association and the American Legion and Native
Sons of the Golden West along with labor unions fuelled the Anti-Japanese
sentiments through mass media particularly the print media. Congressman
Leland Ford of Los Angeles emphasized on the presence of Japanese Americans
along the coast as a security threat to California. Though opinions of others such
as Congressman John Costello of Los Angeles and some officials from the Justice
Department and the Army were about the aforesaid issue, the Executive Order
9066 signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, which provided for the internment
of the Japanese American community, proved to be the final nail in the coffin. It
imposed criminal penalties for opposing the order, and the Supreme Court, in
test cases brought up by Japanese Americans, affirmed that the evacuation was
constitutional…. some military officers, including [Lieutenant General John]
DeWitt, shared the public’s racist attitude toward the Japanese. The Justice
Department’s abdication of responsibility to the War Department allowed the
Army’s plan to go forward (Okihiro 106-108). After taking an overview of various
political policies, economic insecurities and socio-cultural perceptions that have
contributed to racial discrimination against the Issei in the U.S. and Canada, the
next sections would locate the impact of such discrimination on the community
as expressed through the select works of fiction.
Issei in Kogawa’s Obaasan

Among the Issei victims of internment were Grandma and Grandpa
Nakane, the Issei grandparents of the protagonist Naomi Nakane in Joy Kogawa’s
Obasan. They were residents of New Westminister. While they were on their
annual visit to Saltspring Island, where they had a shop before, in spite of not
being residents of the place, they were sent to Sick Bay. Naomi notes Sick Bay,
particularly, the Pool was a prison at the exhibition grounds called Hastings Park
in Vancouver. Men, women and children outside Vancouver, from the “protected
area” – a hundred mile strip along the coast – were herded into the grounds and

kept there like animals until they were shipped off to roadwork camps and
concentration camps to the interior of the province. (Kogawa 93)
Grandpa Nakane arrived in Canada in 1893, wearing a “Western suit… and
platformed geta on his feet. When he left his familiar island, he became a
stranger, sailing toward an island of strangers” (21). As a skilled boat builder he
established a shop on Saltspring Island. Grandpa Nakane brought his cousin’s
widowed wife and her son, Isamu, and married her. Isamu, thus, became older
half-brother of Naomi’s father, Mark Nakane (refer fig.1. and fig. 2.).
Fig.1. Genealogy of Nakane family
Fig.2. Genealogy of Kato family
Technically, Isamu was an Issei as he was born in Japan in 1889. Isamu’s

wife Ayako or Obasan was also an Issei who came to Canada and worked as a
music teacher. She became a good friend of Grandma Nakane who was “an
accomplished koto player and singer” (22) and eventually was married to Isamu.
Emily Kato, Naomi’s maternal aunt and a Nisei activist, while trying to find
a way out with Mark Nakane, her brother-in-law, in the face of such grave
violation of fundamental rights by the government, insists on registering their
protest by meeting the officials of Security Commission5 responsible for such
ruthless measures.She plans to explain them the fact that the Nakanes are not the
residents of Saltspring Island. They should not be imprisoned in Sick Bay as
other elderly inhabitants of Vancouver and New Westminster have not been
interned. Aunt Emily has a better idea of the conditions in the camps as her close
friends Fumi and Eiko are present there. Aunt Emily has not lost faith in the
democratic machinery of the country and hopes that producing facts before the

officials would make them rethink their policies. However, Mark is skeptical
when he points out that the officials may not be keen in listening to their story in
the face of impending war and national crisis.
Naomi, a Sansei, can comprehend the plight of the Issei during the war
““Too old”…I can imagine that my grandmother said much the same thing those
dark days in 1942, as she rocked in her stall at the Vancouver Hastings Park
prison6. Grandma Nakane, Uncle’s mother, was too old then to understand
political expediency, race riots, the yellow peril” (20).
Internment and Protective Silence of the Issei in Obasan

In Kogawa’s Obasan, at various points in the narrative, Naomi recollects
the male family members and acquaintances being interned. She has heard
fleeting references to the same from Ayako and Emily. While taking a look at a
photograph of Isamu and Mark standing in front of a boat designed by the latter,
Naomi notes “Uncle [Isamu] too was taken away… He had no provisions, nor did
he have any idea where the gunboats were herding and the other Japanese
fishermen in the impounding fishing fleet” (26).
Naomi is quick to highlight that the adults were resolved not to reveal
details of the terrible period of internment to the next generation. In Naomi’s
case the occasional discussions were limited to her parents, Emily, Isamu and
Ayako. For the Sansei like her, the memories of internment are “drowned in a
whirlpool of protective silence. Everywhere I could hear the adults whispering
“Kodomo no tame. For the sake of the children… Calmness was maintained“ (26).
A major instance of protective silence seen in Kogawa’s Obasan is the
secrecy maintained around Naomi’s mother’s disappearance. It is only when
Nakayama Sensei, a local minister, reads from the letter exchanged by the Katos,
Naomi’s maternal grandparents, that the protective silence maintained for the
sake of the children is breached. According to Nakayama-sensei the letters
express the deep emotions of “in the time of war – your mother. Your
grandmother. That there is suffering and their deep love” (279). Grandma Kato
and Naomi’s mother who had gone to visit the former’s ailing mother in Tokyo
were stuck in Japan with the start of the Second World War. When both of them
had gone to Nagasaki to help Grandma’s niece Setsuko with the birth of her
second child, they learn that Grandma’s sister, her husband and their mother had
died in bombings. Grandma Kato, mother and Chieko, the second child of
Setsuko survive the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
However, they are in miserable condition and have witnessed the horrifying
suffering and death of other members of the family and their acquaintances. In
1949, Chieko was suffering from leukemia. After learning about the horrifying
suffering her mother endured, Naomi observes “The letters take months to reach
Grandfather. They take years to reach me. Grandfather gives the letters to Aunt
Emily. Aunt Emily sends letters to the Government. The Government makes

paper airplanes out of our lives and flies us out of the windows” (291). The letters
of the Katos function both as instruments of concealing vital information from
the Sansei, employed primarily by the Issei and Nisei to spare the next generation
from the tremendous pain that would accompany the revelation of the truth, as
much as silent documents of personal history.
One must also note that the Japanese Canadians become racial subalterns
in Obasan not only because of the all pervasive silence they maintain about their
suffering, but also as the appeals and petitions sent to the government officials by
Nisei activists such as Aunt Emily with reference to confiscation of property and
businesses as well as internment and separation of families in the name of
national security fall on deaf ears (44-45). Naomi and her elder brother Stephen,
the Sansei, also become victims of the ugly undercurrents of racial subalternity
while attending school in Bayfarm internment camp in Slocan. Verbal and
physical abuse are the means of establishing and maintaining the racial status
quo among kids. The older Japanese Canadian kids use violence against humans
as well as animals to vent out their rage in the face of humiliation. Stephen faces
violence in school. His glasses and violin are broken.
Print media and consumer products also contribute to the indoctrination of
children and serve as instruments of racial discrimination and systematic
marginalization of the Japanese Canadians in popular culture. Stephen is given
“the Yellow Peril War game” made in Canada where there are “weak, small yellow
pawns”. Naomi comes across a character called Chicken Little in Little Tales for
Little Folks. As a child, she associates this with the yellow chicken killed by the
white hen in their backyard. Naomi is disturbed and does not want to be
discriminated along racial lines. Her deep-seated fear and insecurity due to
prejudice is summarized in “Yellow is to be chicken. I am not yellow” (181). Percy
Bower a boy in Stephen’s school calls him “gimpy Jap” and challenges him to
fight with his group. Naomi witnesses the brutal killing of a chicken by Sho, a
Japanese seventh grader and Danny, Stephen’s classmate. A white girl blames
Naomi for keeping her helpless kitten in the skating rink. The images of the
helpless animals are symbols of the helplessness of the Sansei kids during
internment and as victims of racial discrimination. Peers tell Stephen and Naomi
that they would be sent away as they are “Japs”. When the children question their
father about their identity he asserts that they are Canadians. The profound
conflict in Naomi’s mind is expressed when she says “It is a riddle, Stephen tells
me. We are both the enemy and not the enemy” (84). The wartime measures
prosecuted the Japanese Canadians for their Japanese ethnic roots in times of
war hysteria and refused to acknowledge the fact that a majority of those interned
were Canadian citizens like Naomi and Stephen. Their race was wielded as a
weapon against the Japanese Canadians, in this case, and Japanese North
Americans. in general, in the face of war, expulsion and internment. Race became
a determining factor in the institutionalized subordination of the Japanese
Canadians during the said period. As Sunahara notes in The Politics of Racism:

With the announcement of a total uprooting, citizenship became

irrelevant. Whether Isseior Nisei, Japanese alien or Canadian citizen,
everyone had become an enemy alien…. In addition, all Japanese
Canadians, unlike the German and Italian aliens, were required to
observe a dusk-to-dawn curfew and to abandon their homes, farms and
businesses for an unknown destination.(46)
Japanese Values of the Issei and their Silence

After having examined the socio-historical context of the select texts to
understand the wartime measures that were a culmination of racial prejudice and
discrimination along with war hysteria, while perceiving Japanese North
Americans as racial subalterns during their internment, it is necessary to
comprehend the cultural values that made a subordinate position palatable for
the time being particularly due the harsh measures. In the literary works that
have been analyzed, the Issei emerge as custodians of the Japanese aspects of the
community identity. Stephen Fugita and Marilyn Fernandez trace the core values
the Issei brought to North America. The Issei were brought up in the Japanese
social system that emphasized family as a basic unit of society which was to be
the foundation of the powerful nation the leaders set out to build. “Loyalty and
filial piety were emphasized to counter “self-conscious individualism”“ (Fugita
and Fernandez 15). Filial ties were extended to local ties seen in villages, cities
and neighbourhoods. In Fukutake’s terms cited by Fugita and Fernandez
“familistic communitarianism” inculcated on the basis of observing customs,
obeying authority and preserving interpersonal harmony was idealized over
decisions made by a rational and autonomous self (16).
Majority of the American and Canadian Issei belonged to the farming class
that had borne the brunt of the Meiji (1868 – 1912) land tax reforms. They saw
temporary immigration as an “opportunity to raise their status in Japan, the so-
called sojourner orientation” (Fugita and Fernandez 16). The promise to come
home in glory was a crucial driving force for the Issei (“Come Home in Glory”).
Issei had Meiji Era aspirations of educational achievements, social mobility and
were open to collaborated efforts as a community. Two significant principles
dictating the social attitudes of the Issei were Wa, which is better translatedas
“conflict-avoidance”, by Miyamoto, Fugita and Kashima, and “Giri-Ninjô”that is
“obligation and duty” (giri) and “responsiveness to the deeper feelings of others”
(ninjô)(Fugita and Fernandez 17).
The uniquely Japanese social attitudes and responses get reflected in
Kogawa’s Obasan. Kogawa aptly names the novel after Ayako Obasan who herself
is an Issei and the literary scene of the novel is dominated by Isseis. The cultural
foundations of Issei of prioritizing norms and preferences of the family and
community over individual will and choices, whether in moments of glory or
crisis, -a tendency of avoiding conflict; fulfilling duties and giving importance to
emotions and responses of others, resulted in preservation and inculcation of
attitudes seen in the text. These values proved to be useful particularly in shaping

the general response to internment and coping mechanisms that were employed
thereafter.
Sunahara quotes from the personal interview of Katsuko Hideka Halfhide,
housing coordinator at Kaslo internment camp in British Columbia, conducted by
her while writing Politics of Racism:
One of the reasons the Japanese people were able to adapt… was that
they always had this tradition of working in groups...This was the whole
background they could draw from: a great stability and a great sense of
social values.... underlying it all was the old tradition [of working
together, tonarigumi]… (81)
The Japanese core values and cultural codes such as enryo (reserve or restraint),
gamen (patience and perseverance) and shikataga-nai (resignation) enabled the
Issei and the Nisei to endure internment. (Sunahara, The Politics of Racism 149).
Naomi’s mother in spite of being a Nisei has been constructed as an epitome of
enryo, gamen and giri-ninjô , perhaps to indicate the great cultural influence the
Issei parents had on their Nisei children, particularly the elder ones, given the
first-borns have special significance in Japanese culture. Giri-ninjô, that is,
prioritizing filial obligations is seenwhen she accompanies her mother Mrs. Kato
while visiting her ailing grandmother in Tokyo even during the war. They further
go to Nagasaki to look after Setsuko who is about to give birth to her second
child. Enryo and gamen, that is, restraint and endurance are an integral part of
her nature given that she does not abandon Chieko, Setsuko’s daughter and a
leukemia patient after the bombing of Nagasaki and insists on returning to
Canada only if she can bring Chieko with her. Naomi’s mother had an option of
returning to Canada after war being a Canadian citizen.
Naomi is able to transcend her personal grief due to separation from her
mother at a tender age and comprehend the significance of fulfillment of family
obligations, restraint and endurance in life of her mother, in circumstances of
terrible suffering, deaths and absences (Kogawa 294), perhaps because her
upbringing and cultural milieu dictated her mother’s priorities, only after the
elderly in her family break the culture of silence and reveal the truths that they
had concealed from her. It is towards the end of the novel that Naomi is able to
piece together the scattered clues to cultural codes of her mother, which she
inherited from the Issei, such as the composed response of her mother instead of
a bitter scolding during the chicken incident in her childhood (71) and an advice
by Obasan during Grandma Nakane’s funeral of not being Wagamama, that is,
selfish and inconsiderate by not honouring the wishes of others (151) and
understand that she was expected to consider her personal attachment to her
mother and the resultant grief after separating from her as secondary to the
significant filial obligations. The sacrifice of personal emotions render Naomi’s
loved ones with the quality of yasahi and kawaiso;both values are about being
tender and helpful to others in moments of crisis.

Obasan embodies restraint when she joins the elders in maintaining

protective silence. Even in a moment of crisis, while Obasan’s family is being sent
to the internment camp, she is gentle and caring towards Kuniko-san, a young
woman with a premature baby but with no diapers. She also serves Nomura-
Obasan, an invalid woman after giving her shelter in their barrack during the
internment (62). Naomi’s process of realization is completed when she concludes
“I had not known that Grief had such gentle eyes – eyes reflecting my uncle’s
eyes, my mother’s eyes – all the familiar lost eyes of Love” (295).
Shikataga-nai, that is, “It cannot be helpedʼʼ or “I must resign myself to my
fate” was an immediate response of the community to the circumstances of
internment which were beyond their control (Sunahara, The Politics of Racism
79). However, they were persistent and focused on survival in the harsh
conditions. Thus, cultural codes inherited from the Issei such as restraint,
resilience, endurance, resignation, filial obligations, being sensitive to the needs
of others and avoiding conflict contribute to the reticence of Japanese North
American community and place them in the subordinate position making them
racial subalterns due internment.
Internment and Issei in Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine

Julie Otsuka, a Sansei herself, deals with the dark chapter of Japanese
American internment in her novel When the Emperor was Divine (2002). Her
debut novel “is based on Otsuka’s own family history: her grandfather was
arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbor was
bombed, and her mother, uncle and grandmother spent three years in an
internment camp in Topaz, Utah” (“About Julie Otsuka”). A salient feature of
Otsuka’s narrative style is the use of unnamed protagonists and characters. This
is done not only to construct representatives of the community in question, but
also to create collectivities to foreground the inherent silence of the racial
subaltern. Such collectivities are seen in Otsuka’s second novel The Buddha in the
Attic (2011). Not assigning names to her protagonists, is a way of drawing home
the point that while constructing a narrative around the racial subaltern, that is
the Japanese North Americans, the dominant whites ensured that the subaltern
is perceived as a dangerous and perilous collective entity which is resonated in
racist and derogatory terms such as “Yellow Peril”.
The boy, a Nisei has imbibed the perceptions of the dominant whites. “For
it was true, they all looked alike. Black hair. Slanted eyes. High cheekbones. Thick
glasses. Thin lips. Bad teeth. Unknowable. Inscrutable… The little yellow man”
(Otsuka 49). This description of the Japanese resonates the racial stereotypes
prevalent in the society, where individuals were reduced to their common, racial,
physical attributes. They were thought of as an enigmatic whole, particularly
conveyed through the two adjectives “unknowable” and “inscrutable”.

The protagonists of Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine are the
woman, the boy and the girl. The novel begins in the spring of 1942 in Berkeley
with passing of the evacuation order for Japanese Americans. Every chapter is a
stage in the evacuation process. The chapters “Evacuation order no. 19”, “Train”
describe the preparation and commute to the internment camp. “When the
Emperor was Divine” shows the harsh reality of the internment camp, in this
case, Topaz, Utah. “In a Stranger’s Backyard” depicts the return of the family
from the internment camp and the numerous hurdles, racial prejudice and
discrimination they face in order to get reintegrated into the society. The last
chapter is titled “Confession” which highlights the preconceptions of the
dominant race, the whites, about the subordinate people, the Japanese
Americans. There are stringent rules regarding law and order, discipline,
language, food, religion, almost an exercise of erasing the culture of the racial
subalterns and training them in the dominant, white, mainstream culture. The
rules aimed at taking ultimate control over the community, such that every aspect
of their lives could be determined and dictated
The rules about the fence were simple; You could not go over it, you
could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go
through it. There were rules about language, too: Here we say…Safety
Council not Internal Police; Residents, not evacuees”(61).
Certain instructions are italicized not only to add emphasis but to expose
the power dynamics that allow gross violations of rights of the subaltern - their
evacuation, internment, unquestionable interference and stronghold on the part
of the white majority in the name of war hysteria. The instructions continue “No
books in Japanese… No Emperor-worshipping Shintos allowed” (61). Every
aspect of the Japanese American life including time and space are regulated and
supervised. Derogatory racial terms are used on the street by people and on the
boards even by authorities:
There were the rules about time: No Japs out after eight p.m. And space:
No Japs allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes. ... the
signs that read INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE
ANCESTRY went up all over town. (76)
Destruction of all the objects indicating the Japanese aspects of their identity by
the mother shows the deep psychological impact of racial discrimination and war
hysteria on the racial subaltern community of Japanese Americans. Being an
Issei from Kagoshima7, the mother responds with restraint, chooses conflict-
avoidance and prioritizes the safety of her family over protesting unjust
measures. She chooses to eliminate objects that would identify them as people of
Japanese ancestry and would make them vulnerable in the light of harsh,
wartime regulations. Her actions are symbolic of being forced to erase their
ethnic past, their collective memories as a race, their traditions, which were
symbolized by the objects that had been cherished over generations, and
annihilating their roots through expulsion and confinement. It was a long-term

measure to enable the dominant race to modify them after they return from
internment under the pretext of facilitating integration and assimilation:
That evening she had lit a bonfire in the yard and burned all the letters
from Kagoshima. She burned the family photographs and the three silk
kimonos she had brought over with her nineteen years ago from
Japan…She ripped up the flag of the red rising sun. She smashed the tea
set and the Imari dishes (75)
Most of the War Relocation Centers8 were built in deserts and with similar
temporary structures and surrounded by fences. The one at Utah is described in
When the Emperor was Divine.“It was 1942. Utah. Late summer. A city of tar-
paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in
the desert” (Otsuka 49).
The War Relocation Authorities were forced to allow recruitment of people
from the camps due to labour shortages. Taking up work in the farms during
harvest season with the hope of securing freedom for limited period did not
resolve the issues for the internees. In fact, they could get a glimpse of the
worsening situation outside.
They said they’d been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local
diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the
windows were the same wherever they went: No JAPS ALLOWED. Life
was easier, they said, on this side of the fence. (67)
The last line indicates how the racial subalterns come to accept their confinement
in the face of the vulnerable position that they occupy in the dynamics.
Rumours of segregation based on gender; sterilization; withdrawal of
citizenship, assassination; deportation to Japan; being held hostage for exchange
of American prisoners of war and being handed over to Chinese are rampant
among the internees in the text. A deep fear and anxiety which were the results of
the uncertainty created by the catastrophic mass evacuation are evident in these
rumours. The complete authority of the dominant race and the narrative woven
to justify the grave injustice as much as to silence the racial subaltern is seen in
the following lines “You’ve been brought here for your own protection, they were
told. It was all in the interest of national security. It was a matter of military
necessity. It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty” (70).
On the fifth day after father is arrested by the FBI, the family gets a note
from immigration detention center in San Francisco informing them that around
eighty three Japanese have already been sent away to camps and he is waiting for
his loyalty hearing (90). The loyalty questionnaire was a bureaucratic instrument
created by the War Department and the War Relocation Authority in 1943 to
apparently test the loyalty of Japanese Americans and to help them form an all-
Nisei combat unit. The War Relocation Authority borrowed the questionnaire to
begin a probe to test loyalty of adult Issei and Nisei women. Question number 27
and 28 became controversial as they asked the respondents whether they would

serve in the army no matter where they were posted and whether they would
pledge unconditional allegiance to the U.S. as well as whether they would
renounce all affiliations to the Emperor of Japan. The loyalty questionnaire was a
result of deep-seated suspicion about the Japanese Americans. Okihiro observes,
…[t]he Pearl Harbor attack revived the stereotype, and public attitudes
toward the Japanese crystallized around the familiar themes of
treachery and disloyalty, and the Japanese became the objects of white
suspicion, anxiety, and anger. The old stereotype fed rumors of
espionage and sabotage, and the attack gave substance to the oft
repeated fears of the “yellow peril” and the peaceful invasion. The
Japanese stereotype circulated in rumor and opinion, in private and
public declarations, by unionists and politicians, among farm groups
and patriots (112).
The Emperor had an influential, in fact, a sacred position in Japanese
society. There was imperial influence on the cultural institutions of the Japanese
Americans as well. This influence gets resonated in the title of the novel When the
Emperor was Divine. The anxiety and insecurity of the wartime authorities got
manifested in their insistence on evacuation of the community and holding them
behind barbed wires with constant surveillance. Okihiro adds further “race
hatred constituted a compelling argument for mass evacuation— to protect them
from the threat of riots and acts of violence” (112). Determining loyalty of the
internees towards the U.S. took official form through certain special provisions
that Fugita and Fernandez point out,
In early 1943, the Army and the WRA attempted to determine the
loyalty of individuals in all ten of the camps …This process was called
registration. Ultimately. Tule Lake was chosen to become a segregation
center and house the so-called “disloyals” from all of the WRA
camps. (56)
In Otsuka’s novel, the mother responds positively to swearing allegiance to the
U.S. and forswearing loyalty to Imperial Japan. “She’d been in America for
almost twenty years now. But she did not want to cause any trouble … or be
labeled disloyal. She did not want to be sent back to Japan… Your father is here.
The important thing is that we stay together” (Otsuka 99). As argued earlier, the
mother exhibits Issei mindset by prioritizing her family and avoiding conflict
even in a critical situation of pledging loyalty.
Otsuka highlights the various impediments faced by the Japanese
Americans in the process of reintegration in the society after internment. The
house of the family is in a miserable condition. There are evidences of occupation
in their absence. However, the neighbour who had been requested to find tenants
has not paid a single penny to the family as rent. Some of their possessions are
gone. These fictional recreations can be corroborated with actual accounts from
the former internees. For instance, Fugita and Fernandez note “Most of the
incarcerees who left camp to pick up the threads of their work and family lives
faced serious hurdles. For one, the majority had little remaining in the way of

economic resources. The period was particularly humiliating for many Issei who
had lost all that they had worked for”. The pre-war ethnic and socio-economic
networks had also been destroyed which in turn reflected in the loss of
community ties (107-108).
Otsuka depicts a poignant picture of how the internees were prepared for
going back into the society. The officials termed the orientation as “unobtrusive
assimilation” (Fugita and Fernandez 108). Embedded in the enlisting of the
characteristic italicized instructions are the dictates of the dominant white race to
the racial subaltern to adhere to the racial limitations and status quo, “we’d been
told, weeks before, in a mess hall lecture” on “…how to behave in the Outside
World… Speak only English. Do not walk down the street in groups of more
than three…Do not draw attention to yourselves in any way”(Otsuka 122).The
father, towards the end of the novel, maintains a protective silence characteristic
to the Issei as the children note “[h]e never said a word to us about the years he’d
been away…never talked about politics, or his arrest… He never mentioned his
loyalty hearing before the Alien Enemy Control Unit…We didn’t want to know…
All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget” (133). He
suffered from symptoms of anxiety, extreme irritation and suspicion. He serves
as the Issei representative of the internees. The last chapter of the novel titled
“Confession” depicts the acute guilt and tendency of self-loathing in the male
members of the community, who had been arrested and interrogated by the FBI
under the pretext of national security. Fugita and Fernandez shed more light on
the long lasting consequences of the internment:
When the resettlers left camp for the last time, not only did they face
numerous social and economic uncertainties, but psychological ones as
well. On the personal and perhaps even subconscious level, some former
incarcerees felt either anguish about being powerless to resist the
injustice which had been meted out to them or, on the other hand,
thought that their own or the ethnic group's inadequacies were
somehow responsible for their treatment. (112)
After analyzing Kogawa’s Obasan and Otsuka’s When the Emperor was
Divine, the Issei, in particular, and the Japanese North Americans, in general,
emerge as racially subaltern group during the internment period. Naomi’s
paternal and maternal grandparents, that is, the Nakanes and the Katos
respectively, Uncle Isamu and Ayako Obasan are the Issei in Kogawa’s Obasan.
The woman/mother and the father are the Issei in Otsuka’s When the Emperor
was Divine. They hold on to their core Japanese values and cultural codes such
as restraint, family obligations, reticence or protective silence, conflict-avoidance,
endurance and resignation even during a catastrophic disruption like the
internment. The restrained response of the Issei and their withdrawal into
protective silence make them racial subalterns of the society depicted in the
respective texts. These characters pave way to the discussions and the analysis of
the role of racial politics, racial discrimination and prejudice during war hysteria
and wartime measures that targeted the racial subaltern community of Japanese

North Americans in marginalizing and silencing the community during the

internment.
Notes :
1 Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 signed on 19 February 1942
2 Minister King’s cabinet approved Order-in-Council P.C. 1486 passed on 24
February 1942
3 The term ‘Issei’ refers to the first generation of Japanese immigrants. ‘Nisei’ is the
second generation and ‘Sansei’ is the third generation.
4 For an overview of various acts passed by American government and Canadian
government with an aim of regulating Japanese immigration, possession of assets
and citizenship see discussions in the works of Ann Gomer Sunahara (2000); Gary
Okihiro (2001); Stephen Fugita and Marilyn Fernandez (2004)
5 British Columbia Security Commission was an agency created to supervise the
evacuation and internment (Robinson n.p.).
6 After the expulsion of Japanese Canadians, they were segregated based on sex and
were kept in former women’s building and livestock barns at Hastings Park. Those
who protested against the segregation were punished. Many men were sent to work
in road labour camps. Many opted to work on sugar beet farms outside British
Columbia and were exploited in name of apparently guarding their freedom
(Robinson n.p.).
7 There are autobiographical elements in the novel. ‘The woman’ was Otsuka’s
grandmother, ‘the boy’ was her uncle and ‘the girl’ was her mother (“About Julie
Otsuka”).
8 See description of Minidoka WRA and The Tule Lake WRA (Fugita and Fernandez
55-56).
Works Cited :
“About Julie Otsuka.” Julie Otsuka. Accessed 16 March 2016.
www.julieotsuka.com/about.
“Archived History Beginning Japanese Explore the Communities.” 13 January
2005. Library and Archives Canada. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/settlement/kids/021013-2141.1-e.html.
“Canada's Japanese Community.” Asian Heritage Month. Radio Canada
International. Accessed 26 Nov. 2019.
www.rcinet.ca/patrimoine-asiatique-en/le-mois-du-patrimoine asiatique
-au-canada/lepopee-des-canadiens-dorigine-japonaise/.
Chaturvedi, Vinayak. Introduction. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the
Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi, London: Verso, 2000, pp.
vii-xix.
“Come Home in Glory.” 2014. Nikkei Tapestry: Japanese Canadians in Southern
Alberta. GALT Museum and Archives. Accessed 25 November 2019
nikkei-tapestry.ca/gloire-glory-eng.html.

Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. “Summary.”

Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Seattle: Civil Liberties Public
Education Fund and U Washington P, 1997. 1-23.Web.
Fugita, Stephen S. and Marilyn Fernandez. Altered Lives, Enduring Community:
Japanese Americans Remember their World War II Incarceration.
Seattle: U of Washington P, 2004.Web.
Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, editors. Selected Subaltern
Studies. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1988. Web
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Houston. Farewell to Manzanar. New
York: Ember, 1973.Print.
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.Print.
Landry, Donna and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader. New York: Routledge,
1996.Web.
Okihiro, Gary Y. The Columbia Guide to Asian American History. New York:
Columbia UP, 2001.Web.
Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor was Divine. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.
Print.
Pandey, Gyanendra. “The Subaltern as Subaltern Citizen.” Economic and
Political Weekly 41.46 (2006): 4735-4741.
Robinson, Greg. “Internment of Japanese Canadians.” 15 February 2017. The
Canadian Encyclopedia. Accessed 26 Nov. 2019.
www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/internment-of-japanese-
canadians.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Preface. The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon, Grove
Weidenfeld, 1963, pp. 7-31. Sunahara, Ann. “Japanese Canadians.” 31
January 2011. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019
www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/japanese-canadians.
---. The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the
Second World War. Ottawa: Ann Gomer Sunahara, 2000. Print.
“The Issei.” 2014. Nikkei Tapestry: Japanese Canadians in South Alberta. GALT
Museum and Archives. Accessed 25 Nov. 2019. nikkei-tapestry.ca/issei-
eng.html.
Uchida, Yoshiko. Journey to Topaz. Berkeley, California: Heyday Books, 1971.
Print.
West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” The Cultural Studies
Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 256-267.

pp. 211-224
WRITING THE BODY: A FEMINIST READING OF

THE POEMS OF RAJATHI SALMA AND
KUTTI REVATHY
Smithalekshmi S.
Abstract
The women poets of the contemporary period have equipped their
poetry with the power to react against the domineering authority.
Barbara Harlow, the well known scholar of Third World literature, puts
it rightly in her seminal book Resistance Literature ; “poetry…is itself an
arena of struggle” (Harlow 33). Resistance literature encapsulates all
such writings which aimed to challenge the regime of power structures.
For manifesting resistance through their writings, they have employed
various techniques like deconstructing mythical hero/heroine/ villain,
rejecting the tools of patriarchy like religion and language and thus
projecting the concealed. The female body created by the patriarchal
mindset in writings was circumvented when women writers described
their body with their first-hand knowledge. Women poets like Kamala
Das have brought in body politics in their writings. For them poetry is a
protest against the silence into which the female body has been trapped
in, or more precisely, it is an act of giving representation to a
misrepresented entity. These kinds of writings are characterized by
highly metaphorical often unpunctuated flow in writing which
represents female body processes in an emotional rhythm. They are not
superseding biology but they prove how to give new meaning and values
to the body. Tamil women poets and activists like Rajathi Salma and
Kutti Revathy, representatives of new generation poets in Tamil Nadu,
met with the charges of obscenity and immodesty when they depicted
the female body in their poems. This study has taken some selected
poems of these two women poets which were originally written in Tamil
and were translated to English by the famous translator Lakshmi
Holmstrom. The present paper tries to analyze the way in which women
write women’s bodies in the context of their traumatic experiences. The
presence of the female body in itself, outside its designated space within
the household, is an affront to caste patriarchy. The woman should
question the domineering patriarchal society that scrutinizes the dress
that is worn by her, the time at which she walks alone or the person
whom she accompanies. Being an integral part in both racial and sexual
oppression, body is directly involved in a political field. Like Foucault’s
articulation on body as a ‘site of power’, the study tries to place body as a
space where various conflicting discourses converge to form a site of
differences.
Keywords : body of woman, obscenity, privacy, resistance, moral
policing, traumatic experiences, body politics.

212 Smithalekshmi S.
Woman was traditionally assigned two major roles in society – one is of

mother and the other is of wife. Of the two roles to perform, the role of wife is
more significant because of her services to her husband. In Indian mythological
texts, wife addresses her husband as ‘lord’ to indicate the status of woman as
subservient to man. The female body has to achieve and sustain certain qualities
to become a dutiful wife. Virginity is one among such standards framed by the
male dominated society. Virginity is considered as a touchstone to purity in India.
It is a widely accepted belief that a girl should protect and give more priority to
her virginity than her life. There is a common notion existing in India that a
virgin girl, alias the ‘pure’ girl, is considered as a token of gift to her husband and
he can do whatever he wishes to do with her body. Society terms it as the
birthright of the husband and nobody questions it as it is deemed to be ‘natural’.
Thus, a wife’s body becomes the personal property of her husband but the
husband’s body is retained as his own territory, as the analysis of the literary
representations to follow make clear.
Additionally, in the context of this paper, we shall find that this is not
mandatory in every marital relationship or in cohabitation, but most of the times
it becomes obligatory. Female body becomes a site of contestation in such
relationships. The dominance of the patriarchal society turns female body into an
object to use or a territory to conquer. Like an unconquered land is conquered by
men of power, the virginity of a girl is looted of by her ‘master’ husband or
anyone else like her lover or a rapist, making her impure by taking away her
‘purity’. The colonial man has a ceaseless urge to conquer new lands and ‘civilize’
the native people living there. Colonization is a metaphor here because the man is
uplifting the woman to become a mother, the most anticipated status a woman
can dream of, thus ‘civilizing’ the woman. Later when she loses the charm after
the child birth, the man will set out to find new lands. As the body of woman is a
site to be explored as per the patriarchal notion, the conquered lands are
attributed the identity of woman’s body in the colonial period itself. “…from the
beginning of the colonial period till its end (and beyond), female bodies
symbolize the conquered land. This metaphoric use of the female body varies in
accordance with the exigencies and histories of particular colonial situations. For
example, in comparison with the nakedness of America or Africa in early modern
iconographic representations, Asia is always sumptuously clothed…”
(Loomba 152).
Jasbir Jain, a Postcolonial critic, notes this woman–territory analogy
during the Indian freedom struggle in her essay titled “Indian Feminisms: The
Nature of Questioning and the Search for Space in Indian Women’s Writing”;
…the history of British rule in India has impacted women in three
different ways which are conflictual and oppositional to each other: (i)
women were the site on which imperial and colonial strategies were
worked out. Child marriage, polygamy, sati and widow remarriage all
became central issues. How far the intervention of the state was
desirable or pro-woman is a larger question in itself. (ii) Women came to

Writing the Body: A Feminist Reading of the Poems… 213
symbolize nationhood and with the myth of woman as the motherland

being identified with them, they came to be treated as the custodians of
culture. (iii) They found legitimate space which promised them identity
and selfhood within the freedom struggle even if it was within
conventional frameworks and moral values which valorized sacrifice and
self- effacement. (29)
Here, woman is identified with the motherland unless and until she follows
the conventional frameworks and moral values of the society. This analogy is only
considered when the woman leads her life as per the norms formulated by the
male dominated society. To become the custodians of culture, a patriarchal
construct as well, women should have to immolate their bodies. Jain continues,
in the same essay, “The State performed a patriarchal role in asserting its right to
reclaim and rehabilitate women; women themselves by committing mass suicides
in order to prevent rape or abduction followed the tradition of jauhar and sati”
(31). Thus, it is very clear that the body of woman becomes a site to exert power
by the various institutions of the society. The symbolic association of female body
with territory/ territoriality is to be defended as it dehumanize woman to an
object. Representing female body in writings can create a unique identity of its
own. But writing on or about the body by women writers would need enormous
courage and strength in a traditional Indian scenario. Helene Cixuous’
observation is pertinent to recall here:
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the
impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics,
regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the
ultimate reserve- discourse, including the one that laughs at the very
idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence’… (886)
The phallocentric society will accuse such writings about female body by women
writers as obscene and immodest. So it is hard to establish the authority over
one’s own body by a woman who wants to negate the authority the man exercises
over her body. To reveal her trauma she suffered, only strong imagery and
powerful expressions are used. Luce Irigaray posits “woman’s writing” as that
which evades the male monopoly and the risk of appropriation into the existing
system by “establishing as its generative principle, in place of the monolithic
phallus, the diversity, fluidity, and multiple possibilities inherent in the structure
and erotic functioning of the female sexual organs and erogenous zones, and in
the distinctive nature of female sexual experiences” (qtd. in Abrams 97).
The ‘ecriture feminine’ helps women to posit themselves from the ‘other’ to
‘Self’. Helene Cixous, who proposed the term, challenged women to express
themselves without any hesitations by coming out of the cocoons made by man to
suppress them. The unhappiness of the woman in living a ‘happy’ life as man
dictates her to lead finds expression in the language she uses to demonstrate her
feelings. The language and experiences of women are entirely different to that of
man. The feminine language can be a threat to phallocentric culture, but it helps
the woman to express her in new ways. Feminine mystique is a term which

became popular by the title of the famous book by Betty Friedan which sparked
the beginning of second- wave feminism. The very idea of this term was
predominantly rooted in the society just like a myth, in the lives of women.
Feminine mystique states that women naturally fulfil their meaning of life by
devoting their lives to become housewives and mothers. It is a false conception
regarding the identity of woman. She wants to identify herself as she is, not what
she is to someone.
There exist a number of differences between man and woman, even if man
and woman share equal political and legal rights on paper. Physique of woman is
physiologically and genetically different to that of a man. As the difference in
physique exists between them, the nudity of woman is more controversial in
degree than that in man. The patriarchal world will define body of woman as a
problematic entity when she gets raped or when her nudity becomes marketed in
porn movies. More precisely, it is an action to make the body of woman a
collective responsibility of the society and thus, a site of exploitation. The
differences it possess with that of man’s is explicitly stated in Foucault’s
observation on this matter.
The problem of how to conceive of the body without reducing its
materiality to a fixed biological essence has been one of the key issues for
feminist theory. At a fundamental level, a notion of the body is central to the
feminist analysis of the oppression of women because biological differences
between the sexes are the foundation that has served to ground and legitimize
gender inequality. By means of an appeal to historical biological characteristics,
the idea that women are inferior to men is naturalized and legitimized. This
involves two related conceptual moves. Firstly, women's bodies are judged
inferior with reference to norms and ideals based on men's physical capacities
and, secondly, biological functions are collapsed into social characteristics”
(Armstrong n.p.). When the inferior tries to express oneself, the superior persona
will make some issues and exert its power to silence the freedom of expression of
the ‘other’. The anecdote in the life of Rajathi Salma, one of the women poets
selected for this study, shows how the patriarchal objections she faced
throughout her life from all circles moulded her to become the fearless Salma that
she is today.
Rajathi Salma is a popular activist and politician in Tamil Nadu. Her real
name is Rokkiah Begum. Before becoming a renowned poetess as now, she led a
cloistered life like other Muslim girls of her age who reached their puberty. Her
love for reading the books she got from the nearby library with the help of her
mother sustained her life. Her extensive reading never allowed the newspaper
bits used for cladding the household things to stray away. But when she got
married in her teens like other Muslim girls, her husband and in-laws drew a
controlling line to announce their authority over her. To come out of this
servitude, she started writing her poems without the knowledge of her husband.
Her husband was hostile to her writing and so she selected a pen name ‘Salma’
for anonymity. Salma published her poems under this pen name with the help of

her mother and Kannan Sundaram, the Publisher of the journal Kalachuvadu.
When her husband detected her as the ‘sensational’ Salma, she had to face
physical abuse from him. He threatened her of acid attack. In order to defend,she
began to sleep at nights hugging their son tightly. Fate had something else in
store for her. She became a representative of people in her Panchayat and from
that point onwards, nothing could stop her from being herself. The story of Salma
proves to be an instance of victory and a source of inspiration to all those people
who aspire to write their own story by expressing themselves fearlessly as she did.
She is a survivor who subverts the impositions of a male-dominated social order.
For truthful depiction of this traumatic experience, the writers would try their
best to intermingle a certain radicalism of imagery like breasts, vagina, etc. which
are taboo as subjects of discussion and inherently embedded in notions of
chastity, chivalry, and purity.
The inculcation of such imagery in their writing gives it a political
importance, the much needed utility for these kinds of writings. The reaction
from the society is uncontrollable when the personal is turned political. The
translator of the poems of Salma and Kutty Revathy, Lakshmi Holmstrom recalls,
In 2003, at a time when politicians and other establishment figures of
Tamil Nadu were caught up in a surge of Tamil chauvinism, a group of
men and women, setting themselves up as guardians of Tamil culture,
objected publicly to the language of a new generation of women poets,
particularly in the work of Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathy and
Sukirtharani. They charged the women with obscenity and
immodesty. (99)
The themes of their poetry like relationship of woman with her body and the
politics of sexuality incensed the fury of the mob.
The poets received abusive letters from individuals as well as literary
organizations. … A popular song writer for films gave a much publicized
interview to a literary journal condemning women writers in general.
After this, another film- song writer, Snehithan, appeared on television
declaring that these women should be lined up on Mount Road in
Chennai, doused with kerosene oil and burnt alive. (100)
The incensed Tamil male dominance wished to show its ascendance by ‘witch
hunting’ these free willed women poets. These destructive criticisms aimed at
annihilating their spirit of openness, only added to their outspokenness.
“The Contract” is a poem written by Rajathi Salma in which she calls
marital relationship as a contract. In marital life, both husband and wife are the
persons who entered into the vow of living together. When the bond goes
balanced as both get the same privilege and same acceptance, there will be
nothing to worry. If someone in the bond is forced to do sacrifice for leading the
marital life in equilibrium, then problem will arise. This is the issue in most cases
of marital breakdowns and to restore it into normal is not an easy task to achieve.
Salma begins the poem by calling her to be the guilty “for all that goes wrong in

the bedroom”(34) by her own mother and sister. The hegemonic atmosphere
where one has been brought up can exert pressure on the cognitive domain and
thus act as an enemy to the same sex. The mother and sister in this poem act like
the blind followers of patriarchy. They are criticizing the narrator to surrender
before her tyrannizing husband.
The dominating husband’s rhetorical question “So what is it, today?”
becomes the first and last words in the bedroom. This shows how powerless she
is in her private room where she shares her powerlessness with her powerful
husband. Her husband has treated her as a sexual object and so she degrades
herself as a whore. Among all these traumatic experiences she bore, she still
yearns for the love of her husband.
To receive a little love
-however tarnished-
from you (35)
These lines show the acceptance and care she desperately is in need of. Even if
the love from her husband is “tarnished” in nature, she craves for it. She wishes
her husband to buy “sanitary napkins and contraceptives” and “many other little
favours”. More importantly she wants “to hold a little authority over [her
husband] if possible, To strengthen what authority [she has] just a little” (35).
The contraceptives in her wishlist denotes a politics of its own. Pregnancy
becomes a problem to woman alone. Man has less concern over it as it does not
affect him primarily. Hence the speaker of the poem “The Contract”, a woman,
yearns for contraceptives and sanitary napkins to be bought by her husband.
Buying sanitary napkins by man is unusual in ordinary society, but the poetess
wants him to buy it. Like a new woman, she wants to make man buy it. The
cultural inhibition stops man from buying sanitary napkins. Being a poetess of
resistance, Salma speaks out the indigestible and breaks the cultural taboo. She
gravely wants to have a little authority over her husband, even though it is “just a
little”.
The speaker in the poem who accuses herself of being a whore to her own
husband is trying to be good in bedroom, just to get a little favours from him. She
once states that she needs the ‘tarnished’ love from her husband “to fulfil my
responsibility as [her husband’s] child’s mother” (35). It can be noted as a
resistance to the venerable customs that are blindly followed for generations.
Here the poetess is questioning the tradition as the tradition teaches us the duty
of mother is to look after her children. The mother of her children or the wife of
the man in the poem is not a stereotyped woman of Indian social traditions; she
is very different from the commonly believed woman created by the patriarchal
society we live in. Here, we find a new woman who questions the traditional way
of attributing certain duties that are bestowed upon woman to commit solely to
woman. She wants to resist the existing pattern of victimizing woman with the
burden of familial duties. The traditional woman may be proud of the childbirth

marks, but the new woman presented by Salma calls it as her ‘downfall’. The
traditional mother may not mind it at all. Yet the poem concludes with the lines,
“In full knowledge of all this, my vagina opens” (35). Here, the opening of vagina
is marked as a demerit of woman. The speaker ridicules the opening of her vagina
as the only thing it knows to do. Amidst the boasting of womb power as woman
power, the poetess points out that woman’s own body traps her to be victimized
before the dominance of man. This is highly metaphorical expression of female
sexuality.
“A midnight tale”is another poem by Salma which portrays the longing for
her lost chastity and beauty. The Speaker in the poem is a married woman who
laments on her indifferent husband who shows sexual dissatisfaction to her as
she has lost her past charm due to childbirth.
These nights
following the children’s birth
you seek, dissatisfied,
within the nakedness you know so well,
my once unblemished beauty. (32)
Here, the speaker of the poem is lamenting about her faded beauty after
childbirth, not because the childbirth was unwanted but she became unwanted
for her husband after it. The sexual satisfaction sought by her husband “within
the nakedness [her husband] know[s] so well” is not there now and so he
becomes dissatisfied. The speaker, the wife, is mourning on her “once
unblemished beauty”. The usage of the word ‘unblemished’ is very apt here as the
body has undergone natural changes after childbirth.
Childbirth is considered, in the patriarchal construct, as the exaltation of
conjugal relation. For achieving this extreme happiness, the body of woman
undergoes many pressures and sufferings. Jasbir Jain in her essay “Indian
Feminisms” perceives motherhood as a “cultural imposition which denies woman
personhood” (32). The pain of childbirth often goes unmentioned and also the
mental trauma that is experienced in post-partum may not even noticed by
others. But when the father discards the mother for her blemished body after
childbirth, one cannot tolerate the pain it creates.
You are much repelled,
you say,
by a thickened body
and a belly criss-crossed with birthmarks;
my body, though, is unchanging
you say
today, hereafter and forevermore. (32)
Interestingly, the woman, having internalized the repressive mechanisms under
which she exists, seemingly attributes this critique of her body to her husband.
The husband is said to be dissatisfied with the “thickened body” of his wife. He

observes that her belly is now “criss-crossed with birthmarks”. He continues that
these changes that caused to her body are “unchanging”.
True indeed,
your body is not like mine:
it proclaims itself,
it stands manifest.
Before this too,
your children, perhaps, were born
in many places, to many others;
you may be proud
you bear no traces of their birth. (32-33)
After facing the body shaming comments by her husband, the narrator is
comparing her body with his. The body of a woman was controlled by the
patriarchal morality, and by the roles of wifehood and motherhood. But when her
husband humiliates her by pointing out the changes happened on her body, she
seeks out to establish her right to her body. Her endeavour to establish selfhood
or project her subjectivity has to work through her body – “[her husband] bear[s]
no traces of their birth” – is a very powerful line which contains the soul of
feminist spirit. The difference between the body of man and woman is explicitly
stated here by mentioning the culturally attributed function of it.
These birthmarks cannot be
repaired, any more than my own decline-
this body isn’t paper
to cut and paste together, or restore.
Nature has been
more perfidious to me
than even you;
but from you began
the first stage of my downfall. (33)
The assertion on body as “not a paper to cut and paste together or restore” is not
only a play of words with the commands in this computer era, but also signaling
on the damage caused by it not healed with a single stroke of any machines. The
poetess strongly declares that the body of woman is not a machine that can be
restored or reformed into the unblemished beauty once it owns. “Closure” is also
a poem written by Salma where she says “Always/ you have plucked away/ by
force/ all that was mine” (38). These lines reiterate the idea depicted in the poem
“A midnight tale”on deprivation of chastity which is believed as a sin.
Kutti Revathi, one of the bold women poets and a contemporary of Salma,
became a well-known personality of Tamil literature when her poem titled
“Breasts” got published. Apart from the traditional view of reducing breasts as a
sexual organ, Revathy appraises it as any other part of the body like eyes or nose.
A doctor by profession, Dr. S. Revathy, generally known by her pen name Kutti

