Border, Globalization and Identity [1 ed.] 9781527510760, 9781527503601

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Border, Globalization and Identity

Border, Globalization and Identity Edited by

Sukanta Das, Sanatan Bhowal, Sisodhara Syangbo and Abhinanda Roy

Border, Globalization and Identity Edited by Sukanta Das, Sanatan Bhowal, Sisodhara Syangbo and Abhinanda Roy This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Sukanta Das, Sanatan Bhowal, Sisodhara Syangbo, Abhinanda Roy and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0360-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0360-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Sukanta Das Part I: Beyond the Border Chapter One ............................................................................................... 12 Space, Border, Identity: Through a Poetic Lens Sukriti Ghosal Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 On First Looking into Friedman’s Bangalore: The World isn’t Flat After All Tara Prakash Tripathi Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 32 Crossing the (B)orders: Globalization and the Ibis Trilogy Jaydeep Rishi Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 44 Kashmir: A Failed Border Iman Ghosh Part II: Bordering the Globe Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 52 Border is in the Mind Abu Siddik Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 61 Thodasa Romani Ho Jaayen: Of Literature and Language, with ‘Borders’ in Oblivion Tuhin Sanyal

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Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 72 Of Borders, Blending, and Blood: The Question of Assimilation and Othering in Victor Séjour’s ‘The Mulatto’ Namrata Jain and Tara Prakash Tripathi Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 83 Border Narratives and Cultural Contours: Studying Amitav Ghosh and the Indo-Bangla Cultural Interface Raja Basu Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 93 Mapping Karachi: Post-1971 Pakistan and Amnesiac Narratives of National Unity in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography Arnab K. Sinha Part III: Understanding Border Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 100 Frontiers and Boundaries: Mapping the Trajectories of Social Mobility and Economic Growth in Pre-modern Bengal Aniket Tathagata Chhetry Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 112 Twenty-first Century Nationalism and the Anti-globalization Movement: The Indian Experiences and Outlook Avijit Sutradhar Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 121 The Politics of Fencing and Exchanges of Enclaves: A Study of the IndoBangladesh Border Koushik Goswami Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 131 ‘The Indian landscape sears my eyes/I have become a part of it’: The Border Individual in the Poems of Nissim Ezekiel Ashish Chhetri Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 140 Border for Sale Debjani Roychoudhury

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 147 Looking Back in Loneliness Hasina Wahida Part IV: Locating Identity Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 156 Bordered in an Interrogated Identity: A Study of Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar Paroma Chanda and Diptarka Chakraborty Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 163 ‘She came home running back to the mothering blackness…’ Race, Identity, and Re-bordering of Self in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah Nilanjan Chakraborty Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 171 Looking beyond the Borders of the Tide Country: A Study of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Ankita Chatterjee Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 181 Highlighting Metamorphosis: A Study of Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant Valentina Tamsang Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 188 ‘All One Race’: The Confluence of the Australian Aboriginal Poems of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Indian Dalit Poems of Manohar Mouli Biswas Utpal Rakshit Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 203 The Unobstructed Obstruction: Borders and Identity in John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas Namrata Chowdhury Chapter Twenty-Two............................................................................... 211 Translation as an Agent of Transculturation and Identity Transformation in an Increasingly Borderless World Sarmila Paul

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Contributors ............................................................................................. 217 Index ........................................................................................................ 221

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this collection of essays on Border, Globalization, and Identity arose during a seminar organized by the Department of English at P.D. Women’s College, West Bengal, India in November 2015. The seminar participants presented research papers on issues such as borders, globalization, migration, and identity. We gratefully acknowledge the participants for their stimulating discussion and scholarly contribution, and thank those who submitted their papers for this anthology. We also take this opportunity to thank the scholars who reviewed these submissions. We are greatly indebted to the Principal of P. D. Women’s College, Dr. Shanti Chhetry, who extended his full cooperation in organizing the seminar and encouraged us to publish the collected papers. Our academic activities have always been supported and encouraged by him. We would also like to acknowledge the financial support received from the University Grants Commission in organizing this seminar, and thank the Eastern Region of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia for collaborating with our department to organize the seminar. We thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their interest in publishing the proceedings of the seminar, which witnessed a fruitful exchange between scholars on a number of issues troubling the contemporary globalized world. We hope the publication of these essays will disseminate its thinking to a wider readership.

INTRODUCTION SUKANTA DAS

I Contrary to some predictions, state borders have not disappeared or even lost their importance in the contemporary globalized world.1 Yet the unprecedented development of information technology and communications has not only turned the world into a village, but also forced us to rethink traditional ways of affiliation and to re-engage with borders, both actual and metaphorical. The expansion of capitalism, the flourishing of the market economy, the erosion in importance of the nation-state, and easier modes of connectivity have facilitated the expansion of global culture. With the emergence of this global culture, and almost seamless connectivity across national borders, questions of identity and borders have come to occupy centre stage in recent theoretical discussion. Traditional notions of identity as fixed have been challenged in an age defined by global culture. Globalization as a theoretical concept has permeated several disciplines and impacted the way people organize their lives today. It is one of the most hotly debated issues, and although there have been divergent views as to its impact and nature, it is difficult to deny its existence or its effect. Some scholars hold it to be a new phenomenon, generated by the expansion of capitalism, and not so different from imperialism in its operation. They hold that, like capitalism, globalization seeks to establish its influence over other regions of the world. This interpretation sees the expansion of global capitalism as an offshoot of Western market monopolization. While capital and the market economy are the foundations of globalizing forces, they are greatly facilitated by communications technology. Advances in communication and information technology contribute largely to the creation of a kind of homogenizing culture. Access to the Internet, and the rapid dissemination of information, serve to create and sustain a form of common culture. It has been 1

For an accessible introduction to globalization see Steger, Lechner and Boli.

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Introduction

suggested that globalization is simply a type of Americanization, or Cocacolonization.2 In other words, globalization is seen as something that encourages cultural homogenization, helping to erode state borders. Scholars have pointed out that borders have become permeable in the contemporary world of rapid communications and incessant flow of people and goods. James Rosenau (1997), for example, argues that what distinguishes these globalizing processes is ‘that they are not hindered or prevented by territorial or jurisdictional barriers’ (p. 80). Therefore territorial borders lose much of their importance as barriers to communication and to the flow of people and goods across them. Such changes pose many questions about globalization. Does it help people who live on the margins? Or is globalization a kind of hegemonic tool in the hands of capitalists? Does globalization help bring about desired changes making for a better world? The supporters of globalization hail it as paving the way for flourishing democratic ideals and values, and for generating economic opportunities for disempowered people. Undoubtedly greater connectivity, facilitated by information and communications technology, has ushered in new kind of culture shared by people across national, ethnic, religious, racial, and linguistic borders. This new culture, sponsored by globalization, affects people in multiple ways, and impacts how they conceive their own identity and that of others. Globalization is said to have minimized, if not obliterated, the power of states, rendering borders largely superfluous. The idea of a borderless world, shrunk to a global village thanks to unprecedented advances in information technology and the expansion of capitalism, has been hotly debated in contemporary discourses about border.3 In simple terms, border is primarily geographical –physical demarcation lines drawn to differentiate one space from another. The notion of border was employed historically by Europeans to perpetuate perceived territorial difference. Mechanisms such as barbed-wire fencing and strict patrols by the military are adopted to ensure the sanctity of border. The geographical aspects of border include the means employed to maintain the difference between people living on each side of it. Globalization is held to have blurred borders as a result of greater connectivity and the flow of people across frontiers. Yet border still seems to pose a barrier or block. With the rise of nationalism, the importance of borders increases, since they are used to maintain and perpetuate 2

Scholars have pointed out that globalization and Americanization have become synonymous because of the pervasive influence of American culture and capital across the world. See Oldenziel. 3 For an understanding of border see Diener and Hagen, Hagen.

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difference, and consolidate the idea of the nation-state.4 Since nationalism depends upon the supposed homogenization of culture within a territory, border becomes all the more important in defining the identity of a nation vis-à-vis other nations on the other side. Early geographers considered boundaries to be of two kinds: good and bad. The natural boundaries formed by rivers and mountains were termed ‘good’, while boundaries artificially constructed by the state were called ‘bad’. This distinction has been contested on the ground that there are no ‘natural’ boundaries, as all boundaries are constructed. Nick VaughanWilliams says, None of these borders is in any sense given but (re)produced through modes of affirmation and contestation and is, above all, lived. In other words borders are not natural, neutral or static but historically contingent, politically charged, dynamic phenomena that first and foremost involve people and their everyday lives’(1).

Since the 1980s, scholars from disciplines other than geography, such as political science, social science, and cultural studies, have worked on different aspects of border. Although the physical existence of borders still matters greatly, scholars are also investigating the metaphorical significance of borders. Borders mark out a particular geographical space from other space, demarcating one territory from other territories. Thus the idea of border is informed by identity and difference. Borders are important as giving shape to a territory, upholding and asserting identity by maintaining difference from others. Borders are intended to give homogeneous identity to the people inhabiting the space defined, and thus assume great significance in the discourse of nationalism. Nationalism emphasizes the attainment of a homogeneous culture within the territory of a nation-state that marks it out from others. National borders function in multiple ways. First, they delimit the sphere of operation of the sovereign state, which does not have any claim on territory beyond its borders. They are demarcating lines, mutually agreed upon by neighbouring states. Borders define the sphere of absolute power of the state, and also point to the powerlessness of that state beyond them. Second, borders are guarded, monitored, and patrolled, with advanced military apparatus employed to safeguard them. Far from being mere lines of demarcation, borders are active, unstable, and the focus of

4

For an accessible introduction to nationalism see Grosby, Gellner, Anderson.

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Introduction

military activity. The state takes great care to protect its borders, because infiltration is regarded as an attack on the sovereignty of the state. Borders are also the entry and exit points for people and goods. Those authorized for entry or exit are allowed to cross the border routinely with surveillance. The state has differently defined attitudes towards people who live within its borders and those outside them. People living within a particular state border enjoy citizenship, with its associated privileges and rights. If a citizen is denied the rights bestowed by the state, s/he can ask the judiciary for their restoration. People living on the other side of the border do not enjoy such privileges and rights, and if they attempt to cross the border without valid documents they are breaking that state’s law. Borders operate on the basis of inclusion and exclusion. Borders define who is welcome within a territory and who is not. In the contemporary global world, borders are experienced not only at the margin, where actual fences or barbed wires exist, but also in the centres where immigration checks are carried out. Borders also assume metaphorical meaning. Racial, ethnic, and religious minorities can experience a sense of exclusion even when they are located within a territory. This metaphorical dimension of borders has been investigated in postcolonial cultural studies by scholars, who describe such borders as ‘contact zones’ or ‘liminal spaces’. A border marks not only the limit of a territory, beyond which the state has no authority or jurisdiction, but also the beginning of another space or territory. Borders also have an existence of their own, because they do not belong exclusively to one territory, but are sites of ‘in-betweenness’, a ‘contact zone’ where cultural exchange can take place. Borders occupy an ambiguous position, in a sense belonging to nowhere. This ambiguity – belonging to nowhere, or for that matter to everywhere –has been investigated by the Chicana scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa. In the preface to her book Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) she makes a deceptively simple declaration: ‘I am a border woman’. Identifying herself with border, she rejoices at its infinite possibility and limitless expansion. She is attempting to disrupt conventional thinking about border and the identity it entails, with a ‘shift out of habitual formations: from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes’ (101). The notion of what constitutes identity in the contemporary globalized world has been explored in various discourses, including psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and cultural studies. Essentially, identity has two dimensions

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– personal and collective. The sense of who I am is what constitutes personal identity, while a human being living within a larger community (racial, ethnic, national, or religious) attains a collective identity from his/her membership of that community. Thus identity operates through an understanding of difference. A human being’s understanding of his/her difference from his/her fellow human beings offers the solid ground upon which s/he constructs identity. Therefore the concept of identity cannot be separated from difference. As Stuart Hall argues, ‘...identities are constructed through, not outside, difference’ (17). The formation of identity takes place with a simultaneous understanding or awareness of its ‘other’: ethnic or national identity, for example, is dependent upon what it is not. However postmodern scholars contest the very basis of identity, suggesting there is no fixed vantage point from which one can look at oneself and others. The postmodern philosopher Deleuze interrogates traditional notions of identity and difference, where identity gets privileged. Deleuze holds that there is no stable, fixed identity, and even apparent identity – considered to be fixed and stable – is actually composed of a series of differences. But identity as invoked in various discourses has been the prime force behind the mobilization of people against another ideology, or against people endorsing that ideology. People see identity as a strategic tool for achieving some political goal. For example, border gives a kind of fixed definition to a territory, and people inhabiting that land are aware of the homogeneity supposed to have been achieved by the discourse of nationalism. But the rapid development of information and communication technology has made borders virtually redundant, as cross-border communication and interaction take place in unprecedented ways. The large-scale migration of people for many different reasons5 has problematized the unitary concept of identity as defined by the discourse of border. Older assumptions about the single dimensionality of identity have been replaced by the concept of plural, or multiple, identities. Therefore the sense of who I am, which constitutes identity, is varied, different, unstable, and liable to reconstitution. Identity is essentially a context5

The migration of people to different lands has been analyzed from viewpoint of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. Certain socio-economic opportunities, such as higher salary, higher standard of living, and relatively peaceful social life, act as ‘pull’ factors, luring people to lands promising such personal fulfilment. However ‘push’ factors, such as ethnic violence, riots, and racial clashes, compel people to leave their land of origin.

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Introduction

specific position, and an individual may choose to give priority to a particular marker of his/her identity (religion, ethnicity, gender, for example) in a particular socio-cultural context. This awareness, and the need to outgrow the stereotyping of identity, leads to a more nuanced understanding of identity. Therefore identity is a position an individual takes after negotiating a number of options available to him/her. But failure to resolve the claims of different identity-markers creates a confusion that can lead to violence resulting from the assertion of a particular identity. Problems with identity can arise when a person asserts only one particular marker of identity as their recognition tag. Such binary thinking has been interrogated by postmodern scholars such as Edward Soja, who worked on Henry Lefebvre’s notion of spatiality, and talked about the creation of ‘Thirdspace’.6 It is only by crossing the border, and thus entering into a kind of Thirdspace – a realm that melds the apparent contradictions – that we can make sense of our identity.

II The present anthology is a collection of research papers from multiple perspectives on a variety of themes related to the issues of border, globalization, and identity. The individual chapters have been grouped into four parts, and deal with key issues of border, globalization, and identity, employing innovative theoretical frameworks to investigate the issues. Regional texts and emerging new literatures have also been taken up to explore the issues. Contemporary fictions, both in English and in regional languages, poetry, and cultural products such as film, have been analyzed to offer stimulating perspectives on identity and border. In his contribution, Sukriti Ghosal offers an in-depth reading of some contemporary poems that explore the sense of bewilderment, helplessness, and unswerving zeal in response to border and in moments of exile. He surveys contemporary theory on different dimensions of space, border, and identity, and explores these issues in his reading of recent English poetry. In an era of globalization, borders become porous and result in a multiplicity of identities. This is explored by Tara Prakash Tripathi, who investigates the emigration of tech-savvy, westernized youths. This process has set up a new kind of tension and conflict between a large 6

Starting from Lefebvre’s concept of spatiality, Soja talks about ‘Thirdspace’, a space beyond the binary, deterministic space where opposites coalesce. For an elaborate discussion of the term, see Soja.