Revathy is a practitioner of Siddha medicine. The profession of Kutti Revathy

gave more importance to body, so her poems are full of images of human body.
The poetess strives to bring out the physical and emotional impact of them. Kutti
Revathy, it may be presumed, does not have any hesitation in giving a title like
“Breasts” to her poem. She uses a disruptive language to represent a colonized
entity like body of woman and the emotions it owns inside. Calling a spade a
spade is heroic deed when it is done by an upper class man, but when a woman
does it or a Dalit does it, the misogynist and anti- Dalit high class society will
harshly criticize that practice. Kutty Revathy was influenced by the village legend
of Nangeli, a bold woman from Kerala who resisted against paying breast tax.
This tax was collected in order to prevent lower class women from wearing upper
body clothes. Nangeli, unable to pay the tax, cut off her breasts in protest. She
treated her breasts as any other organ on human body like hands or legs. Nangeli
raised her voice of resistance against the patriarchal supremacy with her body.
This incident influenced Kutty Revathy to write a poem on breasts. She
acknowledges this in an interview to N. Kalyana Raman, a famous translator of
Tamil Nadu.
The poetess handles breasts as a ‘normal’ body part, not something that
should be whispered in shame, in her poem “Breasts”. The speaker of the poem
watches the growth of breasts ‘in amazement’. The poetess tries to draw her
connection with breastsboth physically and emotionally during her “changing
seasons”.
At times of penance
They struggle and strain;
and at the thrust and pull of lust
like the proud ascent of music
they stand erect.
From the press of an embrace
they distil love; from the shock
of childbirth
milk, flowing from blood. (58-59)
Unlike the common notion of seeing breasts merely as a sexual object, the poetess
is attributing a place of companionship to it. Breasts are a living reality for her
and not a commodity that is projected on the body of woman to extend ‘its’
market value. Society will crucify the poet for using ‘such a dishonourable’ image
in poems to win popularity. But the male gaze of society can only see breasts as a
sexual organ of woman and hence denounce Kutty Revathy as a poet who uses
such images to get attention from the public. Breasts are compared to ‘bubbles,
rising from marshlands’ and ‘two teardrops’ in her poem. These two comparisons
show the impermanence of everything around us which was once a part of us.
The shape of the bubbles and teardrops instills the image of the object in reader’s
mind. Sometimes articulating the very name of breasts is considered as a taboo,
even though all the human beings and animals are directly connected to it by
sustaining their lives. Yet the ‘so called’ morality of the society punishes those

who are outspoken. The publication of the poem “Breasts” evoked a controversial
situation in Tamil Nadu.
Other than “Breasts”, there are several other poems by Kutti Revathy which
bear the idea of body of woman. Her “Childbirth”is an example of such kind of
poems. In “Childbirth”, she says
on the very day I put forth
a cluster of flowers, ready to fruit,
your sickle felled me,
flayed me, tore apart my body.
All the same, around my feet,
right up to my ankles,
again and again they will rear their heads
my majestic crests. (71)
Here, the poet is accusing a dominant power for plundering what she has. Her
body was “ready to fruit” but the ‘sickle’ of dominating power tore her apart. The
poetess may be speaking about a rape that took place within or outside a conjugal
relationship. Marriage is considered as a sacred relation, but at times it can
become scary in the sense that marital rapes have increased . According to a
report,
Every third women, since the age of 15, has faced domestic violence of
various forms in the country, reported the National Family Health
Survey (NHFS-4) released by the Union health ministry. (Saaliq n.p.)
In another instance, Kutti Revathy draws out what she needs in a marital life but
what it turns out to be. The poem “I have invited this summer for you”shows
what she expects from her nuptial relation;
My body is tender and limp
as if it needs to be wrapped around
with many hands. (69)
But it turns out to be an utter failure as she states it;
my body is a land that is alive,
and our quarrels stained with salt tears,
has been opened, between my sleeping
and waking. (70)
“Rain-River” is a poem by Kutti Revathy which manifests the union of two lovers,
one is compared to rain and the other is to river. The poem recounts the intensity
of their union
The fierceness of your embrace
whirls me about
tosses me against the rock-beds
makes me lose my breath. (60)

Yet the lines show a clear picture of the dominating spirit of the lover who makes
his beloved breathless.
Most of the marital relationships in India face a kind of similitude towards
colonizer- colonized dichotomy. The husband always acts as the ‘centre’ and wife
as the ‘other’ in more than half of the relations. The familial ties, the fear of
society and lack of support from others are the main reasons why a woman is
inclined to the dominating and subjugating power of her husband. Some
pertinent questions like how to survive and how to face society and what will the
society think of me are grappling the woman who is engaged in unhappy
marriages to lead her life as ‘normal’ as it is ‘programmed’ by her husband. Thus,
the husband manifests the similar dominating-drive of the colonial power or
what British was to countries like India and the wife becomes a colonial subject
or the colonized.
This colonialist ideology created colonial subjects who behaved in the
way the colonizer had programmed. They willingly accepted the
superiority of the British, and their own inferiority. It produced a
‘cultural cringe’, so to speak…They (the colonial subjects) developed
what is called a ‘double consciousness’, that is, perceiving the world
through the consciousness of the colonizer as well as through their own
vision provided by their native culture. This is also termed unstable or
double identity… [Thus] one becomes a psychological refugee, in not
being able to feel at home even in one own’s home. (Nagarajan 187)
Becoming a psychological refugee is a very complicated situation. The
existence for namesake makes one revolutionary or depressed. In Kutti Revathy’s
poem titled “Suicide- soldier”, the protagonist Selvi is using her body to destroy
the system she hates.
Carp-eyed Selvi,
you are about to cast aside your own clothes
and lock them away, as if they are your body.
The mirror sets to right your nakedness
which you wear as your dress. You proceed
to assemble your uniform; your weapons
and suicide belt become your body now. (63)
The woman in the poem selected her body, which was considered as a sex object
by the patriarchal society, to destroy a group of people. She is a suicide bomber
and what she does is revolutionary for her beliefs but foolishness to others. After
all, she is using her body as a tool or an object and does what she wants to do with
it. . The traditionally attributed ‘weak’ feminine image of female body gets
manliness in this poem. The body of Selvi turns out to be a man-like entity that
can exert its power on others. This is a noteworthy poem as it renders masculinity
to female body.
Holding your breath, you scream.
Before you yourself are aware, the shock

of that blast photographs your blue face

for a blinding minute. Then, roaring,
your body bursts apart, Selvi. (63)
Thus, turning out to be a rebel is a way out solution and becoming depressed and
clueless on the meaninglessness is not a right method to look at life. In “Sleeping
seed”, Kutti Revathy describes body as,
My body, lacking anyone to seed and nourish it
dries out, cracks open into fissures. (66)
The incompleteness and the rootlessness which later turns out to be in an
‘unhomed’ condition make the woman perplexed about her existence. In one
instance, the poetess draws an image of a lover who cannot lead a normal life
without the company of her lover in the poem “Floodgates ofmemory” as, ‘The
flood of your memory/ opens the sluice gate of my vagina” (73). These lines
emphatically state the male dominance and female subjugation in the female
psyche.
Susan Bordo, a modern philosopher who works on body studies, asserts in
her essay titled “Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body” that female
body was “a socially shaped and historically ‘colonised’ territory”. She further
adds that “Feminism imagined the human body as itself a politically inscribed
entity, its physiology and morphology shaped and marked by histories and
practices of containment and control” (250). The male dominance has subjugated
female psyche by the ‘practices of containment and control’. Rajathi Salma and
Kutty Revathy have brought in the metaphorical usage of female body in their
writings to abolish the practice of treating female body as the central site of
exercising patriarchal control. Kutty Revathy, a Siddha doctor by profession, has
no inhibition to use the names of body parts, both private and public, as it is. It is
part of her daily life and this ordinariness is explicitly stated in her poems as well.
According to Lakshmi Holmstrom,
…a woman’s experience of herself and her body is either manipulated or
distorted in some way by social, cultural and political means, or is
denied altogether. It could be said that Kutti Revathy is deeply
influenced by that strain of Siddha thought which claims that our bodies
are ourselves: it is through the body that we understand the Natural
world, gain knowledge of ourselves and achieve a connectedness with
the universe. Perhaps it is this that drives her to call for a much more
nuanced language in the current debates on sexuality and the politics of
the body. (114-115)
The poems of Salma depict the metaphors from female body to show the strong
feelings of woman that cannot be stated vividly without the use of such body
images. Her poetry is evolved out from her life experiences and that experiences
have turned her poetry into the poetry of resistance. The society had cut off her
spirit of freedom when she reached her puberty and she was imprisoned in the
familial prison. The secluded life in a closed room has shaped her to use images

of body parts to represent the extreme emotions and feelings. Her direct deploy
of images like vagina gave a new meaning and values to the female body. Her
poetry reclaims the idea that every essence of the female lies in her body. Salma
was born as a Muslim but she never tried to cover her emotions with ‘purdah’ of
servitude.
In a male dominated society, a woman empowered to express aloud her
desires and dissatisfactions is a threat to the status quo of power structures that
persist in society. Hence, the patriarchal society tries to cover the body of woman
with the customary cloth of social codes and customs. Writing the body by
women can remove the masochistic and voyeuristic pleasures existing in our
society. It urges to reconsider male dominated assumptions of sexuality and
desires. When such social codes and customs are removed, that is, when that
covering is removed and the body comes to the public as naked, the patriarchal
society will lose its equilibrium. The female body in the poems of Rajathi Salma
and Kutti Revathy is represented as an image of resistance against the
exploitation a woman suffers in her marital and social life. Kutti Revathy portrays
the resistance by explicitly writing about the organs of human body while Salma
manifests it by throwing light on the degradation of sexual relations. This
foregrounding of female body, a technique of resistance literature, can disrupt
and subvert the existing order of male supremacy by usurping the very prominent
male territory and thus reclaiming it as one’s own territory. Writing the body by
these two women poets have succeeded in bringing it up as a discourse of
resistance.
Works Cited
Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th ed., Centage Learning India
Pvt. Ltd., 2005.
Armstrong, Aurelia. “Michael Foucault: Feminism”. The Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002. https://www.iep.utm.edu/. Accessed 25
Nov. 2019.
Bordo, Susan. “Feminism, Foucault and the politics of the body”. Feminist
Theory and the Body, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick,
Routledge, pp. 246-257. 25 Sept 2017. https://doi.org/10.4324/
9781315094106. Accessed on 20 April 2020.
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of Medusa”. Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula
Cohen. Signs.Vol. 1, no.4, 1976, pp.875-893. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/ 3173239 Accessed 18 Jan. 2020.
Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. 1st ed, Methuen, 1987.

Holmstrom, Lakshmi, Translator. Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets. By Malathi

Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathy, Sukirtharani, Harper Perennial, 2015.
Jain, Jasbir. “Indian Feminisms: The Nature of Questioning and the Search for
Space in Indian Women’s Writing”. Breaking the Silence: An Anthology
of Women’s Literature. Ed. Shobhana Kurien, Ane Books Pvt Ltd, 2013.
pp. 28-41.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/ Postcolonialism. 1st ed., Routledge, 1998.
Nagarajan, M. S. English Literary Criticism and Theory: An Introductory
History. 1st ed.,Orient Black Swan, 2011.
Saaliq, Sheikh. “Every Third Woman in India Suffers Sexual, Physical Violence at
Home.” News18.com, 8 February 2018. https://www.news18.com/news/
india/the -elephant-in-\the-room-every-third-woman-in-india-faces-
domestic violence-1654193.html. Accessed on 25 Nov. 2019.

pp. 225-241
ANXIETY, ALTERITY AND ALIENATION OF PAN-

DIASPORIC KERALA WOMEN IN ARRANGED
MARRIAGES: AN ANALYSIS OF JANU IN
JAISHREE MISRA’S ANCIENT PROMISES
Sonu Sujit David and K. G. Bhuvana Maheshwari
Abstract
The article examines the novel Ancient Promises by Jaishree Misra, in
the framework of postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, psychoanalytic,
conflict and re-Orientalism theories and through three major forms of
displacement:
a) Cultural displacement from urban New Delhi to native semi-urban
Valapadu, Kerala.
b) Dilemma within the protagonist of aligning herself with her place
of origin.
c) Ideological position (democratic) of urban Delhi versus Marxist
ideology of native Kerala and the class conflicts therein.
The paper dwells on the anxiety the protagonist Janu undergoes by
giving up Arjun, her first great love and giving into an arranged
marriage. The gradual coldness of her husband’s family and his
indifference to her and their daughter’s needs led to feelings of alterity.
The paper therefore also examines how a pan-diasporic writer
experiences alienationce thrown into her native culture; her feelings of
rootlessness and meaningless existence leads her to experience
otherness in her marital home and thus leads to alienation. The birth of
a mentally challenged daughter further intensifies the resultant trauma
she experiences. The cultural displacement from her adopted homeland
Delhi brought about a loss of her own identity and the difference in her
upbringing both perplexed and traumatized the protagonist Janu after
marriage.
Keywords : Anxiety, Alterity, Alienation, pan-diasporic, Re-Orientalism,
Trauma.
Diaspora does not refer to simply the geographical dispersal but also to the
vexed questions of identity, memory and home which such displacement
produces. (The EmpireWrites Back 217-218)
The Indian Diaspora (which began with the voyage of indentured labourers
from India to the Fiji and Trinidad and Tobago islands to work in the sugar

226 Sonu Sujit David & K. G. Bhuvana Maheshwari
plantations) produced Indian diasporic writings from writers like V. S. Naipaul

(who is no longer clubbed with Indian diasporic writers because of his affiliation
to England) whose concept of home and homeland has taken a very different
meaning from the search of his roots to the route he adopts to identify himself.
From Naipaul to Rushdie, each writer is connected to their origin differently and
has found different routes to find homeland. Diasporic literature is thus
grappling with the idea of home and homelessness.
The term “diaspora” comes from the Greek translation of the Bible,
meaning “to scatter about, disperse,” from dia- “about, across”, and, speirein “to
scatter” (originally in Deuteronomy xxviii.25). Safran points out that the term
has its Western beginnings in the Jewish diaspora communities, extending to
groups “such as the Armenian, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Kurdish, Palestinian,
Parsi, and Sikh, whose experiences of expatriation, institution building, cultural
continuity, and refusal to relinquish their collective identities have demarcated
them from mere immigrants” (36). The term has come to mean a group of people
that were expelled or migrated from their historic homeland out into different
parts of the world. Further, it implies that they established new political
communities in those places, making contact with the people of the receiving
lands for various purposes, but generally remaining closely together as
communities of religion, culture and/or welfare (Rios and Adiv 2).
As a nation, India is made up of several states with its unique languages,
cultures and customs. As is the case with any migration and assimilation, one
sees a mass exodus from smaller cities to bigger metropolitan urban cities like
New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, etc. by people from different
parts of India in their quest for a better life. This set of people who have
assimilated into the culture and customs of places within India but foreign to
their own language, customs and culture is what is termed as pan-diasporic by
the researcher. The term “pan-diasporic” needs clarity at this point. Just as
“diaspora” is the overarching term for all Indians living outside India, the term
“pan-diasporic” is the overarching term for all diaspora that is scattered within
India in different states. The pan-diasporic is interpreted here as referring to a
broader and universal experience of diasporic identity cutting across Indian
states and its cultural boundaries. Like the diaspora scattered abroad, the pan-
diasporic community also experiences alterity and alienation. In fact, the
diaspora scattered abroad is looked at with leniency or less severity by the
homeland because of being in a foreign land whereas the experiences of the pan-
diasporic community is negated or scoffed at as this community is within the
geographical parameters of the nation-state India. This dispersion for a better life
has resulted in the destruction of the real identity of the migrants and a confused
identity for the subsequent generations of the pan-diasporic community. Jaishree
Misra, the author of Ancient Promises1 is one such pan-diasporic writer about
whom Kalra et. al. say, “It could be argued that those writing in English in India
have a diasporic consciousness forged either through internal migration to the
metropolis or by being multilingual” (46).

Anxiety, Alterity and Alienation of Pan-diasporic Kerala… 227
The protagonist Janu in Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises has an in-

between identity as she is a Nair girl whose roots are from Valapadu, a semi-
urban place in Kerala but is born and brought up in the urban landscape of Delhi.
So Janu is a pan-diasporic Malayali-Delhiite. Janu experiences a sense of
rootlessness/not belongingness with respect to her native land and culture. The
general feeling is this sense of rootlessness exists only if one is detached
geographically from one’s native land and has settled in another country with its
unique culture and customs. But in a diverse country like India, where people
migrate from one state to another for various reasons, this displacement resulted
in social, cultural implications and caused one to question one’s real identity.
Most of the postcolonial interpretations of the Second-generation diaspora often
mask, occlude, alienate and disown these in-between identities. For instance,
Ashcroft et. al. note that hybrid forms are always regarded as ‘the other’ which is
radically different from ‘the self’ and a simultaneous proposition suggests that
authority is maintained over them even as there has been a deliberate attempt to
destroy or marginalize their very presence. This argument is supported by a
recent approach in culture studies that traces the unproblematic and
confounding nature of the cultural identity of the in-betweens, which, as the
cultural theoretician Stuart Hall puts it, “…is never complete, always in process,
and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (222).
The ability to live within two worlds is applied to the experience of pan-
diasporic people living in postcolonial nations. But the protagonist Janu of
Ancient Promises is forced to, through the institution of marriage, relocate to her
native homeland which is alien to her. This has created a cultural displacement
for this pan-diasporic protagonist. This cultural displacement causes anxiety in
Janu as she is unable to comprehend how to come to terms with the
contradiction between the two cultures she is exposed to. The third chapter of the
novel Ancient Promises begins with explaining this paradox in the protagonist
Janu’s life. She says, “That these two places ran together in my blood, their
different languages and different customs never quite mixing, never really
coming together as one. And when, as a Malayali girl growing up in Delhi with
Malayali parents but Delhi friends, and Malayali thoughts but Delhi ways…” (18).
It becomes very difficult therefore especially for a pan-diasporic person to
explain the otherness he/she feels when in the company of his/her relatives in
his/her native land. The spattering sense of identity with regards to the language,
social rituals and customs and yet the difference in the way of language usages,
pronunciations, mannerisms, the different connotations that a word or sentence
may imply to the native speaker and the apparent sense of loss in conversations
by the pan-diasporic in-between second-generation is lost on many postcolonial
interpretations of the second generation of pan-diasporic community. The sense
of a shared language and culture is not enough for an identity of “being ” who you
are (i.e. here a second-generation pan-diasporic Malayali-Delhiite) to the sense of
what this migration has caused to you “becoming” who you are- a person with an
in-between identity, a second-generation pan-diasporic Malayali-Delhiite bride

in her originary “homeland” Kerala.

Janu tries to establish her cultural identity as how Stuart Hall defines the
second sense of cultural identity :
Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well
as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not
something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and
culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But,
like everything which is historical, they undergo constant
transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised
past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and
power. Far from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which
is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of
ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different
ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives
of the past. It is only from this second position that we can properly
understand the traumatic character of ‘the colonial experience’. (225)
The anxiety that this disconnectedness (of becoming a Maraar bride from
being a Delhi-bred Janu) brings especially when forced into a contrasting
environment to one’s upbringing creates a feeling of anxiety leading to alterity
and subsequent alienation.
When Janu, the protagonist is asked by her mother-in-law if she would
like to have tea, Janu replies “Yes, please.” She is reprimanded by her mother-
in-law: “Look you are not in Delhi anymore. Like it or not, you now live in
Kerala, so I suggest you drop all these fashionable Pleases and Thank Yous.
Here we don’t believe in unnecessary style” (80). The author Jaishree Misra
has through this novel drawn attention to a pan-diasporic culture which the
dominant native culture of Kerala has marginalized and attempted to erase.
Jaishree Misra has in this novel attempted to blur the Malayali ideological
boundary and allow multiple ways of identifying a Malayalee rather than
creating binaries between them. Both Jaishree Misra and her protagonist
Janu share pan-diasporic sensibility – they are not quite “at home” in either of
their two cultures. It is a new identity - of “becoming” which is again fluid and
open to further dynamics of their “positioning”.
Jaishree Misra’s novel Ancient Promises dwells on the plight of the
protagonist who is unable to comprehend why she is unable to enjoy Kerala as
she did when she came for her holidays. She finds herself a misfit in the
wealthy Maraar household which expects her to fit in their orthodox ways of
living, willing to doll herself as the educated wife of Suresh when he starts
business in urban Mumbai. Her education and urban upbringing were totally
frowned upon and mocked by her in-laws. To put it in Jaishree Misra’s words:
There is so much that is so wonderful about Kerala but I still feel a bit
like Janu of Ancient Promises when she says, “Kerala is a place for
holidays, not forever.” It’s a complex state, and still highly conservative.
I find it sad that, despite the impressive education figures and the

numbers of women who work and earn their living, it encourages an

environment (especially in the upper classes) in which the women have
to “know their place” and behave in a certain way. It’s subtle but it’s
there. “Literacy without liberation,” I say in Ancient Promises. (Vinai
and Hazarika 196)
Chesler further states that in 1996, psychologists Peter Glick of
Wisconsin’s Lawrence University and Susan T. Fisher of New Jersey’s
Princeton University confirmed that hostility towards women may coexist
with positive feelings towards women who know their place and who support
traditional gender inequality (qtd. in Chesler 79). They called it “ambivalent
sexism”. According to the authors, such ambivalent sexism helps maintain
traditional and unequal gender roles and serves as a balm for the conscience
of the dominant group members “as well as a more effective and positive
means of coercing co-operation from the subordinate group, whose members
receive various perks and even affection in return for “knowing their place.”
Janu’s co-sister is treated well as she fits into the prescribed norms of
the Maraar household. Whereas Janu is excluded and segregated as she fails
to fit into their expectations of a Maraar bride. Janu ponders on her identity
thus: “Who was she? Mrs. Suresh, pretty-and-wearing-nice-saris-and . . .
nothing else was important anyway. A Maraar daughter-in-law? Not quite,
looks like one on the outside, complete with silk sari and big red bindi and
flowers in the hair, but with funny Delhi ways that needed more ironing out –
“Still she says daal for parippu!” and “Still she doesn’t know how to sit
properly while wearing a sari” and “Still preferring a good book to sitting
around a kitchen table and tearing some poor soul apart” (100).
Janu here faces an existential crisis as she is unsure of what her identity
truly is. This Janu always felt that she did not belong in the Kerala culture and
specifically in the culture of the Maraar household. In other words, Janu
experienced alterity. Lucidity of the term Alterity/otherness is required at this
point. Alterity also is synonymous to be the “other” i.e. someone who is not
like or different from the common/same environment/culture/surroundings,
etc. “Otherness” denotes a difference based either on gender, sex, race or
ethnicity mainly due to lack of similarity and even the out of ordinary. Hence
the “othered” is excluded or marginalized. Few instances from the text Ancient
Promises is highlighted to exhibit the “otherness”/alterity that Janu
experienced. Janu tried her best to assimilate but in vain. She says, “A year
had passed, very slowly and inexorably in the Maraar household, and it was
now clear to me that, however hard I tried, I wasn’t to be one of them. But it
still didn’t stop me from trying” (109).
Janu was mocked at her lack of knowledge in hanging out sari blouses
to dry. She was asked :
Is that how you hang out sari blouses in your house? We do it like this.
And I would rush to rearrange my wet, newly washed blouse hanging

shamefully on the line next to the smartly folded Maraar ones, done just
so. Even a badly hung blouse could announce to everyone who walked
past the washing line that there was an intruder in their midst, one that
could never ever measure up to the others. There for the fish-seller and
the gardener and the next-door neighbours to look at and laugh at. (109)
Janu expressed her desire to go to Delhi for three weeks which was promptly
turned down by her mother-in-law stating that it was her (Janu’s) father-in-
law’s birthday.“So I wasn’t to get to Delhi for another year. My chances of
seeing my parents and being able to tell them that I wasn’t really as terribly
happy as they’d hoped were receding” (109). Chesler notes that according to
John Beard Haviland, in a study of Mexican Zincantan, “A new bride,
introduced into her husband’s household, represents a potential break of
confidentiality; her in-laws begrudge her even occasional visits to her own
mother, where she can leak out family secrets and gossip about her new
household to an outsider” (qtd. in Chesler 87).
Janu’s father-in-law’s birthday was a torment for her. She says,
“Perhaps because Amma knew I had dared to attempt making my own plans, I
seemed to be singled out for an extra dose of meanness this time. What are
you doing with that vilakku? It goes there. Haven’t they taught you
anything?”(109). Janu feels alienated from her own husband Suresh as well.
She says, “Suresh didn’t need to discuss money or his business with me – for
that he had his father. We didn’t need to discuss the household – for that
there was his mother. Leisure time was shared with his sisters” (101).Karl
Marx’s theory of alienation describes estrangement (Ger. Entfremdung) of
people from aspects of their Gattungswesen (“spedes-essence”) as a result of
living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a
consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of
which estranges a person from their humanity. Saleem notes,
Alienation is the basic form of rootlessness, which forms the subject of
many psychological, sociological, literary and philosophical studies.
Alienation is a major theme of human condition in the contemporary
epoch. It is only natural that a pervasive phenomenon like alienation
should leave such an indelible impact upon contemporary literature.
Alienation emerges as a natural consequence of existential predicaments
which are both in intrinsic and extrinsic terms… Owing to its historical
and socio-cultural reasons, the Indo-English literature also, could not
remain unaffected by it. Alienation is the result of loss of identity…Man
fails to perceive today the very purpose behind life and the relevance of
his existence in a hostile world. (67)
The protagonist Janu expresses her incompatibility with the native
environment that led to her sense of isolation, randomness and
meaninglessness in her existence, and further, her sense of alienation in the
Maraar household. She says:

It didn’t sound as if anyone in this family had grown up outside Kerala,

the Malayalam flying around me was fast, fluent and elegant. My years
of growing up in Delhi and having to struggle with Hindi in school, had
relegated Malayalam to a very low priority. It was getting clearer by the
minute that my holiday-Malayalam, so comical it sometimes even made
my grandparents giggle, was unlikely to endear me to this family. (81)
Janu’s incompatibility also caused conflicting emotions within her which
furthered her sense of alienation. She struggled with conflicting ideologies of her
conditioning and upbringing in urban Delhi.
Lindsay’s astute observations may be cited here whereby Friedrich Engels
(1820-1895), Marx’s collaborator, applied these assumptions to the family and,
by extension, to gender roles. Lindsay notes, “He suggested that the master-slave
or exploiter-exploited relationships occurring in broader society between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat are translated into the household… Engels argued
that a woman’s domestic labour is ‘no longer counted beside the acquisition of
the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an
unimportant extra.’ The household is an autocracy, and the supremacy of the
husband is unquestioned. “‘The emancipation of woman will only be possible
when women can take part in production a large social scale, and domestic work
no longer claims but an insignificant amount of her time’ (Engels, 1942:41-43)”
(qtd. in Lindsay 7-8). Lindsay further states:
The conflict perspective is evident in research demonstrating that
household responsibilities effect the occupational location, work
experience, and number of hours worked per week. Undesirable work
will be performed disproportionately by those lacking resources to
demand sharing the burden or purchasing substitutes. Because
household labour is unpaid and associated with lack of power, the
homemaker (wife) takes on virtually all domestic chores (Lindsey,
1996a; Riley and Kiger, 1999). The more powerful spouse performs the
least amount of household work. (Qtd. in Lindsay 8)
In the Maraar household, the men handled the business and the womenfolk were
supposed to handle the household work. So it was evident that the power
dynamics was in favour of the men. Even gendered spaces were observed in the
Maraar household. The women sipped coffee in the kitchen and the men were
elsewhere. “The men were congregating elsewhere, in some distant and privileged
verandah or living room, to which large trays of tea were being regularly
dispatched” (81).
The Maraar clan seemed enormous and the meal-time routine seemed to
be men first in the dining-room, children alongside at the kitchen table, then the
women, the drivers and servants and finally, only after the old Ammumma had
fed everybody else, would she eat. Janu thought of her own grandmother and
couldn’t think of her being relegated to Ammumma’s position. This was in so
much contrast to her upbringing in democratic Delhi where a more egalitarian
approach was adopted in carrying out household responsibilities and work. The

beliefs and values she was nurtured with has been shattered when she is married
into an environment that emulates the Marxist philosophy and take on life. The
class conflict in Marxism is translated in the household scenario where the men
assume the bourgeoisie position and the women are relegated to the proletariat
level. In a similar vein, the pre-dominant Communist Party in Kerala which
dones a Marxist ideological façade caters to the patriarchal norms of the society.
G. Arunima in Pennezhuthu says:
Kerala has always occupied a paradoxical position within Indian politics.
On the one hand, with record of having had the first democratically
elected Communist government in the world, it has represented for
many a progressive hope within an otherwise sectarian democracy… an
equally visible set of “indicators” that is often ignored is the extent of
violence against women… the virtual absence of women in politics, and
the left parties' refusal to address these as “political” issues. That left
wing politics in large parts of the world has not been sensitive to issues
of gender… has been addressed politically and academically by feminists
for many decades now. However, in the case of Kerala, this is linked to a
larger phenomenon from the early 20th century where the growth of
nationalist (and later Communist) political activity was coterminus with
the emergence of a discourse of masculinity. This discourse, especially in
the early decades of the 20th century, was linked to a critique of
matriliny, the dominant pattern of kinship in Kerala. The masculine
idiom was ‘progressivist’ in many respects - it was to move out of the
“barbaric” past of matriliny into patrilineal modernity; it was the
language of “social reform” of this period that actually enabled the anti
matriliny legislations - but more importantly constituted the political
training ground for the latter day “communists”; finally, for many
among them it was the recovery of a “masculine” identity, apparently
shackled till now by the matrilineal (read “women-centred”) culture.
(Arunima n.p.)2
Again, Meyerowitz states :
Joan Scott offered a different approach for rethinking and rewriting
history. Influenced by Derrida’s deconstructionism and Foucault's
formulation of dispersed power, she asked historians to analyze the
language of gender, to observe how perceived sex differences had
appeared historically as a natural and fundamental opposition. These
perceived differences, she wrote, had often subordinated and
constrained women, yes, but they had also provided a “primary way of
signifying” other hierarchical relationships. This was the heart of her
contribution: she invited us to look at how “the so-called natural
relationship between male and female” structured, naturalized, and
legitimated relationships of power, say, between ruler and ruled or
between empire and colony. The history of gender could, it seems,
inhabit more of the historical turf than could the history of women.
(Qtd. in Meyerowitz 1347)
The researcher has used Meyerowitz’s article “History of Gender” to
highlight how the relationship between male and female structured, naturalized

and legitimated relationships of power and hence the need to perceive a

viewpoint wherein doing gender precedes the biological defining of gender.
Ammumma, by virtue of being the financially weak link in the household, ends
up as the cook for the entire Maraar household even though she is the mother of
the matriarch of the Maraar household. In contrast, Janu is unable to
comprehend anywhere in her mindscape the very thought of her grandmother
being relegated to such a position. Even her own father who is a respectable Air
Commodore in Delhi becomes an object of ridicule at the hands of the youngest
daughter of the Maraar household as it is perceived as the de facto privilege of the
groom’s family.
The protagonist Janu, rightly so, is totally confused and at loss to respond
to everyday situations thrown at her even as she tries her best to adjust to the
marital house’s demands. Chesler states,
British psychologist Anne Campbell notes that girls do not like any girl
who “positively assesses herself or explicitly compares herself with
others. Girls find this offensive. Painfully—and almost constantly—girls
scrutinize each other’s behaviour for displays that might be interpreted
as showing that one girl is trying to differentiate herself from others in
the group. To girls, as research confirms, “belonging” is the most
important thing—and in order to belong, each girl must “conform to
group expectations while not exceeding them.” Of course, boys also need
to belong to a group, but, “having achieved this they then strive for
public recognition of status within it.” Status-seeking girls tend to be
rejected or excluded by other girls. As we shall see, girls view members
who are in any way better or worse than other group members as less
desirable friends. Finally, Campbell points out that naturalistic studies
show that “cliques are girls’ preferred mode of association.” She
theorizes that such a preference is “probably the result of a desire to
avoid status competition,” which might result in being excluded. (Qtd. in
Chesler 54-55)
Janu, the protagonist tries her level best to fit into the Maraar household.
She says that in spite of her mother’s advice that one could fit in a new
surrounding at a younger age, she is unable to do so. She says,
I was also beginning to get a sense of having a lot of reassuring to do.
That hadn’t occurred to me before, that this new family of mine might
have developed a pre-conceived notion of me! Somehow I had to let
these strangers know that I was kind-hearted and affectionate. That
children and animals usually liked me. And that, despite Delhi, I was
really not too stylish and had come into their lives very eager to love
them (85).
Sam Watson in his interview with McMahon3in light of forced form of
displacement of the Aboriginals says: “[y]ou can take aboriginal people out of the
land but you can’t take the land out of aboriginal people. So regardless of where
we live and what we do, we always have that relation to our spiritual side. (in
Dean 8)” (Qtd. in McMahon 49-50). In a similar vein, it can also be argued that

you can take the second and subsequent generation of the pan-diasporic
community out of their homeland (albeit adapted by their parents) but you cannot
take the adapted homeland out of the pan-diasporic community. So regardless of
where they live and what they do, they will always have that relation to their
adapted homeland where they grew up. So, just as sense of place is internalized by
part of any indigenous community, so is it internalised by the pan-diasporic
community. The pan-diasporic community has assimilated itself into the new
homeland through the process of inculturation and acculturation, syncretism and
cross-culturalism. Hence they are embedded in the culture of their new homeland
and now find their originary “homeland” distant and unrelatable. Hence a mixed-
up identity or an in-between feeling arises like developing fault lines in the
process of identification.
Each state in India has its own distinct set of languages, cultures and
customs and forges their own unique identity as a state and in relation to the
nation India. Yet when people of each of these states migrate to the large “melting
pot of cultures” i.e. in urban metropolitan cities like New Delhi, Mumbai,
Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc., they forge an affinity between different cultural
groups. This happens right from their childhood when they are exposed to
multiple cultures in school. Janu the protagonist meets her teenage crush Arjun in
this very setting. Both Arjun and Janu have developed affinity to the urban culture
of New Delhi. This new identity may not quite be coherent to the traditional
notion of identity in their native homeland. Though the first generation pan-
diasporic community may conform to their adapted homeland’s paradigm, they
would still retain their own unique identity of their native homeland too. But this
sense of distinct cultural identity and shared understanding of the first-
generation pan-diaspora regardless of where their new homeland, is not
necessarily shared by the second and subsequent generations of the pan diaspora.
It becomes a bit too far-fetched to assume that the subsequent generations would
follow suit. The first generation pan diaspora deals with areas of intersection with
their new homeland but the subsequent generations become comfortable in their
adapted homeland’s culture and customs and are left in a state of flux, always
negotiating how to handle this dual culture – that they live in and that which their
parents impose of their native homeland.
Pan-diasporic literature explores borders and boundaries and particularly
the novel Ancient Promises deals with the crossing of borders by the protagonist
Janu between her adapted homeland New Delhi and native homeland Kerala.
Malayalees, since the splurge of oil companies in the Gulf and the consistent
demand for Malayalee nurses and doctors in various states of India and abroad
have migrated all over the globe. This community is known for their resilience and
ability to co-exist in both adapted and native land. Their fluidity and ability to
slide between the two lands is commendable. But they are faced with resistance
from the subsequent generations who insist on creating a new and distinct
identity rather than trying to recreate/import their native culture. They are
confronted with this very dire need to preserve their native culture (thrust upon

by their parents) while imbibing their adaptive homeland’s culture. This rupture
and dislocation which is a significant feature of postcolonial studies has been
identified by Jaishree Misra through her protagonist Janu’s fault lines.
The protagonist Janu is placed into a marriage much against her desire. She
is married off as a form of punishment for the audacity she showed by falling in
love with a boy who is from New Delhi and not approved by her parents or
community. Her parents tried to make up for this loss of dignity (as they viewed
it) by forcing her into an arranged marriage much against her will. She was denied
the desire to continue her studies in Delhi where she grew up as her parents
feared that she would cause them further shame. In her unpublished article, “The
Concept of Humiliation”, Evelyn Gerda Lindner4 defines humiliation thus:
Humiliation means the enforced lowering of a person or group, a
process of subjugation that damages or strips away their pride, honour
or dignity. To be humiliated is to be placed, against your will and often
in a deeply hurtful way (although in some cases with your consent) in a
situation that is much worse, or much ‘lower,’ than what you feel you
should expect. Humiliation entails demeaning treatment that
transgresses established expectations. It may involve acts of force,
including violent force. At its heart is the idea of pinning down, putting
down or holding against the ground. Indeed, one of the defining
characteristics of humiliation as a process is that the victim is forced
into passivity, acted upon, and made helpless. (4)
In fact, Janu is the one who is humiliated first by her parents and then by the
members of her husband’s household. Right from her mother-in-law to her little
sister-in-law, none of them spared her from their regular jibes. A few such
instances from the novel are listed below :
... I replied, ‘Yes, please.’ ‘Look you are not in Delhi anymore. Like it or
not, you now live in Kerala, so I suggest you drop all these fashionable
Pleases and Thank Yous. Here we don’t believe in unnecessary
style.’ (80)
‘Do you know, I refer to your father as “Air Commode”. Only air comes
out on the lavatory. It always makes everyone laugh.’ She giggled loudly
and looked slyly at me to gauge my reaction. (88-89)
‘Oh look, Sathi, have you ever seen such tiny ear-rings? They’re like your
jumikis, only ten times smaller.’ (91)
It didn’t take long for me to start hating myself for the many different
things that gave the Maraars reason to slap their knees and laugh until
tears ran down their cheeks. For my mother having omitted to teach me
how to cook; for not being able to speak Malayalam elegantly; for
forgetting constantly not to mind my Ps and Qs; for having been brought
up in Delhi; for having had an aunt who, in the nineteen twenties, had
an affair that everyone in Kerala (except me) had heard about. There
was so much to be ashamed of. (97)
As noted earlier, female human beings have the power to include or exclude

others – mainly female others – from their group. When men exclude a woman, it
may indeed have dire consequences both economically and socially. However,
being excluded by boys and men is not as emotionally devastating to a girl or
woman as being excluded by others of her own gender. In 2000, Australian
educators and psychologists Lawrence and Owens, Rosalyn Shute and Phillip S.
Lee studied how 15year olds set into motion indirect aggression. They found that
girls persistently “spread rumours, break confidences and criticize other’s
clothing, appearance and personality. Sometimes they say nasty things….. engage
in exclusionary behaviour, ostracize one female for short or long periods of time”
(qtd. in Chesler 70). The reason for their behaviour stated were that the victim
was annoying, indiscreet or aggravating or found starting conflict and so bringing
it on themselves. The effects of such exclusions can have far reaching
consequences that may last a lifetime. Some of the effects seen are the victim’s
confusion at first then the victim getting into a state of denial that this cannot be
happening to her and that she would not let it get to her. Ultimately, she feels
immense pain and goes through hurt, fear, high state of anxiety, low self-esteem,
lowered self-confidence and finally depression. Here we see Janu going through
all these stages which finally results in a traumatized Janu. Chesler says, “...when
a group of women betray or collude in the betrayal of an individual group
member, there is really no higher authority to stop them, no legal or religious
council who can rule on the matter in a binding way. This is a no man’s land,
where anything goes” (202).
The Maraar household is totally controlled by the matriarch, Janu’s mother-
in-law. Whatever she desires is what happens. The men merely follow her wishes
and the women who are outsiders (here the daughters-in-law (even amongst them
between the traditional and non-traditional)) and insiders (daughters who are
given preferential treatment) are totally at her mercy and whims. Hence it is
psychologically traumatic for Janu to be held at the mercy of this matriarch figure
of the Maraar household. Janu struggles to adapt to the norms of her marital
home.
Pan-diasporic people migrated from their traditional land into places within
the country but into different cultural identity. They learn to negotiate language
use, customs and socio-political norms which are essential for their survival in the
new land. This then leads to the adaptation/formation of a new social
organization. This adaptation to new culture/customs has been a key difficulty for
the pan diaspora. The subsequent generation of the pan diaspora has imbibed the
culture, customs and socio-political norms of the new homeland of their parents
as well as spattering customs, language and norms of their native homeland.
Hence a re-adaptation of their native homeland’s way of doing things becomes a
significant issue in pan diasporic literature which most of the initial group of pan
diaspora (migrants) fail to comprehend. This is the reason why Janu’s parents fail
to understand her inability to fit into the Maraar household’s way of life. Janu’s
assimilation in the urban culture is so complete that she fails to align herself to
her ancestral land’s culture and customs albeit aware of the basic rituals and

norms. It is because of Janu’s preferred affiliation to the city she grew up in that
she couldn’t adjust to the topsy-turvy world (to her mind) of the Maraar
household. Her sustained efforts to adapt to the marital kinship status in order to
gain acceptance and harmony were all in vain. This was because though she lived
in Valapadu with the Maraars, she had never left New Delhi in her mind.
Maurice Stevens says :
Rather than thinking of trauma as an identifiable and discrete event that
must have occurred at some specific point in time and place, it can be
more usefully understood as a cultural object whose meanings far
exceed the boundaries of any particular shock or disruption; rather than
being restricted by the common sense ideas we possess that allow us to
think of trauma as authentic evidence of something “having happened
there,” a snapshot whose silver plate and photon are analogues to the
psyche and impressions fixed in embodied symptoms, the real force of
trauma flowers in disparate and unexpected places. And, like most
cultural objects, trauma, too, circulates among various social contexts
that give it different meanings and co-produce its multiple social
effects. (3)
The protagonist Janu is uprooted from her secure environment in New Delhi
to a semi-urban Valapadu, where she struggles with the inadequacy of
language, culture, customs and rituals. She is mocked at daily on a consistent
basis by the members of her marital household. She grew up as an only child
in a nuclear family where both her parents worked and is now thrust into a
large joint family that is so different from hers. She tries her best but in vain to
seek the approval of her marital household. She is rejected at every turn. She
tries to seek solace in the nightly embraces of her otherwise indifferent
husband Suresh only to realize that he would not stand by her. She realizes
this when he defends every accusation Janu hurls at him for not speaking up
for her or protecting her. This situation is further deteriorated with the birth
of her mentally challenged daughter Riya. The entire family alienates her
because she refuses to give up on her daughter who needs her. She tries to get
her the best treatment possible as she realizes that Riya can never be treated
in small town Valapadu.
In her attempt to seek treatment for her abroad, she faces hostility from
none other than her husband who was not willing to send her abroad with
their daughter. Things get complicated with the reappearance of Arjun, her
first love from New Delhi. He promises her marriage and also taking care of
Riya. But when Suresh hears of it, he refuses to divorce Janu and uses Riya as
a final straw to lure her back. The trauma of separation from Riya and
Suresh’s attempt to prove her mentally ill – all these were incidents that
deeply traumatized Janu. The cultural and social expectations added to the
trauma quotient for Janu. K. Tal (1995) explores the notion of Trauma and
how traumatic cultural events are reported in written texts. Key features of
trauma literature are equally applicable in post-colonial literature. The

protagonist Janu is a survivor of extreme cultural upheaval. Tal asserts that

the key goal of trauma literature is change and that the act of writing as a
means of “bearing witness” is an aggressive one, representing a “refusal to
bow to outside pressure to revise or to repress experience, a decision to
embrace conflict rather than conformity. (7) Jaishree Misra through her semi-
autobiographical novel’s protagonist Janu refuses to conform or promote
accepted views of Maraar household and instead bears witness to those whose
voices are silenced in that house, viz. the elder co-sister. Jaishree Misra has
made literature a forefront tool to express her desire to embrace all her
conflicts and made the writing of the novel Ancient Promises a cathartic
process for her.
Re-Orientalism theory is exhibited here in the novel’s analysis as it
depicts the way the pan-diasporic writer writes about her own community’s
flaws and raise concerns/questions that address gender issues and the
resultant trauma that creates an imbalanced growth of their society. In India,
historically, the mother-in-laws have always wielded greater power over their
daughter- in- law whom they have psychologically and physically abused. The
most common weapon used by the mother-in-law is the weapon of silence.
Janu’s mother-in-law rarely spoke with her and used this tool of silence very
effectively on her. Chesler notes,
Most women have a repertoire of techniques, with which to weaken,
disorient, humiliate or banish other female group members. A woman
won’t often physically knock another woman down. Instead, she might
use silence as a way of unnerving or gas lighting her opponent. The gas
lighter will refuse to look at the targeted woman when she speaks, will
not engage her in dialogue, will not hear what she says. The gas lighter
might subtly but continually move to a more favoured woman in the
group as a way of rendering the targeted woman ultimately invisible
even to herself. The key to the gas lighter’s power is the group’s
unwillingness to name what she is doing or to stop her. (210)
In traditional Kerala homes across different religious practices, it was
common practice to condition a girl to fit into a patriarchal society by being
subordinate to the male members in the house and community – to accept
themselves as secondary citizens.
This is exhibited in various interactions socially and in state hierarchies.
A woman who is highly educated is also expected to be docile and meek in her
mannerisms and not expected to raise her voice or protest. They therefore
learnt the art of indirect aggression very quickly. Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina
Mendes introduce their chapter on re-Orientalism thus :
According to Edward Said’s Foucauldian take on imperial discourses,
the cultural construct of Orientalism was the European imperialistic
strategy of composing a positive image of the western Self while casting
the ‘East’ as its negative alter ego, alluring and exotic, dangerous and
mysterious, always the Other. As such, ‘the Orient has helped to define

Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality,

experience’ (Said 1-2), emerging as an intricate part of western culture
itself and as a way to face internal contradictions… Orientalism… has
developed in a rather curious trajectory over the last few decades. One
direction of particular interest has been identified and designated as ‘re-
Orientalism’ (Lau 2009), where ‘Orientals’ are seen to be perpetrating
Orientalisms no less than ‘non-Orientals’ and, moreover, perpetrating
certain and selected types of Orientalism. Where Said’s Orientalism is
grounded in how the West constructs the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’, re-
Orientalism is based on how cultural producers with eastern affiliations
come to terms with an orientalized East… (1)
Hence it is quite evident that the writer from the West is clueless and lacks first-
hand experience of the indigenous writer whose life experiences is better
translated into their native experiences. The Oriental writer is better equipped to
express the local palpitations that their women face in the light of their cultural
context and expectations. Jaishree Misra is a writer who has lived through the
experiences of anxiety, alterity and alienation in her married life and hence is
able to give a firsthand account from her experiences in her semi-
autobiographical novel Ancient Promises. A western writer is unable to bring that
intensity and depth into his/her writing as an indigenous or a pan-diasporic
writer can about their own life situations. Hence, Re-Orientalism theory’s
importance is critical to the understanding and interpretation of indigenous
culture especially in the age of living in a global village.
Jaishree Misra’s Janu becomes a voice for the young pan-diasporic
community with her bicultural identity and urban lifestyle which counteracts the
widely accepted stereotypes about what a ‘real’ Malayalee daughter-in-law is or
should be. As Lau and Mendes note:
Re-Orientalism theory is crucial to the critique of postcolonial cultural
production today, in particular given the increasing complexity of global
cultural exchange. Re-Orientalism provides a fertile conceptual territory
for exploring the pressures and contradictions of post-colonial
production and of the ways that producers (be they creative authors or
academics) and texts critically engage with those dynamics. (3)
All postcolonial texts emphasize on the great importance to understand the
significance of indigenous writings rather than diasporic writings in order to
grasp the realities of the Eastern/Oriental world. In light of this, it is
important to also realize that pan-diasporic writer/reader’s experience of the
alienation/divide from one’s homeland and its culture is also of paramount
importance in understanding the sense of loss of identity, the not
belongingness and alterity that the pan-diaspora community experiences.
As a pan-diasporic reader, the researcher herself realizes the difference
in the treatment of a diasporic person/writer’s experience. The way a pan-
diasporic writer writes about her homeland is quite different from the way a
native turned diasporic writer writes about her homeland experiences. Such a

person is the first-generation diaspora whereas writers like Jaishree Misra are
second generation pan-diaspora. Even the second and subsequent generation
diasporic writers outside India have a totally different perspective of their
native homeland. Hence, theoreticizing the narratives of the diasporic
community as a general common genre can be quite misleading. It is in this
sense that Re-Orientalism theory acts as a powerful tool to depict the exact
dilemmas that the pan-diaspora faces. We can safely derive that Jaishree
Misra has through Ancient Promises drawn attention to a pan-diasporic
culture which the dominant native culture of Kerala has marginalized and
attempted to erase when confronted with it. Misra has attempted to blur the
Malayalee ideological boundary and allow multiple ways of identifying a
Malayalee rather than creating binaries between them. Misra’s work forged in
the crucible of migration is influenced by the history and politics of Kerala and
India. As a pan-diasporic researcher, all attempts to apply postcolonial
studies, diasporic studies and psychoanalytical studies have been made to gain
academic standing and to obliterate colonialist silencing practices. In
conclusion, it never suffices to reiterate that the pan-diasporic writers of the
turn of the twenty first century through their fictional narratives throw a
plethora of concerns that unless addressed, will severely hamper the true
potential and growth of the subsequent generation of pan-diasporic
community in India.
Notes :
1 From Ancient Promises, by Jaishree Misra, 2000, Haryana, Penguin Books.
Copyright (2000) Jaishree Mishra and Penguin Books. Reprinted with permission.
2 This quote is part of G. Arunima’s presentation at a workshop which is listed in the
Works Cited.
3 Quote modified with permission from Dr. Kimberely McMahon-Coleman.
4 From “The Concept of Humiliation: Its Universal Core and Independent Periphery ”.
2011. Oslo. Copyright (2011). Evelin Gerda Lindner. Unpublished manuscript.
Reprinted with permission.
Works Cited :
“The sociology of Gender – Theoretical Perspectives and Feminist Frameworks.”
catalogue. pearsoned.co.uk/assets/hip/gb/hip_gb_pearsonhighered/
samplechapter/ 0132448300.pdf. Accessed on 26 Sep. 2013.
Chesler, Phyllis. “Women in Groups.” Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman. Chicago
Review Press, 2009. we.riseup.net/assets/…/Woman%27s+Inhumanity
+to+ Woman+ Phyllis+ Chesler.pdf. Accessed on 20 May 2019.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Rlwclarke.Net, 2019. rlwclarke.net
/Theory/SourcesPrimary/HallCulturalIdentityandDiaspora.pdf.
Accessed on 29 Nov. 2019, p. 222.

Kalra, Virinder S., et al. Diaspora and Hybridity. SAGE Publications, 2005.
eBook Collection (Academia.edu).
Lau, Lisa, and Ana Cristina Mendes. “Introducing Re-Orientalism: A New
Manifestation of Orientalism.” Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity
Politics, Routledge, 2011, p. 1.
Linder, Evelin G. “The Concept of Humiliation: Its Universal Core and Cultural
Dependant Periphery.” 2001. humiliationstudies.org/documents/evelin/
CorePeriphery.pdf. Accessed on 05 Sep. 2016.
Lindsay, Linda. L. “The Sociology of Gender: Theoretical Perspectives and
Feminist Frameworks.” Gender Roles: A Sociological Perspective, 6th
ed., Pearson Education, Inc, 2011, pp. 7-8.
McMahon-Coleman, Kimberley. “Indigenous Diasporic Literature:
Representations of the Shaman in the Works of Sam Watson And
Alootook Ipellie.” Research Online, 2019, https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/
786/. Accessed on 5 Aug. 2019.
Meyerowitz, Joanne. “A History of ‘Gender.” The American Historical Review,
vol. 113, no. 5, 2008, pp. 1346-1356. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/
30223445. Accessed on 13 July, 2019.
Misra, Jaishree. Ancient Promises. Penguin Books,2000, pp. 1-308.
Rios, Michael, and Naomi Adiv. “Geographies of Diaspora: A Review.”
Academia.Edu.2010. academia.edu/1863428/Geographies of Diaspora A
Review. Accessed on 28 Nov. 2019.
Saffran, William. “Project MUSE – Israel Studies – Volume 10, Number 1, Spring
2005.” Muse. Jhu. Edu, 2005, muse.jhu.edu/issue/9675. Accessed on 29
Nov. 2019
Saleem, Abdul. Eajournals.Org, 2014, eajournals.org/wp-content/uploads/
Themeof Alienation-in-Modern Literature.pdf. Accessed on 18 Nov.
2018.
Stevens, Maurice. “From the Past Imperfect: Towards a Critical Trauma Theory.”
Letters, vol.17, no.2, pp. 1-5, Project Muse. Accessed on 3 Sep. 2016.
Tal, Kali. “Worlds of Hurt: Reading the literatures of Trauma.” American
Literature and Culture Series. 3rd ed. Cambridge UP, 1995.
Ashcroft et. al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literature. Routledge, 2003. play.google.com/store/books/details/
The_Empire_Writes_Back_Theory_and_Practice_in_Post?id=s7-
AAgAAQBAJ. Accessed on 29 Nov. 2019.
Vinai, Maya and Hazarika, Jayashree. “Re-assessing the Kerala Model Woman in
Fiction: An Interview with Jaishree Misra.” Asiatic, vol.9, no. 1, June
2015, pp. 195-198.

pp. 242-259
FROM PAGE TO SCREEN: BANGLADESH

REVISITS TAGORE’S RAKTAKARABI
(RED OLEANDERS)
Srideep Mukherjee
Abstract
In the syncretic culture that has historically been the hallmark of
Bangladeshi society; the influence of Rabindranath Tagore has been
pervasive, whether in imagining the nation in the pre-independence
phase or in its critiques from various subject positions in subsequent
times. This paper takes up a denotative reading of the original text of
Tagore’s Raktakarabi (1924), and then its connotative rendering by the
Bangladeshi director Rubaiyat Hossain in her feature film Under
Construction (2015).7 In the extant from, the textualities of Raktakarabi
lie in the playwright’s aesthetic rebellion against acquisitive tendencies
that he associated with the West; emerging as it does from a colonial
perspective. Perceived from a post-postcolonial standpoint however,
Tagore’s Yakshapuri as the setting and the characters as decimated
individuals, defy boundaries of nation-states or even East-West binaries.
Traversing the semiotics of page and screen over spatial-temporal
paradigms, both become strikingly oracular in the context of our subject
positions within ‘developing’ South Asian societies. Against this milieu,
Hossain’s appropriation of the text on celluloid nearly a century later;
and her dynamic relocation of the Tagore play to the readymade
garment industry of Bangladesh make an important point in cultural
representation. For all its potential of women’s empowerment and
strategic importance in terms of foreign exchange, she finds in the
industry in particular and in the city of Dhaka in general, a draconian
modern day equivalent of Tagore’s Yakshapuri. By transposing the
original dystopian setting of the play, and through the reinvention of the
central figure of Nandini amidst new matrices of class and gender,
Under Construction resonates with an urgency that is but emergent in
Raktakarabi, and takes us beyond its original aesthetic appeal. In terms
of intertextuality, Hossain’s film underscores new meanings for Tagore’s
Raktakarabi by calling for reassessments from humanist and eco-
critical perspectives that are highly relevant to our times.
Keywords : Post-postcolonial nation, Textuality, Appropriation,
Readymade Garment Industry, Feminist, Dystopia,
Celluloid.

From Page to Screen: Bangladesh Revisits … 243
Introduction
In Bengal Divided: The Unmaking of a Nation 1905-1971, Nitish Sengupta
probes the paradoxical turn in collective Bengali psyche from 1905 when people
rejected “the British-directed partition of their land and fought against it”
(Sengupta ix), to 1947 when “the same majority asked for a partition of Bengal
between Muslim majority and Hindu majority areas” (ibid.). Spanning across
seven decades of modern Bengali history, Sengupta’s work, dedicated to the
martyrs of the joint forces that liberated Bangladesh in 1971, locates the
continuing aspect of syncretic Bengali identity, wherein intermittent communal
ruptures can only be attributed to political machinations. The hiatus that has
majorly marked the ‘national’ history of Pakistan till 1971 is further proof that
masses of East Pakistan/Bangladesh have largely prioritised linguistic/cultural
identity over the communal. This paper primarily rests upon such proven
intersectionalities, but seeks to re-assess the contemporaneity of cultural text(s)
against critical contexts of ‘postcolonialities’ that have evolved in present times.
Why Tagore and why Raktakarabi now?

While Tagore’s influence has been uniformly celebrated in the Indian
nationalist movement, his reception in East Bengal/Pakistan (and subsequently
Bangladesh) in the tumultuous years from 1930s to the ‘70s has had a complex
history. This corresponds to Sengupta’s observations on the reversal of the trends
of communal amity observed in passing from Bengal partition of 1905 (annulled
in 1911) to the Indian partition of 1947, insofar as the Bengali Muslim mind-set
was concerned. The initial dynamics of the departing coloniser’s entrenched
purpose of instituting communally divisive politics has been critically analysed by
historians like Sengupta. Concurrently, historians like Hasan Zaheer in The
Separation of East Pakistan: The Rise and Realization of Bengali Muslim
Nationalism have further researched upon the ramifications of neo-colonial
repression by West Pakistan upon its Eastern counterpart. The present paper
concentrates upon the culturalist manifestations; and in this, Tagore’s position is
specifically interesting in the light of a continuing history.
From being branded a Hindu poet by the dissatisfied Muslim community
initially misled by parochial and statist designs of West Pakistan, Ghulam
Murshid in ‘Poet of the Padma’ traces the internalisation/appropriation of Tagore
as a “symbol of secular Bengali nationalism” (Murshid np). The revival of a
syncretic culture that became the hallmark of Bangladeshi society recognised
Tagore and his contemporaries from both Bengals as cultural icons. In fact, as
Saadia Toor shows in ‘Bengal(is) in the House: The Politics of National Culture in
Pakistan, 1947-71’, the proximity to Tagore literature in general and Rabindra
Sangeet in particular marked out the Bengali in East Bengal as not Muslim
enough (and by implication not Pakistani enough) in the eyes of the West
Pakistani administration. Along with an abiding interest in all things Bengali, the
study and inculcation of Tagore thus remained a rallying cry of resistance in East
Bengal/Pakistan, against all forms of state repression leading up to the brutal

244 Srideep Mukherjee
military action in 1971. Syed Jamil Ahmed in ‘Designs of Living in the

Contemporary Theatre of Bangladesh’ specifically points to 1961, the year of
Tagore’s birth centenary, as marking the resurfacing of social drama of national
identity in Bangladesh, when people of East Pakistan braved the oppressive
regime to commemorate the event. He looks upon it as a definitive “breach”
(Ahmed 137) that “led to the precipitation of the crisis in 1971, when a civil war in
East Pakistan led to a definitive schism and the consequent birth of Bangladesh”
(ibid.). Eventually, while all forms of Tagore literature gained renewed currency
in the public realm, the widespread performance of his plays assumed additional
discursive significance in foregrounding secular nationalism against the backdrop
of the renewed rise of Islamism in Bangladesh, post 1975. In this context, Ahmed
feels that Tagore “substantiates, authenticates, and validates the urge of
(Bangladeshi) urban theatre practitioners to ‘imagine’ the nation not by the
marker of religion but language” (141). He is also of the opinion that theatre in
Bangladesh has repeatedly turned to Tagore’s plays to retrace “the quintessence
of ‘Bengaliness’” (ibid.).
Tagore’s denunciation of chauvinistic nationalism as a soul-less
abstraction, “a cruel epidemic of evil that is sweeping over the human world of
the present age, and eating into its moral vitality” (Tagore, ‘Nationalism’ 16) is
well known. Given his resultant problematic cohabitation within the nationalist
movement, it is relevant to comprehend the locus of his work in general, and also
to place a text like Raktakarabi within the emergent framework of the history of
nationalism and Bengali theatre; and thereafter locate its centrality in a newer
world order. The beginnings of rudimentary nationalist thought in Bengali
theatre date back to the nineteenth century, linked as it is with the European
proscenium model largely as a colonial acculturation on the one hand, and to the
revival of extant traditions of Sanskrit drama on the other. In ‘Performing (Domi-
)Nation: Aspects of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Theatre’, Sudipto
Chatterjee identifies the paradox of the Bengali Hindu literati revelling in their
glorious past that Orientalist research was rediscovering for them; and thereby
falling into the trap of shared glory of common ancestry with the colonial
masters. Having struck a note of kindredness with the British masters on grounds
of racial origins, the Hindu nobility naturally looked upon the Muslims as the
‘Other’, as invaders of their land and the corrupter of a ‘pure’ heritage. This
subversion of a cohesive cultural identity suited the colonial ploy of severing the
Muslim subject from the mainstream of Hindu culture; a long-drawn common
heritage notwithstanding. This initial stage thus becomes akin to the mode of
colonial discourse that Bhaba calls ‘mimicry’, whereby one notices in the
colonised subject “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a
difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhaba 86, Italics original).
Sudipto Chatterjee perceives the dramatic output of Michael Madhusudan Datta
[Sermista (1859) in particular] as western style Bengali drama that stands out as
“the best paradigm of the kind of hybridity that British colonialism in India
generated” (Chatterjee n.p.); while he considers Datta’s followers as exhibiting an
“ambivalence of colonial discourse” (ibid.) in their plays. Much has been made of

works like Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan (The Indigo Mirror, 1860) or Mir
Mosharaff Hossain’s Jamidar Darpan (The Landowner’s Mirror, 1873) or
Dakshinaranjan Chattopadhyay’s Jail Darpan (The Jail Mirror, 1875) as social
plays that made political statements by holding up a mirror of subaltern
exploitation amidst a section that was however much removed from the scenes of
actual affliction. While all these plays addressed the subaltern cause under
colonial domination, the fact of their enactment in urban settings and in
historical perspectives made them more doctrinaire with potential for seditious
content than espousing much of the nationalist ideology in real. Notwithstanding
Girish Ghosh’s failure with Macbeth, the trend of adapting Shakespeare’s plays
on the nineteenth century stage in Bengal even around the implementation of
The Dramatic Performances Act of 1876 (Haralal Roy’s Rudrapal in 1874, and
Nagendranath Bose’s Karnabir in 1884/85 being good instances), must largely
be seen as another mode of the ambivalent deconstruction of Anglophone culture
within the triad of assimilation, adaptation, and contestation that characterizes
relations of political subterfuge in colonial milieus. In such a mixed milieu of
nationalist theatre in Bengal, Tagore’s thought provoking essay ‘Rangamancha’
(The Stage, 1902) where he advocates a paradigmatic return to indigenous forms
like jatra to minimise distances between performer and audience, and to eschew
‘useless’ expenses on the ornateness of British theatricals is very significant in
understanding his conception of nationalism as may be evolved from the stage.
Tagore’s plays have often been divided into categories like classical, realistic, and
symbolic; but from the present point of consideration it is important that they
cumulatively harp upon the ideal of nation as “a natural regulation of human
relationships, so that men can develop ideals of life in co-operation with one
another” (Tagore, ‘Nationalism’ 10).
To return to the more immediate context at hand, it can be argued that in
more recent times of the free flow of global capital, when Bangladesh witnesses
the same razzmatazz of cultures that is the universalizing feature of all third
world neo-colonial societies, Tagore’s inclusively humanistic view of nationalism
that is manifest in Raktakarabi holds even more relevance for this fast
developing economy :
In the West the national machinery of commerce and politics turns out
neatly compressed bales of humanity which have their use and high
market value; but they are bound in iron hoops, labelled and separated
off with scientific care and precision. Obviously God made man to be
human; but this modern product has such marvellous square-cut finish,
savouring of gigantic manufacture, that the Creator will find it difficult
to recognize it as a thing of spirit and a creature made in His own divine
image. (Tagore, ‘Nationalism’ 6)
Against such a globalised milieu dotted with dynamically shifting frames of
cultural history, this paper will read into more nuanced ways of approaching
Tagore by the Bengali intelligentsia.

The specific choice of the play is inspired both by textual history and
performative factors. Readers might take interest in the fact that Tagore began
the writing of Raktakarabi, which has undergone several change of names before
he settled for the present one, when vacationing in Shillong (then undivided
Assam) in the summer of 1923. In his ‘Note on the Play’ Ananda Lal mentions
Tagore’s conversation with Kshitimohan Sen of an oleander plant supposedly
crushed under a heap of discarded iron pieces, eventually sprouting a branch
from beneath the debris, and then a single red flower “as if created from the
blood of its cruelly pierced breast” (Lal 129).5Raktakarabi is thus pervaded by the
reality of the indefatigable nature of human spirits; and expectedly, its central
female character Nandini emerges with much connotative potential. As a text,
Raktakarabi lends itself to multiple textualities in emergent spatial-temporal
settings, every time accentuating our contextual understanding of its textual
relevance.
From conception to its first publication in Pravasi in late 1924,
‘Raktakarabi’ has had a long gestation; in fact Lal feels that “no major play of
Tagore had consumed so much creative time between conception and
publication” (ibid.). Its staging history too has been long drawn, the first one
coming only in 1934 and being perceived largely as a closet drama presumably
because of the highly symbolic potential. With Bohurupee’s iconic 1954
production directed by Shambhu Mitra, Raktakarabi first lived up to its manifold
dimensions as a postcolonial critique of mammonism1, a vicious proclivity that
Tagore felt was engendered by Western civilization. In subsequent performativity
however, contextual appreciation of the play in the emergent light of post-
postcolonial2 societies has blurred binaries of East and West, or for that matter
even national boundaries.
In Bangladesh too, Raktakarabi has had abiding reception in performance,
specifically in the context of the dialectics of national politics in recent times.
Ahmed particularly mentions Nagorik Natya Sampraday’s 2001 production at a
crucial historic juncture when cultural nationalism was threatened anew by the
forces of religious nationalism. The high mark of Nagorik’s production is the
ending of the symbolic play, which is perceived as a dramatisation of Syed
Shamsul Haq’s faith that “this red oleander is the seed of our dream, the mantra
of our courage and the wings of our flight” (Ahmed 142). This paper views
Tagore’s source text as traversing the divergent semiotics of drama and film
through its appropriation by Bangladeshi film director Rubaiyat Hossain in
Under Construction (2015). Nearly a century apart, and punctuated by epochal
histories that have indelibly altered trajectories of nations, Tagore’s text is
subjected to assignations of temporally connotative significations of class-gender
matrices in Hossain’s apparently deconstructive practice on celluloid. Before
introducing readers to this appropriative rendering, it would be in place to
outline the salient features of the source text in brief.

Tagore’s Raktakarabi (1924)

The symbolic potential of the indomitable nature of human life
encapsulated in the red oleander plant mentioned earlier is the wellspring of
Raktakarabi. To begin with, it is a play where Tagore pits the natural urge for an
ecologically harmonised community life against acquisitive tendencies and
mammonism, which he perceived as western imports. The West however, is not
something physically distant, for Yakshapuri as the setting of the play, and the
characters across socio-economic hierarchies are all very Indian, or even Bengali
for that matter. This element of self-reflexivity is evident in Tagore’s own words
in a talk given in 19243, later transcribed by Leonard K. Elmhirst:
The habit of greed – greed for all things, for power, for facts, with all the
ramifications that greed is able to set up between man and man – is
arrayed against the explosive force of human sympathy, of
neighbourliness, of fellowship and love, the force which we may term
good. Good is here arrayed against the dehumanizing force of mammon,
of selfishness, of evil: of that which separates us from our fellows against
that which cements us together, of that which, because it divides us, is
untruth, is a lie. (Tagore, ‘Red Oleanders: An Interpretation’ 208)
Almost a century after these words were spoken, their significance emerges both
in retrospect and in an apocalyptic view. In the more immediate context of the
Industrial Revolution, the enhancement of economic prowess at the cost of
human indices, an obsessive national pride of colonial nations leading to a race
for armaments and culminating in the First World War, it is possible to read
Tagore’s words as summing up the crisis of ‘civilization’ in Europe that was only
contributing to the deracinating of humanity at large from a more settled
ecological pattern of life. This validates all the more Tagore’s call for an
understanding of nationalism beyond its parochial limits as a religion of global
humanity that would synthesize the best of the West and the East. As a postscript
however, the excerpt will be seen as apprehensively pointing to a radical
redefinition of ‘Empire’ from a territorialised political entity to what Hardt and
Negri consider a form of biopower with psycho-physical force which “not only
regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature”
(Hardt and Negri, Empire xv).4 Thus, notwithstanding the geospatial origins of
such acquisitive tendencies, its disruptive transference into and the rupture of
our originary assimilative culture, as also the resultant erosion of human values
are causes for consternation that are deplored in Raktakarabi.
The metaphoric setting of Yakshapuri is a gold mining township, where
men/workers are but numbers, their womenfolk are superfluous in the eyes of
the authorities, and there is a dehumanising exploitative state machinery in place
where people in positions of power are but generic entities corresponding to the
location of each cog in the wheel of social hierarchy. The only permissible
endeavour in Yakshapuri is digging into the bowels of the earth for more and
more gold, an activity justifiable not by need but as intoxication for “solidified
wine” (Tagore Trans. Lal 149)4. Amidst such a Dickensian Coketown like setting

that is peopled with faceless facades, Tagore’s protagonist Nandini, though ill at
ease, is nevertheless the embodiment of the raktakarabi (red oleander) of the title
with her joie de vivre. Predictably therefore, she is a discursive presence that
creates commotion of sorts to the body politic of Yakshapuri.
The subaltern characters, all of them associated with digging gold, show
varying responses to her presence, which is qualified across gendered identities
but difficult to homogenise from the perspective of class consciousness. Thus
while the boy excavator Kishor is her infatuated admirer and longs for exclusive
rights to fetch red oleanders every morning; Gokul (also an excavator) who
cannot quite comprehend the raison d’être of Nandini (who has no ‘work’)
amidst the soulless bustle of Yakshapuri perceives her as the ‘Other’ and hence a
threat to their status quoist lives. Between the couple Phagulal and Chandra, the
former, an excavator who finds solace amidst a debilitating life in getting himself
drunk, is avowedly in awe of Nandini; while his wife, herself an ‘encumbrance’ in
Yakshapuri, shows explicit signs of jealousy about Nandini. Chandra feels that
Nandini “just goes around here being beautiful twenty-four hours a day, which
we can’t stand” (146). Her insecurities are manifest when, in order to rationalize
this dislike for Nandini, she even seeks ideological alignment with the Sardar,
who, as an instrument of statist repression, is a tangible agent of her own
oppression:
CHANDRA. All right, fine, maybe we are the idiots, but even the Sardar
here can’t bear to see her, you know that?” (ibid.)
With Bishu, for whom the playwright uses the epithet “mad”, and whose exact
assignment in Yakshapuri is not specified but is a worker nonetheless, Nandini’s
engagement is more complex. They have clearly known each other up and close
before Yakshapuri, but had lost track somewhere, and find each other in this
veritable hell where Bishu slogs and Nandini remains an enigma. Despite the
intervening hiatus of time, he is still her alter-ego in a qualified way in the sense
that they share an intuitive understanding which is however not directed towards
connubial relations. He sings for her, Nandini calls him her rampart on whose
shoulders she “can climb high and see the outside” (153), he even risks his life for
her sake in the end and this leaves Nandini aghast. The likes of Chandra find
Bishu a bundle of contradictions, for his philosophy of the existence of such
sorrows “from which no sorrow can charm you” (ibid.) evades common
understanding. Chandra’s words about Bishu must be understood beyond its
immediate implications of womanly rivalry, in emergent contexts of the
hegemonic sway of absolutism upon the consciousness of the individual, in ways
that subvert free will and inadvertently turn subjects into compradors of statist
forces :
CHANDRA. He’s possessed by Nandini; she pulls at his heart, at his
songs too. (145)
Tagore’s perception of statist forces in Raktakarabi is equally complicated.
There is, in order of appearance, first a Professor of Physics, who is clearly a soul

in eternal conflict between his bookish materialist spirit that conforms to the
statist line, and his subconscious metaphysical self which yearns for liberation
but is consciously suppressed. In him we see the interplay of desire against
artificial restraint that is manifest in all his interactions with Nandini. The Raja of
Raktakarabi, a figure that has endlessly baffled scholars, is initially only a voice
who remains behind a maze constituted by “an extremely complex screen” (135).
Having set the machinery of gold excavation in motion, he comes across as a
figure of self exile – always spoken of in terms of his superhuman strength and
potential for cruelty, but really hankering for a natural life of freedom that
continues to elude him. The net that confines the Raja for a major part of the play
is thus clearly one of his own making, for the steam-roller of neo-colonial
aggrandizement, once set in motion can never be halted except by complete
destruction. So it is only towards the end of the play, when his own mechanism
has revolted against him does the Raja break free of his net and join the masses
after he has broken the flagstaff which has so long been the symbol of his
authority. But for the major part of Raktakarabi, he remains a figure of
confinement, longing to possess Nandini as the living symbol of humanity,
naturalness, and liberty – qualities that he cannot embrace in his present
predicament. The Sardar, the Deputy Sardar, the Assistant Sardar, and the
Headmen, all part of the state machinery of the exploitation both of nature and
human life, stride colossus like over the plot of Raktakarabi. While discerning
individuals like Bishu and even Kishor dare to provoke them for their moronic
qualities, conscientious ones like Phagulal grudgingly acquiesce with their
commands, and hegemonised subjects like Chandra and Gokul fail to see through
their facades. With Nandini, their interactions are mostly confrontational, for
they perceive firsthand the disruptive impact she is spreading upon the subjects
of Yakshapuri whom they have internally colonised and domesticated.
These characters know each of the workers by their unique identification
numbers and address them as such. Further, as the play progresses, we find that
as intermediary levels of wielding state authority, they have internalised a degree
of autonomy that finally leads them to oppose the Raja when he breaks out of
self-imposed confinement and takes to asserting the just rule of law and
egalitarianism in Yakshapuri. If this band of officers are a critical variant of the
Althusserian Repressive State Apparatus (RSA), the Gosain or the spiritual
teacher in Raktakarabi under whose tutelage the workers as subjects of the state
are entrusted, clearly functions as the Ideological counterpart (ISA). As
handmaid of the Sardar and his cronies, the Gosain’s task is to do as instructed in
administering “peaceful mantras to their ears” (150). There is thus no gainsaying
that the intended impact of the Gosain’s presence and his words are tacitly the
opposite of that created by Nandini. While he subverts metaphysics by using the
little learning and precarious conditions of the masses to indoctrinate them
towards accepting their life in Yakshapuri as transitory at best, Nandini’s zest for
naturalness perceives earthly life as summum bonum where individuals must
have their worth.

It will be clear from the foregoing analysis of the overarching theme and
the major characters that Nandini is posited as the vantage point for perceiving
the evils of this hazardously acquisitive society. All the same, there arises a
differance6 between the authorial conception of Nandini’s character as outlined
in the ‘Introduction’ to the play, and reader/audience expectations raised by her
presentation in the text:
Sometimes aquatic creatures of the inedible variety accidentally get
caught in fishermen’s nets. Not only do they not suit the work of filling
stomachs or filling pockets, in the process they tear the nets too. A girl
named Nandini has arrived in a similar manner in the story-net of this
play. This girl, it seems, will not allow the barrier behind which Makar-
raja stays to endure. (132)
The gastronomical image has an initial jarring impact if considered in the context
of Nandini who apparently outshines all other characters as much with her
physical beauty as with her moral-ethical position. Even if we concede that such
imagery is deliberately used to offset the bleakness of mammonism prevalent in
Yakshapuri against the sweetness and light that she radiates, the fact that without
her beloved Ranjan (of whose magnanimity and dynamism she partakes) she is
only one half – a hemisphere as it were, the hopes that she awakens remain
unfulfilled. As Raktakarabi stands, Nandini is always seen in waiting for Ranjan
to arrive, so that he can take up his naturally ordained task of delivering the
oppressed masses from this authoritarian regime; she being his consort in this
mission. Her divination of the arrival of Ranjan on the day of the action by
aligning it with the blue jay dropping a feather on her bed is a lyrical feat of
Tagorean mysticism. The incident gives Nandini hope and strength; and the play
derives its title from the laurel of red oleanders that she carries all along to crown
Ranjan at the moment of his arrival. This association of the intensely personal
with the collective cause is without doubt celebratory, but in reception it also
carries the feeling that somewhere Tagore denies his protagonist the autonomy of
her much-deserved agency.
This gap between expectation and reality could however be a deliberate
authorial strategy. By leaving Nandini as but a harbinger of hope, a mystical
personification of the cultural construct of Mother Nature as it were, who
envisages completion through union with the sun of her life but fails at the
instant, Tagore could be making a deeper point. The dismantling of status quo
that Yakshapuri was beset with, much like the political scenario that prevailed in
East Pakistan from 1947 to 1971, required ‘civil strife’, which alone could tear
down the hegemonic machinery of exploitation and repression. In this, Nandini
has been instrumental; for she has enervated the initiated, challenged the high-
handed just as she has raised scepticism in some, and she eventually causes the
Raja to emerge out of his complex screen. But before the last action becomes a
reality and the Raja breaks his symbolic flagstaff to join the masses against the
Sardars, Ranjan arrives in Yakshapuri as is reported. Not knowing him in person,
and feeling challenged by his insolence, the Raja has ordered his killing, and in

much the same manner that he had earlier threatened Nandini with, albeit in a fit
of possessiveness :
NANDINI. I’ll sit by your fortress gates.
RAJA. Why?
NANDINI. When Ranjan arrives by that path, he’ll be able to see I’m
waiting for him alone.
RAJA. If I crush Ranjan, mix him with the dust, and he can’t be
recognised at all? (159)
When the reader/ audience are shown a glimpse of Ranjan, it is as a corpse
shrouded in dust amidst the trickling of his life-blood. The knowledge that he has
been tricked by his own people on the one hand, and the remorse that he has
killed youth with all his power (despite the fact that Ranjan did utter Nandini’s
name) on the other, impel the Raja to break his flagstaff and initiate the ‘civil war’
against his own errant and wayward state machinery. But much more significant
than that is Nandini’s resolve to become “the vehicle of that journey” (183) on
which Ranjan had embarked, and her leading the battle cry from the front as she
surges forth on her own destruction. Her last words are suffused with the fervour
of lyric intensity:
Nandini: Phagulal, the Sardar ... has opened the path for my victorious
journey ... he has hung my garland of jasmine in front of his spear. I’ll go
and make that garland the colour of red oleanders with the blood of my
breast. – Sardar! He has seen me. Victory, victory to Ranjan. (185)
As spectacle, this is stupendous, and has been presented as such on stage
whether by Mitra’s Bohurupee or by Haq’s direction with Nagorik. But in a post-
postcolonial materialist milieu and perceived from an ideological standpoint,
Nandini seems to have been ahead of her time in her vision of a heterosexual
union that can embellish the domestic sphere even as it becomes a champion of
the collective cause. It is significant that as long as Ranjan is alive, Nandini
depends on him to lead her; but when he is vanquished, she becomes his flag-
bearer. It is also noteworthy that Nandini’s march is towards inevitable
annihilation, and she believes this is the only way to commemorate Ranjan. With
the physical red oleander having been planted on the corpse of Ranjan, she
internalises its redness not just as a colour but on its connotative value as her
own life-blood. This voluntary subjection of the feminine creative principle to the
prototypical invasive power of masculinity by Tagore makes Raktakarabi a
problematic text from the (eco)feminist perspective. As such, this paper views
Tagore’s Raktakarabi as work in progress, with high symbolic connotations; and
it is exactly at this juncture that Rubaiyat Hossain’s film Under Construction is
seen to intersect the play.
From Tagore to Hossain

Having identified the ruptures underlying the overwhelmingly mystical in
Tagore’s characterisation of Nandini, or the undertones beneath her pervasive

lyrical impact, one cannot be oblivious of the humanist appeal and eco-critical
potential inhering her symbolic presence. With Nandini as the embodiment of
that light which is beauty and love combined; Raktakarabi is destined to be
‘incomplete’, because it is “the measure in which we fail to reach this relationship
of love in our relations with our fellow men” (Tagore ‘Red Oleanders: An
Interpretation’213). It is therefore utopian to conceive of Nandini in isolation
from Yakshapuri; and in a post-postcolonial perspective, the emergent reality of
the draconian setting defies boundaries of nation-states or even East-West
binaries. India or Bangladesh, East or West Bengal, Tagore’s Yakshapuri is
menacingly oracular in the context of our subject positions within ‘developing’
South Asian societies. It is here that Rubaiyat Hossain’s Under Construction
interrogates the ‘incomplete’ conceptualising of Nandini as an idyllic Bengali
woman - unfazed in her author ordained performativity, and aesthetically
distanced even from women’s realities enmeshing her. Hossain’s assertion that
she is not inverting Tagore, rather taking his cue in a changed and relevant
milieu, finds credence in the poet’s own words in 1924 on the sociology of
Raktakarabi:
So it is that, when make use of men … they crush and mutilate not
merely their victims but the humanity which is in themselves. They
prefer to think in terms of empire, of organization in factory or field or
workshop, in politics or church or sport, and to satisfy their craving for
power or survival … (ibid. 212)
Hossain adapts the text on celluloid nearly a century later; and relocates the
Tagore play to the Readymade Garment (RMG) industry of Bangladesh, thus
making an important point in cultural representation. Notwithstanding the
potential that RMG holds both in terms of women’s empowerment and foreign
exchange; Hossain’s Under Construction ventures beyond economics, into the
same sociological concerns that Tagore earlier voiced. She finds the industry in
particular, and the city of Dhaka in general, a draconian modern day equivalent
of Yakshapuri; it’s here and nowness being an appalling consternation. While the
RMG divests individuals of their constructed identities, the real estate peril that
has seized Dhaka makes it look like a city under construction as it were. This
gives a dual signification to the title of Hossain’s film. By thus transposing the
original dystopian setting of the play, and through the reinvention of the central
figure of Nandini amidst new matrices of class and gender, Hossain’s film
registers an urgency that challenges any complacent aesthetic appeal of
Raktakarabi.
Rubaiyat Hossain’s Under Construction (2015)5

Hossain locates Under Construction, her second feature film after
Meherjaan, in twenty-first century Dhaka, a city that is eponymously rattling
under the construction boom of real estate, as indicated earlier. The film is
pervasive with sights and sounds of gargantuan high-rises, and chronicles the
anomie of public life marking inegalitarian third world societies. Having thus

metamorphosed Yakshapuri into Dhaka, her subject therein is Bangladeshi

women in the RMG manufacturing industry - an obfuscated but undeniable
fragment of the nation. With WTO statistics showing a second largest global
share of 6.5% in 2017 (The Daily Star August 2, 2018), the RMG sector is clearly
Bangladesh’s biggest bet to leapfrog on to globalisation. However, the attendant
perils of neo-colonial gender exploitation vitiate the industry that employed 80%
girls and young women with average monthly wages of US$ 101 during the
aforementioned period, compared to China (US$ 518) and Vietnam (US$ 284), to
mention the first three countries in this bracket. Hossain’s concerns center
around such exploitation of female labour, their alarming working and living
conditions in factories and ghettos, poor enforcement of legislation, and skewed
gender equality circumscribing the plight of the doubly or even trebly
marginalised if one may.
Under Construction is a gynocentric critique of this urban neo-colonial
Bangladesh, with Dhaka city and its womenfolk. The latter is essentialised
through the emergent perceptiveness of Hossain’s protagonist Roya Hassan, who
is also undergoing the construction/ metamorphosis of her dismal identity as a
twenty-first century Bangladeshi woman. The dominant visualization of Dhaka is
between the binaries of wire nets of opulent high-rises and the subaltern
workforce populating the RMG and real estate sectors. This parallels the Raja’s
net in Raktakarabi and the condition of the masses in Yakshapuri.
Simultaneously, Roya’s individuality evolves from a liminal culture compliant
gender role to a dialectical- material pattern through her layered understanding
of life as a theatre actress, her trajectory being quite different from that of
Tagore’s Nandini. Yet the parallel arises as a meta-theatrical imposition, for Roya
has been faithfully enacting Nandini on stage for twelve years now. As the action
commences, her career as actress faces a challenge, for her director wants to
replace Roya with a younger Nandini who can presumably attract more audiences
with youthful charm. Avowedly a keen reader of Tagore herself, Hossain
contextualizes the collective and the individual through her appropriation of
Raktakarabi, earlier discussed in this paper as a visionary colonial critique of
western materialism and dehumanisation.
Nandini’s symbolic lyricism with her mystical rapture is alluring in
naturalistic theatre, and might appeal to the taste for spectacle. However, Under
Construction veers away from this trope as Roya emerges from naturalistic
Tagorean stage presence to her individual subject position. She awakens to
interrogate the denial of agency that consigns Nandini’s dismay at the mindless
oppression of man and exploitation of nature in Yakshapuri to abortive
performativity. Roya’s husband Sameer is no Ranjan incarnate; so once she is
initiated on the path of iconoclasm, Roya now comprehends her conjugal life as
de facto an Ibsenian doll’s house. She perceives the resemblance between her
stage career and marital life, for quantifiable deliverables are the sole yardsticks
in both. While Rassel, her director, capitalizes on Roya’s time-tested histrionic
skills and abhors any critical engagement with the character she performs;