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group of English-speaking, westernized, tech-savvy youths and local residents, who become frightened about the impact of foreign culture upon indigenous, tradition-nourished culture. Jaydeep Rishi investigates Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, showing how the process of globalization took place in an earlier period, when traders, soldiers, and sailors were its agents. Encompassing a wide expanse of history, and traversing extensive geographical space, this paper tracks Ghosh’s take on an earlier phase of globalization and the crossing of borders. Iman Ghosh revisits the conflicted terrain of Kashmir to argue that identity is slippery, particularly because of the confluence of various cultures and traditions. Ghosh explores the multi-dimensionality of ‘Kashmiri’ identity, with a critical study of poetry about Kashmir, and an analysis of popular culture, particularly Bollywood films set in this region. Abu Siddik interrogates the discourses of globalization that herald the withering away of borders, and shows how modern-day borders still operate in numerous ways in all spheres. Critiquing contemporary discourses and recent events, particularly in India, Abu Siddik explores the trauma of people who are impacted by religious, linguistic, and cultural borders. In his paper, Tuhin Sanyal explores ‘borders’ in the ancient language and literature used and written by the Romani people. He reveals linguistic traces that the Romani people have left, traversing boundaries, and revisits Romani literature by transcreating some Romani songs and poems illustrating the issues of border. In their paper, Tara Prakash Tripathi and Namrata Jain explore the issues of assimilation and crossing borders by analyzing Victor Séjour’s work ‘The Mulatto’. Through an in-depth reading, they bring out the problems of assimilating people of mixed race in a racialized society. Raja Basu takes up the issue of nationalism and the borders it creates against the back-drop of cross-border interaction in the Indian subcontinent. Critiquing the discourse of nationalism, Raja Basu shows how borderland cultural practices override the rigidity of borders. Arnab K. Sinha charts the troubling terrain of the cartography of the Indian subcontinent, combining a study of Kamila Shamsie’s novel Kartography with a historical account that nullifies the borders on the map. Aniket Chhetry historicizes the concept of border, drawing a distinction between modern-day borders and the pre-modern concept of boundaries or frontiers. He analyzes the nature of pre-modern boundaries in his exploration of the Brahmanic frontiers of Bengal in the medieval period. The spread of global capital and dominance of a market economy forced nations to invite foreign investment in order to establish large-scale

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Introduction

industry and set up Special Economic Zones (SEZs). This led to the emergence of movements opposed to land-grabbing by industry, particularly in the Indian subcontinent. An anti-globalization movement arose to ensure the democratization of natural resources and the protection of the environment. In his paper, Avijit Sutradhar discusses the adverse impact of globalization on indigenous people and their culture. In his paper, Koushik Goswami traces the origin and subsequent development of various ‘chitmahals’ (enclaves) on the Indo-Bangladeshi border, investigates the problems faced by residents, and makes a socio-historical analysis of the birth of chitmahals that calls for dialogue and empathetic collaboration beyond the border. Ashish Chhetri investigates the problems of exile, migration, and identity in his paper on Nissim Ezekiel’s poetry. In her paper, Debjani Roychoudhury focuses on the popular consumption of cultural products associated with border. She investigates popular Bollywood films that are preoccupied with border, particularly those retelling the story of Partition. Using clips from television soaps, Roychoudhury explores how the popular imagination associated with nationalism and Partition has been exploited to make money at the box office. Partition – one of the most traumatic events in the recent history of the Indian subcontinent – continues to attract the attention of writers. Hasina Wahida explores this subject by analyzing some novels in Bengali, revisiting the traditional concept of border by presenting the lived experience of victims of Partition. In their paper, Paroma Chanda and Diptarka Chakraborty explore notions of identity and home by analyzing Amrita Pritam’s novel Pinjar. Torn between home and identity, a woman is forced to leave her ancestral homefaces double marginalization. The paper critiques the provisional nature of identity, and examines the notions of ‘home’ and ‘identity’ as experienced by women. Defenders of globalization hail it as ushering in prosperity, nourishing democratic values, and facilitating economic opportunities for people. But it does not always offer such bright prospects. In his paper, Nilanjan Chakraborty explores the feelings of alienation experienced by ‘outsiders’ in American society because of racial identity. He exposes flaws in the liberty discourse of globalization. In her paper, Ankita Chatterjee investigates ‘border’ in all its manifestations, and analyzes how Amitav Ghosh dismantles various borderlines. Chatterjee takes up Ghosh’s notion of ‘syncretic culture’ to explore his novel The Hungry Tide, set in the volatile Sundarbans. Employing Ghosh’s notion of borders as ‘shadow

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lines’, the paper draws attention to the interpenetration of culture as portrayed by Ghosh. Valentina Tamsang analyzes the problems of assimilation in an alien land, making an in-depth study of Manju Kapoor’s novel The Immigrant. She looks upon ‘affect’ as the catalyst in transforming the lives of Nina and Ananda. Drawing parallels between Aboriginal writing in Australia and Dalit literature in India, Utpal Rakshit explores the sufferings of both peoples, investigating forms of resistance, ideological suppression, and construction of identity in the face of a dominant ideology. Rakshit compares the poetry of the Australian Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and the Indian Dalit poet Manohar Mouli Biswas. In her paper, Namrata Chowdhury explores the problematic of identity and border by analyzing John Boyne’s novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, set during the Holocaust. Employing psychoanalytic theories, Choudhury explores the transgressive nature of boundaries. Finally, Sarmila Paul explores the problematic of translation, and discusses the transformation of ‘local identities’ through an act of transcreation.

Select Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Grosby, Steven. Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli (eds.) The Globalization Reader, 3rd edn. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2007. Lefebvre, H. The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976. Oldenziel, Ruth. ‘Is Globalization a Code Word for Americanization? : Contemplating McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and military bases’. Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis, 4(3), pp. 84–106, 2007. Rosenau, James N. ‘The Complexities and Contradictions of Globalization’. Current History, 1997. Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989. Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

PART I: BEYOND THE BORDER

CHAPTER ONE SPACE, BORDER, IDENTITY: THROUGH A POETIC LENS SUKRITI GHOSAL I In an interview prior to his death, Michel Foucault, who theorized about heterotopia, said that ‘Space is fundamental in any form of communal life, space is fundamental in any exercise of power’ (qtd. in Postmodern Geographies, Edward W. Soja, 19). Now the space we live in is ‘a heterogeneous space’, à la Foucault: ‘We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another’ (Foucault, 23). The Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre (in The Production of Space) argues that space is a social construct. As sex is biological but gender is a social construct, so within the natural space inhabited by humanity there are multiple spaces based on relations and values that we recognize and endorse in day-to-day life. The second half of the twentieth century saw a semantic extension of this concept. The body, and all that it represents, is conceived spatially. As the body is related to reproduction, the question of miscegenation–the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types–has become pivotal in recent studies (for example, purity vs. hybridity). ‘Mongrelization’ has been envisaged as a strategy for combating interracial feud and terrorism. Understandably, such an approach interrogates the monolithic concept of identity, and points more towards the porousness of various borders, geographical or imaginary, drawn in various names. Space may be demarcated by drawing a line on a map, fencing a territory, or raising imaginary boundaries of separation. The notion of imaginary boundaries makes the border metaphorical. Border thus not only signifies tangible boundaries, dividing a place and people occupying the space, but also becomes a psychological category. As a metaphor, it may

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encompass a temporal boundary as well. For example, when we talk of a generation gap, we refer to the timeline that separates people living on either side of a generation line. Theory of border or boundary is a cognitive theory of ‘social classification’ (Zerubavel, 1991; 1996): work/family, East/West, black/white, Brahmin/Dalit, straight/queer and the like. It takes into account issues such as the nature of categorization, the need for integration or segmentation of domains or roles specific to each domain, and the mechanism – for instance flexibility or permeability – for achieving it. It also seeks to probe how people construct, maintain, negotiate, or cross boundaries or borders, the lines of demarcation. Boundary crossing and role transitions are central to border theory. Nippert-Eng mentions two such strategies: placement, which ‘draws the line between realms’; and transcendence, which keeps the boundary ‘in place by allowing us to jump back and forth over it’ (p. 8). Identity is a loaded term, with complex layers of meaning. Identity is the outcome of the recognition of what one is to oneself and to others. Identity is a differential experience, requiring a borderline that marks out an individual or group within the circumscribed domain from those outside that space, geographical or imagined; that is, the specific literal or metaphorical border. The Platonic division between eidos and eicon, form and its derivatives, proved useful in understanding the relation between identity and difference. What I am can be grasped only from knowledge of what I am not. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, however, has shown the gap in this proposition, and maintains that if eidos can be distinguished from eicon, the latter can also be distinguished from the former. The reversal of order of occurrence in the binary redefines the status of privilege always enjoyed by the first member of any binary. This means there is only difference – no fixed, essentialist, stable identity. To quote Deleuze: ‘If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its internal difference’ (32). In Deleuze’s version, pure difference is nonspatio, temporal difference per se. For Deleuze there is no subject, there is only a differentiating process. But as identity essentializes being, it presupposes the existence and necessity of a border. Thus a nation, a religious community, or a political party requires a border for the purity of its defined identity, but must cross it if it wants to re-define its identity. Border crossing, therefore, is looked upon as a transgressive act by the community that seeks to exercise power over a domain (cf. ‘homogeneity necessary to the exercise of power’, Kathleen Karr, ‘Race, Nation, and Ethnicity’ 377). Crossing the border

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Chapter One

may be a homecoming for an exile, or an infiltration to the people on the other side of the inhabited domain if one is unwelcome there. Any intercultural encounter punctures a stable form of identity, thereby necessitating the creation of what Soja calls ‘Thirdspace’. The advantage of this so-called transgression/infiltration is that it expands the horizon of our experience, re-moulding the familiar identity. Here a plurality of perspective – accessible by overleaping the border, that is, by negotiating with the Other – is a precondition of the assertion of identity. Two forces – centripetal (aligning oneself with a homogeneous community) and centrifugal (liberating oneself from set boundaries) – are simultaneously operative in human nature. This is comparable to the four forces in physics – gravitation and strong (inter and intra-particle attraction/bond), and electromagnetic and weak (radiation and dispersal). In-betweenness occurs when one recognizes the necessity of fusion, but refuses to commit oneself to either sensibility. Lack of commitment may be due to fear of contamination, that is, loss of the existing pure grain of identity. Moreover, since membership of a group is by nature exclusive, memory and a sense of attachment hold the person concerned back from integrating with the new community. But since the first half of the twentieth century opinion has changed greatly due to changes in attitude towards hybridity. If Modernists stressed the importance of fusion, ‘post-modern hybridity emphasizes not fusion but multiple and mobile positionings created by performative transgressions of national grand narrative’ (Kerr 379). The need for re-interrogating the question of space and border, and how identity is related to these, has been felt since humanity stepped into a globalized borderless space. The revolution in information and communication technology has rendered geographical borders almost redundant, causing deterritorialization, to borrow the pet phrase of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (in Anti-Oedipus), especially of netizens. Yet identity politics succeeds in thriving in one essential area. In the last two decades the world has experienced traumatic violence and terror due to the stereotyping of identity-markers, or racial profiling: for example, black=inferior, Brahmin=superior, mulatto=criminal, Muslim=terrorist. While this prejudice has a political design and hence relates to power, it points to a mindset that is prone to maintain difference by securing the border, rather than crossing the border in search of the ‘commonality which cuts across situated differences’. Soja has rightly advocated the creation of a ‘Thirdspace’ to escape the determinism inherent in physical or metaphorical spaces determined by a boundary: I define Thirdspace as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness

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that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectices of spatiality-historicality-sociality’ (Soja 1996, 57).

By encouraging us to jump the border, the Thirdspace, a heterotopos (Foucault draws our attention to the mirror image which is simultaneously physical, because the mirror is an object, and virtual, because the image is unreal) may catalyze de-separation. The next section of this paper will attempt an examination of how these various aspects of space, border, and identity have been articulated in contemporary English poetry. I have chosen poetry for two reasons. First, border studies are principally focused on stories and fiction. Articulation of border-sensibility in poetry is somewhat less explored. Second, poetry – the most condensed form of literature – demands the utmost concentration in reading. While reading poetry, we cross the border of our own self most successfully and rewardingly. What is theorized may impress us as a felt experience. This idea has been touched upon by Mary Buchinger, in an interview in the journal Border Crossing: I think poetry presents an opportunity to go both inside and outside oneself. The invitation to see something in a very different way – to enter into a sensibility utterly unlike your own – is an inherent invitation to experience your own reality differently. The self is challenged in encounters with others – poetry has the power to disturb default understandings of the self and others’ (emphasis added) (Buchinger).

II David Wojahn, who received the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1981 for his collection Icehouse Lights, captures the borders of memory and desire in his poem ‘Border Crossings’. The narrator presents a character who, trapped in a country with which he cannot identify himself, sets out to leave that country with his fiancée. He recognizes the border separating his colourful past from the panicky present, as he feels compelled to ignore the aesthetic tokens of his past life for the expedient escape from a cul-de-sac. But crossing the border is a woeful experience. It is: … passing four locked doors to reach her, as if each were some frontier checkpoint to a country even farther

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Chapter One distant than the one he’s trapped in now (Wojahn)

Li-Young Lee is an Indonesian-born American poet, whose father escaped from Indonesia because of rabid anti-Chinese sentiment and finally settled in the USA when Lee was still a child. In ‘Immigrant Blues’ Li-Young reveals the dilemma of immigrants, for whom acquisition of a new language is a survival strategy, yet who cannot bridge the insideroutsider divide for several generations. In the poem we hear the voice of an immigrant whose father advised him long ago to pick up the language of the country where they have settled. Ironically, to be an ‘insider’ he must bid farewell to his mother tongue. But border-crossing under compulsion –described in the poem as ‘Loss of the Homeplace and the Defilement of the Beloved’ – is actually a betrayal of one’s self. The eventual bewilderment of the speaker is powerfully articulated in terms of sexual penetration: If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not, she answered, at peace with the body’s greed, at peace with the heart’s bewilderment. (Lee)

In nature no space is owned, it is only inhabited; humanity is eager to draw a line to assert the extent of its authority in the name of sovereignty. So a fence is erected, a border is drawn, a boundary is raised to restrict access, to exclude. Carl Sandburg, the twentieth-century American poet and three-times winner of the Pulitzer Prize, describes the spatial reality of a border in his poem, ‘A Fence’. The fence is hard and strong and any attempt to surmount it entails disaster: The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of any man who falls on them. (Sandburg)

One may refer here to Tenzin Tsundue, a Tibetan poet born in India, who in his poem ‘Crossing the Border’ recreates the ordeal of fleeing Tibet to settle in India. Over vast snowy terrains, the refugees travel for several nights in order to avoid being spotted in daylight by patrolling planes. Without food, with only ice to quench their thirst, their limbs exhausted, and with children shrieking in fear and adults praying to ‘Yishin Norbu’ (the reincarnation of an accomplished lama), they manage to crawl along the snowfields without stopping, for the alternative is death. The poet movingly recounts the trauma of a mother who has lost her frostbitten daughter in this fearful attempt to negotiate the border:

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Then, one night, my daughter complained about a burning foot. She stumbled and rose again on her frost-bitten leg. Peeled and slashed with deep bloody cuts, She reeled and writhed in pain. By the next day both her legs were severed. Gripped by death all around, I was a helpless mother. (Tsundue)

Although the border is a line proclaiming thus-far-and-no-farther, it has to be negotiated if we are to emerge from the narrow cocoon of our individual selves. As any border, cartographic or metaphorical, creates two territories under the control of different individuals/groups/entities (for example, past and present), without crossing the border one cannot succeed in joining the two hemispheres to make a globe. The border-side territories are therefore to be looked upon as complementary aspects of a fragmented whole. Crossing the border is imperative not only for existence, as in the case of refugees, but also for a fuller experience of our being, as a cultural byproduct lowering tension in the world. The problem with any border is that, in the name of creating a homogeneous group, it creates a duality of identity – calling for commitment to one means being hostile to the other, if one fails to create an imagined Thirdspace, where contraries cease to exist. This duality is the theme of another poem of Tenzin Tsundue, entitled ‘My Tibetanness’. The persona of the poem notes that even after ‘thirty-nine years’ of exile (following the Dalai Lama’s escape to India in 1959), the lives of over one lakh (100,000) Tibetan ‘refugees’ in India, continue to be grim. They are ‘People of a lost country, /Citizen to no nation’: At every check-post and office I am an ‘Indian-Tibetan’. My Registration Certificate, I renew every year, with a salaam A foreigner born in India. I am more of an Indian. Except for my chinky Tibetan face. ‘Nepali?’ ‘Thai?’ ‘Japanese?’ ‘Chinese?’ ‘Naga?’ ‘Manipuri?’ but never the question – ‘Tibetan?’ I am a Tibetan. But I am not from Tibet.

Chapter One

18 Never been there. Yet I dream of dying there. (Tsundue)

The tone of the poem sensitizes us to the tragedy of being excluded, to being spatially othered. In his poem ‘Night’, significantly included in his book Songs of Innocence, the eighteenth-century English poet William Blake envisioned a heaven where the antitheses of Innocence and Experience, the Tyger and the Lamb are resolved: And there the lion’s ruddy eyes Shall flow with tears of gold: And pitying the tender cries, And walking round the fold: Saying … ‘And now beside thee, bleating lamb, I can lie down and sleep…’ (Blake)

But can what Blake calls this ‘fearful symmetry’ be achieved on earth? That calls for the rational dismantling of ‘mind-forged manacles’, crossing a thousand borders towards a healthier de-separation. Border crossing can be a frustrating experience if the spatial line is crossed, but the temporal line stands frozen in history. In other words, if one crosses the border with an expectation of retreating to the space of a golden past, the time-space symbiosis is disturbed. The space of the past, the space one knew and treasured in one’s memory, must have changed meanwhile. If we ignore this fact, and look for what was left before separation/migration – whether voluntary or under duress – we will be disappointed. This aspect of the border crossing experience is the focus of ‘You Crossed the Border’. Written by Reza Mohammadi, a promising young Persian poet, it was inspired by the return of one of his friends to Afghanistan after an interval of many years: Oh poet! You have come to the kingdom of misery, to a land with no sky, a land where poets trade in humanity, where the mouths of prophets are stopped, where dogs are ministers and donkeys are imams. No calls to prayer issue from its mosques free of bribes. (Mohammadi) (first translated by Hamid Kabir)

Another aspect of the disillusionment of the ‘homecoming’ of the displaced is expressed by Choman Hardi in her poem ‘At the Border,

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19

1979’. Hardi, a Kurdish poet also writing in English, has explored her childhood memory of her family’s return to Iraq in 1979, after five years’ exile in Iran. The poem presents two parallel points of view: that of the adults, who are enthusiastic about homecoming, and that of the observing child, who is critical. At the last checkpoint, where the land under their feet ‘is divided by thick iron chain’, they are elated and expectant, and ‘soon everything would taste different’. The poet’s sister in playful mood puts one leg on each side of the chain, and stands literally in two countries. Her mother is excited because soon they will have ‘cleaner’ roads, a ‘more beautiful’ landscape, and ‘much kinder’ people. But as they are given entry into Iraq, the poet has a different feeling. She was promised something better, carefully evoked by the use of the comparative– ‘cleaner’ roads, ‘more beautiful’ landscape, ‘much kinder’ people. What she finds instead is: The autumn soil continued on the other side with the same colour, the same texture. It rained on both sides of the chain. We waited while our papers were checked, our faces thoroughly inspected. Then the chain was removed to let us through. A man bent down and kissed his muddy homeland. The same chain of mountains encompassed all of us. (Hardi)

This helps us recognize another important aspect of border – its arbitrariness. Spatially, border creates a barrier, a break in what is continuous. Border is arbitrary for two reasons. First, it clashes with the notion of freedom; ignoring the authority-configured border, be it the code of conduct dictated by patriarchy to women, or laws legislated by the powers that be, may invite disciplinary action. Second, it ruptures continuity, as signified by the repetition of ‘same’: ‘same colour, the same texture’. The idea of continuity is also foregrounded by the image of rain falling ‘on both sides of the chain’ and the ‘same chain of mountains encompassed all of us’. That the boundary is arbitrary, that the other is no other but the same, can be discovered only by one who has crossed the border. In ‘Mending Wall’ the twentieth-century American poet Robert Frost was hesitant to build a wall that might exclude what is to be included: Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.

20

Chapter One Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down!’ (Frost)

Given that the wall is already there, why not cross it to enrich our experience? The existential crisis of people living in the borderlands has been brilliantly voiced by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, a Chicano poet-cum-social activist well-known for her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. In her poem ‘To Live in the Borderlands’ she presents the precarious state of someone inhabiting a borderland. Such a person is likely to be the victim of nationalist/racist crossfire: caught in the crossfire between camps while carrying all five races on your back not knowing which side to turn to, run from…(Anzaldúa)

As one’s identity is likely to get hazy amidst these conflicting allegiances, the people living in the borderland feel the inadequacy of traditional identity-markers, but cannot always brush them aside: To live in the Borderlands means knowing that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years, is no longer speaking to you, that mexicanas call you rajetas, that denying the Anglo inside you is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black; Cuando vives en la frontera people walk through you, the wind steals your voice, you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat, forerunner of a new race, half and half– both woman and man, neither – a new gender… (Anzaldúa)

In the borderlands an individual is ‘the battleground / where the enemies are kin to each other’: To live in the Borderlands means the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart pound you pinch you roll you out smelling like white bread but dead; (Anzaldúa)

So one must devise a survival strategy. One such is sitting on the fence:

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To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads. (Anzaldúa)

Sitting on the fence is admitting the reality of the fence, but with no intention to cross it. Anzaldúa recognizes the importance of cultivating a higher consciousness that dreams of transcending the limits of border in any form. In this concept of a ‘new mestiza’ (a woman of mixed racial ancestry), Anzaldúa recognizes an enlightened state that helps challenge all forms of dichotomies on both sides of a border: male/female; believer/atheist, Christian/Muslim and the like. Mary Buchinger, a contemporary American poet, finely expresses a symbiosis that might help us ‘to explore meanings of other close and mutually defining relationships’, tide over the differential crisis, and progress towards a space of harmonious borderlessness. A river holds the rock in its ‘flowing heart’; a river holds a tree on its ‘sloped bank’. But the contrary is also true: ‘I must ask/ as the sky asks/ of every pond, /ocean, stream, /is it you in my grasp, /is it me? (Buchinger).

Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. 2007. Blake, William. ‘Night’. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/night/ accessed June 2016. Buchinger, Mary. ‘Say I am a river’ Border crossing Blog, May 2016. http://bcrossing.org/six-poems-by-mary-buchinger/ Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Preface by Michel Foucault. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking, 1977. Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16, 22–27. Translated from the French by Jan Miskowiec, 1986. Frost, Robert. ‘Mending Wall’, in The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Henry Holt 2002. Hardi, Choman. http://genius.com/Choman-hardi-at-the-border-1979-annotated, accessed April 12, 2016. http://www.powerpoetry.org/content/live-borderlands, accessed April 16, 2016.Kerr, Kathleen. ‘Hybridity: Postmodern’, Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, (ed.) Patricia Waugh.Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.1991.

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Mohammadi, Reza. http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/you-crossedthe-border, accessed June 12, 2016. Nippert-Eng, Christena E. Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1996. Sandburg, Carl. http://carl-sandburg.com/a_fence.htm, accessed May 20, 2016. Tsunde, Tenzin. http://www.friendsoftibet.org/articles/tenzin.html, accessed May 20, 2016. Wojahn, David. ‘Border Crossings’, The Falling Hour. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1997. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47825 https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/immigrant-blues Zerubavel, Eviatab. The Fine Line. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1993. http://bcrossing.org/six-poems-by-mary-buchinger/

CHAPTER TWO ON FIRST LOOKING INTO FRIEDMAN’S BANGALORE: THE WORLD ISN’T FLAT AFTER ALL TARA PRAKASH TRIPATHI

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ‘Indians’ and came home and reported to his king and queen: ‘The world is round’. I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: ‘The world is flat.’ (Friedman 2005)

Thomas L. Friedman made this remarkable discovery known to the world in his 2005 bestseller, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. What Friedman means by his assertion that the world is flat is that companies and individuals from any country can participate and compete in the global economy on an equal basis, thanks to advances in information technology. The telecommunications revolution ushered in the era of what Friedman calls ‘globalization 3.0’, which contributed to the flattening of the world. This discovery was based on Friedman’s trip to Bangalore, but it took residents of the city – now known as Bengaluru –by surprise. Although their city was somehow responsible for this monumental transformation of the world from round to flat, they felt nothing changed positively in their world. If anything, it was changing for the worse. Unimpeded immigration had been making their scanty resources more meagre. Thanks to rapid globalization, they had been feeling more and more out of place in the city that they called home. In other words, Friedman’s declaration, which caused great excitement among globalizing forces of the ‘flat world’, fell flat as far as local Kannadigas were concerned.

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Chapter Two

In my paper, I will explore the struggle between the culture-driven local and technology-driven global forces in the city that has been seen as a model of cosmopolitanism. In the light of that struggle and some recent events in Bangalore, it can be clearly said that Thomas L. Friedman’s claim that the world is now flat is nothing but romantic. The romanticized picture of Bangalore that Friedman portrays in The World is Flat has serious flaws. Because such romantic notions made Bangalore the mecca of globalization, the title of this paper echoes a poem by the English Romantic John Keats. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Friedman defines globalization as: The inexorable integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies to a degree never witnessed before – in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.(7)

In The World is Flat, he demonstrates how everything that his definition of globalization entails can be seen in Bangalore: General Electric’s biggest research center outside the United States is in Bangalore, with seventeen hundred Indian engineers, designers, and scientists. The brain chips for many brand-name cell phones are designed in Bangalore. Renting a car from Avis online? It’s managed in Bangalore. Tracing your lost luggage on Delta or British Airways is done from Bangalore, and the backroom accounting and computer maintenance for scores of global firms are done from Bangalore … (109)

Undoubtedly, when Friedman visited Bangalore to write his book, he found the city very favourable for globalization as defined by R. Langhorne. It had attained ‘the latest stage in a long accumulation of technological advance’ where some people could ‘conduct their affairs across the world without reference to nationality, government authority, time of day or physical environment’ (Langhorne 2001, 2). Friedman argues how, with globalization, the world has shifted from being constantly under the threat of lethal wars to being the domain of peace-loving people. Communications technology, which was previously used to demonstrate aggression over the ‘hot line’ between the Kremlin and the White House, is now being used to establish ‘help lines’ that connect everyone in America to call centres in Bangalore. Comparing today’s flat world with the world of the Cold War, Friedman further extends the contrast between these two lines of communication:

On First Looking into Friedman’s Bangalore

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While the other end of the hotline might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the UN, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in From Russia with Love. There is no Boris or Natasha saying ‘We will bury you’ in a thick Russian accent. No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: ‘Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?’ (Friedman 2005, 65)

In linking globalization with peace and prosperity in the world, Friedman seems to be doing for globalization what, in Edward Said’s view; Victorian novelists were doing for colonization: building an environment in support of it. Said, in his book Culture and Imperialism, suggests that, whenever Victorian novelists mentioned a colonial locale in their novels, they depicted it as a source of prosperity which, in turn, resulted in order and peace at home. He illustrates this with an example from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, where Sir Thomas Bertram’s estate in the West Indies is presented as a source of comfort to his family, but when he returns from the colony, chaos ensues there (Said 1994, 88–89). Austen, it must be remembered, does not show how Mr. Bertram behaves towards the slaves on the estate, or under what conditions the slaves have to work. In the same way that such Victorian novelists fall into ‘aesthetic silence’ when it comes to the ‘colonial others’, Friedman seems to maintain a distance from the ‘others’ affected by globalization in The World is Flat. Nowhere in his description of globalization do we find any discussion of the problems faced by the city-dwellers of Bangalore. The Bangalore that Friedman envisages has nothing intrinsically ‘bangalorish’ about it. In his narrative, he plays at the golf-courses and attends meetings in five-star hotels and Western-looking, multi-storey office complexes. Friedman’s Bangalore is a de-bangalorized, deterritorialized, delocalized place such as can be found in any city of America. Of this Bangalore Friedman says, in The World is Flat, ‘No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas. It didn’t even seem like India.’ He further asks, ‘Was this the New World, the Old World, or the Next World?’ The answer perhaps should be his third. Whereas ‘the Old World’ for Friedman represents India, not developed and – due to poor infrastructure –not easily accessible to all, ‘the New World’ represents well-developed American cities with very restricted access to outsiders. ‘The Next World’ can perhaps be said to exist anywhere, anytime. It is not constrained by place or time, and Friedman thinks it is open to all.

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Chapter Two

As the self-styled ‘discoverer’ of this new world, Friedman has the right to compare himself with Columbus, and makes full use of the opportunity to do so at the outset of his book. Any avid student of history surely knows that explorers such as Columbus, in order to persuade monarchs and aristocrats to support their voyages, inflated their successes by concocting fabulous – and sometimes misleading – narratives about the newly-discovered places, with one fundamental message: the place promises prosperity, therefore we must invest in it. Columbus sold to European aristocrats the idea of exploring for economic gain the new world that he discovered. Friedman seems to be doing the same thing in a different context. His motive seems to be to present Bangalore in a favourable light in order to encourage people from outside Bangalore to try this new world. However, there is a fundamental difference between Columbus and Friedman as explorers. Whereas Columbus’s faulty calculations about the world led him to a new scientific discovery: that the earth is round, Friedman’s incorrect calculations about the new world have led him to a false economic claim that the world is flat. This ‘discovery’ is based more on faith than reason and requires ‘suspension of disbelief’ to attain credibility. Friedman has not been very successful in selling his theory that ‘the world is flat’, and has been criticized by various globalist writers. But more interestingly, he has earned a significant amount of bad publicity in blog literature, a significant source of information and opinion in the ‘flat world’. ‘On first looking into Friedman’s Flathead’ by James D. Macdonald criticizes Friedman’s romantic ideas about globalization. Inspired by John Keats’ poem ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, Macdonald’s poem clearly decries Friedman’s romantic vision. The references, in the context of Friedman, to Don Juan and Jose Canseco – perhaps symbolizing villainy, mendacity, and dishonesty undermining the flat, level playing-field – are remarkable. Interestingly, the poet is using for his ‘heresy’ the same medium – communications technology –that in the first place made the religion of globalization possible, and the same as the auspex used for disseminating his prophesy of globalization to the world. Much have I travell’d in a chartered jet And munched betimes upon a Cinnabon; Upon my iPod listened to Don Juan Which I downloaded from the wireless ’Net. I did not understand the ’Nineties lore Of Windows systems and of Pizza Hut, How one was opened and the other shut,

On First Looking into Friedman’s Bangalore

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Till I heard Friedman speak in metaphor. Then felt I like a steroid in a vein: Jose Canseco on a level field, Whose random thoughts of glory and of pain Were like an ice-cream sundae all congealed. The moral is, when put by words in train, That which does not exist can’t be revealed.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, the noted economist and recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, delineates a very different picture of Bangalore and the neighbouring areas to the one offered by Friedman. Stiglitz graphically describes the reality of a place just a few miles away from the Indian Silicon Valley in the following passage, which debunks the notion of globalization as a panacea for the problems of poverty and its related hardships. The claims made by the various apologists for globalization – that its trickle-down effect will save people from the hell of misery and the dehumanizing effect of hard labour – are rendered hollow: The back roads of Karnataka, in southern India, are filled with potholes, and even short distances can take hours by car. Women labor on the roads breaking stones by hand. The landscape is dotted with lone men plowing the dusty fields with oxen. At roadside stalls, shopkeepers sell biscuits and tea. It’s a typical scene in India, where much of the population is still illiterate and the median income is just $2.70 a day. (Stiglitz 2006, 25)