Sameer has hitherto been happy with her housekeeping skills and reproductive
obedience. As Yakshapuri becomes a metaphoric locale on Roya’s mind-map
thwarting the feminine mystique, Roya/ Nandini comes to challenge Tagore’s
reduction of his protagonist to effeteness and eternal waiting for her beaux
Ranjan to bring deliverance for the ostracized. Rassel, who does voice-over as the
statusquoist King behind the mysterious maze that Nandini tries to dismantle, is
equally parochial in his perception of gender roles in life/ theatrical
representation.
So, while an ageing Roya is considered unsalable as the regular Nandini,
yet Rassel banks upon her proven skills in doing Nandini, when expatriate
Bangladeshi curator Imtiaz Ilahi calls for Raktakarabi on a global platform. An
awakened Roya however questions the gullibility of Nandini as the poet’s Muse,
and expresses her reservations about being commodified as an actress yet again.
Besides, Hossain’s Dhaka as a monstrous locale with its grossly jinxed
developmental indices is more a tangible threat than the distant symbolism of
Yakshapuri. Groomed at New York University, Imtiaz easily deconstructs the
difference between the “sensitive, intense, wonderful” stage Nandini and the
thinking woman Roya. Even before he and Roya share a mutual comfort level
that does evolve into fulfilling physical intimacy that she has never had in
conjugal life, Imitiaz finds merit in her questioning of the picture-perfectness of
Nandini, for real-life women are seldom so. With an evolving Roya who will turn
from actress to director, Imtiaz pitches for a reinterpretation of Raktakarabi with
topical relevance. It is significant that with this move, Hossain surges ahead of
Tagore in conceptualising co-equal gender participation in the mimetic
(re)creation of a projection of the probable, on terms of Aristotelian philosophy.
It is therefore evident that the pivot of Hossain’s narrative rests on her
construction of Roya’s identity as a round character; a possibility that Tagore
raises for Nandini but does not take to culmination. As a daughter, she invokes
her mother’s (Amma) displeasure for preferring a demanding stage career over
domesticity. Amma in turn is presented by Hossain with certain baffling dualities
that are evidently the result of hegemonic repression imposed by patriarchy
under the pretext of adherence to dictates of religion. Then there is Roya’s long-
time friend who has compromised her academic career for motherhood, and is
actually surprised when Roya, despite being a full-blooded woman, says she is
not ready for a child. Across generations thus, women remain hegemonically
conditioned to abrogating rights on their bodies and reproductive functions, both
of which are systemically perceived in dissociation from their psycho-social
frames. It is precisely in this that Roya appears different because she sees
motherhood both beyond biology and routine duty; and hence mounts a
challenge to patriarchy. Such an ideology takes the female creative principle of
Under Construction beyond the paradigms actually realised by Tagore in
Raktakarabi.
Hossain’s exploration of Roya’s multidimensional nature is optimal in her
protracted encore with Moyna, her domestic, wherein the borders of social class

within the gender matrix are transcended in complex ways. On the face of it,
Moyna considers Roya’s marriage a worthwhile one, for the husband is not
abusive. Roya in turn, for all her aversion to biological motherhood, cares for
Moyna with an instinct that is almost maternal. When Moyna, notwithstanding
Roya’s counsel, decides to marry the liftman Sabuj, by whom she is pregnant, and
finally sets up a living in the slum, a new Roya emerges. Her compassion for
Moyna, who, despite her advanced pregnancy, now works in the RMG to make
ends meet like most Bangladeshi women of her standing, transforms Roya from
an actress to an activist, whose forte is theatre. She does not let go of
Raktakarabi, only reorients it from the erstwhile aesthetically distanced
performance to one that incorporates her story and other women’s stories – an
aggregate of real lives.
The personal truly becomes the political as Hossain contextualizes media
footage of the Rana Plaza collapse at Savar near Dhaka on 24 th April 2013 which,
according to ILO reports, killed at least 1132 people and injured more than 2500.
Roya sees the ghastly sight on television, learns that social media is abuzz with
reports of a cover-up, and has nightmares of pregnant Moyna trapped on the
sewing machine. All of this she puts into her directorial production of
Raktakarabi that is designed for international audiences, much to the applause
of the curator (now her friend) Imtiaz Ilahi, and the chagrin of her director so
long, Rassel. Hossain must be credited for steering clear of any universalizing
trope of masculinity, which is often the bane of feminist practices. By resiting
Raktakarabi in a RMG unit, culling out her Nandini from an assortment of
severally marginalised female subjects, and representing her as a pregnant RMG
worker, Roya emerges an organic intellectual. From her erstwhile performative
role of Nandini, she comes to encapsulate the essence of being Nandini, as she
ably aligns her ideology with the collective cause, employing aesthetic portrayal
to speak for the subaltern. The personal-collective coalesce is also evident in her
understanding with Imtiaz, who puts his weight behind her. As Rassel grudgingly
makes way for Roya to direct the avante garde production of Raktakarabi,
Hossain’s text not only allays misconceptions about Roya’s approach to
motherhood, but underscores an important point. It also redefines from a third
world feminist standpoint8 the biology-only perception of maternity as simply a
productive process validating womanhood. Hossain’s/ Roya’s Nandini does not
wait in futility for her lover Ranjan to arrive in the RMG unit/transposed
Yakshyapuri to bring new hope and wear her chosen garland of red oleanders or
the crest feather. Neither does she languish in the theatricality of ‘suicide’ to
commemorate her Ranjan. Rather, she resiliently strives to give birth to her
offspring Ranjan who, being the product of her consciously chosen
motherhood/authorship will usher in a better world order. Moyna as Nandini
and Roya as the director thus redo Raktakarabi as a physico-aesthetic manifesto
of feminism.
In doing this, Hossain uses meta-theatre to its best advantage. She weaves
individual women’s narratives – Amma’s, Moyna’s, her friend’s whom she comes

across after ages at the beauty parlour; with the collective where women are
either seen doing menial jobs at construction sites or walking in a file to their
respective RMG units. In all of these, it is Roya’s constant stream of thoughts
leading to her acquiring a better understanding of herself at every moment, that
works as the binding thread. So by the time Roya comes to direct her version of
Raktakarabi on a stage where the backdrop is formed with bits and pieces of
cloth, she has internalised this idea of multiple Nandinis as opposed to Tagore’s
ideal woman. The spectacle of the march of the dead in Tagore’s text, whom the
Sardar derisively calls “the Raja’s leftovers” (166) becomes in Hossain a march of
emaciated and livid RMG workers. Unlike Tagore’s Nandini who only shrinks at
the paleness of faces she once knew and expresses dismay as to why such a thing
happened, Roya actually has full awareness of the situation that she depicts on
the stage. Hossain’s Nandini rather finds the justification of her existence in
becoming a champion for the cause of the female subaltern, rather than giving
herself up to despair or mindless sacrifice. In doing so, she might no longer
remain the charming woman of Tagore’s play who invokes various degrees of
longing among several characters each in their own ways; but Hossain’s Roya as
Nandini definitely conveys the urgency of a situation that is common knowledge
in developing economies of the Global South.
Under Construction thus evolves a new discourse of syncretic Bengaliness
from an urgent third world feminist standpoint. It holds culturalist relevance in
our societies in present neo-colonial times. Hossain achieves this by taking up
what she considers Tagore’s work in progress, and invests Nandini with a
‘completeness’ that she rightly envisages as the desirable voice of a large section
of the female Bangladeshi workforce. The reorientation of the biological axis of
femininity by perceiving motherhood as a psycho-social construct is a good
beginning towards this end. It facilitates radical realignment of a portent text of
soft power like Raktakarabi from humanist and eco-critical perspectives that
mainstream societies must acknowledge, if globalisation is to attain its full
potential. In concluding, this paper holds that such efforts constitute hope for the
future of new-wave feminist cinema in Bangladesh, as a means of stirring the
collective unconscious.
Notes :
1 In a Biblical understanding, Mammon is broadly associated with greed; and the
basic understanding is that it does not square with the pursuit of the Divine. Given
the symbolic potential of Raktakarabi as a play, Divinity and Mammonism are
perceived by Tagore as opposite polarities of the human psyche, manifest in
characters with opposed sets of motivations. This becomes clear in his own words,
quoted later in the text, as transcribed by Leonard K. Elmhirst. With its exploitative
bureaucratic machinery exerting panoptical surveillance in Yakshapuri where the
primary activity is gold mining, the play assumes apocalyptic potential in the sense
that the setting can almost be equated with the neo-colonial space of a Special
Economic Zone (SEZ) where profit and productivity are the only parameters of

economic development, to the utter disregard of human potential. In the context of

the early twentieth century when the play was written, the same idea could well
explain the imperial greed of the coloniser that led to the exploitation of resources
and manpower in the colonies of Asia and Africa.
2 Postcolonial literature and theory largely studies the terms of transactions between
once colonised subjects and their European masters, and to this effect peruses
divergent histories of former colonies. The coinage post-postcolonial, rather than
signifying any break to the postcolonial, is used to take this further in terms of
newer internal dynamics of centre and margin among hitherto colonised societies.
In that sense the two are overlapping categories where the postcolonial flows into
the post-postcolonial, much in the same way as there are no definable boundaries
between modernism and postmodernism. In centering newer margins, post-
postcolonialism hopes to implicate newer oppressors springing out of the once
oppressed. As Eyoh Etim puts it, “Such a re-Othering and re-Centering is based on
the deconstructable self-posturing of the previous binary structures which, from all
indications, can no longer sustain our postcolonial realities” (5). In the context of
the present paper, the term post-postcolonialism is a realisation of Tagore’s critique
of nationalism in more than one way. The history of East Bengal/Pakistan before its
liberation as Bangladesh in 1971 has been one of such internal colonisation after the
departure of the British, and as mentioned earlier, in this phase of history, Tagore
literature has been a sustaining influence to the Bengali nation. Subsequently,
against the milieu in which Raktakarabi is adapted by Rubaiyat Hossain, this aspect
of post-postcolonialism is rabidly present in Bangladeshi society. While economic
markers of prosperity show upward mobility, the human index, whether in Tagore
or in Hossain, is always naturally on the wane.
3 Tagore delivered this talk in Argentina. Evidently, his purpose was to set at rest the
bafflement of critics, both at home and abroad, regarding the symbolic potential of
Raktakarabi.
4 In their ‘Preface’ to Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri succinctly define the
theoretical proposition of ‘Empire’ as it stands in a post-colonial global order. It is
first and foremost not bound by physical boundaries of nations; but exists
autonomously over the entire globe. Consequently it follows that the idea of Empire
effectively suspends history and fixes the existing state of affairs on ahistorical time
frames. Being liberated from both space and time, Empire creates the world that it
inhabits. Finally, and paradoxically, though the concept works against the grain of
national societies, it is perforce a perpetual and universalist ‘peaceful’ formation
that inscribes its own finite limits on the basis of its pervasive strengths. In the
present context of semiotic transference of Tagore’s Raktakarabi to Hossain’s
Under Construction, it is possible to understand the sociological implications of
both the source and the derived text against the framework of this neo-colonial
global order of Empire. It is in this expansive understanding that Tagore’s play
retains its relevance and becomes valid as a cultural text almost a century after its
composition.
5 All textual references to Raktakarabi are from Rabindranath Tagore: Three Plays,
translated with an ‘Introduction’ by Ananda Lal. All subsequent in-text citations are
indicated directly in parentheses.
6 Derrida’s first use of the term with a suave change of spelling from ‘e’ to ‘a’, a play
on the dual meanings of the root French word ‘differer’ as both ‘defer’ and ‘differ’,
became central to his critique of logocentricism as a deconstructive process. In the

present paper, both senses of difference and deferral are implied with regard to the
conception of Nandini, first by Tagore and then by Hossain; and the subsequent
reception of the character by audiences across two genres of performance. There is,
as has been pointed, a difference of perception with regard to her character as
outlined by Tagore in gross gastronomical terms, vis-a-vis audience expectations of
her being invested with greater agency than she actually has by the end of the play.
The idea of deferral establishes continuity from Tagore to Hossain; the latter’s
conception of Roya Hassan/Nandini in meta-theatre may not have the romanticism
of Nandini of Raktakarabi, but is much more oriented to the needs of the time. In
that sense, the feminist standpoint gives Hossain’s protagonist a deferred agency
that is absent in Tagore.
7 Under Construction had a poor run in theatres in Bangladesh, where it faced
inhospitable responses. It was Hossain’s second full length directorial venture after
Meherjaan (2011), which, despite international acclaim, faces a virtual ban in
Bangladesh. The present author has secured exclusive viewing rights of Under
Construction from the director. As such, Hossain must be thanked for sharing her
work towards purposes of research.
8 Taking from Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist
Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”, the critique of Western feminism that
arbitrarily sets up homogenizing narratives for non-Western feminist articulations,
Rubaiyat Hossain’s Roya/Nandini is represented as an individual with a mind of
her own. This brings her severally into conflict with others who subscribe to
gender-ordained roles for women. So the husband, the mother, the director, the
friend, and even the subaltern Moyna find that Roya does not conform to their
comprehended stereotypes; each of which has been adequately discussed in the
paper. In her ability to imbibe the spirit of motherhood through her activist zeal,
Roya simultaneously transcends the imperative limitations of mothering a child in
a barren marriage; as also gives birth to protest through what she does best –
aesthetic portrayal of the subaltern. From this renewed understanding of feminism
as a vibrant force beyond doctrinaire philosophy, Hossain’s film gives a
contemporaneous conclusion to Tagore’s text by locating it amidst realistic settings.
Works Cited :
Ahmed, Syed Jamil. “Designs of Living in the Contemporary Theatre of
Bangladesh.” Mapping South Asia Through Contemporary Theatre:
Essays on the Theatres of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri
Lanka, edited by Ashis Sengupta, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 135-176.
Bhaba, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Chatterjee, Sudipto. “Performing (Domi-)Nation: Aspects of Nationalism in
Nineteenth- Century Bengali Theatre”. https://www.lib.uchicago.
edu/e/su/southasia/TESTold/Sudipto.html.
Etim, Eyoh. “Post-Postcolonialism’: Theorising on the Shifting Postcolonial
Paradigms in African Fiction”. IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social

Science (IOSR-JHSS), Vol. 24, no. 5, May 2019, pp. 01-12, http://
www.iosrjournals.org/iosr- jhss/papers/Vol.%2024%20Issue5/Series-
7/A2405070112.pdf.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000.
Hossain, Rubaiyat, director. Under Construction. Khona Talkies, 2015.
Mirdha, Refayet Ullah. “Bangladesh remains the second biggest apparel
exporter.” The Daily Star, 02 Aug. 2018, https://www.thedailystar.net/
business/expor/bangladesh-remains-the-second-biggest-apparel
exporter -1614856.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2, vol. 12 no. 3, vol. 13. no 1, Spring-
Autumn 1984, pp. 333-358, http://www.jstor.org/stable/302821.
Murshid, Ghulam. “Poet of the Padma.” Frontline, vol. 28, no.27, Dec. 2011-
Jan.2012. https://frontline.thehindu.com/static/html/fl2827/stories/
20120113282701700.htm.
Sengupta, Nitish. Bengal Divided: The Making of a Nation 1905-1971. Penguin
Books, 2012. Tagore, Rabindranath. Nationalism. Macmillan, 1918.
---. “Rangamancha”. Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. 5, Visva-Bharati, 1940,
pp. 449-53.
---. “Red Oleanders: An Interpretation.” Transcribed by Leonard K. Elmhirst.
Visva-Bharati Quarterly, New Series, 17, Nov. 1951, pp 208-17.
---. Raktakarabi. Three Plays, translated by Ananda Lal, Oxford UP,
2001, pp. 129-186.
The Rana Plaza Accident and its aftermath. International Labour Organization,
Geneva, 2017. www.ilo.org/global/topics/geip/WCMS_614394/lang-
en/index.htm.
Toor, Sadia. “Bengal(is) in the House: The Politics of National Culture in
Pakistan, 1947-71.” Being Bengali: At Home and In the World, edited by
Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Routledge, 2014, pp. 202-233.
Zaheer, Hasan. The Separation of East Pakistan: The Rise and Realization of
Bengali Muslim Nationalism. Oxford UP, 1996.

pp. 260-269
THE REPRESENTATION OF THE AGED IN J. M.

COETZEE’S FICTION: A SELECT STUDY
Padumi Singha
Abstract
Old age is very crucial period of life. Youthfulness, speed and energy are
some attributes that we always like to retain. Though most of us do not
desire it, the truth is, everyone is destined to become old. Usually, an old
person is a subject to his/her individual psycho-somatic changes as well
as the familial/cultural perceptions and reactions to old age. In many a
case, old age is perceived in negative light considering it to be
‘unproductive’ and a ‘burden’. This approach relegates an old person to
the social/cultural margin making him/her an ‘other’. In this paper an
attempt has been made to do a literary analysis of old age as represented
in select fictional works of J. M. Coetzee. The study contends to help us
in order to understand the cultural construction of the aging identity
while focusing on Coetzee’s articulation of this ‘otherness’.
Keywords : Coetzeean fiction, old age, youth/progress, old/decline,
aged as the ‘other’.
The representation of ‘age’ is a significant yet less explored aspect in the

oeuvre of J. M. Coetzee. This paper attempts an analysis of the literary
representation of old age in select Coetzeean fiction and contends that the study
would help us to understand the cultural construction of the aging identity while
adding to Coetzee’s articulation of the politics of otherness. Rüdiger Kunow
remarks that old age can be viewed from the postcolonial perspective since the
latter focuses on the disjunctiveness and incommensurability of the social and
cultural subaltern and safeguards its presence as resistant otherness, it may
speak to central concerns of age studies because age is “the difference we must all
live with” (2). Literary and cultural analyses become enriched with critical and
scholarly consideration of age along with race, gender and other elements of
identity since exploring older age from within literary studies may allow for a
more nuanced exploration of the relationship between the lived experience of
older age, its textual representation and its perception in public consciousness
(Pretorius 11).
In her essay “Aged by Culture” (2015) Margaret Morgonroth Gullette
makes a very poignant remark: “The fall of the baby embodies progress, while the
fall of the old man embodies expectations about his failing body” (22). The
remark reveals the binaries of perception about ‘age’ in human life —while young

The Representation of the Aged in J. M. Coetzee’s … 261
age signifies ‘progress’, old age signifies ‘decline’. The society generally prizes
youth, quick thinking and speed over experience, insight and resilience. But the
fact remains that each of us has confronted, or will eventually have to confront,
the physical, psychological, social, and other changes that happen with time; all
of us who live will eventually belong to the “Othered” category that is old age
(Marshall vii). The term aged/old comes to signify and include a diversified group
of people. According to Michel Philibert, to assess properly the marginalization of
the aged at the present time, we need to consider all those over fifty which would
include two or even three generations. The aged are heterogeneous by social
class, level of education and income, living conditions and ways of life. Again,
beyond the age of fifty a single individual may go through successive phases of
social participation and assimilation, depending on fluctuations that occur, as
one advances in age, in the matrimonial, family, occupational and financial
situation as well as health and the extent to which one suffers from and is able to
compensate different sensorial, physical and psychic handicaps (18).
According to Leni Marshall, Age/ing Studies analyze the meanings of age
across the lifespan, within specific historical or cultural contexts (2). In Age
Becomes Us: Bodies and Gender in Time (2015) she opines that perceptions
about self-identity include age as well as gender, race, bodily ability, and many
other categories of identity. Each person has a relationship with her or his
younger selves as well as with the now-self. A person’s interior sense of self,
particularly the individual’s experience of embodied age, is not necessarily the
same as the visible age of the external self to which others react (1). Toni
Calasanti et al opine that the point at which one becomes ‘old’ varies with other
attributes such as ethnicity, sexuality and class. Old age brings losses of authority
and status. Those who are perceived to be old are marginalized, even subjected to
violence like elder abuse and to exploitation and cultural imperialism (17).
Regarding the “social isolation” of the aged in the west, Philibert opines that
young people and adults flee contact and conversation with the aged for various
reasons, among which the fear of their own aging, which is gerascophobia, plays a
major role (27).
‘Literary gerontology’ has been described as the interpretation of aging and
creativity through close readings of literary texts (Zeilig 20). According to Anne
M. Wyatt-Brown, literary scholars first began to address the subject of aging in a
systematic way in the 1970s (300). For the literary scholars, the combination of
literary criticism and gerontology required extensive studies of age issues and
gerontological theories as well as to attract the audience who would respond and
critically appreciate their interdisciplinary insights. Wyatt-Brown also opines that
today more literary scholars have mastered gerontological theory, thereby
bridging the gap between the two fields and creating a legitimate sub-specialty in
literary studies. Literary gerontology includes the following categories
(1) analyses of literary attitudes towards aging; (2) humanistic approaches to
literature and aging; (3) psychoanalytic explorations of literary works and their
authors; (4) applications of gerontological theories about autobiography, life

262 Padumi Singha
review and midlife transitions and (5) psychoanalytically informed studies of the
creative process (300). The complex interface between gerontology and literature
can enrich each field while handled in an informed and sensitive way (Wallace
405). According to Hannah Zeilig, the pull that literature has on our imagination
makes literary gerontology an especially insightful means of considering aging;
however, she warns us that often those interested in aging naively excavate
literature for insight into both the subjectivities and universalities of aging (22).
We come across the representation of the elderly people as protagonists in
Coetzee’s various works under study such as the Magistrate (Waiting for the
Barbarians, 1980), university professors Elizabeth Curren (Age of Iron, 1990)
and David Lurie (Disgrace, 1999),) and novelist Elizabeth Costello (Elizabeth
Costello, 2003 and Slow Man) and photographer Paul Rayment (Slow Man,
2005). All these characters are well established white people although they are
either from broken families or living solitary lives. They try to hold on to what
they think ‘liberal’ values until something drastic occurs and shake their existence
and worldviews. The elderly people do not merely appear as self-less and
sagacious. The Magistrate and David love the company of beautiful young women
though they feel that they need to retire from the ‘game’. Paul too falls in love
with his nurse. The lives of older women are explored through Curren and
Costello. Curren relives a life of sharing with Vercueil, an elderly vagabond, while
attaining new political perspectives. Issues of love, parenting and filial duty
pervade all the novels. As parents Curren, David or Costello none wishes to be
‘burdens’ in the children’s lives.
In the Heart of the Country (1977) displays Magda’s father as a white
master who is exploitative towards the black servants as well as to his own
daughter. He even takes advantage of the young bride of their black servant
Hendrik. According to Gullette, “Ageism is allied intersectionally with misogyny,
racism, ableism, homophobia, classism, and other biases, in the sense that any of
these prejudices, and certainly the compound ones . . . are likely to worsen with
the increasing age of the targets” (“Against”). While Magda has to take care of his
every need, he is too self-centered to pay attention to the needs of the ageing
daughter. As an unmarried lonely woman Magda lives an unhappy life with her
widower father. She opines that he is very “arrogant” and has murdered all the
“motherly” in her. Magda regards him as “merely an ageing man who has had
little love and who thinks he has found it, eating bread and peaches with his girl”
(56). The father appears considerate to Magda only in her childhood memories.
Very touchingly she talks of her ceaseless duties to her old and disabled father: “I
feed my father his broth and weak tea. Then I press my lips to his forehead and
fold him away for the night . . . I used to think that I would be the last one to die.
But now I think that for some days after my death he will still lie here breathing,
waiting for his nourishment” (149).
The elderly Magistrate shelters the barbarian girl but is aware that “she
wants nothing of old men and their bleating consciences” (29). Her blindness
puts him at ease with his ageing body: “under her blind gaze . . . I can undress

without embarrassment, baring my thin shanks, my slack genitals, my paunch,

my flabby old man’s breasts, the turkey-skin of my throat” (33). In appreciation
of beauty he resembles David and like him he too enjoys an active sexual life.
Susan Sontag’s remark “Men are ‘allowed’ to age, without penalty, in several ways
that women are not” sounds significant in this regard. She says that getting older
is less profoundly wounding for a man though both men and women have to be
on the defensive as they age, there is a double standard about aging that
denounces women with special severity; society is much more permissive about
aging in men, as it is more tolerant of the sexual infidelities of husbands (31). The
Magistrate accepts the truth about his sensual self: “The older a man the more
grotesque people finds his couplings . . . I cannot play the part of a man of iron or
a saintly widower. Sniggers, jokes, knowing looks — these are part of the price I
am resigned to paying” (35). He understands “the foolishness” of men of his age
and opines: “what old men seek is to recover their youth in the arms of young
women”; he finds it “obscene” that “his heavy slack foul-smelling old body”
embrace young beauties and realizes that he should stay “among the gross and
decaying” (106).
In Foe (1986) Susan judges Cruso to be sixty years of age with “the
stubbornness of old age”. She finds him too old to change and indifferent to her
wishes. Growing old on his island without anyone to contradict him has had
“narrowed his horizon” and he acts as “he knew all there was to know about the
world” (13). Susan shares a part of her life with old men like Cruso and Foe. Her
freedom is curtailed at Foe’s hands as she wants him to write her island story. She
is confident of her own youth and capacity and sympathizes with aging Foe:
“Your mouth sags open, you snore softly, you smell . . . like an old man. How I
wish it were in my power to help you, Mr Foe!” (53). She exclaims at how she has
aged and how in Bahia the Portuguese women didn’t believe her having a grown
daughter. She realizes the onslaught of time as she is no longer young: “Friday
grows old before time, like a dog locked up all its life. I too, from living with an
old man (Cruso) and sleeping in his bed, have grown old” (55). She confesses that
life with Cruso and Foe has been arduous: “life with Cruso put lines on my brow,
and the house of Foe only deepened them (93). Her views on her aging self is
summed up in Sontag’s remark: “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the
imagination — a moral disease, a social pathology — intrinsic to which is the fact
that it afflicts women much more than men. It is particularly women who
experience growing older . . . with such distaste and even shame” (29).
Elizabeth Curren considers herself as “An old woman, sick and ugly,
clawing on to what she has left” (50). Her view reverberates with Sontag’s ironical
comment on society’s notion of old women: “An older woman is, by definition,
sexually repulsive — unless, in fact, she doesn’t look old at all” (36). Sense of
nostalgia and memory are replete in her words as she tells Vercueil that her old
car “belongs to a world that barely exists anymore . . . What is left of that world,
what still works, I am trying to hold on to . . . I am comfortable there, it is a world
I understand. I don’t see why I should change” (65). Ironically, she has to

264 Padumi Singha
‘change’ in regard to the political ramifications of her age. In difficult times the
thought of the faraway daughter keeps the lonely, cancer-ridden, old mother
“sane” though she never wants to ask her daughter to “save” her. She remarks
that the old live through their progeny: “But when you bear a child from your
own body you give your life to that child . . . Your life is no longer with you . . . it is
with the child. That is why we do not really die: we simply pass on our life” (69).
She also talks about wish fulfillment of old age — her wishes to live and love and
be granted “just one more summer-afternoon walk down the Avenue amid the
nut-brown bodies of children on their way home from school, laughing, giggling,
smelling of clean young sweat” (51).
As a privileged white old woman she has Florence, a black woman, as her
domestic help without whose competence she would “sink into the indifferent
squalor of old age” (33). Once, Florence’s son Bheki and his friend John
manhandle Vercueil. Florence likes them for teaching the “good-for-nothing”
fellow a lesson while Elizabeth admonishes her for being a bad example: “You are
showing Bheki and his friends that they can raise their hands against their elders
with impunity. This is a mistake. Yes, whatever you may think of him, Vercueil is
their elder!” (45). Their lack of respect for elders makes her ask Florence
crucially: “What kind of parents will they become who were taught that the time
of parents is over? . . . They kick and beat a man because he drinks. They set
people on fire and laugh while they burn to death. How will they treat their own
children? What love they will be capable of? Their hearts are turning to stone
before our eyes” (46). She does not feel entitled to enjoy the beauty of the world
because of the political ramifications of the apartheid. Her worldviews are in
utter contrast with those of youngsters like Bheki and John who are growing up
with the apartheid. Political activism epitomizes for them excitement, adventure
and sacrifice. Her words of advice fall off John like “dead leaves” as the
“negligible” words of an old woman (72). The generation gap is palpable in her
words: “You are tired of listening to old people . . . You are itching to be a man
and do man’s things” (134).
When both youngsters are hunted down by the state authority, she informs
Vercueil the indispensable facts of war: “I still detest these calls for sacrifice that
end young men bleeding to death in the mud. War is never what it pretends to be.
Scratch the surface and you find, invariably, old men sending young men to their
death in the name of some abstraction or other. Despite what Mr Thabane says . .
. it remains a war of the old upon the young” (149). She speaks “the truth of her
defiance through the pain of her old age” (Pretorius 75). She questions her right
“to have a voice at all” and soon realizes that considering the ‘age’ (biological and
political) she lives in, she has “no voice” but carries on speaking defiantly with a
“voice that is no voice” and tells Vercueil that her voice is the “the true voice of
wisdom” (164) which signifies her spiritual ageing. David Attwell opines that Age
of Iron attends to generational differences between Mrs Curren and her daughter
(the one who will not return until the current rulers are swinging from the
lampposts), and between Mrs Curren and the young black militants who are

mounting an insurrection from the townships. Her relationship with the boys is
permeated by distress at the fact that they are surrendering their childhoods to a
heartless code of masculinity and the slogan ‘Freedom or death!’ (148).
In the beginning of Disgrace, David Lurie appears to be a self-sufficient
person who considers himself “too old” to change his “temperament” (2). He is
with “good health” and a “clear” mind and “For a man of his age, fifty-two,
divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1). As Linn
Sandberg points out that “sexuality as lifelong and as part of positive ageing is a
markedly masculinist and heterosexual discourse in which most of the focus is
placed on restoring men’s potential” (14). When David is ‘disgraced’ due to an
affair with a student, his ex-wife Rosalind reminds him: “You are too old to be
meddling with other people’s children” (45). He takes note of her ‘point’:
“Perhaps it is the right of the young to be protected from the sight of their elders
in the throes of passion. That is what whores are for . . . to put up with the
ecstasies of the unlovely” (44). He philosophizes that his affair with Melanie is
like the “marriage of Cronus and Harmony: unnatural”; and he is prosecuted for
“unnatural acts: for broadcasting old seed, tired seed, seed that does not quicken,
contra naturam. If the old men hog the young women, what will be the future of
the species?” (190). In the crowd of the young, he feels out of place. He thinks of
Yeats’ Byzantium and the comments on old age: “The young in one another’s
arms, heedless, engrossed in the sensual music. No country, this, for old men. He
seems to be spending a lot of time sighing. Regret . . .” (190). At times he worries
about his life: “The life of a superannuated scholar, without hope, without
prospect: is that what he is prepared to settle for?” (175).
David comes to live with his daughter Lucy in her farm. But things take
different turn as she is raped and he is assaulted by three black strangers. Lucy
conceives and keeps the baby against his wishes. She does not even escape from
the place in spite of his advices. As a self-assertive woman she does not entertain
her father’s paternalistic attitude regarding her activities. David complains to Bev
Shaw: “Lucy says I can’t go on being a father for ever. I can’t imagine, in this life,
not being Lucy’s father” (162). His growing intimacy with Bev and his assistance
in her animal clinic change him for his own good. Later he acknowledges his
daughter’s standpoint and the arrival of the baby. He starts considering himself
as “A grandfather. A Joseph” (217). Whether it is Michael K, Elizabeth Curren or
David, in all cases, what Coetzee renders is what Philibert explains that ‘life’ itself
is ‘transmission’ between the parents and children for generations (30). David
comes to question himself and his responsibility with a critical eye:
What will it entail, being a grandfather? As a father he has not been
much of a success, despite trying harder than the most. As a grandfather
he will probably score lower than average too. He lacks the virtues of the
old: equanimity, kindliness, patience. But perhaps those virtues will
come as other virtues go: the virtue of passion . . . He must have a look
again at Victor Hugo, poet of grandfatherhood. There may be things to
learn. (217-18)

266 Padumi Singha
Elizabeth Costello is a sixty-six years old Australian author who travels to

the United States in order to receive a major literary award. Her son John teaches
physics and astronomy at a college in Massachusetts. Though she is to deliver
lecture there on animals, he does not broadcast his connection with her as he
prefers to make “his own way in the world”. Since age has made her “a little frail”,
without the help of her son she would not be undertaking this taxing trip. After
the long flight she looks her age. Two years have passed since he last saw his
mother and “he is shocked at how she has aged. Her hair which had had streaks
of grey in it, is now entirely white; her shoulders stoop; her flesh has grown
flabby” (59). Though he is with her “out of love”, he remembers the forsaken
childhood he and his sister used to live with her. She used to seclude herself in
the mornings to do her writing and they were not allowed to intrude under any
circumstances. He does not read her until he is thirty three: may be to protect
himself or as a revenge for locking him out. She has written him, his sister and
his late father into her books in ways that is painful at times. He ironically views
that she is “by no means a comforting writer” and is to be rewarded for “a lifetime
of shaking people” (5). Exasperated he thinks: “Why can she not be an ordinary
old woman living an ordinary old woman’s life?” (85). But he is also “proud” of
her and is ready to “protect her as long as he is able” (7).
Costello reappears in Slow Man, the saga of Paul Rayment — a professional
Australian photographer of French lineage in his sixties, living on his own as a
divorcee. One can understand what Philibert calls the “social isolation” of the
aged in Paul’s case. An unfortunate accident makes him feel the onslaught of both
age and disability. The doctors would have chosen “reconstruction” in a younger
person but considering his old age they amputate the leg above the knee and
advise him to have prosthesis. Before the crucial accident he appears a self-
sufficient male member of the society who keeps himself absorbed in multiple
chores: he visits library and cinema, cooks even bakes his own bread; instead of
having a car he rides bicycle or walks. He is strong and good looking “the kind of
man who might last into his nineties, eccentricities and all” (25). The accident
makes him succumb to a “circumscribed life” and he wants to commit suicide.
His former self-image departs: “Frail care. Care of the frail. He had never thought
of himself as frail until he saw the X-rays” (17), though he knows that his city
Adelaide would offer enough support to “the frail aged”. Sandberg opines that
descriptions of the ageing body as a frail, leaky and unbounded body and
assertions that old age is characterised by non-productivity, increasing passivity
and dependency clearly parallel the characterisations of female bodies and
femininity in the discourses of old age. And the buzzwords of successful ageing,
such as autonomy, activity, productivity and control over one’s health and body
clearly parallel conceptualisations of masculinity (14).
Before the mishap Paul appears to follow the verdict of ‘successful aging’
which requires maintenance of the activities popular among the middle-aged
privileged with money and leisure time. Staying or appearing fit is highly valued
social capital. In this sense, successful aging means not aging, or being and

looking ‘old’. The body becomes central to identity and to aging, and the
maintenance of youthful appearance becomes a lifelong project that requires
increasing levels of work (Calasanti et al. 15). In the hospital, a man older than
Paul is moved into his room. He thinks that both of them are “Two oldsters; two
old fellows in the same boat” (12). The doctors and nurses are young and kind but
Paul senses indifference as if they think that the old people have nothing left to
give to the tribe and therefore do not count. Sarah Lamb opines that the image of
healthy, successful aging appears appealing to many North Americans as well as
to many around the globe, especially to those who envision themselves having the
physical, financial and mental means to pursue lifelong health and activity. Yet
she asks crucially:
…does the currently prevailing successful aging model overemphasize
independence, prolonging life, and declining to decline at the expense of
coming to meaningful terms with late-life changes, situations of
(inter)dependence, possibilities of frailty, and the condition of human
transience? — setting up for “failure,” embarrassment, or loss of social
personhood those who face inevitable bodily or cognitive impairments
and impending mortality? (42)
Marijana Jokić, Paul’s new nurse treats him “not as a doddering old fool”
but as a man who has lost freedom of movement because of injury (28). He
thinks that she puts him among “the old whom there is no point of saving” and
wonders where “would she put herself: among the young? the not-old? the
neither young nor old? the never-to-be-old?” (29). He falls in love with her and
feels embarrassed as a diminished old man on crutches. He has no children and
in his old age, his childlessness worries him. He imagines having children with
her and feels jealous of her husband. He is very fond of her sixteen years old son
Drago who receives a motorcycle as birthday gift from his father and hangs out
with friends racing and practicing skids. When Marijana asks Paul to advise
Drago, he speaks of the youngsters’ love of speed and adventure: “He is testing
himself. You cannot stop young men from exploring their limits. They want to be
the fastest. They want to be the strongest. They want to be admired” (41). During
Drago’s stay with Paul, he helps him out as Paul pees in pyjamas. Both Marijana
and Drago accept the body with a ‘matter-of-fact’ approach whereas Paul
sentimentalizes and is not ready to accept the change. The Jokić family builds for
him a recumbent bicycle; though he feels grateful, he does not ride it. Elizabeth
Costello thinks of him too “fastidious” to have a sense of humour. She tries to
help him to come in terms with reality. Though he has lost a leg and ambulating
is difficult, she reminds him that “after a certain age we have all lost a leg, more
or less. Your missing leg is just a sign or symbol or symptom . . . of growing old,
old and uninteresting” (229).
In the case of the aging selves of the Magistrate, David and Paul, one senses
the view that our standard constructions of old age contain little that is positive.
Fear of and disgust with growing old are widespread; people stigmatize it and
associate it with personal failure, with ‘letting yourself go’ (Calasanti et al. 15).
Both Magda and Susan feel more like what Gullette comments in “Against

268 Padumi Singha
‘Aging’” that bodies get “heavier” with stigma as people age past youth. On the
other hand, both Elizabeth Curren and Elizabeth Costello are projections of
elderly women in esteemed positions and they are privileged as white. However,
one understands the significance of Kathleen Woodward’s opinion about societal
bias against ‘the older female body’:
In our mass-mediated society, age and gender structure each other in a
complex set of reverberating feedback loops, conspiring to render the
older female body paradoxically both hypervisible and invisible. It
would seem that the wish of our visual culture is to erase the older
female body from view. (163)
Hannah Zeilig makes a significant observation that insights from literature
are truly helpful if the author and her/his work are contextualized properly, when
their depiction and representations of age are interrogated rather than accepted
and when they are understood as one in a number of cultural discourses (29).
One can never disregard the ethico-political dimension of ageism in Coetzeean
fiction. Antoinette Elisabeth Pretorius comments that Coetzee leads us to “an
understanding of the ageing body and subjectivity mediated by a focused
representation of an inescapable ethical duty to the Other” (34). While projecting
old age in the works, Coetzee is very concerned about the psycho-somatic aspects
of the aged while being critical of the societal and cultural prejudices. With much
consideration Coetzee has represented in his fiction the stories of joys and pains
of the elderly people who are often socially or culturally ‘othered’. It may be a
major reason for which considerable effort has been expended in attempts to
understand the social realities of aging through literature (Hendricks and
Leedham 203).
Works Cited :
Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-Face with Time,
Viking, 2015.
Calasanti, Toni, et al. “Ageism and Feminism: From ‘Et Cetera’ to Center.” NWSA
Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 13-30. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/4317183.
Coetzee, John Maxwell. In the Heart of the Country. Vintage Books, 2004.
---. Waiting for the Barbarians. Vintage Books, 2004.
---. Foe. Penguin Books, 2010.
---. Age of Iron. Penguin Books, 2010.
---. Disgrace. Secker & Warburg, 1999.
---. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. Vintage Books, 2004.
---. Slow Man. Vintage Books, 2006.
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. “Aged by Culture.” Routledge Handbook of
Cultural Gerontology edited by Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin, 2015,

pp. 21-28. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/

9780203097090.ch3.
---. “Against ‘Aging’ – How to Talk about Growing Older.” Theory, Culture &
Society, Dec. 21, 2017, https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/margaret-
morganroth-gullette-aging-talk-growing-older/.
Hendricks, Jon and Cynthia A. Leedham. “Making Sense of Literary
Aging:Relevance of Recent Gerontological Theory.”Journal of Aging
Studies, vol. 1, No. 2, 1987, pp. 187-208.
Kunow, Rüdiger. “Postcolonial theory and old age: An explorative essay”, Journal
of Aging Studies, 2016, pp. 1-8, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.jaging.2016.06.004.
Lamb, Sarah. “Permanent personhood or meaningful decline? Toward a critical
anthropology of successful aging.” Journal of Aging Studies, vol. 29,
April 2014, pp. 41-52, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2013.12.006.
Marshall, Leni. “Aging: A Feminist Issue.” NWSA Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, Spring
2006, pp. vii-xiii. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4317180.
---.“Constructing the Body of Age Studies”, Age Becomes Us: Bodies and Gender
in Time, State University of New York Press, 2015, pp. 1-20.
Philibert, Michel et al. “Social Indicators Concerning The Aged — Their
Construction And Use.” Division of Socio-economic Analysis, Unesco,
Paris, 30 Dec. 1982.
Sontag,Susan. “The Double Standard of Aging.” Sunday Review of The Society,
Sept. 23, 1972, pp. 29-38.
Pretorius, Antoinette Elisabeth. ‘To eke out the vocabulary of old age’: Literary
Representations of Ageing in Transitional and Post-transitional South
Africa. D. Litt. Thesis, University of Pretoria, Sept. 2014.
Sandberg, Linn. “Affirmative old age — the ageing body and feminist theories on
difference.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 2013, vol. 8,
no. 1, pp. 11-40, doi:10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.12197.
Wallace, Diana. “Literary portrayals of ageing.” An Introduction to Gerontology,
edited by Ian Stuart-Hamilton, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 389–415.
doi:10.1017/cbo9780511973697.014.
Woodward, Kathleen. “Performing Age, Performing Gender.” NWSA Journal,
vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 162-189. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/
stable/4317191.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. “The Coming of Age of Literary Gerontology.” Journal of
Aging Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 1990, pp. 299-315.
Zeilig, Hannah. “The critical use of narrative and literature in gerontology.”
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, vol. 6, no. 2, 2011, pp. 7-
37. https://www.ep.liu.se/ej/ijal/2011/v6/i2/a02/ijal11v6i2a02.pdf.

pp. 270-286
MISSIONARY ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE

MANUFACTURING OF DESIRE IN
NORTH-EAST INDIA
Hamari Jamatia
Abstract
The paper focuses on the missionary ethnography of North-East India in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and how it constructed
native cultures as units that could be dismantled and rebuilt through the
cultivation of new desires. Missionary ethnography hinged on the idea
that a careful conditioning of the impulses surrounding ‘desire’ could
ensure that education, cleanliness and scientific outlook appear to be
viable alternatives to the indigenous ‘heathen’ culture. Colonial forces,
in this case the missionaries, became conduit for the normalization of
Christian values that would ultimately manifest itself in the behavioral
pattern of the newly converted ‘civilized’ natives. To this end, the paper
highlights two related notions of uncivilized behavior that deeply
concerned the missionaries—violence and the occult among the natives
to delve into how ethnography changed their configuration among the
Christianized population of the North-East. The paper does a reading of
a few select ethnographic narratives by the American Baptist
missionaries who were posted at various stations such as Guwahati,
Naga Hills and Garo Hills.
Keywords : Missionary ethnography, myth of boundless desire,
heathen, civilized behavior, education, governance.
Introduction
The memoir, A Corner in India (1907), by missionary wife Mary Mead
Clark, begins with a scene of struggle between a tranquil missionary domesticity
and its trespassing by native hill men. While living temporarily in Sibsagor,
Assam, she describes how a group of Ao Naga men had appeared at the mission
bungalow one day and had tried to forcefully sell her a goat that they had brought
along. Mrs. Clark recalls that despite her repeated vocal refusals, “these strange,
uncivilised men down from their mountain fastness, still persisted in dragging up
the steps of the veranda of our bungalow, a large, long and horned hill goat
hoping to receive from us double or quadruple its value” (Clark, 1). Even though
this was her first time meeting members of the Naga tribe, Mrs. Clark echoes the
colonial sentiments passed down from missionary to missionary reserved for