In Bangalore, the situation is not much better. The rate of unemployment among the local population is very high. The jobs available from transnational companies mostly go to non-native people. On average, around 1,000 people move to Bangalore every day. The population of this Silicon Valley is now approximately ten million, which is four times more than fifteen years ago. The 1991 census of India showed the total population of Bangalore to be 2,660,088, which roughly doubled by the 2001 census, to 4,292,223. By the 2011 census, it was touching thirteen million. However, the infrastructure has shown no sign of matching the rising population. Employees who can instantly reach anywhere in the deterritorialized digital world to solve the problems of customers of multinational corporations find themselves spending hours on the roads on which they reach their offices, located just a few miles from their residences. The city that was once known as a pensioners’ paradise for the relaxed life and healthy climate it offered now suffers from rampant pollution and depression. In July 2015, The Bangalore Mirror reported that the city registered the second highest suicide rate in India. Crime is on

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Chapter Two

the rise in this erstwhile peaceful city, and kidnapping, rape, and theft are commonplace. The majority of local people, who do not get much that is positive from the ‘development’ that took place as result of globalization, hold globalization responsible for the chaos that is the order of the day in this Silicon Valley. The description above comes no where near the rosy picture of Bengaluru that Friedman painted, in which he seems to find no difference between Brooklyn and Bangalore. For example he argues that thirty-five years ago, if you had the choice between being born a B+ student in Brooklyn or a genius in Bangalore, India: …you’d rather be born the B+ student in Brooklyn, because your life opportunities would be so much greater in Brooklyn, even as a B+ student. Today, you’d much rather be born a genius in Bangalore, because when the world is flat, and you can plug and play, collaborate and connect, just like you can from Brooklyn, your life chances and opportunities hold more potential than ever before. (Friedman 2005)

Tomlinson’s view about the accessibility of the benefits of globalization –‘despite its increasing ubiquity, it is still restricted to relatively small numbers of people and, within this group, to an even smaller, more exclusive, cadre of frequent users’ (Tomlinson 1999, 8)– appears absolutely appropriate when applied to Bangalore. ‘One measure of the accomplishment of globalization,’ claims Tomlinson, ‘is how far the overcoming of physical distance is matched by that of cultural distance’ (6). On that front, there has been more distanciation, expropriation, and dissimilation of the local Kannadiga culture from the public spaces by the universalist culture of globalization. Local food is considered primitive and is therefore scarcely available, unless cooked at home. Conversely, the ‘sacred’ food of globalization – fast food – is served at most of the eatingplaces. Kannada – the local language – can hardly be heard in public places. The all-important language of globalization – English –seems to be the primary language of the city. Tomlinson’s words again fit the context very well. He says: This is in many ways a troubling phenomenon, involving the simultaneous penetration of local worlds by distant forces, and the dislodging of everyday meanings from their ‘anchors’ in the local environment. (Tomlinson 1999, 42)

This phenomenon of ‘the simultaneous penetration of local worlds by distant forces, and the dislodging of everyday meanings from their

On First Looking into Friedman’s Bangalore

29

“anchors” in the local environment’ is not restricted just to the culture and language of Karnataka. Local residents feel the impact of this phenomenon in many other ways. It hurts the local population more if the state government seems to sidestep their wishes and interests in favour of the forces of globalization. Janaki Nair (2007) draws our attention to such a negative approach towards the local population by the administration of Bangalore, which banned bicycles from certain roads in the city, arguing that ‘foreigners’ would not approve of them. The bicycle did not seem appropriate for the fast-moving network society of the flat world, where the city is conceived of as a space for the unimpeded flow of commodities, people, and information. Yet, as Nair puts it: The fact that an estimated 20 per cent of its population resides in slums, that close to 70 per cent of its employment is in the unorganized sector, and that 60 per cent of its population is ill served by a public transport network challenges any proud claim that Bangalore is well on the way to becoming a network society. (Nair 2007, 119)

It is not surprising then, with the demographic so drastically transformed after the city ‘plugged’ in to globalization, that a xenophobic, reactionary, fundamentalist resurgence of Kannadiga culture is being experienced in the city. This is despite the fact that the people of Bangalore have long been known for their acceptance of cosmopolitanism. It was against the back-drop of this resurgence that, less than a year after Friedman made Bangalore synonymous with globalization throughout the world, some well-known literary figures, led by the wellknown Kannada writer U. R. Ananthamurthy, approached the state government and suggested that the name of the Bangalore officially be changed to its vernacular original, Bengaluru. They believed that, by changing the name given by the British colonizers to its Kannada original, the Westernization of the city – one of the offshoots of globalization – could be curbed. Ananthamurthy expressed his objection to the influence of globalization in the city in an interview with the Press Trust of India: ‘Globalization is forcing us to become unilingual, and we are willfully following it without even realizing that we are losing a great deal in return.’ Justifying his proposal for name change, he told the New York Times that it would ‘awaken the consciousness of people to the existing inequality’. He further explained what he meant by the ‘existing inequality’: In this city, people can study French or Spanish, shop in a fancy supermarket full of goods produced by multinationals, and ride in cabs

30

Chapter Two driven by English-speaking drivers… But do these people living in ‘Bangalore’ know that there is a ‘Bengaluru’?

The demand for the old, vernacular original name for the city was symbolic of returning to the traditional notion of locality that was ‘contextual and scalar’. Appadurai’s description of the ‘techniques of naming’ is relevant in this context. As Appadurai puts it, The large body of literature on techniques for naming places, for protecting fields, animals, and other reproductive spaces and resources, for marking seasonal change and agricultural rhythms, for properly situating new houses and wells, for appropriately demarcating boundaries (both domestic and communal) is substantial literature documenting the socialization of space and time. More precisely, it is a record of the spatiotemporal production of locality. (Appadurai1995, 180)

‘The spatio-temporal production of locality’, which the de-anglicized name Bengaluru symbolizes, is the antithesis of Friedman’s detemporalized, despatialized, deterritorialized Bangalore. This name change, then, would be a significant step towards reterritorialization of the city. The proposal for a name change generated much controversy. But finally the politicians were powerful enough to have their way: they decided in favour of Bengaluru. The reaction Bangalore was on expected lines, even though the major firms remained calm. The Economist summed up global annoyance with the following words: When it comes to brand management, it may be hard to beat the ineptitude of the politicians of Bangalore. No sooner has their city’s name become a global byword for all that is exciting and cutting-edge about the new India, than the elected custodians of the brand decide to rename it Bengaluru.

But some globalists are quite optimistic about this name change. The name ‘Bangalore’ had earned quite a bad reputation in major cities in the U.S.A., where ‘to be Bangalored’ meant ‘to be replaced by some employee in Bangalore’. It is being suggested in some globalist circles that the name change will help to make-over the image of the dreaded Bangalore in the developed world. Throughout this paper I have countered the euphoric vision of Bangalore that Friedman presented in The World is Flat and several related articles. Although the name of the city has now been changed for many years, Bangalore, or Bengaluru, has many issues to face, just like any other cosmopolitan city. There are many achievements that the city

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can be proud of; yet recent reports about incidents of violence against nonKannada speaking people show that there are also things to be concerned about. There is no denying that the issues relating to a city cannot be resolved just by wishing people away, something that some bureaucrats and champions of globalization have done. Friedman’s monolithic notion of a ‘flat world’ derecognizes different stakeholders and ignores their contested vision for the city of Bangalore. As Janaki Nair has explained: Between the technocratic imaginations of planners, leaders of the new economy, and the bureaucrats, on the one hand, and the social life of various groups, on the other, lies a very wide and contested range of meanings of urban space. This gulf may not be bridged by a revolution powered only by information technologies. (Nair 2007, 120)

Those who feel displaced, culturally, socially, or physically due to the juggernaut of globalization need to be supported by the government and by those who have gained from their loss. The world is not flat after all.

References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1996. Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. .1999. —. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2005. Langhorne, Richard. The Coming of Globalization: Its Evolution and Contemporary Consequences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2001. Macdonald, James D. ‘On First Looking into Friedman’s Flathead.’ Making Light. 2 June. 2005. Nair, Janaki. The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2007. Rai, Saritha ‘You Say Bangalore, They say Bengalooru.’New York Times, 2 November 2006. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1994. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Making Globalization Work. New York: W. W. Norton. 2006. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture.Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999. .

CHAPTER THREE CROSSING THE (B)ORDERS: GLOBALIZATION AND THE IBIS TRILOGY JAYDEEP RISHI

Globalization is “the action or procedure of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas and other aspects of culture” (Albrow and King 1990). With its ever-expanding tentacles, globalization is regarded as having blurred national boundaries, challenging our affiliations to racial, ethnic, communal, national, and cultural identities in an irreversible way. It is rapidly reshaping the way that we have traditionally explored the social world and human culture, and since the 1970s globalization studies have been centred on several sets of phenomena. The first set focuses on the emergence of a globalized economy involving new systems of production, finance, consumption, and worldwide economic integration. The second area of focus has been ‘global culture’; the third concentrates on the rise of transnational institutions; the fourth emphasizes the multidirectional movement of people around the world, involving new patterns of transnational migration, identities, and communities. The final area is predominantly concerned with new social hierarchies, forms of inequality, and relations of domination around the world (Robinson 2007, 125). If we find globalization to be one of the key concepts governing the twenty-first century, we also see that it is one of the most hotly debated and contested concepts. There is no consensus on the term ‘globalization’, and different interpretations seek to bring out different perspectives on the world we live in: The contending battle ground of such concepts is a leading edge of political conflict since the meaning of such concepts is closely related to the problems they seek to discuss and what kind of social action people will engage in. (Robinson 2007, 126)

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While some scholars have equated globalization with expanding inequalities, varied forms of exploitation, dominance, and marginalization, others have trumpeted newly-found prosperity, freedom, emancipation, and democracy. One of the fundamental questions that surround globalization concerns its time of origin. This temporal dimension shapes and determines how we understand the concept of globalization. Globalization theories have three broad approaches in this regard. The first view perceives globalization as a process that has been going on since the dawn of history; the second considers it to be a process coterminous with the advent and spread of capitalism, and hence to have a 500-year lifespan; the last view identifies it as a recent phenomenon, associated with such processes as postindustrialization, postmodernization, or the restructuring of capitalism, and hence gives it about 30 year time-frame. Whichever point in human history we take to be the starting point of globalization it is now believed that the first modern humans to spread east across Asia left Africa about seventy five thousand years ago (Science News 2011). It began as a small trickle. While one estimate puts the number of migrants from Africa in the beginning at about 2,000 – the size of a hamlet (Chanda 2007, 3) – others estimate it at about 150 – the size of a typical hunter-gatherer group (Wade 2006, 75). More than five billion of today’s non-African population are believed to have their roots in Africa, and in this age of globalization they are increasingly interconnected and interdependent. Homo sapiens –anatomically modern humans – are the first mammalian species voluntarily to migrate and settle across the globe, triggering the process of globalization. All the divergences in the form of physical differences that gave birth to the various races happened over the course of the next 60,000 years, forged by variations in geography, climate, and natural selection (Chanda 2007, 3). The various diasporas from Africa that settled in different corners of the globe established themselves as distinct communities and then began to reconnect with ‘long-separated cousins across oceans and mountains’ (Chanda 2007, 3). The process of reintegration has been thicker and faster with every passing era, integrating today’s world in ways never seen before. This process, in the view of Chanda, has been driven by adventurers, traders, soldiers, and preachers, who have from very early days travelled and settled in all corners of the world. This reconnection was first triggered by agriculture. With an assured food supply, there was an increase in population, which fuelled migration to other areas. Post-agrarian migration was no longer a search for the means of survival, as was the case for the earliest exodus, but was shaped

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by ‘a behaviour typically performed by defined subgroups (often kin recruited) with specific goals, targeted on known destinations and likely to use familiar routes’ (Anthony 1990). In this movement they were motivated by the ‘push’ of negative stresses at home and the ‘pull’ of attractions in the new destination (Chanda 2007, 26). The first set of migrants, who may be called ‘adventurers’ emerged as the trailblazers of globalization. The growth of agrarian communities also witnessed the emergence of ‘traders’, the second group of players to fuel globalization. The food products grown in one area were sold or exchanged in other areas that could not produce them. The emergence of long-distance trading led to a greater interconnection between communities (Curtin 1984). This commercial network continually expanded, thickened, and accelerated, eventually encompassing the globe in an ever-tightening web (Chanda 2007, 29). The rise of agrarian societies was also responsible for the birth of states. The impetus to expand the territorial and population base was a driving-force that led to imperial ambitions and greater connectivity between states. With the development of more efficient and rapid forms of transportation, and a solid economic base, the size of empires and of their armies expanded. The imperial drive, embodied by ‘warriors’, played a great role in shaping the globalized world. The final group of players responsible for globalization was the ‘preachers’. The local deities of early agrarian societies gave way to the universal religions that appeared with the emergence of empires and the expansion of trading networks. The proselytizing spirit of the universal religions became the fourth major driving-force towards globalization. Religious voices were later replaced by secular ones –advocates of environmental and human rights for example – who bind the world even more firmly. The basic motivations of security and a better and more fulfilling life that had driven our forefathers to migrate, trade, conquer, convert, and establish a connection between different corners of the world are the same motivating forces that drive globalization today. What started as a ripple has, over time, grown into waves. The process of reconnecting the dispersed human community gains momentum every day, and it is technology that drives this movement, binding us ever more tightly. The Ibis trilogy of Amitav Ghosh brings into play the myriad aspirations and apprehensions of characters across a vast landscape that once shaped the imperial order. A complex chessboard, stretching from the poppy fields of the Gangetic plains to the Tiger’s Mouth of the Pearl River

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estuary across vast spans of the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, throws up a medley of players, whose endeavours and sufferings shape the history of our time. In this complex mélange, barriers are broken, borders are crossed, and established orders vanquished. As the great powers clash, we find a new world order, where borders are overcome and the seeds of globalization disseminated. Antoinette Burton, discussing the first part of the trilogy Sea of Poppies, describes Ghosh’s fiction as an example of the writing of ‘world histories from below’ (Burton 2015, 71). Although in the Ibis trilogy the author is chiefly concerned with the opium trade, he is able sympathetically to conceive and depict the lives of people who are mere footnotes in the annals of history. Through an exhaustive range of characters drawn from India, China, and the nations surrounding the Indian Ocean, he draws our attention to the global networks of indentured labour, maltreated lascars, penalized convicts, and other subaltern figures, whose destiny is determined by the opium trade. The title Sea of Poppies includes two key words: ‘sea’ and ‘poppies’. The two issues of indentured labour and forced opium cultivation and its trade are reflected by these two words. The setting is nineteenth-century India, and Ghosh shows how these two issues are interrelated, exploring how the British forced the peasantry to take up opium cultivation, how these peasants were consequently impoverished and reluctantly accepted life as indentured labourers, or girmitiyas. This period was marked by the abolition of slavery in America, the fallout of which was an acute shortage in the labour market. The British, in dire need of labour for their plantations in various thinly-populated colonies, found an opportunity in the plight of the Indian farmers, who they exported as contract labourers, or girmitiyas. These impoverished Indian peasants left India forever, leading to the spread of the Indian diaspora around the globe. While many writers, including V.S. Naipaul, have analyzed the migrant Indian labourer in his newly-found homeland, Ghosh finds it more poignant to capture their moment of departure from Indian soil. This departure, reflected most affectingly in the character of Deeti, is a product of forced opium cultivation and the machinations of British colonialism. Opium seems to be the overriding force that shapes Deeti’s life. She is married to an opium addict who works in an opium factory. She is drugged with opium and raped by her husband’s younger brother, with the sanction of her mother-in-law, as her husband is not fit to produce a child. To uncover the truth, Deeti administers small doses of opium to her mother-

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in-law, who finally reveals it. The unbounded power of the drug is reflected in Deeti’s observation: ...if a little bit of this gum could give her power over the life, character and the very soul of this woman, then with more of it at her disposal, why should she not be able to seize kingdoms and control multitudes?’ (Ghosh 2008b, 38)

The novel describes the journey of Deeti and her lover, Kalua, from their village in Bihar to a ship called the Ibis, as they volunteer as girmitiyas, to escape the sectarian caste, class, and gender violence rampant in their native land. The next novel in the series, River of Smoke, moves forward fifty years, but in a flashback reverts to events at sea and in the lives of some of the characters. Deeti, now the matriarch of the Colver clan, visits her ‘memory temple’, where crude drawings concretize incidents preserved only in her recollections. Although Deeti and Kalua are free agents, who have voluntarily agreed to be girmitiyas, they are practically compelled to make this choice, due to the forced opium cultivation in North India. Lomarsh Roopnarine argues: India as a dispatching colony experienced uneven development because of British colonialism. Foreign penetration and imperialism disintegrated and dissolved the traditional economic and social structure in the countryside, rendering massive population available for recruitment. (2003, 103)

The next group of people to board the Ibis are convicts. It was common for the British administration to transport lawbreakers to offshore colonial penitentiaries. Sea of Poppies narrates the tale of Rajah Neel Rattan Halder, a zamindar (landowner) and business partner of Mr. Burnham. Quite unwittingly he becomes embroiled in the dubious opium trade of Mr. Burnham and falls into a debt trap. He is asked to relinquish all his property in payment for his debt, but refuses. He is branded a criminal and put into a filthy prison. In this dirty prison he strikes up an unlikely, and yet tender, friendship with a Chinese opium addict, Lei Leong Fatt, as they both await transportation to Mauritius. The third group on the Ibis consists of lascars, non-European sailors drawn from various parts of South Asia and Africa, comprising ethnicities such as Malays, Bengalis, Goans, Filipinos, Arabs, Kutchis, Tamils, Malayalis and others. Ghosh comments that ‘the lives of the lascars should be of more interest today than before because they were the first Asians and Africans to participate freely and in substantial numbers in a globalized workspace’ (Ghosh 2008a, 56). The lascars are different from

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the other two groups as they had a degree of freedom in a seafaring life in a ‘globalized workplace’. The movement of adventurers is a feature that has shaped all human migrations. The workforce in the Ibis trilogy suffer from the overarching forces of systematic coercion, forced labour, and economic exploitation, typical in present forms of globalization. The Ibis trilogy chiefly deals with the opium trade, a result of aggressive British efforts to capture the Chinese economy. In an effort to reverse China’s perceived isolationist and exclusionary trade policy with the West, the British flooded China with vast quantities of opium, which proved disastrous for both China and India. The trilogy depicts a period when the opium trade began to replace the spice trade as the chief economic growth engine of the British Empire. This facet of British economic imperialism is one which has largely been unexplored. It involved a new triangle of economic activity: forced production of opium in the fertile Gangetic belt, its processing in the Indian factories, and its marketing in the reluctant Chinese bazaar. This immoral trade wreaked havoc on the Indian peasantry, who were driven to a life of poverty and destitution, and ripped the Chinese social fabric apart, as more and more Chinese youths became opium addicts. If the forced cultivation of opium ruined the agrarian society, the factories themselves stood as edifices of colonial power and mastery. Ghosh’s depiction of the opium factory as a grand structure with a fort-like impermeability reflects how the colonial power revolved around opium trade. Ghosh modelled his description of the factory on an account by the Scottish head of one such factory, designed curiously to serve as a tourist guide. The grandeur of colonial structures was intended to project power, and this factory was certainly built for such a purpose. The awe-inspiring building consisted of many concentric circles, the innermost preserving the end-product in specially-designed vaults. The colonial structure is further reflected by the shadowy presence of waif-thin, dark labourers going about their work in a mechanical fashion while the portly white superintendents lord it over them. The ominous and deadly nature of this hugely immoral business is a reminder of the absolute nadir that the British hit with their exploitative economics. The opium trade with China was initially the monopoly of the East India Company. However, once this monopoly was abolished in 1813, traders from countries such as Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands as well as Parsis from India joined in. Some Chinese traders, mainly members of the Co Hong, were also accomplices in this illegal venture. In River of Smoke, Ghosh draws on historical evidence to present the ruthlessness with which some businessmen practised this trade.

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The trading lobby found strong support from the British government, though initially the traders were reluctant to involve the state. The traders invoked the principle of ‘free trade’ as propounded by Adam Smith to justify their opposition to the Chinese government’s injunctions against the opium trade, arguing that they were simply catering for the demands of the Chinese. However, such a claim ignores the fact that the demand for opium was artificially induced by making the drug readily available. ‘The fact that the opium found no eager buyers in China in 1782 suggests that it had not yet become a nation of addicts, although that would change dramatically in the next century. Indeed, fifteen years later, the British were importing four thousand chests per annum into China’ (Hanes and Sanello 2002, 89). That the principle of free trade was used as a decoy for contraband trade becomes clear when we come to know from Bahram, the leader of the Parsi traders at Canton, how the British trading lobby forced his in-laws’ family out of the business of ship-building by unjust trade barriers. The duplicity of the British traders also comes into focus when the Commissioner at Canton, Lin Zexu, in a letter to Queen Victoria questions the differential policy of the English, whereby the export of opium was banned in England but actively encouraged in the case of China. Though the official British line was not to allow any illegal trade in China, in reality the British Government turned a blind eye to all such activities, and facilitated the production of opium under the auspices of the East India Company in India. At this point the interests of the merchants and the British Government converge, since the huge profits emanating from the opium trade preceded territorial conquest and colonization. One character stands out in River of Smoke: Bahram Mody, the Parsi trader from India. Bahram ignores any moral scruples regarding trading in opium. Even though he himself suffers from, and condemns, British trading practices in India, he involves himself in the exploitative trade for the sake of profit. Ironically, he himself drowns in opium addiction, falling prey to the very evil he has championed so long, and finally commits suicide in an opium-induced hallucinatory moment. The secondary storyline of River of Smoke involves botany, in particular the search for elusive camellias. The French orphan Paulette embarks on this quest with a British plant-hunter and gardener in a thematic inversion of the opium trade. If the contraband trade in opium is dependent upon forcing an illegal product on China, Paulette’s endeavour marks an attempt to extract something pristine from China. Both efforts ultimately feature a clear profit motive, a signature of many characters in

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the trilogy, and an obvious foreshadowing of our current globalized, commercialized motivations. The third novel in the Ibis series, Flood of Fire, brings into focus the third group responsible for shaping the globalized world: ‘warriors’ or soldiers. The opium lobby, which suffered a huge financial loss due to the implementation of a ban on the opium trade and confiscation of the drug, persuaded the British government to launch a war against China. It would, however, be simplistic to see the First Opium War – which forms the background of this novel – as influenced by opium alone. With this war, the very nature of China’s hitherto remote relationship with the world was profoundly challenged. The dynamics of the increasingly globalized world of trade and commerce could not ignore a huge market such as China, and opium served as the perfect cause for the use of military force forcibly to open it up. The army raised to attack China, however, comprised mostly Indian sepoys, or Muslim and Hindu recruits from India – identified in reports of the time by such phrases as ‘Bengal volunteers’ and ‘Madras native infantry’– along with substantial contingents of Irish and Scottish troops. Ghosh stresses the role of the Indian sepoy in the opium war – largely ignored by historians – particularly through Kesri Singh, Deeti’s brother, whose story stresses how subalterns were reduced to pawns on the imperial battlefield. Kesri, a proud soldier belonging to the Pacheesi, deserts his paltan to volunteer on a foreign expedition, after he is made an outcaste as news of Deeti’s elopement with Kalua filters in. Cooped up in Fort William, he dreams of travelling to various foreign places such as ‘Lanka, Java, Singapore, Bencoolen and Prince of Wales Island in Malaya’. But when Maha-Chin cropped up he derided the suggestion: who had ever heard of sepoys going to China? The very name Maha-Chin suggested a realm that was unfathomably remote: what little he knew of it came from wandering pirs and sadhus who spoke of crossing snow-clad mountains and freezing deserts. The idea of a seaborne campaign being launched against such a land seemed utterly absurd. (Ghosh 2015, 230–31)

Of all the predicaments that a sepoy faced, the most serious issue was that of loyalty. A sepoy was constantly under the gaze of his masters, his loyalty being a matter of deep uncertainty. In The Glass Palace we find the Indian soldiers puzzling over the question of whether they are serving the right cause:

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The loyalty of the sepoy to his paltan always conflicts with his loyalty to race, religion, caste, village, and family, which brings the element of division and betrayal into the army with him. Kesri Singh’s loyalty to the company is often undercut by his allegiance to his race, as he has to deal with the discomfort of having less pay and worse equipment than his white comrades. Yet, ‘the army is the only place where he can feel at home; what he carries from his village is Bhojpuri and memories of his grey-eyed sister, not a sense of belonging’ (Roy 2015). Nowhere is the issue of conflicting loyalties better described than in the dilemma Kesri faces seeing the Chinese soldiers. As a professional soldier, he hates the Chinese warriors, who prefer death to surrender, as they make him realize that he is only a hired killing-machine. When he feels death is upon him, he regrets its unworthy nature: dying not for any cause he values, but trapped in a war where his sympathies are with his enemies, justifiably defending their own village. Kesri’s dilemma epitomizes the question a Chinese officer asks Neel earlier in the book: Why do these sepoys fight for the British? The human narrative of the great imperial drive is conveyed through Kesri and the other sepoys, mere cogs in the looming trade wars between two superpowers. The superior naval might of the British forces, coupled with their precision war-planning, results in a humiliating defeat for China. The Opium War, which Ghosh covers in the final part of his trilogy, serves to show how the power of the gun was used more often than not to serve the twin causes of free trade and globalization. The final set of travellers in the Ibis trilogy has a marginal historical presence, but seems to enjoy the author’s approbation. Traders such as Zadig Bey and Charles King desist from dealing in opium, even if they are aware of the enormous profit margins the trade generates. Charles King, in particular, takes a moral stand, dissuading fellow businessmen from opium trade: But may I ask you why your concern does not extend to the lives you put in jeopardy with your consignments of opium? Are you not aware that with

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every shipment you are condemning hundreds, maybe thousands of people to death? Do you see nothing monstrous in your own actions? (Ghosh 2015, 463)

This set of people, theoretically identified as ‘preachers’ in the initial section of this paper, speak of an alternative globalized vision. Zadig Bey, in a conversation with his painter friend Paulette, recounts the long history of contact between the Chinese and foreigners. In Zadig’s view, the intrusive martial and commercial actions of the Europeans, particularly in the late eighteenth century, are responsible for the isolationist policy that China adopted. The cosmopolitan nature of Canton is evident as he points out ‘even the city’s guardian deity is a foreigner – an Achha in fact!’ (Ghosh 2011, 377). Robin in a letter to his friend, Paulette, recounts: But how is it possible, I said, that people from Hindustan and Arabia and Persia were able to build monasteries and mosques in a city that is forbidden to foreigners? It was then that I learnt it has not always been thus: there was a time, said Zadig Bey, when hundreds of thousands of Achhas, Arabs, Persians and Africans had lived in Canton. Back in the time of the Tang dynasty (they of the marvellous horses and paintings!): the emperors had invited foreigners to settle in Canton, along with their wives and children and servants. (Ghosh 2011, 377–378)

Akhil Gupta, speaking about the Indian Ocean trade network between the seventh and fifteenth centuries, points out: Not only did these networks lead to an incredible exchange of ideas, technologies and goods, they also brought people from different lands into contact with each other, often for extended periods of time. This created centres of cosmopolitanism that, in their extensiveness and reach, were comparable, and perhaps even more intensive, than anything we can observe in the world today – at a very different moment of globalization. (2008, 7)

The narratives about the four sets of travellers in the Ibis trilogy bring out how the world is increasingly interlinked. Happenings at local level are increasingly dependent on events and systems operating in other parts of the globe. Watching a battle, Neel wonders: How was it possible that a small number of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn? How was it possible that the outcome of those brief moments could determine who would rule whom, who would be rich or poor, master or servant, for generations to come? (Ghosh 2015, 388)

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The Ibis trilogy highlights ‘two aspects of the long history of globalization: the nature of transnational trade networks and their effect on host/captive nations; and the kind of mobility apparently facilitated under such economic and political conditions’ (Poddar 2015). In doing so, Ghosh charts the long history of globalization, bringing out its connection with aggressive trade and imperialist intentions. The novels are also a significant attempt to portray the subaltern view of the world, challenging the universal Eurocentric views of history with instances of alternative narratives of micro-history, which in turn are shaped and influenced by the meta-narratives that seem to dominate and govern the world.

Bibliography Albrow, Martin and Elizabeth King. Globalization, Knowledge and Society. London: Sage. 1990. Anthony, David W. ‘Migration in Archaeology: The Baby and the Bathwater.’ American Anthropologist 92.4 (1990): 895–914. Accessed November 17, 2015. http:/www.jstor.org/stable/680651 Burton, Antoinette. ‘Amitav Ghosh’s World Histories from Below’. History of the Present 2:19(2012): 71–77. Accessed November 11, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent. 2.1.0071 Chanda, Nayan. Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization. New Delhi: Penguin Viking. 2007. Curtin, Philip D. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1984. Ghosh, Amitav. The Glass Palace. New Delhi: Harper Collins. 2000. —. ‘Of Fanas and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail.’ Economic and Political Weekly, 43:25 (2008a): 56–62. Accessed November 15, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40277589?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. —. Sea of Poppies. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin India. 2008b. —. River of Smoke. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin India. 2011. —. Flood of Fire. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin India.2015. Gupta, Akhil. 2008. ‘Globalization and Difference: Cosmopolitanism before the Nation State.’ Transforming Cultures eJournal, 3.2: 9(2008)1–20. Accessed November 17, 2015. https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/article/view/921 Hanes III, Travis W. and Frank Sanello. The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another. Illinois: Sourcebook Inc. 2002.

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Poddar, Sanjukta. ‘Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke: Globalization, Alternative Historiography, and Fictive Possibilities.’ Postcolonial Text, 10.1(2015): 1–22. Accessed November 16, 2015. http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewFile/1790/1796 Robinson, William I. ‘Theories of Globalization’ in The Blackwell Companion to Migration, edited by George Ritzer, 125–43. Malden: Blackwell.2007. Roopnarine, Lomarsh. ‘East Indian Indentured Emigration to the Caribbean: Beyond the Push and Pull Model.’ Caribbean Studies 31.2(2003): 97–134. Accessed November 18, 2015. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25613409 Roy, Nilanjana. ‘Book review: Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh’. Business Standard. May 30.(2015) http://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/book-review-floodof-fire-115052900727_1.html. Wade, Nicholas. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. New York: Penguin. 2006. .