Missionary Ethnography and the Manufacturing o f… 271
people from the hills—that the tribals did not possess the refinement of the
Westerners in their mannerisms as evidenced in their lack of respect for the
missionary’s privacy. Mrs. Clark elaborates, “Thus was I introduced to these
stalwart, robust warriors, dressed mostly in war medals, each man grasping his
spear shaft decorated with goat’s hair, dyed red and yellow, and also fringed with
the long black hair of a woman, telling the story of bloody deeds…dubbed by the
Assamese ‘head cutters’” (1). Mrs. Clark’s description of the Nagas sets off the
tone for the rest of her memoir where she studies the tribe in their appearance,
lifestyle, and beliefs as part of the missionary ethnographic archive.
Soon after being introduced to the Nagas at Sibsagor, Mr. and Mrs. Clark
journey to the Naga Hills and set up a mission village called Molung where they
spend their years building the foundation of a strong church. In the early years, it
was upon the Clarks to visit natives’ homes and persuade the people to accept
their doctrine. The role-reversal is, however, lost on Mrs. Clark who sets out to
work among the people with the purpose of changing them while strictly trying to
remain immune to any similar counter effect. Mary Mead Clark’s memoir records
her experiences among the Ao Nagas where the American Baptist Mission
became a success story of proselytization and modernity. In her work she
describes her first encounter with the Naga natives and narrates the latter’s
subsequent journey from a state of barbarity to a state of civility. In doing so, the
memoir becomes an ethnographic study of the Nagas by taking a close look at
their lives in their natural habitat. She describes their homes, agriculture, travel,
hunting expeditions, weddings and death rituals.
The Clarks joined the rest of the mission workers who had arrived before
them, in targeting the indigenous life on the basis of its cruelty, superstitions,
filth, violence and polygamy. The missionaries inferred the inferior “nature” of
the indigenous population by observing the conduct of the individuals and groups
and by noting the various ways in which the tribal men and women failed to live
up to the standards of what they touted to be their own superior missionary
civilization. This comparison and the resultant evangelical preaching led to a
reform movement that brought about rapid drastic changes in lifestyle of the
natives. These changes manifested themselves in a rise in literacy, a new taste for
cleanliness, and an abstinence from heathen rituals.
The paper argues that missionary ethnography, in this case, that of the
American Baptist Mission, coaxed and sustained the discourse that its object—the
savage natives—formed a society that could be dismantled and rebuilt using
modern management tools. This construction of culture around colonized
subjects hinged on the idea of human ‘desire’ as a central force that can be shaped
and designed in such a way that a community can be persuaded into reform. The
essay understands “desire” as a strong inclination towards certain ideology, self-
image and symbolism that ultimately dictates the conduct of the individual and
the community. This understanding emerges from the works of Michel Foucault
who defines desire as the primary mechanism that determines the action of the
individual/population. Foucault defines desire as “the pursuit of the individual’s

272 Hamari Jamatia
interest”, claiming that every individual “acts out of desire” (101). He adds that
this desire, which appears to very natural, is open to certain mechanisms of
power through which it can be moulded and shaped. In missionary ethnographic
realism, one can observe that a careful conditioning of the impulses surrounding
‘desire’ ensured that education, cleanliness and scientific outlook appeared to be
viable alternatives to the indigenous culture portrayed as illiterate, wild and
barbaric. Colonial forces, in this case the missionaries, became conduit for the
normalization of these values that would ultimately manifest itself in the
behavioral pattern of the natives as good Christians.
To achieve this objective, the missionaries targeted the symbolism of tribal
rituals, and redefined the concepts of masculinity, femininity, and respectability
among the new covert communities. Through the very act of recording the culture
of the tribes of North-East, the missionaries sustained a discourse that validated
their need to introduce the civilizing project by comparing themselves to the
‘other’ or the tribals who they deemed inferior. In other words, ethnography
provided the platform where the missionaries could study their own self-image
against that of the tribes and encourage the othering of the native cultures. In this
essay, I highlight two related notions of uncivilized behavior that deeply
concerned the missionaries—violence and the occult among the natives to delve
into how ethnography changed their configuration among the new population of
the North-East.
The paper focuses on selected works of American Baptist Mission workers
stationed in parts of North-East India. Apart from A Corner in India, this paper
shall study A Garo Jungle Book (1919) by missionary William Carey and The
Whole World Kin (1890), a collection of papers and letters by Nathan Brown and
wife Eliza Brown, the first missionary couple to Assam. In addition, a few
excerpts from Assam Mission, a collection of papers presented by missionaries at
the Baptist Mission Jubilee Conference in 1886 have also been included.
The Missionary as Ethnographer

The missionaries’ purpose of living in colonized lands was to convert the
population. But, conversion first required knowing the people one was tasked to
work among. This meant that missionaries had to routinely engage with and
observe the different peoples of the area. Thus, American missionaries working in
North-East India, much like the missionaries in the rest of the world exhibited an
ardent engagement with ethnographic study. They spent many years and decades
living in close proximity with the natives and undertook a close study of their
lives. They attended weddings, visited the sick, and witnessed harvest and burial
ceremonies as viewers. Annette Rosenstiel, in an essay, argues that the
missionaries were the first individuals to take a scientific approach to
ethnography and establish it as a discipline. By scientific approach, she meant
that the missionaries converted the study of cultures into a discipline in which
they judiciously kept a record of their observations and drew inferences that

would help them establish a church among the new people. The missionaries also
learnt the native language, published their findings and indulged in ‘participant
observation’ technique in which they partook of the cultural activities under
study. Rosentiel opines that some missionaries such as William Carey1, also
promoted non-ethnocentrism. She quotes Carey as writing: “The missionaries
must try to understand their (the natives’) moods of thinking, their habits, their
propensities, their antipathies, etc. This knowledge may be easily obtained by
reading some part of their works, and by attentively observing their manners and
customs” (108). According to Rosential, Carey emphasized the importance of the
missionary being “one of the companions and equals of the people to whom he is
sent” (108). In other words, the missionary ought to display the spirit of
egalitarianism that the missions were originally established for.
Yet, despite Rosentiel’s insistence that missionaries were instructed to treat
the natives as equals, there seems to be a marked difference between theory and
practice. Missionaries arriving to the North-East felt no affinity towards the
“animists” who they deemed to be peoples without history, culture and literacy.
Nathan Brown, the first American Baptist missionary to reach Assam describes
the Singpho tribe thus: “They seem to be perfect savages, entirely in the state of
nature, having no books, and are even without a written character to express
their own language” (118). He had earlier referred to savages of India as similar to
those of Burma, “There are the Singphos, the Miris, the Mishmis, the Abors, the
Nagas and other savage tribes, some of whom are in a state very similar to the
Karens, and have no written language or books. Here is the spot for missionaries
to go in, and sow the seed of life” (111). In his writings, Nathan Brown established
himself as an agent for the nineteenth century civilizing mission that would go on
to teach the natives how to lead a civilized life. Other missionaries such as A. K.
Gurney, who was in-charge of Sibsagor field in the 70s and 80s maintained that
there will always be a hierarchy between them and the natives. He states:
Our modes of life, habits and thoughts are different from those of the
native Christian. There is a great gulf between them and us. Our position
is much above them. We cannot avoid this. We cannot bring ourselves
down to them or lift them up to us… The missionary in education and
knowledge is far above his native brother, and he belongs to the
conquering race, the English and Americans being all the same to a
native…. The missionary is so great in the eyes of his native brother, and
the latter feels so inferior in knowledge and wisdom that he does not feel
like taking the lead when the missionary is near but instinctively waits
for him. (Assam Mission 119)
The reflection by Mr. Gurney exposes some of the ambivalence associated
with missionaries as ethnographers. The writers recorded natives’ cultures from a
vantage point of view and could not help having a condescending attitude
towards it. They seem to solidify the understanding of ethnography as an
“invention” of cultures where one’s own identity dictated the interpretations of
alien societies. Roy Wagner in his analysis of culture writes that in some way, an
ethnographer “invents” the culture he works with as he “finds new potentialities

274 Hamari Jamatia
and possibilities for the living of life” (13-14). Here, “invention” does not mean
that the culture did not exist prior to the ethnographer’s arrival, but that it is
made “visible” by the ethnographer’s focus on its “distinctiveness” that marks it
as similar or different to his own culture. Wagner declares that what the
ethnographer sees as unique about different culture stems from his “use of
meanings known to him in constructing an understandable representation of his
subject” (16). In short, culture is studied through culture. Wagner briefly adds
that the difference between a missionary ethnographer and a secular
ethnographer falls in the realm of “relative objectivity.” The anthropologist,
inspite of his cultural background, is supposed to “adjust” to foreign cultures and
study it objectively whereas a missionary is understood to use his bafflement to
view anything native as “cussedness and slovenliness, thus reinforcing their own
elitist self-images” (16). In other words, a missionary fails to look at native
culture beyond the trappings of his own culture.
It is no surprise then that twentieth century post-colonial critics have been
critical of ethnography and have accused missionaries of acting as catalysts for
colonization. According to James Buzard, the notion of culture has been criticized
for being an “essential tool for making other,” in which a line is drawn between
the civilized and the uncivilized where the latter is seen as an appropriate subject
for cultural intervention (3). Culture divided the native population into “readily
governable thought packets” that came handy in their “control and regulation”
(4). The study of culture, therefore, became an imperial project to make the
otherwise “barbaric” people easier to govern.
Ethnography in the Nineteenth Century

In addition to James Buzard, the paper derives much of its understanding
of ethnography from the works of Christopher Herbert who has analyzed the way
nineteenth century developed and treated the concept of culture. Herbert in
Culture and Anomie (1991) writes that ethnography as a disciple for the study of
culture had just begun to become more distinct as a field of enquiry in the 1860s.
This was due to the colonization of Polynesian countries which created a need for
the study of the new populations that had come under the Victorian sovereign’s
control. British bureaucrats and anthropologists began to take an interest in the
lives and beliefs of the natives’ they were administrating. By developing
ethnography as a discipline, the colonizers presented foreign cultures in a state of
distress that required reform. According to Herbert, the earliest ethnographers
noticed that colonized societies were “inferior” in stature as they did not have the
refinement that the British middle class exhibited. The Polynesian society was
seen as a system of “excess” in which basic human passions were left unregulated.
Under the colonial eyes, this perceived exhibition of unbridled senses was seen a
symbol of depravity. Herbert argues that the nascent discipline of ethnography
hinged on the consciousness that the way a society treated “desire” determined
its position in the evolutionary graph of humankind. This meant that colonized
societies, with their display of unbridled passions, were inferior to the British

society that had learnt to cultivate a restraint or a control on desire, thereby

marking itself as a superior civilization.
Herbert goes on to elaborate that this importance of “desire” as a marker of
inferior and superior civilization had its inception during the evangelical revival
movement that had engulfed Britain between eighteenth and nineteenth century.
Under the leadership of Methodist John Wesley, the reform movement created
and sustained the belief that the nature of man when left unregulated can prove
dangerous. John Wesley asserted that all men were born carrying the symbols of
the original sin in which Adam and Eve fell from God’s grace as a result of their
lack of control over their desires. Thus, man in his natural state exhibited “the
image of the beast, in sensual appetites and desire” (31). Wesley’s “mythology of
sin” became the basis on which the fetishes of “self-control, discipline, work,
‘purity,’ resignation, self-abnegation” (32) were built in the Victorian culture
under the insistence that desires had to be kept under constant scrutiny. This
understanding led to the escalation of desire into a moral category in which
man’s morality could be gauged through his ability to suppress the beast within.
Hence, with the spread of the imagery of man as inherently fallen, the evangelist
divided his nature as a “figurative imagery” into the twin category of sin and
salvation. What made the situation incongruous was that while religion required
docility, it also required an “intense cultivation of desires” (35) in the form of
passionate worship rituals. Herbert writes that desire, both encouraged and
forbidden, “must have generated as a result no small quotient of tension and
ambivalence” (35). Nevertheless, by inculcating the suppression of desires as a
necessary precursor to any respectable civilization, the evangelical revival created
a discourse for evolutionary ethnography in which the Victorian society, with its
overarching focus on self-repression, became the epitome of refined culture.
Herbert, therefore, argues that society orchestrated the formation of culture by
controlling desire impulses among individuals and groups. He writes that society
does not serve as “an expression of immanent natural, divine, or semiological
order”, but functions as “an artificial restraint imposed by necessity upon volatile,
uncontrollably self-multiplying individual impulses and desires which in a state
of unimpaired freedom, could any such state exist, would act without limit” (35).
In other words, the formation of culture simulates the construction of individuals
and exhibits itself in the form of their conduct by dictating and moulding their
desire. Superior civilizations claimed to function under “social restraint” in which
individuals who exhibited a heightened sense of self-control became elevated in
comparison to the beasts of the wild, which in ethnography referred to colonized
societies with their display of unbridled natural impulses.
It was therefore discovered that human conduct, both Victorian and
colonized, must not be left to its natural devices but can be and should be shaped
through external social forces. Herbert writes, “…human desire by its very nature
is keyed to the constitutive principles of a society and acts not to disrupt but,
inescapably, to express and to reinforce them” (40). Controlling desire meant
conduct had to be governed at every stage. Yet, control did not have to be

276 Hamari Jamatia
oppressive or disruptive; rather it worked and still works under the guise of
individual freedom or liberty to conform to such laws. “In order for desire to exist
in any coherent, active, and potentially satisfiable form, it must embed itself in a
fully social matrix, which is to say, become directed towards objects
conventionally defined and symbolically coded as desirable by human society”
(50). According to Herbert, culture is not a form of control, but a “system of
desire” in which aspirations are already predetermined by the society.
“The myth of boundless desire”

With Victorian society touting itself as a superior civilization, the
evangelical belief in man’s fallibility or original sin found its new location among
the colonized societies. Herbert, who calls it the “myth of boundless desire,”
writes that colonization created a circumstance where the colonizers began to
derive their own cultural identity through the study and evaluation of foreign
societies. Learning about the cultures of different societies and portraying them
as a system of excess became a way of establishing themselves as just the
opposite. Missionaries in their travels to Polynesia, Africa and India found ample
evidence of heathen immorality shaped by the latter’s “uncontrolled following of
immediate desires” (Herbert 60). Ethnography as a discipline began to create and
sustain the Victorian image of the native as an “uneducated savage” prone to
“anarchy” and “selfish restlessness” (62). This gaze continued to permeate across
all aspects of native culture, from their traditional way of dressing to the
maintenance of their homes to their rituals of death.
In their study of native culture, American missionaries too shared the
concept of the British civilizing mission where the native ‘culture’ was denigrated
for its exhibition of uncontrolled desires. The first generation of missionaries to
the North-East equated native life with lawlessness, laziness, unnecessary
violence and superstitions that marked them in need of a civilizing mission. The
nineteenth century protestant thought operated under the belief that “civilizing
and Christianizing” were the two sides of the same coin and that one must invest
in education and civilization before one can effectively implement evangelism
(Hutchison 65). William R. Hutchison writes that the American Mission was
inspired by the Puritan phrase “errand into the wilderness” that suggested a
“heightened activism—the actual transporting of a message and witness to the
unknown, possibly fearsome and uncivilized places” (5). In other words, the
American Mission, primarily under the American Board of Commissioners of
Foreign Missions (ABCFM), established in 1810, shared a common ideal with its
European counterparts and saw civilizing missions as a pressing requirement in
the face of imperialism in which the “white man’s civilization would inevitably
superseded that of the less developed cultures,” (64) and even destroy it.
“Errand into the wilderness” also consolidated the image of colonized
societies as savage and simplified the missionaries’ claim that in comparison,
they themselves were organized, hard-working, peaceful and reasonable. William

Carey, the writer of A Garo Jungle Book highlighted that among the tribe that he
worked with, “the fiercest passions held sway” (6) that led them to commit
terrible bloody deeds. They consistently sustained the images of savagery,
barbarity and a dependence on occult to drive home the point that the natives
had not yet found the right way to live.And yet, much like Herbert’s Victorian
conceptions of desire, the American missionaries too, espoused ambivalence
towards its treatment. Whereas they saw native desires as vulgar and uncivilized,
their own desire to work among the newly colonized areas was seen as divine
providence. Also, the missionaries claimed to know the difference between two
sets of desires—those that need controlling and those that need to be fulfilled.
This understanding is evoked in a letter that Mrs. Brown, the first female
American missionary in Assam, wrote to her sister in America, where she says
she is torn between two desires.
I sometimes have an unconquerable desire to see my friends once more
before I die. But the Lord has been gracious to me; I should be very
ungrateful to speak of trials and sufferings without at the same time
acknowledging the goodness of the kind Hand that has so often given me
support, and at times such sweet peace and consolation. As much as I
desire to see you once more, I have no settled wish to give up laboring in
the missionary field and return. (150)
Missionary thought encouraged desire for proselytization but at the same
time demanded controlling other desires that would come in the way of fulfilling
their mission. The missionaries lived under trying circumstances without modern
amenities and support, and lost a number of lives to sudden diseases. Yet, their
desire to spread Christianity made them persevere in the plains and hills of
North-East, unwilling to surrender to the natives or the environment. The
morality of desire, therefore, depended on the subject of its impulse. In this
scheme of things, native desires were seen as dangerous and immoral as it
promoted savagery and superstition, whereas missionary desire was seen as
divine. Therefore, Mrs. Brown found great happiness in noticing that after their
arrival, there developed a curiosity for learning among the people: “There is a
rapidly increasing desire among all classes, to learn to read; and we learn from
many quarters, that a spirit of inquiry concerning this new religion exists among
the people” (Brown, 223). The native desire for knowledge is encouraged as it is
seen as a positive impulse that will lead people to read the Bible and be
persuaded to reform. This desire is also seen as a tool that will counter their
ignorance and teach them the Christian way of life.
North-East and Culture

The use of “North-East” in this essay refers to the way the landmass with its
seven states – Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland,
Tripura, Meghalaya – has come to be recognized as a post-colonial political
terminology. In thenineteenth-century, when maps were fluid, much of the area
we understand as “North-East” was clubbed with the Assam province. Today,

278 Hamari Jamatia
when the state boundaries have been drawn and earmarked, my primary texts are
located in the three states where American Baptist missionary activities were
rapidly established—Assam, Nagaland and Meghalaya. The term “North-East”
does not do justice to the heterogeneity of the land and its peoples. There are
multiple problems in clubbing seven unique states together as if they are mirror-
copies of one another. Yet, I seek to use the nomenclature “North-East” as a
matter of convenience as well as part-acceptance of the way the region has come
to be identified since the advent of colonial modernity.
American missionary writings seldom recognized the native lifestyle and
ideology as constituting a well-defined culture, choosing instead to define them
as “habits” and “customs” of the hill tribes. The missionaries repeatedly termed
the natives ‘wild’ and ‘savage’ to highlight the fact that these people lived in a
state of nature subsisting on primitive tools and practices. Indeed, several times
in their works, the Garos and Nagas are likened to monkeys due to their flair for
living in the ‘jungle lair,’ climbing trees and disappearing among the foliage at
will.2 The corresponding ethnography resorted to describing the natives under
such titles as “The savage at home” (Clark 40), “The savage in costume and at
work,” (49) “Savage worship and strange legends,” (57) thereby stripping them of
any respectable civilization. The disdain for local cultures exposed the
missionaries’ refusal to recognize the existence of multiple cultures around the
world. In this regard, James Buzard in his analysis of nineteenth century
ethnography has highlighted the lacuna of the earliest ethnographers in
identifying local cultures as “the wholeness of a particular people’s way of life”
(5). Instead, the discipline fixated itself with a single yardstick “for judging the
development of human faculties” (5) based on the European model of civilization.
Writing in the context of Victorian ethnography, Buzard notes that anthropology
favoured a narrative in which “the evolution of human social forms and
technologies, was committed to dealing with levels of human Culture— frequently
written with a capital C—from primitive to advanced, and not with separate,
relatively autonomous ‘cultures,’ differently evolved under different
environmental conditions” (6). In other words, it was believed that there was only
one culture—exemplified by the British society—and different societies marked a
different stage of civilization, with primitive populations at the bottom of the
pyramid and the British at the helm.
Through frequent labeling of colonized societies as “savage” and “wild,” the
American missionaries, too, subscribed to the concept of evolutionary
anthropology in which they believed in the hierarchies of civilization. The study
of local cultures served to strengthen the conviction that the natives required a
guiding hand to pull them out of centuries of darkness. The missionaries sought
to find inspiration in some of their successful experiences among the American
aboriginals where Christianity had made a marked difference. They found
similarities between the hill tribes of North-East India and the North American
Indians in their fetish surrounding the human skull and the human scalp
respectively. They believed that just as Christianity had succeeded in reforming

some sections of American Indians, it would achieve an identical accomplishment

among the people of North-East. In addition, it strengthened the conviction that
certain management tools at the dispensation of missionaries were capable of
coaxing heathens into embracing new desires. The flexibility of desire, therefore,
became the grounds on which the battle of Christ and culture was fought.
Violence and the Occult Among the Natives

In order for the missionaries to modify the state of the natives, they needed
to first break it down into multiple units. Among the tribes of North-East India,
this translated into an intense engagement with two concepts that came under
constant attack as motifs of their apparent savagery—that of the tribes’ violent
temperament and that of the race’s dependence on the occult.As soon as they
arrived to the North-East, the missionaries noted that the Nagas and the Garos
exhibited a tendency to resort to violence in dealing with everyday situations,
unlike those of the peaceful population of the contiguous Bengal. Their narratives
therefore portrayed the two “savage tribes” as operating within a cycle of
lawlessness and barbarism in which they mostly stayed hidden in the inaccessible
hilly ranges only to appear in the plains to raid the villages or to trade in the
markets at the foothills. During the raids, the raiding team would attack a hamlet
and carry back “cattle, goats and dogs and not infrequently a much prized human
head,” (Clark, 116) writes Mrs. Clark. The American mission harked on to this
image of the natives as head-hunters in most of their ethnographic writings. They
detailed the manner in which this ritual was part of the native identity and how
the hill villages had homes that displayed skulls as decorative items. To the
missionaries, head-hunting became a demonstration of the backwardness of hill
people and a threat to the other, more civilized communities of British India.
Other exemplars of the violent disposition of the hill tribes included the penchant
for animal sacrifices at every chance, and bloody feuds among personal enemies
that ended in murderous rages.
As for the importance of occult in their lives, William Carey in a chapter
titled “The Wild Men at Home,” writes that superstitions guided the behavior of
the locals at each step:
No journey can be taken unless the fates are propitious, no war engaged
in without a sacrifice, no land cleared for cultivation without impaling a
monkey or a goat, no marriage solemnized, or birth celebrated, or
sickness tended, no experience of the coming of death to take away its
victim, without the shedding of blood. (23)
Both acts of head-hunting and the occult happened amidst uncontrolled
drinking habits. Mrs. Clark and William Carey were intensely critical of the use of
intoxicants among the Nagas and Garos in which every festival and every feast
mandatorily included animal sacrifice and a free-flow of alcohol. Carey recalls,
“When in liquor the Garos are merry to the highest pitch; men, women, and
children dancing until they can scarcely stand. A birth, a marriage, a death, the

280 Hamari Jamatia
opening of a market, the sitting of a council, the trial of a delinquent, almost any
and every event serves as an occasion for feasting and an excuse for drink” (9).
For missionaries and British bureaucrats, this unrestraint merriment and
violence pushed the boundaries of native conduct towards immorality with one
missionary in Assam Mission declaring, “The Garos are ruined by sin” (67). Here,
one can see the “invention” of culture playing out between the missionary-as-
ethnographer and his/her interpretation of native lifestyle. Through his/her
writing, the ethnographer makes “visible” certain traits of the Nagas and Garos
that to him/her appear distinctive due to its shock value. By contrast, the
missionary sees his/her own culture as exemplar of peace and love and believes
that by displaying patience and suffering, he would inspire the locals into
imitating the same.
In Assam Mission, for instance, Mr. Mason while presenting his paper
titled “Methods of Mission Work” urges other missionaries to conduct themselves
in “a Christ-like love” (Assam Mission 102) so that the converts learn from their
teachers how to augment their spiritual life. Some pages later, Mr. W. E. Witter
calls on the missionaries to be “living examples of the Word….to exemplify God’s
love for the Assamese, Garos, and Nagas by our separateness from sin and our
patience with ‘the unthankful and the evil’” (Assam Mission 153). The American
missionaries identified native life as synonymous with sin and evil with no room
for subtleties. Such a stance highlighted their own role as accomplices in
establishing a British government in the North-East. Their ethnography
reinforced and supported the official narrative that natives were “incorrigible
savages,” making it convenient for the British to annex all hill territories to
maintain peace and order.
The bureaucrats and the missionaries were in consonance that long-lasting
peace would only come with cultural reformation, that is, if the wild desires of the
savages are curbed through a culture of restraint. To this end, the government
sought the help of missionaries in silencing dissent. E. G. Philips notes,
“Government has not been slow to see, as the Chief Commissioner put it in his
Resolution on the Educational Report for Assam of 1881-82, that ‘it is difficult to
convince a Garo or a Khasia…of the advantage of learning. The only lever that has
been found effective is that of religion’” (Assam Mission 67-68). Hence, the
government handed over the management of schools entirely to the missionaries
in the hopes that they would be able to tame the savages. The Christian religion
was seen as a tool that would modify the conduct of its converts by dismantling
its dependence on violence and occult.
Towards a New Symbolic Order

Clifford Geertz writes that culture functions within the gambit of semiotics
where conduct is dictated by the meaning it produces. He argues that culture is
not “an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of
meaning” (5). To produce this meaning requires that members of a community be

aware of the relationship between action and its many interpretations. Geertz
explains his idea by citing the difference between a “wink” and a “twitch,” both of
which are “identical movements” but which have vastly different connotations. A
“wink” as a conduct is an act of communication “in a quite precise and special
way,” in which there is a signifier, a sign and a recipient who is part of “an already
understood code.” A twitch, on the other hand has no secondary function.
Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in
which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking. That’s all
there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, and voila!—a
gesture. (6)
Human behavior is therefore a “symbolic action” which is shared by
members of his community so that communication can take place, and while
“winking” is one of the simpler examples of it, any culture is a cauldron of “texts”
that constitute “webs of significance.” Thus Geertz sums up culture as “a
historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of
inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people
communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes
towards life” (89). Human actions, therefore, create meanings that can be
understood by people sharing the same culture.
Keeping this in mind one can witness how an action creates two different
interpretations for two sets of cultures. Head-hunting as an act is perceived as
barbaric and wild by the missionaries, but among the tribal communities
themselves, it served as a sign of masculinity. Mrs. Clark writes that as much as
the raids by Nagas contributed as an additional source of income, the act of
killing and taking the heads of the fallen enemies was linked with masculine pride
and played a catalyst in men-women relationships. “Men were dubbed women or
cows until they had contributed to the village skull-house. Young maidens
instigated their betrothed to this bloody work, and it was woman’s voice that
trilled the cry of victory when these prizes reeking in blood were brought into the
village,” (47) Mrs. Clark writes. A Naga man’s worth and a Naga village’s honor
were tied to the number of skulls that the community had managed to extract
from other settlements.
Similarly, among the Garos, head-hunting served to create bonhomie
among its different members as a form of group activity. In A Garo Jungle Book
Carey notes that that the Garos “won an evil reputation of murderous raids” and
routinely massacred the landholders of the plains for material gains. On their
return journey from a triumphant plunder, the tribesmen would collect the
“reeking heads; and filling these with wine and food, would eat, drink, and dance,
chanting songs of triumph” (Carey 11). Head-hunting, as a cultural behavior, was
symbolic of community prowess and therefore contributed to the social status of
these tribes as an inseparable part of their identity. Nonetheless, the British
government was critical of this activity and tried to ban it as early as 1822.

282 Hamari Jamatia
However, the practice continued undeterred for many decades till missionary
presence in the hills put a stop to it.
For missionaries to succeed in conduct management, they first had to
break the symbolic order associated with certain sinful desires that physically
manifested itself in the conduct. A telling instance of this is narrated in A Corner
in India where we witness a gradual shift in the factors that determined the
making of a desirable youth. It started with a native Assamese preacher—Zilli—
guiding the young men of Molung into embracing the Gospel. At first, only one
youth was attracted to the new religion. But, that single young man was soon able
to influence a friend and bring him to Christ. The following excerpt from a letter
by Mrs. Clark records how Christianity sowed its seeds in the new village:
A religious and social reform has been quietly going on at Molung,
beginning with a young man, who, strengthened by the Holy Spirit and
helped by Assamese teacher Zilli, laid hold of one of his companions,
and by persistent, prayerful effort brought him to Christ. Here were now
two promising young men, the pick of the village, educated in the school,
one, the son of our most influential village official, and the hearts of both
filled with the love of Jesus, and set for the defense of his kingdom and
social purity…. One after another of the young people were pressed into
the ranks, and the White Ribbon Society, without the name, or
buttonholes in which to wear the badge, grew in numbers and influence
and power. (138)
Some pages later, Mrs. Clark writes that these boys were members of the Training
School run by missionaries where they prepared “young men for pastors,
evangelists and day school teachers” Meanwhile, young women were trained “to
be suitable wives for such men” (148).
The above account of missionary activity among the Naga youth highlights
the fact that the manly pride associated with head-hunting was slowly replaced by
a pride in being Christian where embracing the new religion became synonymous
with literacy, rationality, and modernity. According to Mrs. Clark, the heathen
young men would spend their evenings “singing objectionable songs, telling
doubtful stories, and engaging in lewd conversation,” whereas the educated
young men who had built a separate dormitory could be heard praying and
singing songs of praise. In the latter accommodation “purity and holiness”
reigned, remarks Mrs. Clark, thus dividing actions into the categories of moral
and immoral in which the heathen populace, with its inability to control its
vulgarity became subordinate to the new Christian population that had begun to
curb their savage instincts.
Education and the Shifting of Desire

What we witness here is the struggle that took place in the domain of desire
and the creation of its hierarchies. When the missionaries had first arrived, the
natives’ “boundless” desire was seen as the root cause of their destitution.

Education was seen as an effective tool to curb the wild desires and channel them
towards more productive ones. Arkotong Longkumer in his analysis of
educational policies among the Nagas argues that the mission immediately
realized that if evangelism was to succeed, it had to first cultivate the minds of the
people. Thus, missionary Nathan Brown prepared the Report of the Committee
on Schools in 1853 to frame an education policy in which it suggested that schools
be established for the “‘training of future pastors and teachers’ and that only
Christians should be employed as teachers with Christian books and daily
observance of religious services” (Longkumer 3).
Longkumer adds that the ABFMS was channeled by the belief that
“prominence of the mind and the cultivation of reason” must precede any
attempt at conversion. The human mind “had to be shaped through an emphasis
on education, which would ‘eventually lead to the vindication of Christian
truth’” (3). Thus, American missionaries wasted no time in establishing schools
and enrolling native boys and girls. Soon enough, the results began to show in the
shape of young men and women who had begun to reflect upon the two cultures
under whose shadow they had grown up—their traditional heathen culture and
the western culture—and who now realized that they were more compatible with
the new Christian teachings. Hence, some of the first male pupils of missionary
schools were also its first converts.
In this context, missionary ethnography focused on narrating the stories of
a few converts who not only validated the mission’s self-image as an empowering
enterprise but they also became the taskforce for the spread of Christianity in the
interiors where the handful of white missionaries could not reach. In his work,
Carey narrates the life stories of two Garo converts—Ramkhe and Omed—who
journey from heathenism to becoming spiritual leaders and who become the
symbols of new Christian conduct in which they are able to differentiate between
desires that are forbidden and those that are encouraged. These two names
appear frequently in missionary history because of their enormous contribution
to the spread of Christianity. In order to add authenticity to the narrative, Carey
translated extracts from Ramkhe’s manuscript autobiography, written in Bengali
in 1886, to piece together the life and experiences of the convert who questioned
his heathen faith in the wake of socio-cultural changes around him.
Carey notes that both Omed and Ramkhe studied at Government secular
school in Goalpara, established in 1847, that “provided them with the equipment
and opportunity for discovering the truth. It opened their eyes and awakened
inquiry in their minds, and was part of the means by which they were taught of
God” (52). He further narrates that as boys of the jungle, Omed and Ramkhe
witnessed the preparation of more than one raid in which the elders of their
village returned home carrying “dripping load of heads” (53). It filled Ramkhe
with a particular fear of demons. After being schooled, however, a deeply
meditative Ramkhe began to question his long-held beliefs and fears and found
solace in Christianity. In his discussion with Omed they agreed that Christianity
“is good in every respect” (69).

284 Hamari Jamatia
After leaving their schools and later on their jobs as sepoys, Ramkhe and
Omed preached among their people of Garo Hills. They eventually set up two
Christian villages in which all motifs of heathenism and the occult were banned.
Omed’s hut was built on the foothills where he could preach to the groups of
people headed to the market. Carey notes that the hut was a “house of
prayer…There are no bamboos stuck around it sprinkled with blood. No priest of
the demons goes there to practice his magic spells. No drink is brewed. But there
is much reading of a sacred book that sounds good to hear, and much reverent yet
familiar speech with the Good Spirit, such as falls, even upon a wild man’s heart,
like a whisper of peace” (Carey 88). Furthermore, Omed grew a community of
followers who would venture into the Rongjuli market with him to preach the
shoppers about Christianity.
Omed’s story confirms the missionary belief that education could play an
instrumental role in countering savagery; that it could help a former heathen
distinguish between moral and immoral desires. Much like how the white
missionaries desired Christianity among the natives despite the dangers that
surrounded them, the newly educated converts, too, channeled their energy
towards the same object in the face of fierce resistance from members of their
tribe. Indeed, things escalated to the extent that Omed and his friends were
physically assaulted while they were preaching at a local marketplace. On hearing
about the attack, the British Deputy Commissioner, Captain Morton, visited the
market and warned all present that anyone who tries to harm the Christians
would be punished. This saved the Christians from further harassment.
Education and Christianization became a joint project shared by the British
officials and the American mission. The mission converted the hill people to
Christianity, making them easier to govern, and the British provided them
protection from prosecution, creating a group of workers who would either
become Christian teachers or take up a government job.
According to Longkumer, education also sowed the seeds for nationalism
among the different tribes of the North-East by giving them a common Roman
script. The missionaries rapidly learnt the local languages, prepared them in
Roman script and went about translating the Bible. At the same time, it taught
English at its schools so that the students could access the translations in their
own vernacular. Inspite of being a multi-lingual people, the Roman script was
common to all, as was English education. Longkumer writes, “Christian
conversion, education, and nationalism – was a vital centripetal force that
fostered an ‘imagined community’ that brought together disparate tribes under
two institutional centres: the school and the church” (9). He argues that sharing a
common script consolidated the different tribes and made way for the creation of
Naga identity that would later on culminate in a Naga nationalist movement.
The “myth of boundless desire” was an ethnographic creation that was used
to classify the world population into civilized and uncivilized. This myth rested
upon the belief that civilized populations of Europe and America had developed
self-control over their basic, animalistic, dangerous impulses whereas uncivilized

people of the colonies had not, thereby making the latter “wild” and “savage”. The
American civilizing mission declared itself an enterprise of “love and peace” and
attempted to develop self-control among the peoples of North-East so they would
rein in their impulses for violence and the occult. At the same time, the mission
promoted new desires that it believed were important to the spread, acceptance
and practice of Christianity—a desire for learning, a desire for peaceful
coexistence, a desire for a new religion, and a desire for a shared language. In
other words, the American Baptist Mission did not annihilate “desire” but
changed its course among the peoples of North-East. This understanding around
the concept of desire prompted and sustained the evangelical discourse and
helped give birth to a new population that was Christian in its beliefs and
conduct.
The converts had begun to dress modestly, had surrendered many of their
traditional rituals, and were rapidly becoming a literate community. The changes
were brought about by missionary ethnography’s discursive construction of a
native population that unfolded on two levels. At one level, it constructed the
‘heathen people’ who the missions sought to convert into Christianity. It paid
careful attention to record and disseminate detailed reports on social and
religious practices, which helped constitute the natives as heathen. On the other
level, it also constructed the ‘civilized people’ who were produced through the
evangelical labor of the missionaries.
Notes :
1 William Carey (1761-1864) was an English Baptist Minister who established the
Serampore College and the Serampore University in Bengal. He inspired the
founding of the Baptist Missionary Society in London. The American Mission held
him in high regard and dedicated the establishment of their organization to him. In
Sophie Bronson’s A Century of Baptist Foreign Mission, she describes Carey’s work
as the reason why missionary societies sprang up in New England, America
2 In A Corner in India, Mrs. Clark worries that Naga school-children are prone to
disappearing among the trees or the roof of some house at school time (8).
Alternately, Carey in A Garo Jungle Book writes that during their resistance against
the British, the Garos took to the trees like “like monkeys, still and invisible among
the leaves,” (49).
Works Cited :
Assam Mission: American Baptist Missionary Union Report. Calcutta: Baptist
Mission, 1899.
Annette, Rosenstiel, “Anthropology and the Missionary”, The Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 89,
No. 1 (Jan. - Jun., 1959), pp. 107-115

286 Hamari Jamatia
Brown, E. W. The Whole World Kin: A Pioneer Experience among Remote

Tribes and Other Labors of Nathan Brown. Hubbard Brothers, 1890.
Buzard, James. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of
Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Princeton UP, 2005.
Carey, William. A Garo Jungle Book; or, The Mission to the Garos of Assam.
Judson Press, 1919.
Clark, Mary Mead. A Corner in India.American Baptist Publication Society, 1907.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books,
1973.
Herbert, Christopher. Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the
Nineteenth Century. U of Chicago P, 1991.
Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and
Foreign Missions. U of Chicago P, 1993.
Longkumer, Arkotong. “‘Along Kingdom’s Highway’: the Proliferation of
Christianity, Education, and Print amongst the Nagas in Northeast
India.” Contemporary South Asia, vol. 27, no. 2, 2018, pp. 160–178.,
doi:10.1080/09584935.2018.1471041.
Wagner, Roy. The Invention of Culture. Revised ed., U of Chicago P, 1981.

pp. 287-305
ANALYSIS OF IDEOLOGY OF DOMESTICITY IN

CHARLOTTE MARY YONGE’S THE DAISY
CHAIN; OR, ASPIRATIONS: A FAMILY
CHRONICLE AND FRANCES WRIGHT
COLLINS’ THE SLAYER SLAIN
Vishnu Priya T. P.
Abstract
This paper offers a comparative reading of two mid-Victorian Pastoral
novels, Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Daisy Chain; Or, Aspirations: A
Family Chronicle and Frances Wright Collins’ The Slayer Slain. The
first was written in Otterbourne, Hampshire, England, and, the second
was written in Kottayam, Kerala, India. Reading them together offers an
opportunity to trace the co-evolution of the Protestant pedagogy on
gender in metropole and colony. As seen in the novels, the domestic
space acts as a site of promise and confession for various characters in
various crises. The pedagogic agenda of both novelists is to demonstrate
how the central characters became the heroines by being the ‘useful’
pastoral figures for home initially and gradually extending their
‘influence’ outside home.
Keywords : Domestic Fiction, Caste, Gender, Colonial Kerala,
Victorian Gender Ideology.
Introduction
This article offers a comparative reading of two mid-Victorian Pastoral
novels, Charlotte Mary Yonge’s TheDaisy Chain, Or, Aspirations: A Family
Chronicle1 and Frances Wright Collins’ TheSlayer Slain.2 The first was written in
Otterbourne, Hampshire, England, and, the second was written in Kottayam,
Kerala, India. Reading them together offers an opportunity to trace the co-
evolution of the Protestant pedagogy on gender in the metropole and the colony.
The article argues that the domestic space in these novels acts as a site of
confession and comfort for various characters facing moral crises. The characters
reveal their inner selves and receive solace from the women who preside over the
domestic space. The pedagogic agenda of both novelists is to demonstrate how
the central characters became the heroines by being the ‘useful pastoral figures’
for their home to begin with, and gradually by extending their ‘influence’ outside
the home.