CHAPTER FOUR KASHMIR: A FAILED BORDER IMAN GHOSH

Deeper analyses of borders may reveal that they usually go beyond their designated functions of demarcation of geographical territories and more significantly become markers of binaries or multiplicities of identities. When we think of a locale marked by a boundary, we cannot think merely of the polarization that such a demarcation may create between the people on this and that side of the border, but we have to extend our perspective to include identity divides between groups of people within that particular border, and analyze how a superficial humanimposed element such as a border can also lead to the homogenization of identities that under any other circumstances would probably not have identified themselves as such. Border, in this sense, is as circumstantial and superficial as it is elemental and instinctual. My paper on Kashmir will delve into the quintessential dilemma that borders posit: how they define and delineate, divide and unite at the same time. How locales become means of identification, and conflict arising from that intense sense of belongingness to a particular geographical space which people potentially could choose, or choose not, to displace allegiances of religion and nationhood, leading to layers and complexities of identity conflicts at many levels. My paper deals with identity conflicts in that piece of paradise on earth that in 2001 Bill Clinton described as the most dangerous place in the world. The multiple narratives of identities that have surfaced around this idyllic locale, and the subsets within them, have led to years of conflict, insurgency, and dislocation. What we are left with are contrary cartographical versions of the region, and a highly contested and amorphous border. To give a brief history of the region, the present border conflict arose in 1947, when the India Independence Act provided the legal basis for

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British departure. Christopher Snedden, in his book Kashmir: The Unwritten History, talks about the impact of that act on Kashmir: In essence, it allowed for the partition of British India into India and Pakistan, with the Islamic dominion comprising Eastern and Western wings, and for the lapse of British paramountcy over princely states. This latter provision appeared to suggest that multitude of these states, including Jammu and Kashmir, essentially became independent after 15th August 1947. However, the departing British and the leadership of both new dominions made it clear that they expected each ruler to make an accession. The British also made it clear that their government would not recognise as a dominion any princely state that declared independence. When the British finally departed the subcontinent on 15th August 1947 most princes had acceded to India, with a few opting to join Pakistan. The Maharaja of J and K was one of only a few princes who had not made an accession. (Snedden, p. 8)

As the title of Mridu Rai’s book Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects aptly suggests, the dilemma that faced Jammu and Kashmir was that this princely state had a majority Muslim population but a Hindu Dogra ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh. While it was widely expected that Jammu and Kashmir would join Pakistan, the Hindu ruler procrastinated in making his choice. Finally a Pukhtoon tribal invasion, allegedly sponsored by Pakistan to force the Maharaja into making a choice in its favour, ironically compelled him to seek the Indian army’s help to stop the indiscriminate looting and killing, allowing India to gain a foothold in the state. A chunk of the state was occupied by Pakistan, and is today referred to as Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, or Azad Kashmir, a name that reflects the desire of the indigenous population to create an independent state, subservient to neither India nor Pakistan. In 1948, United Nations Security Council Resolution 47 mandated that a plebiscite should be held to decide the fate of Jammu and Kashmir. The promised plebiscite has yet to be held, and Kashmir continues to be heavily militarized and terrorized. The tragedy of the region is of Shakespearean proportions: the story of the reduction of Jahangir’s firdaus on earth to a battlefield of terror, of political machinations, and of alleged army atrocities is summed up in eloquent words from the film Haider: ‘Hum hai, ya hum nahin.’ (Haider) My paper will refer to the works of Basharat Peer, Rahul Pandita, Mridu Rai, Christopher Snedden, Mirza Waheed, and Agha Shahid Ali, and also to popular culture artefacts such as Haider, in its attempt to understand and analyze the territorial and identity conflicts that the Kashmir situation posits. Kashmir is an idyllic locale that has inspired fierce loyalties from the varied subsets who identify themselves as

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‘Kashmiri’, from the Azad Kashmiris to the Kashmiri Pandits and everyone between. Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims, however, remain the strongest claimants to ethnic ‘Kashmiri’ identity. Narratives about the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits, the indigenous Hindu Brahmins of Kashmir, who were forced into exile during the insurgency movement of the 1900s, remain muted, even absent; nevertheless they have tremendous relevance in any discussion about identities in the valley. I will largely refer to two important recent memoirs in English that have emerged from Kashmir: Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots and Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night, which both depict Kashmir in the 1990s, when the insurgency movement was at its peak, in the lived experiences of the Kashmiri Pandit and the Kashmiri Muslim communities respectively. While one was grappling with the practical difficulties and emotional trauma of the loss of a home, the other was either giving into, or battling, the seductions of an azadi movement and the promise of martyrdom. Both these memoirs begin with narratives of pre-1990s idyllic Kashmir –the Kashmir of lazy evenings spent sitting by the kangri, while sipping kahwa, and listening to stories of how the sky turns red whenever there is khoonrizi,or bloodshed. Both memoirs arise from a common feeling of angst at the defilement through violence of this idyllic homeland, and from a common identity that is ‘Kashmiri’, irrespective of religion. The concept that binds together the overarching ‘Kashmiri’ identity, which supersedes religious affiliations, is the idea of Kashmiriyat. Snedden defines Kashmiriyat in his book: Called Kashmiriness or Kashmiriyat, a newer term with Perso-Arabic roots, this trait was a fundamental and apparently long-held part of Kashmiri identity and culture. Kashmiriness emphasizes ‘the acceptance and tolerance of all religions among Kashmiris’. It is ‘manifested in the solidarity of different faiths and ethnic groups in the state’. The concept was apparently epitomised by the patron saint of Kashmir, Sheikh-NurDin, a Muslim born in 1375 of a Hindu convert to Islam. Popularly known as Nund Rishi, he repeatedly poses a question in a poem: ‘How can members of the same family jeer at one another?’ The answer is the essence of Kashmiriness: whoever they are and whatever their religious backgrounds and practices, all are members of one indivisible Kashmir Valley ‘family’. It is a recipe –or even a requirement for tolerance. (Snedden, p. 18)

This idea of Kashmiriyat is the basis of the essential Kashmiri identity in the Kashmir Valley, one that is derived from regional-ethnic affiliation and a fierce sense of shared loyalty towards the paradisiacal homeland,

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and that bases itself on a common culture, common food customs, and sometimes even common religious practices and figures of worship. Lal Ded, Nund Rishi and his shrine in Chrar-e-Sharif, which was tragically destroyed in a skirmish between the Indian army and militants, were sacred to both communities. Snedden interestingly points out that both communities prefer ‘halal’ mutton to beef or pork, although Hindu Brahmins elsewhere usually practise vegetarianism and the Pandits were not concerned about defilement or pollution by touching. Peer similarly relates how the surname ‘Bhat’ is used by both Pandits and Muslims. This concept of Kashmiriyat, however, tends to gloss over conflicts on the ground that happened first intermittently, then conclusively, during the 1990s. It homogenizes on the one hand, and on the other serves to reinforce the ‘Kashmiri’ identity, as distinct from an Indian or Pakistani identity. Pandita writes tellingly in his memoir about a red sweater from Amritsar that his mother had owned: One of my earliest memories is of her wearing a red sweater with a floral pattern. It was much later that I came to know it was a gift from my father, who had ordered it from Amritsar through a visiting cousin. For years, I think, the image of India for an ordinary Kashmiri was restricted to Punjab –to Amritsar and Ludhiana. Kashmiris went to Delhi, or Bombay, or Calcutta, but any non-Kashmiri was Punjabi for them. (Pandita, p.24)

Similarly, Basharat Peer distinguishes clearly ‘Kashmiri Muslims’ from ‘Indian Muslims’ throughout his memoir, especially when describing his experiences at Aligarh Muslim University, where he was sent for higher studies in order to keep him away from the tumult of the insurgency movement and random army action against Kashmiri youth. Again, Azad Kashmiris, while preferring Pakistani rule over Indian domination, maintain their distinctiveness from Pakistan, as is evident by the name they still prefer to go by. It is this idea of an idyllic home and its subsequent loss that imbues the Kashmiri consciousness, and which finds expression in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and films about Kashmir. Interestingly, the Kashmiri situation has found expression through a spate of non-fiction, both memoirs and commentaries, which gives us a sharper sense of the immediate lived experience. The Kashmiri Pandit consciousness reconstructs its memory in terms of actual locales, homes, and material objects that were lost: the symbolic loss is mirrored by actual physical loss. The loss of the Kashmiri homeland is equated with the loss of actual houses, rooms, and living spaces; the shift from the paradisiacal and idyllic to the nondescript and filthy ghettos of Jammu and sometimes

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Delhi. The refrain of Pandita’s book is a sentence that his eventually voiceless mother often repeats to anyone who cares to listen: ‘Our home in Kashmir had twenty-two rooms’ (Pandita, p. 10). After a visit to a Kashmiri Pandit home in Jammu, Peer states: ‘They once lived in a house that had rooms with different names’ (Peer, p. 200). The attempt to come to terms with the trauma of the loss of home through the reconstructive act of writing similarly pervades the works of Kashmiri Muslim writers such as Peer, Agha Shahid Ali, Mirza Waheed and others. Agha Shahid Ali writes achingly in his poem ‘Dear Shahid’ from The Country Without A Post Office: ‘O! Those days of peace when we all were in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we went.’ (Ali, p. 29). His haunting line from the poem ‘Farewell’ in the same book, ‘They make a desolation and call it peace’ (Ali, p. 7), speaks of the symbolic obliteration of the homeland, conveying a sense of the extreme physical beauty of the land being replaced by the intense ugliness of violence. Peer describes a Kashmiri Muslim youth sent away to Aligarh to keep him from joining the azadi movement, recounting his departure, his first experience of the loss of home: ‘I didn’t feel sad or troubled. I did not know how long it would take to return home. Every departure ever since has been a continuation of that moment.’ (Peer, p. 61). Of course, the Kashmiri Muslims writers I refer to are all expatriates who moved out of Kashmir and even India, representing the youth of the 1990s who escaped the seductions of the insurgent movement and army atrocities. The only way to do this was through relocation. The voice of Kashmiri youth who could not escape, and who were caught up in the insurgent movement, or fell prey to Indian army atrocities, remains mute in literature, dependent upon third-person accounts for their side of the story to be heard. Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator locates itself in the village of Nowgam, situated very close to the Line of Control that separates Kashmir from Azad Kashmir, marking the limits of the Indian army’s control and the beginning of the Pakistani army’s. This is a de facto border, but a very real one, and one that is ignored in India’s cartography, which includes within India Azad Kashmir, an area that has been administered by Pakistan for the past 67 years. ‘Collaborator’ is a term used for a local who aids the Indian army. Here, the young collaborator and his family are the only ones who stayed behind in a violence-torn dystopian village when the rest fled. He is given the job of scavenging through piles of dead bodies of militants/freedom fighters (depending which side of the history you are on) gunned down by the Indian army, to search for their identities and weapons, which could be used later for publicity purposes. The heaps of

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bodies strewn amongst the beautiful, blooming, yellow flowers of the valley are a striking image, a microcosm of the hellish violence in the ethereal valley. The complete alienation that the Kashmiri Muslim community feels, especially from the Indian state, is a determinant feature of identity politics in the valley, which finds roots in the conundrum of a Hindu ruling Muslim subjects, and expresses itself in political, cultural, and sociological terms. Over the years, resentment towards the Indian army has played a controversial role in the valley, expressed in a sense of isolation from the symbols of the Indian state, and lack of support for the Indian cricket team. Peer talks about the identity cards that Kashmiris had to carry on them at all times for random searches by the Indian army: The shopkeeper boasted that the identity cards he sold worked best with soldiers. They had the words ‘Indian Identity Card’ on them and an impression of the Indian emblem: a pillar with four lions on four sides, a wheel, and a pair of oxen on its base. (Peer, p. 20)

Later Peer writes after moving to Delhi for his work as a journalist: I was also getting to understand the various Indias that existed, Indias that I liked and cared about, Indias that were unlike the militaristic power it seemed in Kashmir. (Peer, p. 69)

The dichotomy between the official border and the de facto one that is the Line of Control is one of the ironies of the Kashmir story, and serves to emphasize how a border can be nothing but an exercise in futility, a line drawn on a map that has little meaning on the ground. The official border carves out Jammu and Kashmir as a single state, whose different constituent elements – Jammu, the Kashmir Valley (the main topic of my paper), and Ladakh – have little in common with each other ethnically or in other ways. Jammu has a majority Hindu-Dogra population, while Ladakh has a predominantly Buddhist culture, with a sizeable population of Tibetan descent. Racially and ethnically, Kashmiris are distinct from Jammuites and Ladakhis. While these three disparate regions are yoked together in a single state called Jammu and Kashmir, ethnic Kashmiris have been divided by the Line of Control into Indian-controlled Kashmir and Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir. Snedden points out that, when we talk about Jammu and Kashmir as a whole, it is essentially an ‘undeliverable entity’ because of the various identity allegiances and conflicting interests and aspirations of the people residing within this state border.

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One of the noteworthy aspects of the Kashmir situation is that narratives by Kashmiris themselves – especially in the English language – were absent from bookshelves until very recently. The representation of Kashmir in popular culture has been simplistic, projecting a onedimensional, idealized picture in Bollywood films. Haider, whose script was co-written by Peer, and borrowed a lot of elements from his memoir, has somewhat changed the course of this narrative, especially with its focus on army atrocities and the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act, or AFSPA. As narratives from and about the valley grow more numerous, it becomes important for us to look into how identities have shaped the history and politics of the valley, which could help analyze and understand how borders shape identities, and how borders are sometimes drawn despite identities. The long drawn-out dispute over the Jammu and Kashmir border makes it a fertile ground for analysis of how borders and identities are inextricably linked to one another, whether in a concurrent or discordant relationship.

Bibliography Ali, Agha Shahid. The Country Without a Post Office. New Delhi. Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd. 2013. Haider. Dir. Bharadway, Vishal. Mumbai. 2014. Pandita, Rahul. Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home In Kashmir. Gurgaon, Haryana.Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. 2013. Peer, Basharat. Curfewed Night. Gurgaon, Haryana. Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. 2009. Rai, Mridu. Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects. Ranikhet. Permanent Black. 2007. Snedden, Christopher. Kashmir: The Unwritten History. India. Harper Collins. 2013.

PART II: BORDERING THE GLOBE

CHAPTER FIVE BORDER IS IN THE MIND ABU SIDDIK

Border in the physical and geographical sense refers to boundary, frontier, and limit. These nouns all denote a line or area separating one piece of territory from another. A border is basically a line that separates political, spatial, and territorial entities. Border in the figurative sense, however, means margin, edge, verge, brink, rim, and brim. All these words refer to the line or narrow area that marks the outside limit of something. Here I refrain from intervening in the arena of specialist political geographers discussing multiple ideas of physical borders across the world. This paper is limited to the metaphorical level, examining the thematic resemblances between Rabindranath Tagore’s 1911 poem ‘Gitanjali 35’ ‘Where the mind is without fear’, Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘Mending Wall’, and Philip Freneau’s 1788 poem ‘The Indian Student: or, Force of Nature’. Border is everywhere in an apparently postmodern, borderless global village. Daily print and electronic media are flooded with news of globalization, cultural integration, multiculturalism, cultural plurality, unity in diversity, racial tolerance, gender equality, economic inclusion, financial freedom, and so on. But lived daily experiences are markedly different from imagined ones. I attempt to argue in this paper that border is everywhere, everincreasing, and ever-widening – and it resides in our minds. In the Indian context, cultural plurality and heterogeneity are at stake. Marathas harass wretched Bihari and Bengali labourers in paradisaical Mumbai. Northeastern students are attacked in prosperous Indian cities. There are frequent attacks on South Asian students in such ‘civilized’ countries as Australia. Caste prejudices are rampant, vulgar, and dehumanizing. Atrocities on the marginalized are taken for granted. The media are deluged with daily doses of horrifying incidents. A Dalit steps into a temple, s/he is humiliated, and the temple is cleansed and purified. A Hindutva fatwa warns Muslims to renounce the Qur’an and beef or go to

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Pakistan. Other examples include the rise of insurgent forces such as Islamic State and the ‘Hindu Taliban’; the killing by Hindu extremists of liberal thinkers such as M. M. Kalburgi, Govind Pansare, and the activist Narendra Dabholkar; and the killing of hapless women from Babri to Dadri as dainis. All these dark events mar India’s ancient image of holistic sagacity. It has become a ‘land of Circe’, where thousands of castes, creeds, and popular cultural superstitions threaten at every opportunity, making the border visible and inerasable. This ‘border’ emanates from prejudiced and biased minds. Despite the best modern scientific education, our ‘enlightened’ minds fear to enter the untrodden territories lying beyond traditional dharmasastras. Our advanced education fails to produce free minds. This paper argues the inscrutable existence of bordered minds. Every human being is isolated, living in his or her mental border. This border is in the mental and psychic landscape, not the physical. With the explosion of information technology in the twenty-first century, we are always under the surveillance of big brother. Where is the life of the spirit? Where is the life of freedom? We are controlled – even persecuted – and not only by state apparatuses. The greatest hindrances to enjoying a life of freedom are the multiple barriers and boundaries imposed by our castes, languages, religions, cultures, creeds, rituals, and customs. There is no way to be minimally free or borderless. We are bounded by physical maladies, economic wounds, stale inheritance, state supervision, educational inertia, racial clashes, communal riots, climatic calamities, and other problems. We cannot be freed from the dehumanizing norms, laws, and practices of the land, which erect dangerous and irksome borders. We all want a hassle-free, paradisiacal life on a bordered earth. Globalization means that different parts of the world become increasingly similar and interdependent. Researchers have discussed the possible disappearance of borders due to globalization, but have come to the conclusion that, even if physical borders are removed (as in the European Union), borders still exist in the minds of the people. Border scholars are now more focused on people’s mental borders. In our postmodern world, however, many boundaries have seemingly become more permeable for people, goods, and capital. A revolutionized information technology that recognizes no boundary limitations has seen tremendous penetration into the corners of every home. This rapid change in border functions has encouraged some scholars specializing in economics and information science to argue the case for a unified geopolitical world, using phrases such as ‘borderless world’ and political ‘deterritorialization’. But this trend has not gained ground around the

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globe. For example, in the post 9/11 era, borders are being re-erected or reinforced in many developed countries. The current political situation in the world, characterized by the prevalence of the fear of terrorism, can be seen as reterritorialization rather than deterritorialization. Nation states are never monolithic; they are inhabited by different ethnic groups. States have used certain unifying ideas to bring together different ethnic groups under one state ideology. The ideas of the ‘American Dream’ (U.S.A.) and ‘Unity in Diversity’ (India) are mythic attempts to unify the nation and celebrate the singularity (borderless identity) of the nation state, whose foundation lies in its common past. But the idea of homogeneous India does not reflect the real-life situation. Racism, prejudice, discrimination, ignorance, and superstition parade grotesquely naked in ‘sivilized’ (to quote Mark Twain) societies. Borders are constantly reconfigured and constructed. Indian literature, culture, history, and politics are mired in multiple layers of unyielding borders. There is no one India. There are multiple heterogeneous Indias. And there is no essential spirit of Indian literature. The nation is stable only on the world map. P. P. Raveendran has argued in his classic essay ‘Genealogies of Indian Literature’ that there are different Indias for different authors. He cites the names of Saadat Husain Manto, Mahasweta Devi, Gopinath Mohanty, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Laxman Gaikwad, Bama, V. K. N. (Vadakkke Koottala Narayanankutty Nair), U. R. Ananthamurthy, Shashi Tharoor, and others as representing heterogeneous Indias. The nation’s borders ‘keep changing from writer to writer, from reader to reader and from subject to subject’. He claims: No one would dare to talk about an essential Indian spirit running through the works of these writers who share the same nationality and perhaps the same period of writing, but whose histories, contexts, mindsets, experiences, lifestyles, languages and sensibilities are different from the other. These writers dwell in different Indias, and to speak of them as sharing a common culture and a common sensibility is to beguile oneself.1

The Hinduized grand narrative of India’s mythic past as an Aryavarta is self-defeating, self-delusory, even suicidal. India is a multilingual, multi-ethnic country, where a unified history asserted by a national grand narrative is contested by different groups, such as women and ethnic minorities. India has a checkered history, where religious plurality and 1

Raveendran, P. P. 2006. ‘Genealogies of Indian Literature.’ Economic and Political Weekly, June 24. (Raveendran 2006, 2558–563)

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heterogeneity rule the roost, as argued by Amartya Sen and many other scholars. India is a ‘shared home’ for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsees, Sikhs, Baha’is and others.2 Although toleration of diversity is always recognized, intolerance is never given up by India and her extremists. Border in the name of religion, caste, language, and parochialism is the undercurrent running through the nation’s tensed pulses. Border is visible not to the virtual and filmy fashionable India, but to the India of the ill-clad, malnourished, uneducated, ignorant millions who fight in the name of Allah, Ram, Buddha, and Jesus in ethnic clashes and cleansings, and bloody communal riots. Why are we afraid to recognize the truth? Why are we sugarcoating the bitter pills? Let us recognize the border. The sooner, the better! Why are we so busy with the politics of writing, fabricating, and multiplying falsehoods such as a ‘borderless’ world and a ‘unified’ India? A morning newspaper with its matrimonial advertisements will disabuse you of any talk of a borderless personality. Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh, citing Jean Gottmann, the internationally respected political geographer of the late twentieth century who is often claimed to be the father of modern geography, has stressed the inscrutable existence of a psychic border which is ever increasing, ever widening, and cannot be erased. A physical border can be transgressed, but not the border of the mind. Gottmann claims: The most stubborn facts are those of the spirit, not those of physical world.… And while history shows how stubborn are the facts of the spirit, geography demonstrates that the main partitions observed in the space accessible to man are not those in the topography or in the vegetation, but those that are in the minds of the people.3

Gloria Anzaldӭa’s 1987 book Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza celebrates the border-crosser, the marginal figure who queers boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and language. Here border is a site of struggle where one seeks to assert one’s identity by crossing it. Anzaldӭa’s theory remarkably and interestingly differs from that of Gottmann, who persuasively and convincingly argues – if I understand him correctly – that one is proud of one’s cultural, bodily, 2 Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity. New Delhi: Penguin Books. (Sen 2005, 16–17) 3 Mojtahed-Zadeh, Pirous. 2011. ‘Borders and Territorial Identity: Persian Identity Makes Iran an Empire of the Mind.’ In Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies, edited by Doris Wastl-Walter, 397. England: Ashgate Publishing.

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psychic, and ethnic border. There is no harm in taking pride in one’s bordered identity. It is man’s/woman’s inborn salient character. It is inerasable. Border basically champions one’s inborn, innate identity. To be bordered by one’s special identity features is a matter of pride, and nobody can completely surmount it. Bordered existence is a matter of cultural assertiveness. Anzaldӭa’s theory, on the contrary, suggests that to cross the border erected by multiple forces is to claim one’s identity. To cross the border is to champion one’s identity. She asserts her borderless identity: Because I, a mestiza, continually walk out of one culture and into another, because I am in all cultures at the same time,4 (99)

She hates to be taxonomically classified by a single identity. She rather takes pride in blurring borders, and therefore celebrates multiple, fluid, borderless identities. She strives to exist in ‘all cultures’. Let us concentrate on some powerful poems to elucidate my main argument, that border is a state of mind and inerasable. While we are dwelling on such fine coinages as globalization, a borderless world, the global village and so forth, more new and formidable borders are being erected every day. First Philip Freneau (1752–1832), the great agnostic, who always celebrated rational and free thinking. I will try to tell the story of Shalum, the ‘copper-color’d boy’, from Freneau’s poem ‘The Indian Student’.5 Shalum has transgressed the border of the ‘savage tribe’ shepherd identity of an uncouth Red Indian. He is taken to ‘whiteman’s land’ by a ‘wandering priest’, exchanges his ‘blanket for a gown’, and is admitted to Cambridge Hall. The boy hears ‘Hebrew lore’ and ‘heathen Greek’, and learns physic, law, grammar, and divinity. Then comes a moment of recognition. The ‘tedious hours of study’ and ‘heavy moulded lecture’ fail to ignite a spark: ‘No mystic wonders fired his mind; … The shady bank, the purling stream, / the woody wild his heart possess’d.’ He has not drifted away from what he was. Susquehanna’s forest boy leaves the 4

Anzaldӭa, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands: La Frontera. Accessed 14 November, 2015. https://www.sfu.ca/iirp/documents/Anzaldua%201999.pdf. 5 Freneau, Philip. ‘The Indian Student or Force of Nature.’ Accessed 15 November, 2015. http://www. bartleby.com/96/96.html.

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‘gloomy walls’, ‘college halls’, and ‘musty books’. He deserts the enticement of wealth and power and returns to the ‘land of shades’. Now he vows: ‘My heart is fix’d and I must go/ To die among my native shades’. He ‘discharges’ his gown and wears again his native dress – ‘His blanket tied with yellow strings’– and returns to the forest. The last two lines of the first stanza, ‘(His blanket tied with yellow strings,)/ A shepherd of the forest came’, are repeated with only a variation of the verbs ‘came’ and ‘went’ in the last two lines of the last stanza, ‘His blanket tied with yellow strings,)/The shepherd of the forest went.’ – which makes the poem circular. The boy came to know the white man’s world, but it could not stir his spirit, and he returned whence he came. The poem is reminiscent of Gottmann’s phrase ‘stubborn are the facts of spirit’. Shalum cannot cross the border, and even bordercrossing cannot ignite, to quote A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, his ‘wings of fire’. Border is in the boy’s mind, and he temporarily overcomes it. But at the end of the day his spirit remains unchanged, and he comes back to his own people and his own land, leaving the white man’s promised land and education forever. I now attempt to argue the power of the psychic border with the help of Robert Frost’s (1874–1963) fine poem ‘Mending Wall’.6 The poem deals with ‘walling’ or bordering: ‘And set the wall between us once again. / We keep the wall between us as we go’. The poem’s persona and his neighbour ‘wear’ their fingers ‘rough’ with handling the boulders needed for mending wall. But the persona of the poem is convinced that he and his neighbour need no wall as there is no enmity between them. He claims: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

But his neighbour remains unconvinced. The persona of the poem realistically argues that they need no wall, as ‘here there are no cows’. But his neighbour clings to his father’s saying, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’. And the neighbour is seen, ‘Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/ In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed’ to mend the wall. The persona’s unflinching faith that ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, /That wants it down’ has not made any material impact on his neighbour’s stubborn spirit. He will not cross the border set by his father. Despite the best persuasion of the poem’s persona not to erect a wall between them, he fails to get an entry into the bordered/walled, dark, 6

Frost, Robert. ‘Mending Wall.’ The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th Edition, edited by Margaret Ferguson et al.

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savage spirit of his neighbour. The persona is all humanity, asking: ‘What I was walling in or walling out, /And to whom I was like to give offence.’ But he cannot open the mind of his neighbour towards the possibility of a borderless identity. He is accustomed to his bordered identity and does not want to set his foot beyond that wall. Shalum has for a few years crossed the border of his ‘savage’ identity, but in Frost’s poem the neighbour has no interest in crossing the border set by his father. I now come to one of Tagore’s (1861–1941) moving poems, ‘Where the Mind is without Fear …’7 which is an attestation of his heart’s desire for a borderless physical and psychic world. He is much concerned for a world fragmented by the ‘narrow domestic walls’ erected by caste prejudice, sectarian violence, irrationality, and the poverty of reasoned argument. Much of Tagore’s caustic attack is encapsulated in his adroit phrase ‘the dreary desert sand of dead habit’. Life is aimless, dried up by meaningless superstition and prejudice. It is a dull, dead desert that needs to be regenerated by the application of ‘the clear stream of reason’. This is why he is with the utmost sincerity praying the ‘Father’ to let his country awake into ‘that heaven of freedom’: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free… Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.

Tagore understood that questions of race, caste, class, gender, nationality, and language make the border visible. But he firmly believed that all these human-created hindrances are vulnerable. He craves a world of truth, perfection, and ‘ever-widening thought and action’. Mere thinking is not enough; it must be translated into fruitful action. His emphasis on the faculty of human reasoning – ‘the clear stream of reason’– champions his humanity. Had Tagore’s message materialized, the earth could have tasted the bliss of this ‘heaven of freedom’. The entire poem is a soulful, solemn plea for a borderless humanity. The poet fervently believes in humanity’s innate goodness and humanity. The poem is a paean for our eternal desire for freedom. Sen finds here Tagore’s ‘emphasis on reasoning and much celebration of freedom’ which can have an ‘enormously constructive role today [even more].’ He further claims:

7

Tagore, Rabindranath. 2008. ‘Where the Mind is without Fear…’ Literatures of India, edited by Anna Kurian. Bangalore: Foundation Books.

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Tagore wanted to overcome all these barriers [borders]. He did not quite succeed there. Yet engagement in open-minded and fearless reasoning, so strongly championed by Rabindranath, is no less important today than it was in his own time.8

Swami Vivekananda’s famous story of the frog in a well, delivered on 15 September, 1893 at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, focuses on the cause of religious borders. He locates the root cause of disagreement among world’s major religions, asserting: I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his little well and thinks that is the whole world.9 (7)

Religious borders are not the only borders, but they are evidently at the root of many social borders whose aggravated role cannot be denied. Vivekananda’s metaphor of the well and Tagore’s walls both have the same imperative. I have attempted to establish in this paper my basic argument that ‘border’ remains in people’s minds. There are of course physical borders, but the border of the spirit is no less important. The poems analyzed above reflect and represent the delicate nuances of the figurative border, with its many complex layers. The bubbles of the ‘global village’ and ‘borderless world’ are constantly punctured by the daily lived experiences of communal riots, ethnic cleansing, murder of liberal thinkers, hate speech, terrorism, fanaticism, and moral policing. The tensions of race, caste, class, gender, nationality, language, and sexuality are so pervasive and rampant that the borders of these identities make our hearts sick. People are killed, denied visas to enter a particular country, barred from entering a prayer house, targeted, detained, persecuted, and loved or hated on the basis of caste, creed, religion, sex, gender, and race. Where is Tagore’s heaven of freedom? To achieve that freedom we need critical reasoning, not the blessings of babas or pirs. But the mental border is too rigid to be crossed easily. It requires extra energy and will power to traverse the border of the spirit. And crossing that border can be both frustrating and rewarding. Henry Louis Gates Jr’s claim that ‘the challenge of mutual understanding among the world’s 8

Sen, Amartya. 2015. The Country of First Boys, edited by Antara Dev Sen and Pratik Kanjilal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. (Sen 2015, 215–216) 9 Works of Swami Vivekanand. 2015. Meerut: Tulsi Sahitya Publications.

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multifarious cultures will be the single greatest task that we face, after the failure of the world to feed itself’ (qtd. in Habib 1)10 encapsulates the cultural wars with which the world is grappling today. Clashes of cultures fundamentally emerge from clashes of heterogeneous cultural moorings. The theme of a borderless global identity may be applicable to the few who are fortunate enough to have access to a virtual life, but in daily life barriers and borders of caste, creed, religion, race, nationality, language, class, gender, and sexuality make our minds’ borders too rigid and concrete to be crossed. The poet Syed Amanuddin’s vehement protest against bordered identity emphasizes the heaviness of a bordered, exasperated heart: i hate hyphens the artificial bridges between artificial values in the name of race religion n language i damn all hyphenated minds prejudiced offsprings of unenlightened souls i denounce all labels n label makers11

Border is in the mind, and until and unless minds get cleansed and purged we cannot cross the border. We cannot proclaim, as Vladimir does in Waiting for Godot: Pozzo: Who are you? Vladimir: We are men12 (112, italics mine)

We are stubbornly habituated to bordered existence, and old habits die hard. Nothing is to be done. ‘The essential doesn’t change,’ says Vladimir. (51)

10

Habib, M. A. R.2005. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present. USA, Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 11 Amanuddin, Syed. 2008. ‘Don’t Call Me Indo-Anglian.’ Literatures of India, edited by Anna Kurian. Bangalore: Foundation Books. 12 Beckett, Samuel. 2002. Waiting for Godot, edited by Javed Malick. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER SIX THODASA ROMANI HO JAAYEN:1 OF LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE, WITH ‘BORDERS’ IN OBLIVION TUHIN SANYAL

The Romani people, who cared little about political ‘borders’ in earlier days, are today united under one flag: their tricolour. Its blue stands for the sky, green for the earth, and red for the ‘Indian wheel’. Once mostly nomadic, the Romani transgressed borders, plucked and ate what the earth had in store, and strained the rivers and seas to see what they could offer, in order to make ends meet. They followed the natural religion of the Hindus who inhabited the Indus delta. Also known as ‘jeevan-si’ (meaning ‘like water’, free-flowing, life-giving, and lively), though highly adaptable to every situation, in Europe they are made to seem puny by the appellation ‘jeev si’ (distorting the meaning to ‘as if something living’) or ‘Gypsy’, to deny them respect, keeping them at bay as sub-human. A book of poems titled Like Water / Sar o Paj, authored by eight Romani female poets and edited by Hedina Tahirovic Sijercic, upholds the ethos of these people, who are like water, liquid and adaptive. It is also possible that Caliban’s name in The Tempest may be Shakespeare’s play on the Romani word ‘Cauliban/ Kaulivarn’, compounded of the Romani words ‘Kaloh’ and ‘Varn’, meaning ‘black’ and ‘complexion’ respectively, casting Caliban as ‘black’ or ‘with blackness’. This makes sense, especially given that Caliban is depicted by Shakespeare as a sub-human entity, associated with darkness throughout the play.