288 Vishnu Priya T. P.
The Daisy Chain, Or, Aspirations : A Family Chronicle

Written with the Oxford Movement in the background, The Daisy Chain
portrays the story of the members of the May family. In the beginning of the
novel, the mother dies in a tragic accident, and the eldest daughter Margaret is
disabled. Dr May, the head of the family, who was driving the cart, suffers from
an arm injury. The death of the mother, who was the sweet presiding power in
the family, affects the family members deeply. The eldest son Richard returns
home after the incident to help his father. Other children, Flora, Ethel, Norman,
Harry, Aubrey, and the baby Getrude try to cope with the new situation. The
novel mainly traces the transformation of Etheldred from a bookish girl to a
philanthropist. Her energy and restlessness, which are deemed undesirable in a
girl, are eventually turned towards good use. She devotes her youthful energies
towards building a Church at Cocksmoor. By taking care of the Cocksmoor
project, she learns to control herself and learns the domestic lessons of self-
denial. Building the church serves her an opportunity to get outside of her home,
and work. However, she eventually learns the lesson of self-denial and gradually
becomes her father’s favourite companion in the domestic space. She sacrifices
her Classical studies to devote herself more to the project. She also tries to behave
like how a daughter or sister is expected to behave in order to prove that she is
capable of devoting herself to the Cocksmoor project. The novel does not depict
so-called significant incidents such as war, rather the minor incidents and
situations that happen at home. These everyday events are presented as of great
significance. In this space unfolds the family life, the locus of human emotions.
The family belongs to that private part of human life where the emotions are
invested. For the sisters, emotionally supporting a brother is as important as
going for war and becoming a hero. The ideology of the novel seeks to elevate the
domestic role of women to the same level as the heroic ideals of warfare.
Prefatorial Statement
The preface to The Daisy Chain offers an opportunity to study the project
of moral pedagogy that Yonge aims at. It reflects on the form of the novel, the
manner of its publication and the purpose it seeks to accomplish. It is worth
quoting the preface at length.
No one can be more sensible than is the Author that present is an
overgrown book of a nondescript class, neither the “tale” for the young,
nor the novel for their elders, but a mixture of both.
Begun as a series of conversational sketches, the story outran both the
original intention and the limits of the periodical in which it was
commenced; and, such as it has become, it is here presented to those
who have already made acquaintance with the May family, and may be
willing to see more of them. It would beg to be considered merely as
what it calls itself, a Family Chronicle- a domestic record of home
events, large and small, during those years of early life when the
character is chiefly formed, and as an endeavor to trace the effects of

Analysis of Ideology of Domesticity in Charlotte Mary Yonge’s … 289
those aspirations which are part of every youthful nature. That the
young should take one hint, to think whether their hopes and upward-
breathings are truly upwards, and founded in lowliness, may be called
the moral of the tale.
For those who may deem the story too long and the characters too
numerous, the Author can only beg their pardon for any tedium that
they may have undergone before giving it up. (Yonge 3- 4)
In the preface, Yonge mentions that the novel began as conversational
sketches in a periodical. The periodical she mentions is The Monthly Packet of
Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church. It waspublished
from 1851 to 1899. Yonge herself was the editor of this periodical from 1851 to
1899. She first serialised her novel The Daisy Chain in the magazine. However, as
mentioned in the preface, her novel outgrew the original intention and the
limitation of the periodical form. She went on to publish the novel in the book
form in 1856. Publishing in a book form offers the author an opportunity to
expand the story and circulate it among a larger audience.
As argued in the preface, Yonge differentiates her work from both the tale
and the novel. She also argues her work exhibits features of both the forms. Peter
Brooks, in his essay “The Tale vs. The Novel” studies the differences and
correlations between the tale and novel forms.3 According to Brooks, a tale is
more related to oral traditions. He points out that, “familial and communitarian
circles fostered the telling of tales” (285). Here, the reception of the story is more
important than the message itself. The listener himself or herself becomes part of
the tale-telling circle as he or she becomes instrumental in propagating the tale
further, while also contributing to the tale. The novel is much more dependent on
the industrial process of printing and distribution (Brooks 285). Brooks argues
that “the novel is complicit with ‘information’” (287), implying that everything is
explained and analysed in the novel unlike “Storytelling [which] does without
explanation and without psychological analysis” (287). Another important
feature that Brooks points out is how the novel deals with the meaning of life
(Brooks 289). It implies the search of the hero or heroine for his or her purpose
in life and attributing a meaning to the events in their life. The protagonists in the
novel tend to be seekers or usually in a quest for something which provides this
‘meaning’.
A few examples of the tales and novels that were in circulation during the
long nineteenth century gives us a sense of how Yonge attempts to distinguish her
work. Oriental tales were a much popular genre during the second half of the
eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century. One feature
which unites these tales is that in their different ways they emphasise the vanity
of human wishes. They highlight the ephemeral nature of the human world.
Samuel Johnson’s History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia was published in
1759. Rasselas explores and exposes the vanity of the human search of happiness.
He meets the men of varied occupations and interests and explores their manner
of life. Frances Sheridan’s The History of Nourjahad was published in 1767. This

is a moral tale where Nourjahad is taught the vanity of his desires. William Jones
wrote The Palace of Fortune, An Indian Tale in 1769. The tale concerns an Indian
girl (Maia) who witnesses a series of visions which reveal the vanity of human
wishes. In 1785 Clara Reeve wrote The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt. In
the preface, she claims that the story was extracted from a book called The
History of Ancient Egypt. The tale portrays the conflicts between Charoba and
the invading commander King Gebrius. William Beckford’s Vathek: An Arabian
Tale was published in 1786. This is about Vathek, ninth Caliph who is tempted by
a supernatural being. The supernatural being promises him the treasures of the
world provided that he renounced Islam and commit crimes. In the end, Vathek
is condemned to eternal damnation and expulsion to the netherworld. Thomas
Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) consists of four tales told by young Cashmerian poet
named Feramorz employed to entertain the Indian princess Lalla Rookh. These
tales are characterised by exotic settings, and the audience constituted the
Romantic circles who were fond of exotica.
It can be argued that the most popular genre of novels in the mid-
nineteenth century was the ‘Condition of England novels’. They dealt with the
social issues during and after the period of Hungry Forties. A feature that unites
these novels is their realist engagement with social problems and class relations
in mid-Victorian England. One of the novels was Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or
The Two Nations (1845). This novel showcases the darker sides of
industrialisation. It shows how prosperity was experienced by the few. The title of
the novel indicates how England had become two nations, the nation of the rich
and the other of the poor. Elizabeth Gaskell’s published Mary Barton in 1848.
Mary Barton is from a low-income family who is attracted to superficial things.
Later she evolves towards a mature understanding about the relationship
between the masters and workers. Another industrial novel by Gaskell was North
and South (1855). North and South also deals with the struggles of working-class
men and the conflicts between the mill owners and the workers. Margaret Hale is
the heroine of the novel. This novel portrays the contrasts between the pastoral
south and the industrial north. Dickens published Hard Times in 1854. The story
is set in the fictional town of Coketown based partly on Preston. The novel
describes the pathetic life in factory towns and the over-emphasis of the
philosophy of rational self-interest and the mechanising effects of
industrialisation.
For Yonge, her work includes features of both the genres. In the preface,
Yonge defines her work as the Family Chronicle. Pedagogic agenda and the
domestic setting with a familial/ communitarian circle are the tale like qualities
of this work. Tales have an other wordly feel to it. They underscore the
ephemeralness of the real world. Human wishes are revealed to be flawed. Yonge
also focuses on not entertaining with vain wishes. But her work also exhibits
qualities of a novel because it explains every situation and seeks to find meaning
and purpose to the main character’s life. Her work is also part of the printing and
distribution industry, which is another quality of novel. But it is also different

from the novels of Hungry Forties because those novels dealt with subject
matters which were less topical and dealt with serious social issues like poverty
and industrialisation. Thus Yonge’s work combines the features of both tale and
novel.
Yonge also differentiates the genres in terms of the audience they are
meant for. The author states that the novel is neither for the young nor for the
elders but a mixture of both, that is for the young adults. It is profitable to read
the preface of the novel The Daisy Chain in comparison with the editorial of the
first issue of the periodical Monthly Packet.4 The editorial will help us better
understand the nature of the audience for which Yonge wrote:
If the pretty old terms “maidens” and “damsels” had not gone out of
fashion, I should address this letter by that name to the readers for
whom this little book is in the first place intended—young girls, or
maidens, or young ladies, whichever you like to be called, who are above
the age of childhood, and who are either looking back on schooldays
with regret, or else pursuing the most important part of education,
namely, self-education.
‘It has been said that everyone forms their own character between the
ages of fifteen and five-and-twenty, and this magazine is meant to be in
some degree a help to those who are thus forming it; not as a guide,
since that is the part of deeper and graver books, but as a companion in
times of recreation, which may help you to perceive how to bring your
religious principles to bear upon your daily life, may show you the
examples, both good and evil, of historical persons, and may tell you of
the workings of God’s providence both here and in other lands.
(Romanes 45- 46)
Though this letter has been chiefly addressed to young girls, it is not
intended that the pages of this magazine should be exclusively for them.
It is purposed to make it such as may be pleasant reading for boys of the
same age, especially schoolteachers ; and it is hoped that it may be
found useful to young readers, either of the drawing room, the servants’
hall, or the lending library. (47)
The editor is clear in her authorial intention. She intends the periodical to
be read first and foremost by a particular group of people; young girls between
the age of fifteen and twenty- five. She means to target this group because this
group aims at self-education. By self-education Yonge intends two things. Firstly
it is meant to be a companion in times of recreation and secondly to incorporate
religious principles into daily life. So the key terms in Yong’s scheme of pedagogy
are religious principles, everyday life and examples of good conduct. The
periodical also has a secondary audience. This group includes the formal
instructors of Sunday Schools, visitors, servants and borrowers of a lending
library. This novel is targeted at people who are in their stage of life who can
transform or with the scope of becoming mature. To this purpose, the novelist
pays attention to the aspirations of young adults who can be instrumental in
shaping the character of the younger ones as well.

Ideology of Domesticity and Mid-Victorian Debates about Gender

The section will offer a brief reading of the ideology of domesticity that is
constructed in this metropolitan pastoral novel. This novel of pastoral will be
situated in the larger context of the mid-Victorian debates about gender. These
debates unfolded on a wide variety of registers. The domestic woman was one
among the registers. Authors such as Sarah Stickney Ellis, Sarah Lewis, Isabella
Beeton and Eliza Lynn Linton were major architects of this mid-Victorian
ideology of domesticity. These authors produced a voluminous body of writings
which had a significant presence in the literary market of the time. Such writings
included TheWomen of England (1839), Woman’s Mission (1839), The Book of
Household Management (1861) and “The Girl of the Period” (1868).5 Along with
these kinds of narratives which can be broadly categorised as ‘conduct narratives’
there was a range of mainstream novels which engaged with the domestic
ideology and the woman question in mid victorian England. These novels spoke
to both women and men about how an ideal woman should be. Even though the
domestic handbooks like The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and
Domestic Habits by Sarah Stickney Ellis dealt with what they termed as the
“insignificant detail of familiar and ordinary life (1)”, they had a significant
impact in the socio-political structure of England. These works were instrumental
in the ascendancy of the ‘middle class’ to a powerful social status. These books
portrayed aristocratic women as superficial and incapable of being ideal
companions for men, thereby giving more value to the psychological depth of
women rather than beauty, rank, or wealth. The novel The Daisy Chain can be
read in this historical context where there were competing discourses on how a
woman should conduct herself.
A short review of the scholarship available in the field is in order.
Armstrong and Poovey have provided enduring intellectual frameworks to study
the formation of the domestic ideology. These frameworks usually cover the
eighteenth and nineteenth century. One of the most rewarding works on the
question of the domestic woman is the book titled Desire and Domestic Fiction:
A Political History of the Novel by Nancy Armstrong. In this work, she argues
that the rise of the domestic woman is a major event in political history. The
category of domestic woman, though it seemed independent of the political
domain, had a significant impact in the political history of England. A
considerable amount of literature on domestic woman represented the value of
the woman in terms of the essential qualities of mind. Consequentially she
became the “first example of modern psychology” (11). She was also the “guardian
and guarantor of private life” (11) and exercised the power of domestic
surveillance. Writings about the domestic woman contested the dominant notion
of sexuality where the desirability of the woman depended on her fortune and
class status. Thus the middle-class woman began to represent the ideal family
encompassing the virtues of companionate marriage. The power that conduct
books and novels attributed to this new category of woman aided the ascendancy
of the middle class in the Victorian social structure. Thus the origin of the novel

cannot be differentiated from the rise of the middle class and the birth of the first
modern individual.6
Also, the history of the novel cannot be differentiated from the history of
sexuality. This trend set by conduct books and fiction were followed by
disciplines like sociology, political economy and natural history. Thus the
domestic novel antedated the way of life it represented. Thus Armstrong also
demonstrates how modern culture depends on a form of power that works
through language. She builds this argument based on some of the ideas from
Foucault’s History of Sexuality.7 In this work Foucault refutes the “repressive
hypothesis”, an idea which claims that sexuality in the Victorian era was
repressed. On the contrary, he claims that there was a proliferation of discourse
on sexuality in Victorian England. Taking a cue from this, Armstrong makes three
interrelated arguments such as: “sexuality is a cultural construct and as such has
a history; second, that written representations of the self, allowed the modern
individual to become an economic and psychological reality; and third that the
modern individual was first and foremost a woman” (8) . These arguments form
the starting point of my interrogation of the dynamics of gender ideology in
colonial South India. By comparing the two novels, one written in colonial Kerala
and other in the Metropolitan, I intend to pay attention to how history of
sexuality and missionary novels are interwoven in colonial Kerala.
Mary Poovey in her work, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of
Gender in Mid-Victorian England argues that middle-class ideology associated
with the Victorian period was both contested and always under construction. The
Victorian gender ideology rested on the binary opposition between men and
women. Both sexes were considered to be different at an ontological level and to
inhabit separate spheres, i.e. the public and the private. However, this ideological
formulation was uneven as it was experienced differently by individuals and was
articulated differently by different institutions (3). Poovey gives examples from
medical, legal, moral, and literary fields of Victorian England to demonstrate how
this ideological formulation happened unevenly. By pointing out these facts,
Poovey also shows us the self-contradictions of contemporary feminist theory
which does not pay attention to the uneven ideological formulation of gender.
Thereby she challenges the importance of the category of ‘woman’ itself and
attempts to write a history of this category.
The domestic woman remained ascendant till the 1860s in Victorian
England. But many women earned their living working in factories, as
seamstresses, farm labourers and even as sex workers, so, categorising all women
naturally as “angel in the house” is a glaring misconception. Towards the end of
the nineteenth century, a new discourse on women emerged . This new category of
woman was called the ‘New Woman’. This term was coined by the writer and
public speaker Sarah Grand in 1894. Some of the popular New Woman novelists
were Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird. These women were
considered to be intelligent, educated, emancipated, independent and self-
supporting and were in competition with the ideology of domestic woman. There

were also widespread attacks on the figure of ‘New Woman’ including claims that
she was a “threat to the human race” and probably an “infanticidal” mother who
has an “abnormal” sexuality (Ledger 10). She became an object of ridicule in the
press and popular fiction. The Punch magazine caricatured her riding a bicycle in
bloomers and smoking cigarettes. These discourses were unstable and further
incited other discourses on how a woman should be. Contemporary feminists see
the new woman movement crucial for the Suffragist movement. But that also
meant some of the critics viewed Yonge as an anti-feminist because of the way
her ideology differed from the ideology of the new woman.
The Reform of Etheldred

The evangelical novel worked with the concept of reformation. The basic
plot narrated the story of a character who is errant to begin with but learns in the
course of the story to conform to the ideal of evangelical domesticity. Central to
the plot are many features such as the moment of reformation: when the
character comes to learn the necessity to reform her, the pastoral figures that
guide in her reformation, and she becoming an exemplar for the other characters.
Thus the plot necessarily has a pedagogical function. Through the reformation of
the central character, it sets up an exemplar for the evangelical audience to relate
to and find comfort in. As the plot contains these exemplars, it is called a pastoral
novel. The concept of ‘reform’ has an interesting history in the metropolitan. The
transformation of Ethel and the pedagogical function of this plot becomes more
apparent if we situate this in the broader context of ‘reform’ and what the concept
of ‘reform’ signified in the metropolitan at that time.
Joanna Innes, in her essay “‘Reform’ in English Public life: the fortunes of
a word”, argues that reform was a chief alternative to revolution (88). The word
reform had a particular history in Britain associated with the constitutional
reforms. However, she argues that after the 1830s, reform passed into more
general currency. When the French revolution brought some discredit to the term
reform, some people like Burke tried to legitimise the use of ‘reform’. Innes
points out that Burke tried to distinguish reform from what happened in France
by suggesting that reform “denoted pragmatic, limited improvement: the
correction, by minor adjustment, of faults that stood clearly revealed” (88). Since
this suggests minor improvement rather than something radical, it is no longer
dangerous. Thus ‘reform’ in the metropolitan emerged as an alternative to
revolution.
Ethel’s reform stands in contrast to revolution because it is not
“speculative”, the word used to describe Ethel initially (Yonge 143). Her reform
happens through “conduct” which is not radical and is not a revolution either. It
is moderate but intents the correction of the faults. As Innes points out, the
concept of reform emerged as an alternative to revolution. Reform is not a radical
and overnight change, but rather a change that unfolds over a period of time. If
revolution is associated with term speculation, reform is associated with

pragmatism, correction and minor adjustment with an awareness of all that was
wrong. Ethel is described as someone with “harum- scarum nature, quick temper,
uncouth manners, and heedlessness of all but one absorbing object, have kept her
back, and caused her much discomfort” (50). All these terms can be associated
with the idea of revolution. The faults of Ethel become more evident with the
tragedy that happens in the May family, which is the death of the mother in the
accident. Her elder sister is left crippled, which leaves a vacancy for someone in
full health to occupy the position held by the mother. However, Ethel with all her
speculations and blindness is not equipped to play her role. She is described as
“impetuous”8 in the beginning of the novel. According to the governess of May
family, Ethel had “a hurried, careless way of doing everything, and an irritability
at being interfered with” (167). The governess thought that she would grow up
“odd, eccentric, and blue” (169). Ethel’s elder sister Margaret thinks that “it is
good for her not to spend her high soul in dreams” (86) and that “there seems to
be so much a spirit of energy in her, that if she does not act she will either
speculate and theorise” (143). This “theorising” and “speculation” in Ethel are
considered very unwomanly traits, and she is reprimanded for not being useful.
She is also described as very “noble” and “high”, but her sister thinks that her
“high purposeness” should not run into eccentricities and unfeminineness.9
Her older siblings Margaret and Richard, carefully guide her and act as the
pastoral figures. They help her to find the balance she needs in her life to handle
the Cocksmoor project and her family duties in such a way that Cocksmoor
becomes an extension of her domestic duties but not her ambition. Ethel
becomes the model to other characters later in the novel. Though Ethel has to let
go of her Greek learning, she wields another kind of power towards the end of the
novel, which is the power of the moralising agent. The power of authority figure
and confession is critical in the novel. Throughout the novel, the characters
confess to the authority figure and go through supervision. The character
formation happens under this supervision, which pays attention to the minute
happenings of everyday life. Though in the beginning she gets into much trouble
and is reprimanded by others, towards the end of the novel Trial, she is the one
admired by all including Flora. The Christian femininity highlighted in the novel
values self-sacrifice rather than Flora’s ambitions even if it is with her husband’s
success. Compared to Ethel, Flora May is considered ladylike, but her ambitions
were not founded on lowliness. Her failure to uphold these values is indicated by
the death of her daughter in The Trial. In the end, the authorial approval is for
Ethel and not Flora May who is considered ladylike. Being a ‘visionary’ and
‘domestic woman’ seems like irreconcilable categories. After all, many writers
complained about the limitations of the domestic role. A visionary is a person
who can imagine how a country, society, industry, and so forth develop in the
future and to plan suitably. But Ethel by extending her domestic role outside the
home is able to perform the role of a visionary as well.

The Colonial Kerala

The Protestant missionary activities of the Church Missionary Society and
London Missionary Society aimed at the conversion of the untouchables and the
Syrian Christians. Often European Christians held positions of authority over the
native Christians claiming their belief is closer to the ‘truth’. 10 In Asiatic
Researches, Buchanan describes his meeting with the Metran of the Jacoba (
Syrian) branch of Thomas Christians of Malabar and terms them as Hindus
(Frykenberg 245). These Syrian Christians had a proud tradition which they
traced back to the Apostle Thomas and his arrival at the island of Malankara in
AD 52. Their ritual purity and rank within caste structures was beyond dispute.
They even wore tonsures like the Nayars and Brahmins strictly observing the
rules of “thottukudayma”.11 Their lineages claimed direct descent from Brahman
converts of Apostle. When the first permanent British political residents came to
represent the East India Company’s interests in Travancore and Cochin, it was
the time of Ecclesiastical struggles between Orthodox West Syrians and Roman
Catholic and Nestorian branches of East Syrian episcopacy (Frykenberg 245). In
1811, after Munroe was made Diwan, circumstances for Christians and
missionaries began to improve. However, after his retirement in 1820, conflicts
started between Brahmans and Christians and then between Anglican
missionaries and the Syrian Christians. In 1836, Bishop Daniel Wilson came to
Travancore and insisted that Syrian Christians should submit to Anglican
doctrines which caused much outrage. The Syrian Christians assembled at
Mavelikkara to firmly reject Wilson’s views and reaffirm the authority of their
tradition. This is the history of the interactions between the Syrian Christians and
the Anglican missions in Travancore.
The picture of colonial Kerala is incomplete if one does not throw light to
the interaction among the Syrian Christians, the Anglicans and the slave castes of
Pulaya and Paraya. According to the 1836 census, there was a slave population of
164,864 out of the total population of 1,280,663. 12 Even though slavery was
abolished in Travancore in 1855, it did not drastically improve the condition of
the slave castes. Sanal Mohan, in his book Modernity of Slavery: Struggles
against Caste Inequality in Colonial Kerala, has pointed out that the emergence
of free labour did not happen immediately after the abolition of slavery. The
primary slave castes, the Parayas and the Pulayas still lived in deplorable
conditions. Most of the information about the slave castes are available in
missionary ethnographies. Other than that, the oral tradition of slave songs is an
excellent repertoire to understand the experience of slave castes. 13 Sanal Mohan
also argues that the missionaries interpreted the caste slavery in Kerala under the
influence of the experience and knowledge about the Atlantic slave trade. The
Atlantic Slave trade was a modern phenomenon because the slaves were subjects
of a modern regime of power.14 Through their interpretations informed by these
situations, the missionaries constituted the slave castes of Kerala into modern
subjects.15 The constitution of the slave castes as modern subjects of power also

enabled them to give rise to resistance. Collins authored the novel The Slayer
Slain in this historical background.
The story of moral reform is incomplete if one does not take into account
how voluntary associations contributed to the development of the public sphere.
Charles Taylor argued that “the differences among today’s multiple modernities
need to be understood in terms of the divergent social imaginaries involved” (21).
A new moral order was the basis of the conception of Western modernity. The
essential forms of social self-understanding crucial to western modernity were
the economy, the public sphere and the practices of democratic self-rule (Taylor
69). Reform movements constituted a significant part of the public sphere,
thereby contributing to the ‘social imaginary’.16 The experience of colonial
modernity in Kerala can be better understood by seeing the particular social
imaginary involved. This social imaginary is unique because of the contestations
and appropriations that happened when the colonial ideologies were translated
into the cultural milieu of Kerala. J. Devika, in her book Engendering
Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Early Twentieth Century Keralam,
argues that the experience of colonial modernity in Kerala necessarily involved
the replacement of caste-based identity by gender-based identity. Thus the notion
of the individual as gendered emerged alongside the emergence of the public
sphere in Kerala.17 The missionaries started the evolution of the public sphere
through print.18
However, later on, it was used by the native authors as well. One of the
major topics of debate was the reform of family and woman. Debates were
happening about the evils of the matrilineal system not just in the evangelical
journals like Vidhyasamgraham but also in the writings of native authors like
Chandumenon. In 1891, O Chandu Menon, author of the novel Indulekha,
submitted a memorandum to the Malabar Marriage Commission. 19
Chandumenon is his report to the Malabar Marriage Commission states his
concerns about “native public opinion” (1). He stated that the majority of the
native population did not want the colonial authorities to make any alterations to
the matrilineal system. He also stated that the native “public opinion” was not
being taken into account before making a decision. This idea of “public opinion”
was not part of the common vocabulary before, but with the advent of colonial
modernity, the scenario changed. Educational magazines like
Vidhyasamgraham20 can give us a glimpse into this process. The matrilineal
system is highly criticised by one of the authors in
“Marumakkathayathalulla Doshangal” (Problems of Matrilineal System) which
was published in Vidhyasamgraham.21
The novel The Slayer Slain published in Vidhyasamgraham magazine is
also part of the debates in the emerging public sphere of Kerala. The print culture
played a crucial role in the emergence of the public sphere. We should keep in
mind that the first printing press in Kerala as established by the Church
Missionary Society. The different community-based organisations like Sree
Narayana Dharma Paripalana Sangham, Nair Service Society, Arya Sabha, The

Yogakshema Sabha, Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha used the language of

reform which was already gendered. Another critic who looked at the experience
of colonial modernity in Kerala is G. Arunima. She analyses how state
interventions paved the way for the ‘reforming of family and women’. 22 She starts
her analysis by pointing out the significance of a painting called ‘There Comes
Papa’ by Raja Ravi Varma. The significance of the painting is that Ravi Varma
chose to celebrate conjugal domesticity and nuclear family at a time when they
were comparatively unknown amongst large sections of the matrilineal
population. The Matrilineal kinship in Kerala was abolished through a series of
legislative interventions that were originally initiated by the colonial state and
completed later under the auspices of the postcolonial regime. Under the colonial
rule, the desire to render tharavadu23 into a manageable and cohesive unit made
the colonial officials redefine power relations within the tharavadu. However, as
Arunima argues, “It was as much as a result of state policy as a cultural desire of
the community to “civilise” itself from a state of primitive barbarism to one of
modernity and progress” (158).24Thus both the evangelical reform movements
and the native reform movements were propelled by the core idea of the reform
of women in colonial Kerala.
The Slayer Slain

The Slayer Slain can be considered as a pastoral novel of pedagogy. The
preface to it reads: “The following story is from the pen of a lady, who has since
gone to her rest. It was intended chiefly for the instruction of the young; and is
now published in English, partly as a tribute to her memory; and partly in the
hope, that, should it be thought sufficiently interesting and instructive, it may one
day assume a Vernacular Press” (Collins 10). The plot of the novel revolves
around Mariam, daughter of Koshy Kurien who is a Syrian Christian landlord. He
exploits the lower caste people who work in his land and treat them as slaves,
going to the extent of chaining them and beating them up. Once in his anger,
Koshy Kurien thrashes Paulosa, but in an unexpected turn of events, Paulosa’s
grandchild receives the blow and is killed instantly. This incident deeply affects
Paulosa, but as a changed man by the intervention of Mariam who introduced
him to the Bible and protestant Christianity, he is able to forgive this injustice.
Not only he forgives this great injustice, but also he saves the drowning Mariam,
thus saving the child of the man who murdered his grandchild. The novel
showcases Mariam as the model for the native girls because she is the guardian of
morality and has all the attributes associated with the Victorian ‘domestic
woman’.
Written by a missionary wife, the novel performs the role of a conduct book
for native women in the colony. The novel was serialised in the literary periodical
of the leading educational institution of its time. The context of serialisation lends
the novel a pedagogical value that is similar to that of the conduct book. In the
novel, young Mariam is the overseer of everyday relationships and the guardian
of morality. She is portrayed as the reason for Paulosa’s change from a thieving

heathen to a forgiving and honest Christian man, and even Koshy Kurien worries
about facing Mariam after he thrashes his slaves. Here, being a proper woman is
connected to being a Protestant individual.25 The description of a home presided
by this individual is as follows:
The appearance of the children with their smooth bright skins and clean
cloths showed that a careful attentive mother managed with a clever
hand the domestic affairs of this Indian home. No decaying vegetables
or unsightly filth were left to annoy the eyes or nose, but all were swept
away and collected in a heap at some distance. The cattle and poultry
were all fed, and lying at rest beneath the cool shade of the trees.
(Collins 15)
This description stands in clear contrast to the description of a home run by a
woman who does not conform to the idea of companionate marriage. The
cleanliness of the home reflects the ‘Godliness’ of the individuals. The domestic
habits of the woman act as the foundation of the progress and well-being of the
whole family.
Mariam also steps out of the comfort zone of her home to cure Paulosa for
which her father scolds her. Then she reminds him how he read to her the story
of the good Samaritan. She points out that she was a good Samaritan to old
Paulosa. Not only Mariam is an individual with interiority, but she also confers
dignity and individuality to Paulosa the slave when she decides to defy
untouchability and approaches him with food and medicine. As an individual, she
debates with her father politely, citing from the Bible. This debate affects Koshy
Kurien to the extent that he began to feel he had been cultivating a dangerous
talent in his child as he could not sin and be at ease in her presence (Collins 36).
Soon, the reform of Paulosa is followed by the reform of Koshy Kurien when
Paulosa saves Mariam from drowning. Home is not just a site of promise to even
the lower caste people in this novel; it acts as a site of confession too. For
instance, when Koshy Kurien sees his daughter after accidentally killing Paulosa’s
grandchild, he tries to avoid looking her in the eye to which she responds:
“Not there father, not there, I like your eyes to look straight into mine,
that I may see deep down into your heart,” said Mariam. His eyes met
hers for an instant; but it seemed as if there was a spark of fire in them
and he could not bear to look into the pure orbs that met his.
(Collins 34)
The novel constructs a domestic ideology of everyday life and offers it as a
solution to the conflict between higher and lower castes. It is in this site of
‘everyday life’ and through the values inculcated through the supervisors of this
‘everyday life’ that caste conflicts in the novel are reconciled. Mariam’s ability to
take charge of relationships serves to position the domestic space of everyday life
as the site of reconciliation between the upper caste Syrian Christians, and the
untouchable slave castes. Caste, gender and Colonial modernity are overlapping
categories in The Slayer Slain. In Dumont’s view, the Indian caste system is
related to the binary opposition of purity- pollution. However, Bayly argues for

an analysis of caste not based on a static model as there was no pan-

Indianization of the caste hierarchy, privilege and prejudice (373).27 The novel
Slayer Slain portrays caste as an ahistorical, essential aspect of Hinduism. The
enumeration techniques of British Raj made caste a less fluid category. Also,
access to resources of production or land is never portrayed as the source of
conflict in the novel. Instead, it portrays how the lower caste slaves become
sincere in their work, and stop their thieving habits with their conversion into
Protestant Christianity. The narrator marks the transformation of the old slave
Paulosa from being a heathen to a Christian by stating that he is “honest” and
“industrious” now (Collins 35). Protestant Christianity is portrayed as the ‘true’
belief, which instils work ethics among the labourers. In the novel, the non-
existence of caste rituals in everyday life becomes a mark of true Christianity. It
consequently, classifies Syrian Christians, whose everyday life is marked by caste
rituals, as ‘false Christians’. Thus the conflicts between the true evangelical
Christians, false Syrian Christians, and the untouchable slave castes find
reconciliation in ‘the everyday life’ that true Evangelical Christianity offers.
As Rupa Viswanath argues, “Missionaries in fact only wished to oppose
what they perceived as the genuinely pernicious face of caste, its “religious”
aspect, comprising meaningless ritual, irrational fears of contagion, and the
cruelty those beliefs elicited” (16). They defined caste as a matter of religion
distinct from “labour and political economy” (16). The “Pariah Problem” became
a major concern in the writings of Missionaries. The labour rights of the Dalits in
the novel is mostly concerned with their right to observe the ‘Sabbath’. The slaves
address Koshy Kurien as master and father and beg him to have pity on them:
“Master! Oh! master, you are like our father, pity us, help us do not be too hard
upon us, we are not beasts, we are men, we have souls, we will work long and
hard for six days. Let us have the Sabbath to think about our great master in
heaven, and about our souls” (Collins 16). For Paulosa, the injustice that
happened to them will have to be balanced out with the divine hand “I go, and we
shall never meet again, unless the same grace, that changed the heart of the poor
slave, melt that of my stony master, I go” (Collins 19). Finally, Paulosa rescues
Mariam and forgives Koshy Kurien because of his Christian values. The injustice
and indignity faced by the Dalits are portrayed as a religious issue for which the
solution was arrived at via Christianity. A ‘pulayan’ in the nineteenth century
Kerala was only permitted to use a specific vocabulary. He cannot address
himself as “I” but as “adiyen”, or “your slave”. It is in this socio-cultural
background that the author makes Paulosa say “You killed my child; I have saved
yours; we are equal now” (38). His individuality and dignity depend on his ability
to emulate a Christian virtue, i.e., to forgive the enemy. The hierarchy of master
and slave was an essential part of the agrarian economy. The slave was equal to
master concerning his Christian values and his claim to having a “soul”. The
pulayas in the novel never ask for better food or better shelter. They ask for lesser
working hours to observe the Sabbath. The thieving habit of Paulosa is seen as a
spiritual degradation rather than an act of desperation arising from poverty. In
other words, the neat picture of everyday life constructed in the novel serves to

camouflage the political and economic aspects. And this everyday life is part of
the ideology of domesticity constructed through the character of Mariam in the
novel.
Conclusion
The ideology of domesticity forms a connecting link between the
metropolitan and colonial Kottayam. Thus the character of Mariam occupies an
interstitial space by being the native woman who embodies the characteristics of
a Victorian domestic woman. Homi Bhabha in his book The Location of Culture
compares the phenomenon of cultural hybridisation to a stairwell. He says,
“[T]his interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility
of cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed
hierarchy” (Bhabha 4). The impact of the novel The Slayer Slain is such that it is
followed by other novels by native authors which have similar pedagogic
functions. One such novel is Sukumari, authored by Joseph Muliyil. The novel
portrays the domestic woman who performs the role of a pastoral figure for other
characters in the novel. Similar novels which highlighted the role of domestic
woman in this fashion include Meenakshi by C Chathu Nayar and
Saraswativijayam by Potheri Kunhambu. One will find many more novels which
highlighted the ideology of domesticity and companionate marriage in nineteenth
century Kerala. The polarity of fixed differences between the colonised woman
and the white woman falls apart in many ways. Though authors like Sarah
Stickney Ellis argued about the essence of English nationality based on the
character of domestic woman, we have already seen how the ideology of gender
was always under construction in the metropolitan.
Gender was quite central to the evangelical ideology of reform in South
India. The Christian Pastorate in the colony constructed and mobilised the
rhetoric of gender because it could be successfully mapped on to the larger
project of evangelisation. This mapping together of gender and Christianity was
not absent in the metropolitan world. However, in the Metropole, the pastorate
was not the only site where the ideology of gender and domesticity evolved. In the
colony, however, the pastorate was the dominant site for this ideology to be
translated and transplanted. We already saw how, in the context of Britain,
Nancy Armstrong had forwarded the well-known thesis that domestic ideology
helped to construct the first modern individual. To adapt it to the colonial
context: the novel asserts that the Indian woman becomes an individual with the
intervention of the Christian pastorate. This assertion is based on a power
relation—between the Protestant pastorate and the Indian woman. The Indian
woman needs to submit herself to the power of the pastorate and, once, she
becomes a Christian subject, she goes on to wield her influence over her
household. As a literary form, the novel enables the propagation of such a
relationship of power and being a proper woman is connected to being a
Protestant individual.

Notes :
1 The Daisy Chain, Or, Aspirations: A Family Chronicle was serialized irregularly in
the Monthly Packet from July 1853 to Dec 1855. A sequel, The Trial was published
in 1864.
2 Frances, Wright Collins, The Slayer Slain, Vidyasamgraham 1864-66. Collins had
begun writing the novel in English in 1859. She passed away before she could
complete it. Her husband took it up from where she had left it and the book in its
present form was published in the Vidyasamgraham, quarterly magazine of the
CMS college Kottayam from 1864-66. Mr. Collins translated the Slayer Slain to
Malayalam as Ghathakavadham in 1877. The Vidyasamgraham magazine was
republished by the Benjamin Bailey Research Centre at Kottayam CMS College in
2003. There is an Australian edition of the novel: Melinda, Graefe and S. C. Harrex
(eds), The Slayer Slain, Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in
English , 1999.
3 Peter, Brooks. “The Tale vs. The Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol.21, No.
2/3, Winter- Spring 1988, pp. 285-292.

4 Source of the editorial is Ethel Romanes’s book Charlotte Mary Yonge: An
Appreciation. 1908.
5 This was first published anonymously in the Saturday Review and then as a hugely
popular pamphlet, it first appeared under Eliza Lynn Linton’s name in 1883 in The
Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays. Linton was the first woman journalist in
England to earn a fixed salary.
6 “Granting all this, one may conclude that the power of the middle classes had
everything to do with that of middle- class love. And if this contention holds true,
one must also agree that middle- class authority rested in large part upon the
authority that novels attributed to omen and in this way designated as specifically
female” (Armstrong 4). Additionally, “I will insist that one cannot distinguish the
production of the new female ideal either from the rise of the novel or from the rise
of the new middle classes in England” (8)
7 “According to Foucault, however, sex neither was nor is already there to be dealt
with in one way or another by sexuality. Instead, its representation determines

what one knows to be sex, the particular form sex assumes in one age as opposed to
another, and the political interests these various forms may have served”
(Armstrong 11).
8 “Norman and Ethel do indeed take after their papa, more than any of the others,
and are much alike. There is the same brilliant cleverness, the same strong feeling,
not easy of demonstration, though impetous in action; but poor Ethel’s old foibles,
her harum- scarum nature, quick temper, uncouth manners, and heedlessness of all
but one absorbing object, have kept her back, and caused her much discomfort”
(50).
9 “Margeret could think: “Dear Ethel, how noble and high she is! But I am afraid! It is
what people call a difficult dangerous age, and the grander she is, the greater
danger of not managing her rightly. If those high purposes should run only into
romance like mine, or grow out into eccentricities and unfeminineness, what a
grievous pity would be!” (60).
10 As Frykenberg argues, “European Christian attempts to control and exercise
dominion over Indian Christians increased during the Nineteenth century and

onwards, especially as this was applied in relation to manifestations of caste

consciousness and caste- related customs” (244) (“Missionaries, Colonialism, And
Ecclesiastical Dominion”).
11 The practice of untouchability practiced according to the caste hierarchy. The social
distance was practiced according to the caste. “According to some writers, the
Nayadi had to keep a distance of 100 feet or more, the Pulaya and the Paraya 60
feet, the Mukkuvan or Valan 40 to 60 feet, the Ezhava or Tiyya 24 feet, the Nayar
12- 13 feet, the Ambalavasi 6 feet, the monarch 4 feet from the Nampoothiri
Brahmin.” Pp 380- 381 A Social History of India, S. N. Sadasivan.
12 See P. Sanal Mohanpg. 3.
13 See P. Sanal Mohan pg 52.
14 See P. Sanal Mohan, Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in
Colonial Kerala : “In the Caribbean world, it has been shown that the technologies
of manufacturing sugar as well as the organization of the sugar cane plantations
were distinctively modern (Mintz 1986). It has been argued that this fundamental
feature of modern plantations had contradictory effects on slavery. It had put in
practice an extremely repressive system of surveillance, which although negative,
enabled the slaves to be modern. In other words, the slaves in the plantations of the
Atlantic world were modern subjects, that is, subjects of the modern regime of
power in the form of plantations” (43).
15 See P. Sanal Mohan pg. 102.
16 In the metropolitan, moral reform movements made a significant contribution to
the emergence of a society capable of debating issues (Roberts 295).

17 J. Devika, Engendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Early
Twentieth Century Keralam, 2007, pg. 27.

18 Rajyasamacharam was the first journal published in Malayalam. BMS brought it
out from June 1847 from a press owned by the Mission at Illikkunnu near
Thallassery. Copies of Rajyasamacharam were distributed free of cost. Although the
name of the editor was not mentioned, it is assumed by many scholars that Dr.
Herman Gundert was the man behind this first Malayalam journal. This paper
lasted up to 1840. Paschimodayam was the second journal in Malayalam brought
out from October 1847 from Thallassery. The publishers of this paper, too, was the
Basel Mission Society. Its contents included articles on natural science, astronomy,
geography and history. Jnana Nikshepam, a monthly magazine in Malayalam, was
published by the Church Mission Society (CMS) in Kottayam from November 1848.
It was the third among the publications in Malayalam and it was the first
newspaper printed in the letter press developed by Rev Benjamin Bailey, a foreign
missionary. Keralopakari was a magazine published by the Basel Mission Society
from 1878. It was printed from Mangalore. Its contents included articles on
Christian literature, essays, proverbs, parables, stories with moral content and
Western literature. All these magazines provided a podium for debates and also
propagated western modernity.
19 The Malabar Marriage Commission was formed in 1891 by the Government of
Madras in response to a bill that was introduced to the Madras Legislative Council
in 1890 by Sir C. Sankaran Nair, a lawyer of the Madras High Court. The
Commission was to inquire into matrilineal customs among the Hindus of Malabar
and explore the desirability of introducing changes in marriage, inheritance and

family organization through legislation. The response of the Madras Government to

the Commission’s report was to pass the Malabar Marriage Act, 1896.
20 See “Vidyasamgraham: Minority Discourses in Selected Articles” by Soumya Sajan.
21 See Vol. 1 No. 7 of Vidyasamgraham magazine pg. 295.
22 G. Arunima, There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny
in Kerala, Malabar, C. 1850-1940, 2003.

23 A system of joint family practiced by the people in Kerala.
24 See “Matriliny and its Discontents” by G. Arunima.
25 There were alternative discourses on ways of being a woman and an individual.
Such alternative discourses were in competition with the pastorate and can be
described as counter-conducts.
26 Rupa Viswanath in her book The Pariah Problem says that the Pariah problem was
only posed but never solved. The colonial state’s foremost commitment was to
maximise tax revenue and the state was dependent on Pariah labour. The East India
company sought to have India exempted from the empire wide abolition of slavery
in 1833.
Works Cited :
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel.
Oxford UP, 1989.
Armstrong Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse, editors. The Ideology of Conduct:
Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality. New York: Metheun,
1987.
Bayly, Susan. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to
the Modern Age. Cambridge UP, 1999.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Brooks, Peter. “The Tale vs. The Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol.21, No.
2/3, Winter-Spring 1988, pp. 285-292.
Chathunayar, Cheruvalathu. Meenakshi. Tiruvanantapuram: Chintha
Publications, 2013. Print.
Diks, Nicholas B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.
Princeton U P, 2001.
Dilip, Menon, translator. Saraswativijayam. By Potheri Kunhambu, Book
Review Trust, 1892.
Dumont, Louis. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications.
Chicago UP, 1980.
Ellis, Sarah Stickney. The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic
Habits. Fisher, Son & Co., 1839.

Frykenberg, Robert Eric. Christianity in India: from Beginnings to the Present.

Oxford UP, 2013.
Foucault, Michel, and Colin Gordon. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings 1972-1977. Harvester P., 1980.
Foucault, Michel, and Robert J. Hurley. The History of Sexuality. Vintage, 1990.
Foucault, Michel, et al. Security, Territory, Population Lectures at the College De
France, 1977-78. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Innes, Joanna. “‘Reform’ in English Public Life: the Fortunes of a Word.”
Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780-1850, Cambridge Univ
Press, 2007, pp. 71–97.
Mary Yonge, Charlotte. The Daisy Chain: Or, Aspirations: A Family Chronicle.
Vol I, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1856.
---. The Trial: More Links of The Daisy Chain. Vol I & II, New York: D. Appleton
& Co., 1867.
Mohan, P. Sanal. Modernity of Slavery: Struggles against Caste Inequality in
Colonial Kerala. Oxford UP, 2015.
Muliyil, Joseph. Sukumari: A Story Desciptive of the Early Work of the Basel
German Evangelical Mission in North Malabar. Mangalore: Basel
Mission Book and Tract Depository, 1897. Print.
Report of the Malabar Marriage Commission With Enclosures and Appendices.
Printed at the Lawrence Asylum Press, 1891.
Romanes, Ethel. Charlotte Mary Younge: An Appreciation. London, A. R
Mowbray & CO. LTD., 1908.
Viswanath, Rupa. The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in
Modern India. Columbia UP, 2014.

pp. 306-315
UTOPIAN VISIONS OF FEMINIST SCIENCE

FICTION: A PATHWAY TO ‘BETTER’ FUTURES
Pritam Panda
Abstract
Science Fiction over the years have achieved a significant place in the
pantheon of literature. From being dismissed as pulp fiction in the 20th
century, science fiction has come a long way to be recognised as a
creative field of duty mainly due to the writings of H. G Wells, Jules
Verne, Arthur Clarke, etc. and the fact that the genre talks about things
that belong to the ‘future’ in a language adhering to the technicalities
followed by the cyber generation. As the progress of the society in
material terms getting accentuated at a very rapid pace owing to prolific
use of technology, the alternate societies presented by science fiction
seems very relevant, plausible and thought provoking in the present
times. Utopian writings belonging to the genre have achieved fame
because they present themselves as a kind of ‘revolutionary literature’ by
offering the prototype of ‘perfect’ worlds that are estranged from the
disparities existing in the contemporary society. Feminist literature is
also similar in ideation to the genre because both the genres talk about
societies that are truly democratic and which provides equal
opportunities to the ‘second sex’ to flourish. Feminist Utopian science
fiction was propelled by the works of writers like Ursula Guin, Joanna
Russ , Margaret Atwood who wrote about societies those were more
benevolent to women and also deconstructed the notion of patriarchal
hegemony. These utopias talked about the subverting the carefully
designed stereotypical social practices that gave an upper hand to the
male society while pushing the women to the periphery eternally. This
paper looks at two texts namely The Female Man by Joanna Russ and
Women on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and how these utopian
texts brought about new concepts in social orientation and its cultural
influence on the gender construct followed by the conventional society.
Keywords : alternate, revolutionary literature, democratic, subversion,
hegemony, orientation.
Science Fiction over the years has found its own significant position in the
pantheon of literature. With our society engaging with science more and more
with each passing day, the importance of science fiction as a literary genre is
exponentially on the rise. Science fiction due to its imaginative texture provides a
lot of scope for the writers to include an array of topics and contexts. Since the

Utopian Visions of Feminist Science Fiction … 307
time of its proliferation as a literary genre, science fiction has been used as a
political, social and cultural tool. Science fiction has moved a long way from being
escapist stories of adventures and fairy tales to being subjects of social and
cultural reformation. Mainstream writers have also used Science Fiction to
comment on the contemporary problems of the society. Basically the futuristic
tenor of the genre allows the writers to extrapolate the present conditions of the
society and visualise it in an upcoming world. Science and technology, as
recognised by the great scientists like Einstein have always been democratic and
progressive. They are meant to expedite tasks and assist in societal development.
But the massive power dynamic associated with it often results in the misuse of
science and technology. In fact, in the present context it has turned into a
Frankensteinsque monster which has been exploited by the power hungry
capitalist forces for commercial benefits. Over the years, science and technology
has turned into a tool of social and cultural exploitation by the dominant forces in
the society. Time and again science fiction writers have turned the genre into a
way of resistance against these malicious forces who have misutilized power and
technology. Feminist science fiction is such a genre in which these kind of
narratives thrive. Science fiction until the 1960s and 1970s had been a very
patriarchal genre due to the social construct that machines and devices are only
dealt with by men and the women folk do not have much to do with it. And it was
reiterated by the almost negligent participation of women science fiction writers,
the marginalisation of women characters in science fiction narratives and the
general presumption about science fiction being a masculine genre due to its ‘non
artistic’ texture. With the advent of second wave feminism in the 1960s, the
women writers started combining sensationalism with the technological critique
narratives and that gave thrust to feministic science fiction. Three texts in this
period stood out: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Marge
Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Joanna Russ' The Female
Man (1970).The Star Trek show on T.V also attracted the female audience
because more than the machines and devices, the socio –cultural dynamics of the
show was much stronger which gave the female section a lot to ponder upon and
engage with. The series was mostly about the interaction with aliens who were
treated with a sense of alienation or ‘otherness’. This was also appealing to the
woman psyche because in a male dominated society, the fairer sex was always
treated as the ‘other’ to the ‘center’. Sarah Lefanu has commented on the
relationship between science fiction and feminism in the following way:
‘Science Fiction is feminism-friendly. With its metaphors of space and
time travel, of parallel universe, of contradictions co-existing, of black
holes and event horizons, Science Fiction is ideally placed for
interrogative functions. The unities of 'self', whether in terms of
bourgeois individualism or biological reductionism, can be subverted.'
(Lefanu, 95). The basic thing common between feminist writings and
science fiction is that both are rebellious in nature towards the
established social and cultural conventions of the society and there is a
conscious and constant effort to disorientate the status quo by both of
them. The existing paper looks at two texts: The Female Man by Joanna

308 Pritam Panda
Russ and Woman at the Edge of time by Marge Piercy and tries to
explore the alternate worlds that they have portrayed and the social,
cultural and political implications emanating out from it.
Feminist utopian narratives basically examine the inter-play of the
dynamics of power between the various sections of the society and re-orientate it
with a more egalitarian approach (in most of the cases). As Frances Bartkowski
states, “The feminist utopian novel is a place where theories of power can be
addressed through the construction of narratives that test and stretch the
boundaries of power in its operational details” (5). These narratives establish
themselves as the critique of the present conventions and try to redesign the
working mechanism of the society. Ann Keinhorst argues that ‘critical utopias’
are different from ‘traditional utopias’ in more ways than one. Critical utopian
narratives take the reader to an altogether new world. They “offer possible
historical alternatives to the present” (91) that are rooted in a “flexible and
alterable” now rather than a “predetermined” future (96). The critical utopia
differs from the traditional utopia in that it is “the vision of a future way of life…
which presently carries the seed of potential historical reality” (98). Secondly, she
opines that critical utopias such as Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères and Marge
Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, unlike conventional utopias, have a
specifically feminist rather than humanist “emancipatory orientation” (97), one
that is firmly rooted in interrogating both the present and the place of women in
it. “Feminist utopia,” she states, “will not be replaced by ‘humanistic’ utopias –as
long as the full humanity of women remains a utopian goal” (98). The utopian
narratives are instrumental in highlighting the concerns, aspirations and fears of
the common persons especially the women community who have been pushed to
the periphery with respect to social control from time immemorial. Feminist
utopian narratives take the readers to alternate physical worlds which not only
are different to the existing social conditions but also inform the readers about
the future repercussions or reverse situations of the present disparities that exist.
The feminist utopian narratives are usually used by the writers to deconstruct the
gender binaries in our prevalent system and explore them with new approaches.
That gender is a social construct and its present conventions needs to re-
examined is well known to the sane individual and these utopian narratives assist
in that kind of analysis. In the essay “Feminist theory and science fiction”,
Veronica Hollinger maintains that although science fiction “has often been called
‘the literature of change’, for the most part it has been slow to recognize the
historical contingency and cultural conventionality of many of our ideas about
sexual identity and desire, about gendered behaviour and about the ‘natural’ roles
of women and men” (126). Feminist utopian writings are a welcome change
because they are more accommodating in terms of gender and sexuality which
the conservative male science fiction writers are circumspect of trying. It would
not be wrong to ascertain science fiction as a form of revolutionary or resentment
literature because it tries to deconstruct the accepted and coded forms of gender
roles and notions. Thus science fiction can be seen as a collaborative field to
feministic writings which creates opportunities women to inhabit in a world

which is free from gender bias thus ensuring scope for optimum realisation of the
fairer sex’s potential.
The first text in consideration is Women on the Edge of Time, a classic
feminist novel by Marge Piercy. The novel is said to have created a special place
for feministic science fiction writing. The novel is widely revered because it is one
of the most famous representations of female dominated ‘utopias’. It endeavours
to reclaim artificial gestation as a potential means of achieving gender equality.
The book is a strong radical attack against patriarchal norms. Plot wise, it tells
the story of a poor Hispanic woman named Connie who is transported to her
dreams to Mattapoiset , an ideal future society where the sexes enjoy total
equality. Her acquaintance in this dreamland is Luciente, a resident of
Mattapoisett. The fictional world of Mattapoisett acts as a kind of utopian world
in which there is complete sexual freedom for ladies. It is an extension of the idea
propagated by the feminist movement of the 1960s where there was strong
advocation for elimination or estrangement of women from procreation
responsibilities as a means to achieve gender equality. The novel takes the help of
the process of ‘ectogenesis’ in which women are freed from the task of breeding a
child within their womb for months. This process was a topic of debate between
feminists as one section believed that the ability to procreate preserves the
individuality, uniqueness and unrivalled ‘capacity’ in the hands of the female sex.
This was not merely a physical activity but a carrier of feministic aspirations and
ideals. That men could not replicate the process, neither could challenge it but
were dependent on it for their off-springs was a means of subverting patriarchal
hegemony. In Piercy’s utopian society, cultivating a brooder society for artificial
gestation is always a pre-determined decision. The character of Luciente
introduces Connie to this process of ectogenosis and thus presents a paradigm
shift in gender politics which leads to an ‘equal status for women’. It is termed as
a ‘necessary evil’ for achieving the goal of sovereignty for women’. Piercy depicts
a world in which a feminist form of social anarchism exists as exemplified by the
process of total sexual license and complete autonomy to the women folks in
terms of gender roles. Pregnancy and child birth are carried through artificial
wombs and there is absolutely no need of women being subjected to excruciating
pain arising out of this processes. Set in the 1970s the book follows a fairly decade
old ideation of gender equality and more or less depicts a world that is devoid of
‘manly interference’. It is a completely subversive attitude to look at the current
problems and there is no effort on the part of the author to opt for a mediating
path. There is no absolutely no scope of having a mutually inclusive kind of
society where there is space for the male section of the society. Thus this novel
comes together as a book which eliminates male activity. This outlook remains a
bone of contention for many female scholars who believed that this is a kind of
escapist vision which is temporal and will not fulfil the basic underlying aim of
achieving women equality in a society that accommodates both men and women.
In an important scene of the text Connie who is from the traditional world
disapproves of the existing social rituals of the Mattapoisett world. At one point

310 Pritam Panda
she tells “She felt angry. Yes, how dare any man share that pleasure? These
women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the last refuge of
women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up,
they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those
sealed in blood and milk” (Piercy, 134). Thus the author contradicts her own
theory of the utopian world being unsure of its extreme feminine anarchy. This
also vindicates the ambiguity of Utopia which is often a story of ‘no-where’
written by those who have not been to that no-where land. Connie’s lack of
freedom has been aptly captured in the beginning of the novel when she is
subjected to brain surgery without her permission. The physical act of subjecting
an individual under the knife without her consent and no valid reason is used as a
process akin to ‘rape’. Not only it is forceful but it dehumanises the person and
subjects the individual to grave psychological scars and results in lack of self-
esteem and also facilitates the growth of schizophrenic tendencies. This act of
scissoring thus acts as a metaphor for rape in the novel. The state in the novel has
been unkind on her, it has taken away her daughter, killed her love and she is left
alone to survive on welfare. She is already subjected to a lot of tribulations in her
life mainly due to her coloured origin and being a ‘female’. But still the society is
hell-bent on thrusting more bad experiences on her in order to glorify the status
quo of the society in which females are the ‘second sex’ and thus should be given
an appropriate treatment in order to maintain the orientation. The character of
Connie is financially dependent on others.
Economics is of paramount importance in Connie’s life. In a capitalist
society, it is financial power that gives the person a sense of dignity and
relevance. “Usually a sensation of repetition upon waking was a waking to: again
bills, again hunger, again pain, again loss, again trouble. Again, no Claud, again
no Angelina, again the rent due, again no job, no hope” (Piercy 33). After the
death of her pick –pocket companion Claud she is completely helpless moneywise
and hence she needs other avenues of income for which she does not have proper
skills neither resources. This is a demonstration of complete failure of social
machinery which has been aptly demonstrated by the treatment of Connie by the
society. That the society is in a constant impulsive endeavour of exerting its
ideological functions on the individual through violent means is reiterated
repeatedly in the text. The society in which Connie lives does not believe in
equanimity but applies the ‘survival of the fittest’ principle. This surely has effect
on persons who do not have adequate resources at their disposal. This kind of
mismatch is being critiqued upon by the author who takes a strong stand against
it by creating a complete female centric world in ‘Mattapoiset’ which seems to be
more of a gender reversed reconfiguration of the unjust regulations carried out in
the male dominated society. That a completely normal lady is taken forcefully to
the mental hospital and the mental health experts are hell-bent on making her
feel sick about herself speaks about the debasement of institutions by the
capitalist forces who want everything to be ‘fall in line’ with their ideology. “As
long as that ethos includes the sexist and racist attitudes of the larger society,
female and non-white male patients will be treated differently (less ethically)

than the white male patients.” (Piercy 172). Although the novel has been accused
of reducing women’s capacity of self-determination, the text acts as a mirror to
contemporary problems of the society whose treatment of coloured women is
severely questionable. The very existence of such a society is questionable where
the foundations do not adhere to social equality and the distribution of economic
and cultural resources is not uniform and democratic. The quest for finding a
utopian respite prompts the author to create a land like Mattapoisset. Perhaps
the author through this point of radicalism points out to the fact that in the near
future the dynamics of the society would subvert and there will be complete
female dominance. Thus an egalitarian society is a figment of imagination which
is almost impossible to achieve. Thus, this text serves as a very important
component of utopian fiction where a new society is constructed by completely
minimising the influence of the male intervention on social dynamics.
The next text in consideration is ‘The Female Man by Joanna Russ. It is a
critically acclaimed book which includes four worlds in different times and
spaces. The four major characters belonging to these four worlds are: Jeanine,
who is a librarian who still thinks that nothing happened in USA or the world,
neither the second world war took place and no great depression occurred.
Joanna is a college professor of the late 60s America who is also the narrator,
protagonist and authorial voice. Janet is the lady from the utopian world of
Whileaway. The fourth character is Jael, an assassin who is violent and she comes
from a polarised space where there are clear demarcations between ‘manland’
and ‘womenland’. The novel is a landmark text with the book advocating for a
classless society without government with strong affiliations towards the natural
world. “Along the 1960s and 1970s, Russ and her contemporaries introduced a
profound change, positioning the female protagonist as a complete individual
capable of all constructive and destructive activities entirely outside of any
relationship with the male identity of western myths” (Albinsky 160). The author
through the plot intellectualises the concept of women’s rights and tries to
analyse it from a ‘male-less’ perspective by making the land of Whileaway free
from males who have all died in a plague.
The world of Whileaway is very much different to the world of Jeanine and
Joanna who live in ‘our Earth’. Joanna wants to become a ‘female man’, only
through which she believes she can live her life to her fullest. By being influenced
by Janet and the envisioned utopian world of ‘Whileaway’, she wants to earn the
epithet ‘Female Man’ because she wants to deconstruct the contradictions based
on gender in her society by the process of unification of these contraries. As the
narrative progresses in part ix of the book, she beautifully encapsulates the well
designed, systematic curbing of the potential of the women community by the
society whose patriarchal dominant intentions are ubiquitously present in the
working mechanism of the social institutions and in the form of moral and public
policing. That Janet liberates them from this kind of oppression is difficult to
accept for them initially but later on they get attached to the radical contours of
Whileaway. As Joanna describes in the novel

312 Pritam Panda
In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I

knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable,
dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent,
obedient, and beautiful. You can always get dressed up and go to a party.
Woman is the gateway to another world; Woman is the earth-mother;
Woman, is the eternal siren; Woman is purity; Woman is carnality;
Woman has intuition; Woman is the life-force; Woman is selfless love.
(Russ 107).
Through the use of the four central characters, Joanna Russ questions gendered
identities and their relevance in settings different from earth and also varied in
time durations. The techniques of time travel and different worlds are
intertwined and the plot is constructed on multiple layers of meaning in order to
add a new dimension to the concurrent differences that we find in our eco system
which are driven by social factors like education, race and gender. In the male
dominated genre of sf it has been repeatedly found that women have been
purposefully pushed to the fringes thus mirroring their peripheral existence in
the society. The roles played by women characters as depicted in science fiction
texts are in no means emancipatory and thus act as a reminder and reiteration of
‘naturalistic’ stereotyped roles meant for women. All the four female characters in
the novel present a unified picture of womanhood. The different configurations
available in the different portrayed worlds and the interlinking of characters and
contradictions point out to a conscious endeavour on the part of the author to
bring about a change in cultural awareness in the contemporary patriarchal
society and also to inculcate holistic consciousness in the future generations.
Janet represents a very completely different woman in comparison to the more
traditional Jeanine and Joanna. According to Joanna, Janet is “whom we
[Joanna and her contemporaries] don’t believe in and whom we deride but who is
in secret our saviour from utter despair” (Russ, 212-13).
The sexual independence that Janet enjoys in the land of Whileaway, the
utopian land is very much different from what is practised in the land of Jeanine
and Joanna and even Jael who comes from a very volatile setting. As a character
she is way too liberal and has much more affinity towards violence. She has more
propensity towards radical feministic activities which seem intriguing and
disgusting to Jeanine and Joanna at the same time. While the process of sex
converts the women folks to weak objects of pleasure often playing second fiddle,
Janet portrays them new avenues of self- pleasure like masturbation and
homosexual relationships. While it is not utopian at all to have this distinctly
different modes of self -pleasure but to have ways which could free women from
‘sexual slavery’ was completely novel and in a sense’ utopian for the female folks.
Even if we look at the process of motherhood in the novel we will find that the
process of parthogenesis was followed thus liberating women from the traditional
modes of motherhood. It destabilised the conventional modes of parenting. It
was a means of liberating women from heterosexual oppression. For the ladies at
Whileaway , parenting was a ‘leisure’ activity they generally undertook at around
thirty years of age. Joanna acknowledged the pressures of maternity being a

patriarchal stigma created by the traditional society when she says in the text
“Besides what about the children? Mothers have to sacrifice themselves to their
children, both male and female, so that the children will be happy when they
grow up; though the mothers themselves were once children and were sacrificed
to in order that they might grow up and sacrifice themselves to others; and when
the daughters grow up, they will be mothers and they will have to sacrifice
themselves fortheir children, so you begin to wonder whether the whole things
isn’t a plot to make the world safe for (male) children. But motherhood is sacred
and mustn’t be talked about” (Russ 204).
If we take into account the fourth character Jael, she is much more
focussed and sharp in comparison to the other Js. She is diametrically opposite to
the character of Joanna.Her intentions veer towards integrating the other three
women characters into the perennial struggle against ‘Manland’ which she is
fighting as a part of ‘Womenland’. The segregation of both the lands and the
constant hostility points out to an alternate futuristic vision of the author of
which Jael is a by-product. She has turned into a ‘violent machine’ and thus
becomes the symbol of the negative facet of the revolution against men. She is
hyper-active in her approach representing an ‘alpha-feminine’ trait in her
treatment of others. She employs a male slave just like the males use female
transsexuals as wives and prostitutes in ‘Manland’. Unlike Janet’s ‘Whileway’
where a mysterious plague eliminates all the males which is off-course an indirect
and less explicit method of alienating male intervention. Thus she is not at all
friendly with the concept of Whileaway and this is starkly visible when she says,
Disapprove all you like. Pedant! Let me give you something to carry
away with you, friend: that “plague” you talk of is a lie. I know. . . . It is I
who gave you your “plague,” my dear, about which you can now poetize
and moralize to your hearts content; I, I, I, I am the plague, Janet
Evason. I and the war I fought built your world for you, I and those like
me, we gave you 1000 years of peace and love and the Whileawayan
flowers nourish themselves on the bones of the men we have slain. (Russ
211).
The author also decodes language as an agent of extension of phallocentric
ideas. Since Whileaway is a genderless society the use of language as a carrier of
phallocentric hegemony is limited. A life is envisioned where the language written
about women is not despotic and is not a reflection of male anarchy thus
maintaining the vision of a ‘utopian’ future. As the language in ‘our world’ as
analysed by Jeanine in the novel is based on patriarchal codes, the entire
population is divided strictly into two categories- male and female which is
dissimilar to the genderless society of Whileaway. Language has been used as the
most significant tool in ascribing ‘gender roles’ to both the biological sexes with
its ‘channels of communication’ and ‘ways of engagement’ both facilitating male
superiority and repeatedly glorifies the subservient status of women. This misuse
of the episteme of language has been completely dismantled in Whileaway. As
Joanna who is the ‘female-man’ in the novel describes her state in which she is

314 Pritam Panda
highly intelligent and rational but society has appropriated her in such a way that
she discounts her intelligence as not intrinsically belonging to her but being the
‘manly qualities’ of a female which she is. AS Myk says that her behaviour reflects
“the linguistic impossibility to identify as a woman without subscribing to the
term’s inherent essentialism” (94).
Utopias are recurrent in literature due to the continuous dissatisfaction
with the present social conventions. As the world is moving rapidly towards a
post human age, utopian literature is gathering new dynamics. Utopias are
escapist modes of literature that not only give the readers some respite from the
hard realities of life, it is instrumental in creating alternate worlds. Dystopias are
very much straight in depicting debilitating milieus and spaces over imagined
periods of time, but utopias are ironical attempts that try to glorify a very
contradictory situation with respect to the corresponding times. The feminist
utopias have a dual responsibility...they need to find a balanced world which is
equally sensitive to the demands of the women folk as well as establishing a sense
of equanimity with respect to caste, creed, gender and language. With the present
times full of disturbing developments including apocalyptic changes in
environment, the uncertainty over future has gripped humanity and there is a
great affinity for speculative literature that speaks about alternate futures.
Although there has been blatant criticism about these ‘feel good’ literature being
too good to be true, factual analysis reveals that most of the scientific
developments that have taken place in the contemporary society has been found
to be inspired by these speculative fiction.
The two above mentioned novels present variable views of a more
inclusive, liberal and egalitarian society for women. But there seems to be an
eagerness to disrupt or eliminate male activity as something ‘contagious’ which
seems ‘too hard to be gullible’ in these contemporary times where ‘female
inclusivity’ in society has improved by leaps and bounds. In contemporary
literature, sci-fi concepts and tropes have been used extensively to portray future
societies which are much more liberating for women. But as time has passed the
significance of these two texts prolifically increase due to the fact that they were
written in the era of ‘second wave feminism’ which was instrumental in
reconfiguring the patriarchy based codes of social regulation to a large context.
All in all, they presented theoretical frameworks in which present age writers
could construct new women-centric narratives and try to add some semblance of
balance in the ‘monkey-balancing’ of power equations that co-exist between
‘male’ and ‘female’ in today’s times. The four world involving the four women
have been carefully constructed so as to ensure that a sense of didactism
emanates from the text that the revolution for women’s rights is not a monolithic
movement but the prerogative of women from all sections and part of the world.
This heterogenic discourse between the four women serves as an inspiration for
the future women generations to dismantle the imposed chains of patriarchal
stigmas and collaborate beyond the barriers of nationality, language, caste, race
and ethnicity. As Bammer observes this novel reinvigorates women sensitivity

against the prevalent imbalance of power equations and motivates them for “a
movement towards utopia in a journey of changes we ourselves create day by day
in the process of living” (Bammer 100). Thus these utopias go a long way to
establishing new modes of critical thinking as well as providing researchers and
social scientists remedial measures to fix emerging problems in the present
world.
Works Cited :
Albinski, Nan B. “When It Changed”. Women’s Utopias in British and American
Fiction. Routledge, 1988, p.160.
Bammer, Angelika. Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s.
Routledge, 1991, p.100.
Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. University of Nebraska Press, 1989, p.5.
Hollinger, Veronica. “Feminist Theory and Science Fiction”. The Cambridge
Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge, 2003, p.126.
Keinhorst, Annette. “Emancipatory Projection: An Introduction to Women’s
Critical Utopias.” Women’s Studies. Vol 14, no. 2, 1987, pp. 91-110.
Lefanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science
Fiction. Women's Press, 1988, p.95.
Myk, Malgorzata. “Becoming-Woman Across Utopian Spaces: Transfiguring
Encounters with Joanna Russ’s “The Female Man.” Utah Foreign
Language Review, Vol. 19, 2011, pp. 85-103, http://www.epubs.
uta.edu/index.php/ uflr/article/view/727.
Piercy, Marge. Woman on the edge of Time. Fawcett Crest, 1976.
Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. The Women’s Press, 1985.

pp. 316-330
DEMYSTIFICATION OF THE POSTMODERN

DIALECTICS OF SPACE AND IDENTITY IN
PETER CAREY’S JACK MAGGS
Anjan Saikia
Abstract
The discourse of “Postmodernism” is an exasperating and problematic
one to define precisely due to its encapsulation of a wide range of objects
and phenomena, and the diverse levels of conceptual abstractions. Its
complex anti-modernist strategies erupted into the scene from the late
1950s and received widespread momentum during the 1970s and 1980s
at an unprecedented level. Apart from freeing it from any extraneous
influence, it also brings into critical discussions the seminal ideas of
indeterminacy, plurality, fragmentation, fracturing, and rejection of
grand and metanarratives as such. In fact, the different aspects of
postmodernism have impacted the contemporary social, economic,
political, philosophical and cultural productions in a significant manner
and extent. The paper frames the notions of space and identity as
operating within postmodern discourse and how these emerge as
representations in the works of Peter Carey.
Keywords : Peter Carey, space, identity, postmodernism.
In the Postmodern discourse, the notion of ‘space’ has occupied a central

position for its thematic and conceptual importance. It has, in fact, re-emerged as
an important means of analysis in literary and cultural studies in recent years. In
other words, the discourse of postmodernism has especially emphasized the
importance of space, geography and cartography, especially in relation to modes
of transgression, transcendence, multi-focalization and fragmentations as well.
Besides, in the aftermath of the hyper-localization of experience, there have been
calls for orienting and re-orienting the efforts of mapmaking and space. In the
“Preface and Postscript” of the book Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion
of Space in Critical Social Theory (1990), Edward Soja significantly states
Today, however, it may be space more than time that hides
consequences from us, the ‘making of geography’ more than the ‘making
of history’ that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical
world. This is the insistent and promise of postmodern geographies. (1)
Similarly, the notion of ‘identity’ has also been given the status of a focal
issue of discussion in the postmodern era owing to its significance, relevance, and

Demystification of the Postmodern Dialectics of… 317
complex and intricate nature. Interestingly, the very processes of identity

formations on the part of individuals as well as the nations have essential and
inevitable connections with the spatial dimensions. Hence, postmodernism has
reckoned both these complex areas under its purview and has widely promoted
these for discussions from different and diverse perspectives. Both the notions of
space and identity have their interconnections, and thus, both of them also
involve and echo multiplicity, relativism, ambiguity, fluidity, theoretical
frameworks, and subjective experiences as well.
Peter Carey is a significant writer in contemporary Australian English
literature and is widely regarded as the legitimate heir to Patrick White in
Australian literature. Carey, a two time Booker prize winner, has thirteen novels
to his credit till date, and in almost all his novels, he explores the issues of
territorial, racial, national and cultural significance in the nation of Australia. In
other words, the issues of history, identity, space, subjectivity, reconciliation,
indigenous aboriginals, and so on are very much prominent in the novels of
Carey.
The basic objective of the article is to demystify and examine critically the
postmodern dialectics concerning the notions of space and identity through the
meticulous reading of Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, one of the important texts in the
canon of Australian English literature. The article delves deep into the
postmodern intricacies and ambivalences connected to space, location,
geography and the eventual impacts of these into the very issue of identity
formation and assertions through the reading of the novel Jack Maggs in the
context of Australia.
In the article, analytical method is applied to study the text Jack Maggs
from postmodern theoretical approaches to space, place and geography and its
essential connections with the processes of identity formation. In this context, the
article directs to study the Australian contexts, the aborigines and the white
ambivalences, and their backlashes through the study of the novel Jack Maggs.
The secondary sources are comprised of the books including edited ones, the
articles and the essays taken from diverse sources.
Postmodernism which came to the scene in the second half of the twentieth
century championed new models and designs in terms of socio-cultural and
political life. By embracing everyday life, mass media, consumerism, sub-cultures
and others alike, postmodernism experimented with almost every important
sphere of human life and existence, and challenged the modernist narratives. It is
such a context, the statement of the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard in
the book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge regarding the
modern rationalist stories and the metanarratives poses immense significance.
Here in the book, Lyotard writes that “the great “metanarratives” or grand
rationalist stories of Enlightenment rationality” (45) have started to exhaust in
the wake of the new condition viz. Postmodernism.

318 Anjan Saikia
The philosophy of space has been under intense revisions in the modern
(nation-building and emergence of physical borders) and postmodern times
(globalization, crossing of borders), and thus today, there is a larger and broader
application of the term space, occupying not only physical or geopolitical
concerns, but also a large number of implicit and explicit areas as well as aspects
and ideas about the human experience. Hence, the notion of space has been
widely proliferated in different disciplines accompanied by their appropriate
streams of logic in the postmodern times. Emphasizing the re-emergence of space
in the Postmodern discourse, Edward Soja in Postmodern Geographies: The
Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1990), strongly argues:
…Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the
immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.’
To recover from this historicist devaluation, to make space visible again
as a fundamental referent of social being, requires a major rethinking
not only of the concreteness of capitalist spatial practices but also of the
philosophizing abstractions of modern ontology and epistemology.
(119-120)
Again, in postmodern deliberations, space is reckoned as nothing but a
production which incorporates within its ambit a great number of complex
issues. Pointing out that, Lefebvre writes in the Preface of the book The
Production of Space (1991):
The more so in view of the further claim that the space thus produced
also serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a
means of production it is also a means of control and hence of
domination, of power; yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those
who would make use of it. (XII, 27)
Significantly, human experiences are inevitably connected with the notion of
space and this is what J. E. Malpas foregrounds in the book titled Place and
Experience: A Philosophical Topography (2004). Here Malpas interestingly
explores the essential relations of space with subjectivity and identification of the
individuals and writes in the following manner:
…-the very identity of subjects, both in terms of their own self-definition
and their identity as grasped by others, is inextricably bound to the
particular places in which they find themselves and in which others find
them, while, in a more general sense, it is only within the overarching
structure of place as such that subjectivity as such is possible. (176)
Thus, space has its essential connectivity with identity which has become a key
term in contemporary social, political, and philosophical understanding and
analysis. Identity is, however, a prodigiously discussed and debated term with an
enormous variety of philosophical, social and political nuances and applications.
Simply speaking, identity is constructed and fluid and multiple in nature and is
engaged in hard dynamics and essentialism. Its proliferation is quintessentially
filled with significance, and that’s why, the term has become a hotbed of
discussion in postmodern epoch in the aftermath of various circumstances and

unprecedented happenings. Hence, conceptualizing identity as something that

people have sought to construct and negotiate would be something just working
at the surface level. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper opine in the essay
“Beyond Identity” (2000) that identity in actuality engages within “it all forms of
belonging, all experiences of commonality, connectedness and cohesion, all self-
understandings and self-identifications” (2). Rogers Brubaker and Frederick
Cooper quite pertinently write the following lines on identity in the essay
“Beyond “Identity’”:
If identity is everywhere, it is nowhere. If it is fluid, how can we
understand the ways in which self-understandings may harden, congeal,
and crystallize? If it is constructed, how can we understand the
sometimes coercive force of external identifications? If it is multiple,
how do we understand the terrible singularity that is often striven for -
and sometimes realized - by politicians seeking to transform mere
categories into unitary and exclusive groups? How can we understand
the power and pathos of identity politics? (1)
It is thus suggested that the formation of human identity takes place within
spatial and temporal contexts. The spatial and temporal contexts shape the
humans’ experience of environment and influence in the construction of culture
and history. Since people define themselves through a sense of place, therefore
context has become the most important component in the process of identity
formation. All these have become viable because of the fact that space is no
longer perceived and sensed merely as a geographical location with physical
boundaries; but because of the fact that it is intimately tied to lived experience
and is supposed to be increasingly associated with social, historical, and cultural
identities and ideologies.
The works of Carey has covered much of the geography of the Australian
experience and hence his novels chronicle his country’s history from the mid-
nineteenth century to the contemporary reality in Australia. Carey’s exploration
of the wide-ranging issues including the convict system, the doctrine of terra
nullius, the Kelly outbreak, colonialism in its various stages, to the shifting stance
of national identity of the nation of Australia on the pages of his novels can be
traced through Bliss (1981), Illywhacker (1985), Oscar and Lucinda (1988), The
Tax Inspector (1991), The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), Jack Maggs
(1997), True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), My Life as a Fake (2003), His
Illegal Self (2008),Parrot and Olivier in America (2009), The Chemistry of
Tears (2012) and Amnesia (2014) . In all these novels, Carey fully explores the
critical potential of self-consciousness, and quite importantly, it is the self-
awareness of his narrators that he addresses issues of constructed ness and
arbitrariness of the reality of the past and the present along with his constant
interrogations of truth and authenticity.
Carey’s Jack Maggs which was published in the year 1997, however, bears
inter-textual references in terms of characters, their names and plot elements
with an important novel in Victorian English literature, i.e., Great Expectations

320 Anjan Saikia
by Charles Dickens. The protagonist of the novel Jack Maggs is a counterpart of

Dicken’s Magwitch, and in this context, it is important to note here that Dickens,
a widely known and read English novelist of the Victorian era, has been adapted
and remained present in Australian literature much before the writing of Jack
Maggs. In The Bluebird Café published in the year 1990, Carmel Bird transforms
this great Victorian author viz. Dickens into a contemporary of the protagonist of
the novel, and in the novel the protagonist here writes letters and exchanges such
things to Dickens. Michel Noonan in his novel Magwitch, published in the year
1982, distinctly recounts Pip’s sojourn to Australia and the recovery of a second
Magwitch fortune. Although Carey is also found replicating some of the
distinctive areas of Dickens famous novel, yet Jack Maggs can’t be considered as
a sequel or interpolation of Dickens’ novel due to the fact that Jack Maggs by
Carey is a new and distinctive creation and is filled with great inventiveness in
terms of character portrayal, contexts, style, content, intentions, directions and
ending as well. In an interview, Carey answered his position regarding his
modeling of the novel Jack Maggs in the line of Dickens Great Expectations with
great clarity. Carey says:
It is such an Aussie story that this person who has been brutalized by the
British ruling class should then wish to have as his son an English
gentleman, and in that matter what pains he has, what torture he has
suffered, that would be what he would want. I think that that’s a very
Aussie thing. I hope it’s of the Australia of the past, not the Australia of
the future. (241, Gaile)
Jack Maggs is about the story of dispossession, appropriation and retaliation,
and here in the novel, the central character Jack Maggs is an orphan who has
been betrayed and brutalized by an uncaring society. Jack Maggs, in the course of
the novel, returns to England in search of his home and this quest of Jack Maggs
for home becomes a continuing mental bondage to his illusions about England,
his past, family and other sources of his identity.
The narrative of the novel is set basically in metropolitan London and is
precisely dated from 15 April to 7 May, 1837. Interestingly, 7 May is the day in
which the assassination attempt on Maggs is done by none, but by his endearing
son, Phipps. Hence the novel is set in the early nineteen century London and
concentrates on the events on a period of three weeks. How Maggs arrived in
London at 6 o’clock from Australia on 15 April with all the risks of hanging, if
discovered anywhere in England, is described in the very beginning of the novel:
It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in
London. It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in
the year 1837 that those hooded eyes looked out of the window of the
Dover coach and beheld, in the bright aura of gas light, a golden bull and
an overgrown mouth opening to devour him-the sign of his inn, the
Golden Ox. (1)
The protagonist of Carey i.e. Jack Maggs is a convict who returns illegally
to his motherland in search of Phipps and is subsequently threatened with death

penalty upon his discovery. Before his deportation to Australia as a convict and
owning his status as a permanent outsider, Maggs was reared by his foster-
mother, Mary Britten who symbolizes Mother Britain here in the novel as a
foundling and was trained for a criminal career for her own profit. In the course
of his criminal activities, Maggs is captured and sentenced to transportation to
Australia to serve the rest of his life as a convict. Quite interestingly, although
Maggs has spent a considerable amount of his life in the new land oscillating
amidst spatial and identity ambivalences, still Maggs always wishes to return to
that motherland which has already rejected him as a valid child of the land. For
all these intricacies, he personally retains his Englishness including in his use of
the English language in spite of spending the last twenty five years of his life in
Australia as a convict. Therefore, after his return to England, Maggs fondly and
boisterously quotes Shakespeare in his speeches, corrects the servant girl viz.
Mercy’s cockney pronunciation and shows his familiarity with the works of Adam
Smith. How Maggs keeps himself abreast of the things happened in England
during his stay in Australia as a convict is evident in Chapter-59 of the novel:
It was a scheme, in all its very definite Divisions of Labour, which would
have met with the approval of Mr. Adam Smith, but I do not think that
this was an author I ever heard Silas mention, although he was a well
respected scholar and able to recite long passages from the Bible and
from Shakespeare. (214)
Jack Maggs is, in fact, a novel of self-delusion where the protagonist searches for
motherly love and comfort and eventually defines his identity in a new way under
different circumstances. As the novel unfolds, Maggs still considers him an
Englishman although he had been in Australia in the last twenty five years as a
convict, and that’s why, he wants to return to London where there is every
possibility of his hanging if discovered. Even if such risks are involved in his
return journey to Ma Britten which symbolizes mother Britain, he is found to be
exceptionally enthralled thinking his coming to homeland and introducing him as
an Englishman with all the pomp and pride. How Maggs still considers England
as his home is evident from his conversation with Ma Britten in the aftermath of
his arrival in London in the novel Jack Maggs:
‘What do you want Jack?’ said the old woman, and this time her voice
quavered. ‘What are you doing here in London?’
‘It’s my home,’ Jack said, raising his voice and revealing the fiercer
character which the porter at the Garden Ox briefly glimpsed. ‘That’s
what I want. My home.’ (5)
Such an action and assertion on the part of this convict manifests the importance
of place and home in one’s life. Hence this great significance of space, home,
locations and geography has made him dared enough at the time of his return to
London to keep behind all the risks including the possibility of his impending
arrest and sentencing if discovered.
As revealed in the novel, Maggs considers himself as an old dog who has

322 Anjan Saikia
been treated badly in his own country, and therefore, he wishes to reconnect with
his own people and establish his Englishness. But to his utter dismay, the people
that he thinks as his own consider him the otherwise. In the discussions among
Tobias Oates, Mr. Buckle and Miss Warriner, Jack Maggs has been referred to
with derogatory manners and terms. How his own people look towards him is
manifested when Tobias Oates says that “I got the rascal” (86). The “rascal”
mentioned here is referred to none, but Jack Maggs. Again the statement of Mr.
Buckle in the same conversation saying that “I guessed he was a bolter from New
South Wales” (87) is equally important in this context. Moreover, such a
statement of Oates on Maggs as “Did you not see his back, man? He is a
scoundrel”(87), testifies the very attitude of the people of the land that he
fruitlessly boasts of his own for such a long time. Besides, Maggs has been seen
by his compatriots as “a vermin” (127), “a cockroach (128) and finally as “the
criminal”. The statement that Mr. Oates made before the doctor where he says
that “it was the criminal, in all his wild and slovenly dishabille, who answered the
call” (182) is extremely significant in this respect. He has been constantly
refereed in the novel by his own countrymen as “the criminal” (228) even after
cutting twenty five years of punishment as a convict in Australia. Moreover, his
original name has been eradicated and replaced with the tag “convict” which is
clearly evident in Chapter -25 of the novel:
“At first the convict had been astonished to read Dabareiel’s flowery
speech-he could not believe that such an educated being might exist
within him-but he accepted it soon enough, …to hide the true nature of
his exploration.” (91)
His convict status is showed again in Chapter 56:
“The convict writhed against his magnetic chains. He sat up, straining
forward, his dark eyes glaring bright as grin. Tobias…but now all
thought of gain was put aside.” (202)
Thus, Maggs has been dubbed as the transported convict all the time even
after passing two and a half decades of after transportation in Australia. Maggs
like many other compatriots deported to Australia as convicts is actually the
victim of a cruel system of justice and these deported convicts as epitomized by
Maggs here swing back and forth in the new land, longing for that land only
which is the force behind their rejection as the sons of the land and the
consequent infliction of such severe punishments, tortures and placement in an
alien and hitherto unknown space. All these contexts clearly testify how
institutions including political ones also work as the markers of space and
identity in some contexts
Quite ironically if he is rejected as her son only because of the fact that he is
a convict, then the question regarding who has actually made him a convict and
in which land easily comes into mind. It is important to note here that it was in
his motherland that he had been given the training to become a thief and it was
Ma Britten who was largely accountable for his training as a thief and his

consequent conviction and transportation. The irony lies here in the fact that it
was in England where he was given the training to become a thief and it was the
same country which deported him to a hitherto unknown land for his theft.
Maggs once states in Chapter 26 that if he were given a space in his homeland, he
might have a different career:
I could have chosen, she is the one I would have wished to claim me as
her own. She was a force of nature, the Ma-her long arms, her wild hair,
her skin always smelling of snakeroot and tansy. She could fill a space.
She could stand her ground. She was the Queen of England in that white
little white washed room, delivering our neighbours’ babies, serving
soups, examining the bones and offal on the rickety pine table” (92-93)
Such a treatment puts the protagonist in great ambivalences where he could
neither acclimatize himself in the new land nor could get a place in the land
which he is longing for such a long time. Interestingly, the forced and new
landscape and the space there makes him greatly restless and his subsequent
hankering after for reconciliation and reestablishment of contacts with the
motherland namely England haunts his mind every time while living in the
country of Australia for the last two decades and a half. In the novel, one can see
how obsessive Jack Maggs is regarding his coming to England and how intensive
he is to identify himself as an Englishman:
I know, God damn. I do know, Sir. But you see, I am a fucking
Englishman, and I have English things to settle. I am not to live my life
with all that vermin. I am here in London where I belong.’ (128)
He also further asserts such belongingness vociferously and identifies himself
with England in a robust manner. In the conversation between Jack Maggs and
Mercy, readers can see his assertiveness regarding his English origin, English
space and English identity:
But it was obvious to her now. She saw it. Perhaps she had always
known. ‘You have babies in the place where you have come from.’
His mouth tightened in denial.
‘My son is an Englishman.’
‘I meant your real children.’
‘I am not of that race.’
‘What race?’
‘The Australian race,’ he said. ‘The race of Australians.’
‘But what of your babes?’
‘Damn you, don’t look at me like that. I am an Englishman.’ (312-13)
How a convict in spite of the inhuman treatment of his homeland seeks
comfort, homeliness and security in the same pain inflicting land is quite evident
from the reading of the novel. However, Maggs as stated above has not
mentioned anything about his pain, suffering and inhuman treatment in
Australia in his letters sent to Phipps, his endearing child in London, whom he
wishes to see as an English gentleman. Actually, Maggs underwent great pains in
Australia both physically and mentally because of the cruel justice system of his

324 Anjan Saikia
homeland. In other words, the justice system of his homeland viz. England and
her rejection to accept him as her son is the basic reason behind his inhuman
treatment and great sufferings in a compulsive and exiled land. In spite of the
rejection of his homeland, he always seeks returning permanently to that land
even after knowing that that land would never accept his presence as a valid
child. Moreover, the people of his homeland do not look him as a son of England,
but consider him a criminal, ultimately, thus, rejecting and nullifying any
possibility of his existence in that country. The malicious treatment, sufferings,
and pains that he received in Australia due to the cruel justice system and
political institutions of his homeland are evident in the novel. Buckle and Oates
in the novel discuss about this criminal and his life in Australia, and though,
Maggs has not told anything about the suffering inflicted by his own homeland in
Australia, still they have understandably guessed and conceived his position in
Australia. They read his scarred flesh as the evidence of his whipping in
Australia, and thus, they discuss in Chapter 24:
“‘Well, we saw a page of his history,’ said the little grocer stubbornly.
‘Whatever his offence, anyone with half a heart can see that he has paid
the bill…’” (88)
“‘Did you never imagine yourself in his position? I felt that damned
thing. Forgive me Miss Warriner, but damned is the right word for
it.’ (88)
Again in another context, Miss Warriner shows the cruelty that Maggs underwent
at the hands of his own countrymen in Chapter 23:
The footman turned. As Lizzie Warriner raised her eyes, she gasped at
the sea of pain etched upon the footman’s back, a brooding sea of scars,
of ripped and tortured skin. (86)
The words “tortured skin”, “pain” etc are not just telling the physical tortures but
also telling about the insidiously inflicted inside prison, pains, and sufferings as
well. Maggs does not relive and recount his nightmarish experience and
punishments in the forced and transported land viz. Australia except in his
dreams by Captain Logan who was known and feared for severe punishment.
Maggs reminds in his dreams the dreaded punishment inflicted in Australia by
his own countryman, Captain Logan:
“One hundred lashes, cried Captain Logan, and lay them on until I see
the bone. Maggs was standing, then he was falling. He could not bear to
be seen in such a state. He walked past Parker’s Hut.Ahead at the
archwayof the prisoners’ barracks where the cursed triangle stood,
Rudder, the flogger, was standing at attention.” (112)
How he considers Australia as a dark land is reflected in his only description
about Australia while responding to a question of Mercy about Australia in
Chapter-89:
“You would not…You don’t know nothing about what it was to be in that
place. You would not be judging me. You would shoot a man you saw

treat a dog as we were treated. You might blow his brains out and not
think yourself a bad’un for having done the business. As for me, Miss, I
had no more wife than a dog has a wife. A girl like you cannot imagine
what it was, to live with such darkness.” (317)
Again he says in the same Chapter about Australia: “We were beyond the King’s
sight. Not even God Himself could see into that pit” (318).
It has become clear that Maggs is severely punished and whipped along
with the other convicts in the country of Australia, but quite interestingly, that
whipping in that remote and distant land is inflicted by none, but by the country
which he dreams and longs even after transportation and whippings. Hence
Phipps in the novel elaborately epitomizes the institutions and the country that
banishes convicts like Maggs and denies any existence of them in England even
though such convicts yearn for the same in their lives. Unlike Dickens Pip who
reconciles with Magwitch, Carey’s Phipps is found to be quite repressive and
violent, even pointing a pistol to his father, and thus, such actions of compatriots,
family members and siblings have concretely pushed convicts like Jack Maggs in
a position where they don’t have any place to identify themselves.
His returning to London after spending twenty five years as a convict in
Australia and his working as a footman in the house of Buckle brings into fore
some of the much needed descriptions of London in particular and England in
general. Unlike in his dreams and imaginations, he finds his motherland after his
return from Australia as a dark and dirty place filled with almost all the possible
variants of criminality including theft, rape, child prostitution, abortion and so
on. Everywhere he feels the image of a prison which itself reflects the prison
inside his mind after his transportation to Australia. Once his illusions about
London and England have been shattered, only then he could realize the gravity
of his current no space and no identity position and also the fruitless yearning in
his broken and dubious mind for a land that doesn’t accept him as her son and
also does not allow him to live peacefully in the transported place too. From all
these, it is lucidly manifested that Maggs has remained alive for such a long time
with an inside prison, horrors and haunts of space, geographical distances and
identity as well. Such propositions distinctly show how space and identity are
subject to productions under the rubric of various causes, circumstances and so
on and so forth. It also highlights that it is circumstance which plays a crucial role
in determining identity and spatial proposition on the part of individuals.
Once Maggs is denied an English identity and space in England by the King
and Queen, the political institutions and the English society as well, Maggs is left
with no other option but to identify himself with the country that received him
and provided land and space for so many years. Again, after encountering the
attempted parricide in London by his endearing son Phipps, Maggs in utter
distress and disillusionment for shattering his hopes and dreams finally returns
to Australia, and thus, he leaves behind forever that space which he longs in his
entire life and also the wishes to become an English gentleman. Thus his return

326 Anjan Saikia
to Australia realizing the very necessity to accept and turn his adoptive, new, and
compulsive land into his homeland is very significant, and from thereon, Maggs
looks to be very firm in the rest of his life. His deterministic views and ideas to
become an Australian by nature, space, and identity have made him very
prosperous and dignified with financial and social successes.
As described in the novel, Maggs, thereafter, willingly accepts his new and
compulsive space as his ultimate space and recovers him from a no space
positioning into a permanent space occupier. That new and compulsive land
eventually becomes his own space in the wake of oscillating so many times in his
life for a home space. The last chapter in the novel i.e. Chapter-91 shows how
Maggs in the new home space succeeds in every venture including financial and
social successes and creates a family filled with filial love, harmony and free from
the erstwhile oscillations and searches for a home space. The final adaptations
and acclimatization in the adoptive land and the eventual transformation of the
same into the homely space is quite interesting considering the history of the
nation of Australia and the encounters between the aboriginals and the non-
aboriginals. The family of Maggs that grows in the after years of his return to
Australia has accepted this new home as theirs on the line of the aboriginals and
that’s why, in the last chapter i.e. Chapter-91, it is seen that the family of Maggs
in Australia looks pretty settled and is described:
Dick Maggs was eleven years of age when Jack returned from England.
He had twice been up before the magistrate, and little john, who was
four years younger, had the same hard belligerent face, the same dark
and needful eyes. It was not an easy role for Mercy Larkin, yet she
applied herself to being their mother with a passion. She who had
always been so impatient of the ‘rules’ now became a disciplinarian. She
brushed their hair and wiped their faces. She walked with them to
school and saw they stayed there. It was she who moved the family away
from the bad influence of Sydney. And in the new town of Wingham
where they shortly settled she not only civilized these first two children,
but very quickly gave birth to five further members of ‘That race.’ (327)
As showed in the novel, Jack Maggs, the protagonist, who longs so heavily
to come to the motherland in spite of the possibility of his hanging has started
negotiating his space and identity finally, depending upon his subjective
experiences, maltreatment and humiliation of the utmost sort at his so called
home space, and hence, he has finally transformed himself from an Englishman
into an Australian. His eventual inclination and priority to the generous,
egalitarian, and reconciliatory Australian culture is quite important behind
addressing his spatial dilemma and identity dislocations. In fact, the processes of
his spatial and identity transformations are hugely the outcome of the shattering
dreams, the pain of un-belongingness and de-recognition for quite a long time. In
other words, the patchy position of his self and identity are the prime causes
behind his eventual transformation and vigorous identifications with the adopted
land. Hence, it can be said here that space and identity are found to be
negotiable, multilateral and fluid in nature and contexts.

The relationship of Maggs with Mercy Larkin is quite interesting from the
novelistic purposes. Her attitudes and actions in the novel bring forth the very
aspects of love, protection, identity, and space needed for a complete life. She
brings mercy into the life of Maggs which his own country does not provide. The
intense longing of Maggs to have a space and an English identity in the country
which has inflicted pain and torture has not only compelled him to oscillate and
sense unsecured; but also kept his children in Australia in abeyance. When
Maggs went to England to establish affinity with that country, it is Mercy who
reminds of his children in Australia and educates them later until Maggs takes in
hand in his new and deterministic life in Australia. When Maggs obsessive love
for Ma Britten does not yield any result, then he ultimately shifts the gears of his
life, and thereafter, takes his own responsibility and rears his children in great
love and fondness. Like Maggs, Mercy also decides to follow him to Australia and
finally chooses a career in that land which Maggs considers a dark one for the last
twenty five years. Hence, the point of responsibility is also intricately connected
with the determination of one’s space and identity as is evident in the case of Jack
Maggs.
Again, once Jack Maggs has asserts his identity and locations with the
Australian land, he has also starts the very process of freeing himself from the
prison of illusions and the wishes of reconciliations with that motherland which
has already aborted and rejected him. He also feels the void of his dream of an
idyllic London and English gentleman ship once things have started to expose.
Henceforth, he starts the process of his emancipation from the inside prison and
no-place and no identity positions and finally recognizes, reconciles and settles in
that space and land that he once considers as very dark and pit. Thus, Maggs has
turned that dark land in his mind into a lighted one and subsequently frees
himself from his inside prison and no-space and no identity zone. From such
references as manifested in the novel, it can again be stated here that the notions
of space and identity have their intricate relations with subjective experiences
and psycho-physical reactions of the individuals too.
From all these assertions, it is quite clearly manifested that the ending of
the novel propels the idea of the growing mind among the convicts like Jack
Maggs to acclimatize themselves in the new and compulsive space as their home
space and place of identity formations now in the wake of rejection, criminal
status, victimization of the cruel justice system, humiliation and so on. In other
words, rather than looking for the erstwhile home space viz. England, the
convicts like Maggs push them from no space and no identity position into a
newly adapted home space and new horizon of identity formation in Australia,
the very place of their transportation as convicts. Hence the ending of the novel
appears to be quite optimistic, resolving, and vigorously Australian in tone,
depth, and nature. The shifting of space and identity as described above quite
clearly reflects the dialectics of the notions of space and identity and the fluidity
and multiplicity associated with these.

328 Anjan Saikia
The descriptions of Maggs and his prosperous years in Australia after his
decision to lift himself from the no space position into an Australian space and
identity are quite interesting in determining the fortune of a nation. The
underlying differences between the indigenous and non-indigenous people and
the resultant crumbling society has finally proceeded to paving the ways for an
ambience of belief, reconciliation, acceptance, demolition of their bonded and
mental prisons, immense sufferings, inhuman treatment, existential crises,
identity divergences and so on and so forth. The novel also shows how the
determination and certainty of home space and identity brings stability,
productivity, bonhomie, harmony, dignity, idyll, peacefulness, prosperity,
magnificence, and grandeur in people’s lives.
After all, Carey’s Jack Maggs, unlike Dickens’ Great Expectations, has
different ending as well as directions and here in the novel he writes an original
Australian narrative concerning the basic issues of the nation of Australia and the
very basis of the contemporary Australian society. While writing this Australian
narrative, Carey focuses upon the core issues and the processes behind the
formation of the Australian society and the intricacies associated with these.
Carey here deconstructs the narratives surrounding Australia and England and
finally subverts all these narratives regarding the English and Australian
societies. Hence in the novel, the grand narratives surrounding English
gentleman ship and Convicts ridden Australia have been constantly put into
question and the validity of such notions have been dismantled eventually
throughout the novel.
In short, in Jack Maggs Carey brings into light the perspectives of the
convict whites in Australia and the very insecurity, lack of affinity, space, identity
and the ambivalences that these people encountered in their lives. Throughout
the novel, Carey shows how constant rejections of the convicts in their homeland
have led them usher in new acceptance and realities and how all these realities
have become integral parts in the evolutionary and evolving process of the land of
Australia. Thus the dismantling and the rejection of the grand narratives have
been achieved quite commendably here and the novel puts into place another
mechanism replete with new reality, acceptance, acclimatization, reunification
and reconciliation.
That eventual shifting and transformation of space and identity on the part
of the convicts in Australia as disclosed in the novel through Jack Maggs, his
family, Mercy and other characters as well shows and demystifies how these
seminal concepts of space and identity are dialectical in nature and subject to
production and also incorporate lack of fixity, dynamism and other multiple
aspects. Hence it is quite significant to note here that this shifting of space and
identity on the part of the characters especially in the case of the convicts like
Jack Maggs is not because of the luxuries and comforts that Australia has to offer
or has offered to them, but because of the compulsion to settle, ensure a plausible
life, create a space, and revamp themselves from the position of no-space and no-

identity, and existential crises into a livable and amenable space, existential
authenticity and identity as well.
Works Cited :
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Bernstein, Mary. “Identity Politics”. Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 31 (2005),
pp-47-74. JSTOR Web 21 March. 2018. <http://www.jstor.org/
stable/29737711>.
Brennan, Andrew. Conditions of Identity: A Study in Identity and Survival.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.Print.
Brubaker, Rogers and Frederick Cooper. “Beyond “Identity””. Theory and
Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 1-47. JSTOR Web 21 March.
2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108478.
Carey, Peter. His Illegal Self. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Print.
---. Illywhacker. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. Print.
---. Jack Maggs. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Print.
---. True History of the Kelly Gang. Brisbane: The U of Queensland P, 2000.
Print.
Carey, Peter. An Interview with Peter Carey. Chicago Review, Vol. 43, No.-2
(Spring, 1997), Pp-76-89. Print.
Carey, Peter. The Voice of the Teller: A Conversation with Peter Carey. Antipodes,
Vol.-16, No.-2 (December, 2002), pp-164-167. Print.
Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Los Angeles: U of
California P, 1998. Print.
Clendinnen, Inga. Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First
Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics. 2003.
Print.
Goodwin, Ken. A History of Australian Literature. Hampshire: Macmillan
Education Ltd., 1988. Print.
Gaile, Andreas, ed. Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter
Carey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New
York : Routledge, 2004. Print.

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Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1991.
Print.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Trans. Geoff Bennington, Brian Massdumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota,
p. 1982. Print.
Malpas, J.E. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 2004.Print.
Nicholson, Linda. Identity Before Identity Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2008. Print.
Prieto, Eric. Literature, Geography and the Postmodern Poetics of Place. New
York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Peter Carey: A Literary Companion. London: McFarland
& Company Inc, 2009. Print.
Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Social Theory. London: Verso, 1990.Print.
West, Barabara A., and Frances T. Murphy. A Brief History of Australia. New
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Woodcock, Bruce. Peter Carey: Contemporary World Writers. Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2003.Print.

pp. 331-344
ABORIGINAL PLACES AND COLONIALIST

INTERVENTIONS : INTERROGATING SPATIAL
POLITICS IN LINDA HOGAN’S MEAN SPIRIT
Khandakar Shahin Ahmed
Abstract
Aboriginal writings emanating from different biogeographical locations
of erstwhile colonies disseminate aboriginal/indigenous communities’
strong sense of rootedness to their place of origin which is quite
antithetical to the spatial perception of the European colonisers. The
first contact of aboriginal communities of America, Australia and New
Zealand with the European colonisers brings to the fore how different
human communities affiliate and identify themselves to a place.
Rootedness or attachment to a place can be realised in very many ways,
and the differences in spatial perceptions may lead to conflict and clash
between communities or groups of people. Aboriginal narratives vividly
represent the difference in perception of a place that lies between the
aboriginal community and the non-native colonisers. This difference can
be comprehended in terms of the dichotomies of anthropocentrism as
against biocentrism. Whereas the aboriginal natural communities locate
themselves in their places with a biocentric faith of sustaining ecological
balance of that respective place, the colonialist intervention as one of the
highest forms of anthropocentric manifestation perceives the aboriginal
place as an unexplored geographical location ready to be exploited and
ravaged in the pretext of progress and development. This paper in
taking note of this conflicting worldviews regarding man’s role in living-
in-a-place, will argue through a reading of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit
(1992) that the forces of ecological imperialism and commodity frontier
completely disrupted the bioregion of the natives.
Keywords : Aboriginal writing, anthropocentric, biocentric, Linda
Hogan.
Aboriginal writings emanating from different biogeographical locations of

erstwhile colonies disseminate aboriginal/indigenous communities’ strong sense
of rootedness to their place of origin which is quite antithetical to the spatial
perception of the European colonisers. The first contact of aboriginal
communities of America, Australia and New Zealand with the European
colonisers brings to the fore how different human communities affiliate and
identify themselves to a place. Rootedness or attachment to a place can be

332 Khandakar Shahin Ahmed
realised in very many ways, and the differences in spatial perceptions may lead to
conflict and clash between communities or groups of people. Aboriginal
narratives vividly represent the difference in perception of a place that lies
between the aboriginal community and the non-native colonisers. This difference
can be comprehended in terms of the dichotomies of anthropocentrism as against
biocentrism. Whereas the aboriginal natural communities locate themselves in
their places with a biocentric faith of sustaining ecological balance of that
respective place, the colonialist intervention as one of the highest forms of
anthropocentric manifestation perceives the aboriginal place as an unexplored
geographical location ready to be exploited and ravaged in the pretext of progress
and development. This paper in taking note of this conflicting worldviews
regarding man’s role in living-in-a-place, will argue through a reading of Linda
Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1992) that the forces of ecological imperialism and
commodity frontier completely disrupted the bioregion of the natives.
Hogan’s novel vividly demonstrates that it is not only the successful
migration of the non-native population to the aboriginal place, but systematic
and regimented importation of non-native species of plants and animals that
completely shattered the unique ecological character of the native place. The
bioregional ethics which governs the natural communities of the native people
has been replaced by policies of ecological imperialism to contribute to the
economy of colonialist enterprise. This practice results in the growth of towns
and cities depending on the consolidation of bureaucratic and labour forces for
specific agricultural farms or mining enterprises. This paper, therefore, argues
that colonialist interventions into native bioregions of the aboriginal
communities through the forces of ecological imperialism ravage the aboriginal
bioregional culture of mutual responsibility for both human and non-human
entities of an ecological terrain, and in doing so it also takes note of how
anthropocentrism and biocentrism as two opposing worldviews determine
relationship to a place.
A bioregional novel strongly delineates in its narrative the aspect of threat
initiated by colonial modernity in the name of development and nation building
to the unique bioregional cultures of aboriginal/indigenous communities. As
instances of bioregional novel, the above-mentioned texts from Native American
context deals with this spatial politics to unravel the ways in which bioregional
cultures come under the process of erasure triggered by capitalist agencies and
totalising narratives of imperialism. The narrative of a bioregional novel
foregrounds the dichotomies between the natives and the European intruders in
their relation with a region. Jim Cheney in his essay "Postmodern Environmental
Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative” (1989) observes that a bioregional
narrative represents a region as a “storied residence”1 i.e. the narrative is
embedded with stories growing from the natives’ deep relationship with the
physical environment and ecological entities of the region. The region as a
residence is not solely occupied in material terms, but the process of shaping a
community through immersion into the ecological system of a region, reflected in

Aboriginal Places and Colonialist Interventions … 333
the bioregional stories of indigenous people, transforms the region into a life-
place of ethical and spiritual fulfilment. The storied residence, therefore, reflects
on the stories generating from the biocentric relation between human and non-
human worlds that ensures ecological health of the region and the human
community. The stories generating from a community’s identification with the
ecology of a region transforms the region from a tangible and physical territory to
an inner and psychic realm of defining human behaviour.
On the other hand, the spatial politics of the European settlers involves
isolating human community from the physical environment in a process of
commodification of the ecological components. The notion of a ‘storied residence’
is at stake as the totalising discourse of profit and progress initiates a process of
eradication of the contextualised discourse of a region by means of perceiving the
ecological entities in isolation from one another. Since the environment is
perceived as a store of commodities, trees, animals, landscape, rivers and other
forms of lives are conceived as objects of profit-making, and this capital-based
worldview, by undermining the mutually sustaining relation among all forms of
life, tacitly undermines the culture of storied residence that is part of the
biocentric relation. Systematic separation of ecological entities from one another
results in the collapse of the local stories that define an aboriginal community in
relation to a region. A bioregional novel interrogates the colonialist spatial
politics by delineating the conflict between the totalising discourse of the
colonisers and the contextualised discourse of the indigenous people. This
conflict finds its narrative enunciation in ways in which the landscape becomes,
on the one hand, the metaphor of both profit and capital for the White settlers,
and on the other hand is shown to be a spiritually fulfilling ecological-human
culture for the aborigines. For instance, in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit the
Oklahoma landscape constitutes an inner terrain of consciousness of Osage
community formation, while the same landscape with its grasslands and fields is
viewed as source of oil and pastures for livestock by the European settlers.
Hogan’s novel exemplifies the quintessential aspects of bioregional narrative in
its representation of the spatial politics of the intruding forces in aboriginal
places. Such spatial politics, demonstrated in the bioregional novels, is depicted
in the way meanings and cultural connotations of the ecology and landscape have
been re/misappropriated by the totalising discourse of colonialist intervention to
legitimise extraction from and exploitation of the environment. The colonialist
narrative of re-appropriation of the environment aims at redefining the man and
land relationship, and this spatial politics involves obliteration of the stories of
aboriginal people through colonial takeover of the land that shapes their ‘storied
residence’.
Colonialist intervention in aboriginal places involves agencies and policies
of dispossessing the aboriginal communities from their places of origin thereby
disrupting a unique human culture that evolves from the potentials and limits of
natural environment of that place. European colonizers legitimize their
possession over the aboriginal places by means of projecting those territories as

empty lands. This politics of representing aboriginal place as empty geographical

location does not negate the presence of aboriginal human population as
dwellers. However, the negation seeks to invalidate aboriginal populations as an
organised human society devoid of any structured and administrational social
settlement. Having identified with the wilderness, as Stephen Greenblatt in his
Marvellous Possessions (1991) states, the aboriginal human population and their
way of life have been described and associated with the element of marvel, a
marvellous phenomenon that has to be normalized and regimented.
Corroborating aboriginal way of life with the element of marvel marks the policy
of not acknowledging the natives of America as an organised and structured
human society having culture of rationality and progress. It is due to this politics
of denial that Columbus observes that he “was not contradicted” (Greenblatt 58)
by the natives. The preclusion of contradictions facilitates intrusion and
circulation discursive practices of documentations and institutionalised
regulations of European paradigm in order to normalize the aboriginal
population:
We can demonstrate that, in the face of the unknown, Europeans used
their conventional intellectual and organizational structures, fashioned
over centuries of mediated contact with other cultures, and that these
structures greatly impeded a clear grasp of the radical otherness of the
American lands and peoples. (Greenblatt 54)
The “radical otherness” of Native American land and people has been
incorporated within the “organizational structure” in order to dispossess the
natives from their right over the place on the one hand, and on the other hand it
legitimizes European colonizers possession over the place.
The political takeover of aboriginal territories by means of European
“organizational structure” has been further accentuated by demographic takeover
of these places. In “Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western
Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon” (1988) Alfred W. Crosby enunciates that
successful colonization of places like America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand
and countries belonging to temperate zones has not merely been attained by
European political and technological interventions, rather the agencies of
ecological imperialism outnumber the natives in their life-place and relegate them
to the fringes. To Crosby, ecological imperialism operates the how Western
Europe as a biological phenomenon marks its expansion in the aboriginal places
of America, Australia and elsewhere. This biological expansion of Europe,
according to Crosby, is facilitated by the Europe-like climate of temperate zone
lands, as against tropical zone lands, where not merely European population
grows rapidly but at the same time domesticated European animals along with
flora and fauna proliferated abundantly in these “Lands of Demographic
Takeover” (Crosby 104). The Europeans “have swarmed” (Crosby 106) and
outnumber the aboriginal population in their place of origin:
In the cooler lands, the colonies of the Demographic Takeover,
Europeans achieved very rapid population growth by means of

immigration, by increased life span, and by maintaining very high

birthrates. Rarely has population expanded more rapidly than it did in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in these lands. It is these lands,
especially the United States, the enabled Europeans and their overseas
offspring to expand from something like 18 percent of the human
species in 1650 to well over 30percent in 1900. (Crosby 105)
The demographic takeover results in “decimation and demoralization of the
aboriginal populations” (Crosby 106) and they are outnumbered in their own
land. Along with the demographic takeover, the physical environment of these
places is taken over or rather tarnished by the forces of ecological imperialism by
means of “awesome success of European agriculture” (Crosby 106).
The triumph of European agriculture on the one hand destroys the local
flora and fauna, on the other hand it disrupts bioregional way of life of the
aboriginal population. Bioregional dwelling in a place involves a way of living-in-
a-place within potentials and natural limits to support the life-sustaining system
of that place for all biotic and abiotic entities of environment of that place.
Whereas European agricultural enterprise manipulates the environment of
aboriginal places, it is further accentuated by the intrusion of domesticated
European animals like horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and rabbits. European
domesticated animals take high toll on the local environment, at the same time
the livestock of imported animals serve as source of capital for the settler-
colonisers to triumph in their agricultural regimentation of the environment. In
the lands of temperate zones, parallel to rapid growth of European human
population, the livestock of imported animals marks a high reproduction rate.
Having demographically taken over the lands of temperate zones, the
proliferation of both human and non-human European communities also acts as
bearers of “pathogens or microorganisms that cause disease in human” (Crosby
107). It results in aboriginal population getting infected by alien diseases causing
large scale death. Europeans as biological phenomenon, having attained
ecological control, promulgate and put in circulation a culture of dwelling in a
place based on consumerist policies and accumulation of capital at the expense of
exploitation of the ecological components. Rapid growth of European population,
both human and non-human, promotes systematization of natural resources and
acceleration of production of food grains and life-embellishing commodities. In
relegating the aboriginal way of life as obsolete and unscientific, the culture of
demographic takeover ushers a way of living life impinged on consumerism and
mobility of capital.
It is pertinent to note that bioregional culture of the aboriginal communities
in the erstwhile colonies does not perceive ecological components of environment
as resources, rather they situate themselves as one of the living entities of that
environment with shared responsibility for all biotic and abiotic dwellers of the
land. This state of dwelling in place on the part of aboriginal population has been
misconstrued as poverty by the European settlers. Having misconstrued poverty
of the natives as resultant of their irrational and unscientific management of

environment, the European settlers take it as cue to view the aboriginal lands as
zones of immense possibility and prosperity guaranteed by abundance of natural
resources and fertile landscape. William Cronon in his book Changes in the Land:
Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) demonstrates that
the relationship of New England Indians to their environment is determined by
the cycle of seasons, and it is a relationship based on ecological ethics as the
natives hold less demand on the ecosystem of the place by changing their habitat
within the region as per natural abundance of seasons.
To Cronon, whereas the ecological relationship of the natives with their
place is characterised by mobility, however, the European colonisers seek to
establish a relationship based on fixities. This is evident as the European settlers
strive to reproduce ecological relationship of European standard in the aboriginal
places by means of establishing monoculture of agricultural policies and
commodification of natural components. European fixity is further evident in
their intent of attaining complete control over the environment of the place by
compartmentalizing landscape for permanent human settlement, bureaucratic
establishment, agricultural fields, domesticated animals, recreational parks,
reserve forest and so on. The segmentation of natural landscape corroborates the
tacit imperial policy of regimenting and exploiting the environment of the Non-
European regions. Having attained the ecological knowledge of dwelling in their
place of origin, the mobility of the natives as requisites of wheels of the season
exhibits their shared responsibility for life-sustaining system of the region, on the
other hand the fixity of the European settlers manifests a human intervention to
reorganise the landscape and ecological properties of the region with a motif of
accumulation of capital and commercial enterprise:
But whereas Indian villages moved from habitat to habitat to find
maximum abundance through minimal work, and so reduce their
impact on the land, the English believed in and required permanent
settlements. Once a village was established, its improvements—cleared
fields, pastures, buildings, fences, and so on — were regarded as more or
less fixed features of the landscape. English fixity sought to replace
Indian mobility; here was the central conflict in the ways Indians and
colonists interacted with their environments. (Cronon 57)
The “central conflict” between the natives and European colonisers, according to
Cronon, can be comprehended by the strife to “replace Indian mobility” with
“English fixity”. The mobility in dwelling the region on the part of the Indians
involves their local knowledge of “habits and ecology of other species” (37) on the
one hand, and on the other hand it exhibits the process of learning to live-in-a-
place without affecting the life-supporting system of the environment as the
“Indians seek to obtain their food wherever it was seasonally most concentrated in
the New England ecosystem” (37).
Indian mobility is based on seasonal diversity and it shapes a way of living
life in a place holding less demand on the ecology. Whereas spring marks the
abundance of seasonally produced food items of different kinds, winter on the

other hand ushers the season of scarcity. Cronon observes, while the Indians feel
it wise to remain starved for days during winter with an assurance that spring will
again bring abundance, but for the European settlers it is rather beyond any
rational comprehension as to why the Indians prefer to remain starved when
there is enormous possibility of extracting the environment for human comfort.
In categorically terming the native way of life as irrational and unscientific, the
English fixity strives to attain complete control over the environment for
reproducing the European way of life characterised by structured and segmented
territorialisation of each and every component of ecology for human usage and
accumulation of capital. Having disrupted the bioregional culture of the native
aboriginal community, the overarching fixity of European settlers, according to
Cronon, quite obtrusively perceives the ecology and landscape as “merchantable
commodities” (20). The biological expansion of the West in the temperate lands
not only marks a demographic takeover of the aboriginal region, simultaneously it
standardises a culture of anthropocentric extraction and commodification of
ecological properties of a region.
The difference between aboriginal communities and European settlers lies
in the antithetical ways both the human communities locate themselves in a place.
Whereas the natives of New England believe in the interdependence and
reciprocity among all the entities, human and non-human, biotic and abiotic, that
constitutes a life-supporting ecological system that can accommodate both human
and non-human communities engendering a human culture based on ecological
ethics, on the other hand controlled by “their tendency to view landscape in terms
of their own cultural concepts” (22), the European settlers perceive the
components of ecology in isolation from the ecological life-supporting system that
is operating within and around the region. Viewing the components of ecology in
isolation involves the process of commodification and mercantile enterprise:
Seeing landscape in terms of commodities meant something else as well:
it treated members of an ecosystem as isolated and extractable units.
Explorers describing a new countryside with an eye to its mercantile
possibilities all too easily fell into this way of looking at things, so that
their descriptions often denigrated into little more than lists. (21)
It is quite pertinent to assert that in the temperate lands, whether in Australia or
in America, demographic takeover leads to ecological takeover of the aboriginal
places. The biological expansion of West, both in terms of population and
regimentation of physical environment, leads to relegation of the aboriginal
population into fringes. Demographic takeover corroborating merchantable
commodification of ecological components engenders a process of diminishing
aboriginal way of living-in-a-place ecologically as obsolete and unscientific on the
one hand, and in doing so, on the other hand it involves a restless and vicious
process of commercialising components of ecology for establishing a capital based
way of life. The entire process reflects on man’s relationship with land/region and
how that relationship facilitates a human culture that determines the
sustainability and longevity of that land or region’s life-supporting system. It can

be rightly said that while degree of human intervention in the ecology of a place
leads to the formulation of human culture, and simultaneously consolidation and
standardisation of that culture legitimise future human interventions in
ecosystem of that place.
Whereas aboriginal way of life exhibits a bioregional culture of close and
spiritual proximity with ecology of their life-place as they hold less demand, both
biological and cultural, on the ecosystem of their region, the intrusion and
subsequent settlement of European settlers in the temperate lands radically
replaces the bioregional way of life of the aboriginals. The urgency of reproducing
a European way of life characterised by production of life-embellishing
commodities of life in abundance leads to regimentation of environment for
permanent human settlement, monocultural policies of agriculture, pastures for
animals, separate domain for domesticated animals, and zones of extractable
natural resources. Therefore, it can be said that bioregional culture of aboriginal
population is eradicated by European commodity-laden consumerist way of life.
Materiality of colonialist interventions in aboriginal places can be felt in the decay
of the aboriginal local environment for the purpose progress and development
and contiguously it marks the emergence of a human culture that is blind to
health of the earth. Colonialist interventions in the temperate lands operate
through dualistic forces of ecological imperialism in corroborating demographic
takeover with merchantable commodification of ecology.
Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit tells place-based stories of the Osage Native
Americans located in the region of Oklahoma. As a bioregional narrative the novel
exhibits how the Osage stories of the region enliven the landscape. The Osage
landscape is not merely represented as a geographical territory; rather the
landscape acts as a metaphor of community formation that connects the Osage
inhabitants with the non-human dwellers and all other entities of the region in a
reciprocal relationship of values and moral sense. Since bioregional narratives
focus on contextualised discourses of the locale, the landscape as a metaphor in
the novel explicates the ways of life that make the Osage native to their place. The
symbolic relationship with the land denoting the moral order corresponds to the
actual act of sustainable dwelling on the part of the Osage. Therefore, the
narrative of the novel sketches the Oklahoma landscape in its layered and dual
manifestations – on the one hand the outer, physical and tangible landscape, and
on the other hand the inner and the metaphysical landscape of Osage psyche.
Both the outer and inner landscapes, in the course of the narrative, correspond to
one another, nourish mutually, and thereby shaping a spiritually fulfilling human
culture of ecological ethics.
It is, therefore, in the novel when characters like Michael Horse and Belle
Graycloud ruminate over the predicament of their ‘land’, they are symbolically
referring to the Osage ways of life. The word ‘land’ connotes to a cultural
landscape, which is both outer and inner that connects the natives with the
physical landscape, the eagle, the bat, the river and all other ecological entities of
the region in relationship definable ecologically sanctioned moral order. In this

connection Hogan depicts how the destruction of the land due to the incessant
drilling for oil symbolically corresponds to the physical ailment and cultural
eradication of the Osage. As a bioregional narrative the novel recounts the Osage
stories connecting the community with region both physically and imaginatively.
Whereas the ‘land’ stands for the community formation for the natives, with the
advent of the European settlers a process of redefining the landscape starts.
Hogan’s narrative ingenuity lies in her depiction of how the words like ‘land’,
‘field’, ‘river’, ‘grass’, and ‘eagle’ are being attributed with new connotations to
legitimise extraction and exploitation of natural resources. Appropriation of
words and their connotations to fit into the totalising discourse of progress
initiates a process of erasing the contextualised bioregional connotations of the
words.
The European settlers consider the land as resource for oil mining and
nurturing livestock animals, and in doing so it triggers a threat to the natives’
bioregional association with the region. While dealing with the issue of invasion of
the bioregions of aboriginal people by intruding forces, bioregional literature in
general does not merely note the material takeover of the land; rather more
specifically it interrogates the spatial politics that eradicates the spiritual aura and
imagination connecting natives to their region. Once the words are appropriated
to fit into the discursive formation of the white settlers, it involves a tacit process
of pushing the place-based stories of the natives into oblivion. For the oil man Mr.
Hale, the meaning of Osage landscape stands for its oil deposit and pastureland
for livestock animals, and within this totalising framework of progress and profit
the metaphysical and imaginary Osage inner landscape of defining sustainable
relationship with the region has been suspended to a dysfunctional state. It is in
this context that Michael Horse’s diary bears the significance of documenting the
native stories as a way of preserving meanings and values with which the Osage
are connected to their land both physically and spiritually. Hogan’s Mean Spirit
as a bioregional narrative explores the metaphorical and discursive implications
of the term ‘land’ in interrogating the colonialist intervention in the aboriginal
territory of the Osage.
Linda Hogan in Mean Spirit recounts the invasion of the Osage region of
north-eastern Oklahoma by the European settlers. The title of the novel itself is
indicative of the destruction causedby the European settlers in dispossessing the
aboriginal natives from their land through a process of merchantable
commodification of ecology. Donald Lee Fixico in his book The Invasion of Indian
Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural
Resources (1998) observes that “the history of the ‘reign of terror’ began in the
early 1900s when oil was discovered on Osage land” (Fixico 27), and Hogan’s
novel vividly depicts how the oil boom in Osage territory leads to large scale
murder of Osage inhabitants in order to take over their land. The novel revolves
around the murder of the Blanket and Graycloud family members by European
settlers in the process of quenching their insatiable desire for natural resources.
Fixico observes that whereas the Native Americans locate themselves within the

ecosystem of their region as participants, the European settlers place themselves

outside and above the system as owners and overseers who can utilize the
ecological components rationally and scientifically for a modern way of life and
capital gain:
The Anglo-American culture of the twentieth century is driven by
capitalistic ambitions to acquire wealth. By contrast, American Indians
are members of tribal nations whose philosophies stress a kinship and
interrelatedness with all creation. And the conflicting dynamics of the
two very different systems have yielded a history of anguishing human
and environmental exploitation. (Fixico xvi)
This “conflicting dynamics” constitutes the core of Hogan’s novel in depicting how
the Osage community is pushed away from their land by the land grabbing
policies of European settlers. The large scale settlement of Europeans in the Osage
territory results in the formation of a commercial town, Watona, as a hub for
trading of Osage natural resources, and at the same time the landscape and
vegetation of the region are wounded irretrievably by oil mining and the granting
of grazing leases. At the start of the novel it is seen that most of the Osage Indians
fail to withstand the commodity frontier of the European settlers and in order to
sustain their bioregional culture they “left behind them everything they could not
carry and moved up into the hills and bluffs far above the town of Watona”
(Hogan 5). The intensity of exploitation of land ravages the ecology of the region,
and simultaneously, the proliferation of European population acts as carrier of
new diseases to Osage territory that results in infection and subsequent death of
natives. European settlers, therefore, expand as a biological phenomenon that not
only demographically reduces the Osage to minority, but at the same time it
dispossesses them ecologically of their right over land.
Hogan commences the narrative of her novel from the temporal signpost of
the 1890s when the federal government of America gave the choice to native
Indians to occupy plots of land which had not already been occupied by white
Americans:
Those pieces of land were called allotments. They consisted of 160 acres
a person to farm, sell, or use in any way they desired. The act that
offered allotment to the Indians, the Dawes Act, seemed generous at the
first glance so only a very few people realized how much they were being
tricked, since numerous tracts of unclaimed land became open property
for white settlers, homesteaders, and ranchers. (8)
The natives are “being tricked” as the Osage community are already rooted to the
Oklahoma region, and on top of that instead of individual possession over land,
the Osage as an aboriginal community believed in their affiliation and rootedness
to their land in terms of belonging to a place as a community in general. For them
their sense of place originates from their awareness of the ecological order
operating within the region, and it shapes their aboriginal culture where the
human community is indivisible from land. Since the Osage, like other aboriginal
tribes of different parts of the globe, does not believe in individual ownership of

land, therefore, the allotment policy hardly makes any sense for the natives.
On the other hand, for the European settlers individual ownership and
private enterprise are the prime requisites for prosperity, and in this regard Fixico
rightly observes that with the Euroamericans “individualism became a strong
characteristic of the American experience and American capitalism. This trait
soon became imbedded in the American character” (Fixico xvii). Individualism of
the European settlers can be contrasted with the sense of community of the
natives, and these contrasting positions indicate the ‘conflicting dynamics’ visible
in how the natives and the settlers locate themselves in relation to land and
physical environment of their region of dwelling. In the novel the oil mongering
white settlers perceive the natives as a community who “were unschooled,
ignorant people who knew nothing about life or money” (Hogan 60), and this
perception leads to a reductive and prejudiced conclusion that “Indians were a
locked door to the house of progress” (Hogan 56). The underground oil deposit in
Osage territory becomes an anathema for the natives as they are essentially
dehumanized in that they are perceived on the same plane with the natural
resources of the region like oil deposit, grazing land and other mineral deposits.
Having considered the natives as “locked door to the house of progress”, the white
settlers realize very well that to excavate the land and extract the natural
resources the first requisite is to eliminate the natives from the land. The natives
and their land are essentially reduced to exploitable commodities. It is evident
when Joe Billy observes: “It’s more than a race war. They are waging a war with
earth. Our forests and cornfields are burned by them” (Hogan 14).
In Mean Spirit expansion of white American population results in reducing
the natural community of Osage into Osage oil. Merchantable commodification of
Osage land and ecology go hand in hand with dehumanization of the Osage
population as they are considered to be the stumbling block on the way to
organized European progress and development. Having reduced the natives to
unproductive and ineffectual material, the white Americans wage an
anthropocentric war against the biocentric culture of natives on the pretext that
the natives are not scientifically enlightened enough to manage and regulate the
land and ecology of their dwelling. Therefore, drilling and dynamiting the land for
oil conflates with shooting, poisoning and robbing the Osage. Failing to
comprehend the diabolic design behind the ravaging of land and inhabitants, the
Osage culture is pushed to the point of extinction. Michael Horse, the village seer,
in his diary laments the innocence of the Osage who fail to understand the sinister
design of the white Americans:
It was a fatal ignorance we had of our place; we did not know the ends to
which the others would go to destroy us. We didn’t know how much they
were moved by the presence of money. (Hogan 341)
The “fatal ignorance” is evident as the natives are tricked to lease out their land to
European settlers. Since the life-supporting ecological system of the region is
completely brought under the umbrella of mining, the reciprocal man and nature

relationship and the bioregional culture that grows from it have been completely
replaced by ‘the presence of money’. Money as the pivotal force of life is rather
new to the Osage, and their struggle to acclimatize themselves with this new trope
of life-force leads them to a disarray material condition.
The newly superimposed materiality on the Osage culture results in a
situation where the natives, despite knowing the irrelevance of money within their
cultural realm, have to participate in the game of accumulating money. Hogan in
her novel recreates the figure of “master criminal William K. Hale, self-
proclaimed ‘King of the Osage’” (Fixico 27), the sinister manifestation of mean
spirit who takes Osage land on lease and subsequently conspires to murder the
native leaser thereby grabbing the land. In the novel John Hale – “a lanky white
man …been a rancher in Indian Territory for a number of years before he invested
in the oil business” (Hogan 22) – whose character is created after William K.
Hale. As the natives are amateur in the management of money, in this newly
emerged capital-based consumerist culture they are always in “debt, owing to
stores, the court-assigned legal guardians” (54) and in such a situation Hale is
“always ready with quick offer and fast cash” (54). The natives are entrapped, and
the enormous possibility of making his fortune in oil leads Hale to plot ceaseless
murders of the natives to attain complete individual ownership in Osage territory.
The Osage are shot, poisoned and blown up and simultaneously the land
and ecology are tarnished and ravaged irrevocably: “the earth had turned oily
black. Blue flames rose up and roared like torches of burning gas. The earth bled
oil” (54). In the novel, Grace Blanket, Belle Grayclod’s niece, becomes Hale’s first
victim. She is shot in broad day light, and Hale murders her with the awareness
that Grace’s minor daughter Nola cannot inherit her land. The official
arrangement is such that only a white can be appointed as legal guardian of
natives, and since most of the natives are in debt the land is legally handed over to
the party who takes it on lease. Grace’s sister Sara is killed in an explosion inside
her house and Benoit who is accused of the act eventually commits suicide in jail
as a native is not entitled to hire an advocate. An old native Walker is poisoned to
death as his death will entitle Hale to become the beneficiary of Walker’s
insurance policy. Stacy Red Hawk, a native police official who is appointed to
investigate the murder of natives, to his utter dismay and astonishment discovers
that “the people he was up against here in Indian Territory were the ones who did
not love the earth and her creatures. Much of what these people believed to be
good, was not good” (205). Stacy’s is disillusioned and resigns his position within
the bureaucratic system of the whites. Hale’s murderous conspiracy reflects the
fact that the Osage are no longer considered as a living cultural human
community, but rather viewed in a quantifiable manner as a bundle of
commodities either to be discarded or utilized. This is further evident as the
European settlers not only excavate the land to extract natural resources, but at
the same time dig the native graves to extract the deceased body and wealth
buried with the body. Grave robbing becomes a lucrative business because of the
“money Indian bodies are getting on the black market from museums and

roadside zoos” (318). In life and after death the natives are reduced to quantifiable
material. In life they are hunted for the underground reserves of oil and after
death their bodies are excavated as “the bodies of Indians were at a premium for
displays across the country and in Europe” (120). It is evident, therefore, that the
settlement of a large European population in the Osage land along with their
organizational structure of officialdom uproots the natives from their land and
culture both demographically and ecologically. The reproduction of a European
way of life is marked by repopulation of the Osage aboriginal land, and this shift is
engendered by a European notion of land ownership expanding and taking over
land and ecology.
Colonialist intervention affects the health of the Osage aboriginal land in
more than one way. Whereas rapid growth of the European population
outnumbers the native population, simultaneously proliferation of European
species of animals hold heavy toll on the physical environment. For the European
settlers domesticated animals to triumph in a new environment species of
European grasses are cultivated. The entire process ravages local flora and fauna
on the one hand, and more specifically it triggers a practice to perceive the Osage
landscape as a domain of capital investment. Overseas successful migration and
settlement of European human and non-human communities along with flora and
fauna are accompanied by intrusion of pathogens and microorganisms that
infects the natives with alien diseases. John Hale is not only an oilman in Osage
territory; at the same time “he was one of the first men to bring cattle to Indian
Territory” (Hogan 54). Having invested heavily in cattle, Hale discerns the
necessity of pastureland for the cattle, and for ensuring brisk growth of the cattle
he introduces new grasses later on labeled as “Hale Grass” (54). For clearing the
landscape for pastures, he tricks the natives with the prospect of profit, and he
along with the natives cut and burn the landscape for the cattle investment. The
new grass has not only “fattened cattle”, but at the same time, strong roots of the
grass have “spirited away the minerals and water from other trees and plants,
leaving tracts of land barren-looking” (54). Transforming the environment into a
viable variable of capital investment has been achieved through the ways the
Osage region is tamed, regimented and commodified by the agencies of ecological
imperialism.
Underground disruption of the land caused by mining corresponds to a
collateral damage of the landscape as the new species of animals and plants
adulterate and change the local flora and fauna in an irrevocable way. Michael
Horse rightly observes that “the land is ravaged and covered with scars and so are
the broken people” (Hogan 341). Having scarred the land, the European
intervention as a biological phenomenon also brings in diseases alien to the
natives. Ona Neck’s son John Stink’s suffers from a special form of tuberculosis
that spread from “coughing settlers to the Indian population” (99), and the
natives identify that “the settlers’ pigs were instrumental in the spread of the
disease” (100). The visible symptoms of this tuberculosis are skin lesions and
swollen glands, and the disease is accompanied by a decaying smell. Stink

contracts the disease in his childhood but the unpleasant smell remains in him,
which is why he is renamed from Ho-Tah-Moie to John Stink by the white
settlers. In the same way Grace’s youngest sister Molene dies of a paralyzing
illness “spread by white men who worked on the railroad” (7). Sara is also infected
by this illness that forces her to remain in bed, motionless, for over a year. It is,
therefore, evident that agencies of ecological imperialism operate together to
dispossess the Osage from their land of origin. The relationship between man and
land has been completely shifted into a different dimension, and aboriginal
bioregional culture is replaced by a profit-laden anthropocentric culture. In
dealing with the contact or encounter between aboriginal culture and European
colonists, Hogan’s novel brings into focus how colonialist interventions operate
through the agencies of ecological imperialism and commodity frontier dispossess
the natives from their land. It involves an all pervasive process of eroding the
ecological system of aboriginal region, and at the same time in disrupting
aboriginal’s relationship with land it eradicates the bioregional culture of
aboriginal way of life.
Notes :
1 Jim Cheney in his essay “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional
Narrative” (1989) demonstrates the idea of ‘storied residence’ in explaining how
bioregional narratives are based on the contextualised discourse by virtue of the
narrations of place-based stories, myths and legends that connect a community with
a place.
Works Cited :
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of
New England. New York: Hill & Wang, 1983. Print.
Cheney, Jim. “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional
Narrative” Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 117–33. Print.
Crosby, Alfred W. “Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western
Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon.” The Ends of the Earth:
Perspective on Modern Environmental History. Ed. Donald Worster.
New York: Cambridge UP, 1988. 103-117. Print.
Durning, Alan Thein. Guardians of the Land: Indigenous Peoples and the Health
of the Earth. Washington: Worldwatch Paper, 1992. Print.
Fixico, Donald Lee. The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century:
American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources. Colorado: UP of
Colorado, 1998. Print.
Hogan, Linda. Mean Spirit. New York: Ivy Books, 1992. Print.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
Print.

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Volume 28 ISSN : 0975-5659 [Print]

2019-20 : 2581-7833 [Online]

Meena Sharma Basil N. D. Diengdoh

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Since its inception in 1976-77, the Dibrugarh University Journal of English

DUJES  Volume 28  2019-20  ISSN : 0975-5659 [Print]/ ISSN : 2581-7833 [Online]

CONTRIBUTORS IN THE CURRENT ISSUE

Harshit Nigam is as an Assistant Professor (Guest) at Miranda House, Delhi

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Khandakar Shahin Ahmed is Assistant Professor, Department of English,

DUJES  Volume 28  2019-20  ISSN : 0975-5659 [Print]/ ISSN : 2581-7833 [Online]

Choice(s) and Whose Choice(s)? : De-construction of Choice(s)

Representing Delhi: A Study of ‘Gaze’ Construction in Select

Exteriorizing the Interior – Diseased Minds, Diseased Bodies:

“Pick a story and see where it will lead you”: Reconfigurations of

“Servant to Hunger”: A Panpsychist Reading of J. M. Coetzee’s

Diasporic Characters’ Desire to Take a ‘U-Turn’ in Selected

Nature in Nuremberg: A Study of W G Sebald's After Nature

Freeing Every Last Man of Shawshank: A Reading of Frank

The Mother of the Vaishnav Nation in Bankim Chandra

Migration and Memory in James Welch’s The Heartsong of

DUJES  Volume 28  2019-20  ISSN : 0975-5659 [Print]/ ISSN : 2581-7833 [Online]

Forms of Social Transmission and the Making of the Public Self

The Possibility of ‘Counter Travel’ in the Age of ‘Belated

Representing the Urban in Rana Dasgupta’s Capital

Sexuality, Selfhood and Self-Annihilation in William Blake’s

Honour(ing) Existence, Resisting Honour: Exploring The

Racial Subalternity of the Issei in Select Japanese North

Writing the Body: A Feminist Reading of the Poems of Rajathi

Anxiety, Alterity and Alienation of Pan-diasporic Kerala Women

From Page to Screen: Bangladesh Revisits

The Representation of the Aged in J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction: A

Missionary Ethnography and the Manufacturing of Desire in

DUJES  Volume 28  2019-20  ISSN : 0975-5659 [Print]/ ISSN : 2581-7833 [Online]

Hamari Jamatia 270-286

Analysis of Ideology of Domesticity in Charlotte Mary

Utopian Visions of Feminist Science Fiction: A Pathway to

Demystification of the Postmodern Dialectics of Space and

Aboriginal Places and Colonialist Interventions: Interrogating