1

The first half of the title of this paper has been borrowed from the Bollywood movie, Thodasa Roomani Ho Jaayen, and the word ‘Romani’ (the language) has been inserted in place of ‘Roomani’ (meaning the soul’s wishfulness) to highlight the soulful kinship between Romani and other Indian languages.

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The Roma people came to the Byzantine Empire from northern and eastern India at the beginning of the eleventh century, after having spent time in Iran and the Caucasus. By the twelfth century they were settling in Asia Minor and what is today Romania and the Balkans. In fourteenthcentury Ragusa (Dubrovnik) they were free citizens, though considered low on the social scale, but in Kosovo, Moldavia, and Wallachia they were enslaved. Their language and religion were corrupted, and their literature was never written down. In the sixteenth century, the emergence of the nation state in Europe brought widespread intolerance towards them. France and England barred them entry, and they were expelled from Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal. Throughout the seventeenth century, punitive policies were widely adopted, such as restrictions on trade, shelter, and Roma gatherings, and prohibition of traditional dress and the Romani language. However, with the abolition of slavery and the granting of legal rights, the nineteenth century saw an overall improvement in their treatment in most of Europe, although this did not last long. The latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries were characterized by theories of eugenics, which culminated in the extermination of half a million Roma in Nazi camps. After World War II, Romani literature surfaced as a sign of protest, in a bid to protect innocent Roma lives and question authority. Yvonne Slee, President of the Sinti Romani Community of Australia, has popularized a documentary film entitled A People Uncounted: The Untold Story of the Roma, a tragedy of epic proportions. It brings Romani history to life with a rich interweaving of their stories, poetry, and music. The film includes compelling and horrific first-hand accounts by Roma Holocaust survivors from different places in Europe, reports discrimination against, and the labelling of, Romani people, and tells how Romani rights are being eroded in countries all over the world. In Slovakia up to 13 Romani share two-bedroom flats in high-rise blocks, and have access to drinking water for only 4 hours a day; in Kosovo the government has located Roma families on lead-poisoned land, where their children fall sick and die. The film portrays a cross-section of Romani people talking about their life and history, and how in films and they have been misrepresented and stereotyped as a magic-knowing, hypnotic, and dangerous tribe. In her collection Dukh – Pain, the Romani poet Hedina Sijercic has written some richly evocative poems that weave together the author’s transient joys and heart-rending tragedies with the help of traditional Romani folklore, similar to the loris popular in India. Hedina’s poetry shatters the fanciful myth of the mysterious and ever-carefree Roma,

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replacing it with lyric images of a people living, loving, and dying, not immune to the caprices of the world that surrounds them. Through endless Romani tragedies, the lingering message of these poems has become simply dukh, a Hindi and Bengali word meaning pain. Cora Schwartz’s memoir, Gypsy Tears: Loving a Holocaust Survivor, is an autobiographical Romani tribute to the forgotten Gypsies who were massacred during the Third Reich. It begins as a love story. When the newly-divorced Cora from the Bronx, New York, first meets Rudy, from Ukraine, in the Catskill Mountains, he begins telling her about a Gypsy girl named Romania, and the Nazi camp where they were both imprisoned. Rudy drinks too much and has nightmares, while Cora plays down her own pain. Their relationship is an unplanned journey that helps Cora understand her own life, brings her to a new understanding of Hitler’s plans to ‘purify Germany’, and creates a new vocation in her life: to bring humanitarian aid to the last Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. It is a passionate love story, layered with history, showing how the effects of Hitler’s actions still live on. Many people think the Holocaust was aimed solely against the Jews. But the Gypsies were not Jewish; they were Aryans, originally from the vicinity of the River Indus. Cora realizes that many Holocaust sufferers were wrongly located and wrongly labelled, and that many have been forgotten and their stories have not been told. The Romani authors Hristo Kyuchukov and Ian Hancock (known for A Handbook of Vlax Romani) explain in their various works the history of this persecuted people, and why ‘Gypsy’ is a scornful name. They offer readable introductions to Roma life, culture, languages, politics, society, health, and food, with an insightful portrayal of this fascinating minority. In surveying the Gypsies, their origins, history, and exclusion from society, Hancock offers advice on rejecting prejudices and stereotypes, and getting to know the Roma as people, rather than subservient beings. In his novel My Name Was Hussein, Hristo Kyuchukov depicts a Roma boy who experiences the injustice of religious prejudice when his mosque is shut down, and he is forced to give up his own name and christen himself ‘Harry’. Janna Eliot compiled Spokes: Stories from the Romany World in typical Romani style. She used quotations from native speakers, poems, songs, proverbs, and folktales to add to the cultural and historical understanding of the Kalderash Roma (akin to the Kalash tribe), Sinti Romani, and Gurbeti Romani (akin to Gurmukhi/Punjabi) languages. Dutch journalist Aad Wagenaar’s Settela’s Last Road, translated by Eliot,is a compelling, heartfelt, and realistic narrative, telling how a nineyear-old Sinti named Settela, with her loving family, was caught up in the

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Holocaust (‘Samudaripen’ in Romani). Sweet Settela never gave up hope till death, retaining a defiant spirit throughout. The book gives a good insight into what happened to Romanies in the concentration and extermination camps. Cooking with Gypsies, by Sita and Dani Bamberger-Stolfi, is about Gypsy cooking, employing the ingredients that are available, and using Roma senses to create a dish that is uniquely Romani. It upholds a fine sense of belonging, making the kitchen the heart of a Roma household – a place for friends and family to congregate as equals, a neutral place, a place where traditions are built – an idea which is also quintessentially Indian. The above discussion offers a glimpse of the lively literary productions of some Roma authors, tracing the start of their efforts towards a documented literature. A developed modern literary tradition is being born out of Roma oral literature. When we look more closely at individual items, we see that the great majority of Romani production is traditional ‘root literature’. Uprooted as they are, the Roma are searching for their roots, and want to implant their inherited communal traditions and values into their own, which we Indians, as their cross-border siblings, must help make possible. Moreover, we Indians have the linguistic acumen to correctly appreciate the Romani ‘root literature’ via translations. Hordes of Romani words are translatable in Indian languages, for which the table below is proof enough.

Lacho deves! Baro Cino Kaloh Parnoh Lacho/Lachi rat! Phen! Ha tuke! Me voliv/kaam tu! Mai diklem Tatcho! Dukyaiya (pl.),

Shubh diwas! Bada Chhota Kala Vivarn Shubh raatri! Behn! Yeh tujhe! Main kaamlipt tohse Maine dekha Sachchha/Satya Dukaaney

Hindi

Shubho Dibawsh! BawRo Chhoto Kalo Bibawrno Shubho raatri! Bone! Iha/Eta tokey Ami bhalobashi tomaay Ami dekhlam Shotti Dokaanguli

Bengali

English (Cockneys have been Italicized)

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Good day! Big Small Black White/pale Good night! Sister! To you I love you I saw True Stores/shops (for fortune-telling) xiii. Kon san tu? Kaun hai tu? Ke hosh tui? Who are you? xiv. Sinti Sindhi Sindhu-r Of Sindh/Inde xv. Kai? Kahan? Koi/Kothhay? Where? xvi. Kai zhas? Kahan chaley? Koi jaash?/Kotha jaao? Where are yougoing? xvii. Bokhali sim Bhookha hoon main Bhookha mui/Bhok laagey more I’mhungry xviii. Yag si? Aag hai? Aagun aachhey? Have a light? xix. Loon Lavan/Loon (Punjabi) Noon/ Lawbone Salt xx. Haide andre Aaiye andar Aashun/Aayre awndawrey Come inside/Do enter! xxi. Dural beshava Duur hai basera Duur-ey bashaa/bawshobaash Live far away xxii. The Romani numbers one to ten and twenty –yek, duy, trin, shtar, panj, shov, yefta, okhto, inya, desh and bish – are all akin to their Bengali/Hindi or Indian counterparts (e.g. Bengali- ek, dui, tin, chaar, paanch, chhoy (and shawshtho), shaat (and shawpto), aaT (and awshto), noy, dawsh and bish) .

i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. ix. x. xi. xii.

Romani

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Chapter Six

When we speak of translation, we speak of various permutations ------------------performed between languages in order to make them communicate with one another. But there are, within such inter-linguistic exchanges, many other strata of translational activities going on, the most important of which I would call ‘social translation’ (at times also reverse translation or transcreation); that is, the passing of information from one group to another in order to make it meaningful to the receiver. One such form of translation is a transition between oral and literary practices that fundamentally changes the very nature of the oral act involved. Making an oral performative act into a text is a case of social translation, which I intend to demonstrate in this latter part of my discussion through the transcreation of four Romani songs and one abridged Romani poem about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, which portray the Romani urgency of expression, borderless, in love, poverty, and crude death.

Paas uss pani-ke, Chhori Romani se.. Maine kiya hai pyaar; Ey maai, ey maai De mujhe paani maai, De mujhe paani maai, De mujhe paani! Paas uss pani-ke, Akeli baithhi chhori ne… Tarrasha mujhe, woh Romani.

Pas o panori Chajori romani Me la igen kamav Joj mamo.joj mamo De man pani mamo De man pani mamo De man pani Pas o panori Beselas korkori Pre ma uzarelas

Hindi words in English script

Paas uss Pani-ke My loose Hindi-Urdu transcreation

Near the dear water A sweet Romani girl… I do love her true; Hey Mother, hey Mother Give me water, mother, Give me water, mother, Give me water! Beside the dear water She was sitting alone She was cleansing me.

Near the Water English translation by Ronald Lee

To ask for my sister My little sister The most pure one The most pure one, father, The best dancer.

Bhogini-ke ora maagey, Konishthha bhogini-ke… Awshuurjospawrshaa-ke, Pobitro duhita-ke… Nrittye nipoona, taakey… Baba! Bengali words in English script

Pas o panori Romani song 2

Wake up, get up father The drums are beating, father The drums are coming, father

Uthho Uthho Baba Oi Damama-y maarey ora, Damama-ninad-ey aashey

Ušti, ušti baba, 0 davuljja maren, 0, davuljja aven baba, duurdin, ghawnoghawra, Mlje phenja te mangen. Mlje tikne phenjake, E maj šužorake, E maj šužorake, baba, E maj keljavnake.

Wake up, get up father English translation by Ronald Lee

Uthho, Uthho Baba My transcreation in medieval Bengali

Ušti, ušti baba, Romani song 1

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Eid-er liga, (pawrob kina!) Shawb Rroma, Daai Kaatey bokri-r seena, Mora shei gorib-eyr ghawr! Shawb Rroma-y, Daai Amago bawro dibawsh! Amago bawro din! Eid-er liga, (pawrob kina!) Shawb Rroma, Daai Shawb Rroma-y gaawon-bazina Shawb Rroma, Daai Kaatey bokri-r seena, Mora shei gorib-eyr ghawr! Amago bawro dibawsh! Amago bawro din! Eid-er liga, (pawrob kina!)

Hederlezi Sa e Rroma, Daye E bakren chinena Ame sam chorrorre Sa e Rroma, Daye Amaro baro dives Amaro baro dives Hederlezi Sa e Rroma, Daye Sa e Rroma djilabena Sa e Rroma, Daye E bakren chinen Ame sam chorrorre Amaro baro dives Amaro baro dives Hederlezi

Bengali/Bangaal words in English script

Eid-eyr liga / Pawrob My transcreation in ‘Bangaal’dialect

Hederlezi (Romani Day) Romani song 3

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Hederlezi, celebration, All the Roma, Mother, Are sacificing lambs We are very poor All the Roma, Mother, Our big day! Our holiday… Hederlezi, celebration! All the Roma, Mother, All the Roma are singing All the Roma, Mother… They are sacrificing lambs And we are very poor. Our big day! Our holiday… Hederlezi, celebration!

Hederlezi / Celebration An English transcreation

Be, be, be happy dear! Be, be, be happy dear!

Khelbo, nachbo ebawng gaibo, Haww, haww, priya khushi go! Haww, haww, priya khushi go!

Mui Yad Vashem My transcreation in cockney Bengali Mui Yad Vashem Rawkto aar dhula ei nawkh More taalu-r upor aanem.

Me Sem Yad Vashem by Rajko Djuric; abridged

Me sem Yad Vashem. Rat thaj praxo me naja. Pe mor palme anava.

I am Yad Vashem Blood and dust my nails On my palms I bring

I am Yad Vashem Ronald Lee’s Translation

A ROMANI POEM ON YAD VASHEM’S DEATH IN THE GERMAN HOLOCAUST

Bengali words in English script

Dance, play, dance and sing

Bhalobashbo tokey aageyr cheyeo Doshor beshi, kaal. Khelbo, nachbo ebawng gaibo

Bhalobashi tokey aaj, Bhalobashbo tokey torshu,

Voliv tut ages Voliv tut tehara dwigoon, tri-taal, Voliv tut nai Desar mai anglal Khel, khel, khel thai gilaba Khel, khel, khel thai gilaba Av, av, av vesolo Av, av, av vesolo

Love You Today My English transcreation I love you today I’ll love you tomorrow, dayafter twice over And I’ll love you thrice more Than ever! Darling, Dance, play, dance and sing

Bhalobashi Tokey Aaj My loose Bengali transcreation

Voliv Tut Ages Romani song 4

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Mui Yad Vashem HaaRd-er upor shulem Mui chokkhu-khuaa holem Mui Treblinka-y mulem Mui Yad Vashem Mui Rawkto-chaador nilem Mui bin-chamRaa-y chhilem Mui Buchenwald-e mulem Mui Yad Vashem More payt phataaye Bhitor-er chhabaal chh(n)idiye Mui Jasenovco-y mulem Mui Yad Vashem Zodina thhamey shurjjyi-udoy Bhulim ne mui Auschwitz-bhoy.

Me sem Yad Vashem. Pe kokala me sutem. Bi jakh-engo achilem. An Treblinka me mulem.

Me sem Yad Vashem. Ratesa man uchardem. Bi morchako achilem. An Buchenwald me mulem.

Me sem Yad Vashem. Mor per pharade. An ma e chave chinde. An Jasenovco me mulem.

Me sem Yad Vashem. Dzikaj o Del - Del ovela, O Auschwitz ni bistrela.

(Cockney Bengali words in English script)

Mui Yad Vashem Aaaguney zoliya Dhuaa kori paan Auschwitz-e mui mulem.

Me sem Yad Vashem. Yag xalem, Thuv pilem. An Auschwitz me mulem.

Chapter Six

I am Yad Vashem Until sun falls and time dies Auschwitz won’t be forgotten

I am Yad Vashem My guts they shattered In me, the child they cut out In Jasenovco I died

I am Yad Vashem With blood I covered myself I remained without skin In Buchenwald I died

I am Yad Vashem I slept on bones Without eyes I became In Treblinka I died

I am Yad Vashem I suffered fire I drank smoke In Auschwitz I died

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Note: The name ‘Yad Vashem’ phonetically translates into Urdu ‘Yaad’ meaning remembrance or memory, and Hindi ‘Vashm’ meaning ash, and it is also a phonetic equivocation on the fringes of Adi Vashm, meaning ‘Initial Ashes’: the inference leads to a negation of a Hindu sacrament through the ashes, and a reminder of the ashes of Holocaust and Auschwitz.

What we have here is a Romani literature of transition, translation, and transcreation, oblivious of ‘borders’ and/or margins. To make it culturally meaningful would require the skills and efforts of writers and editors, scholars and educational institutions to be directed towards the living oral traditions – something that at present is sadly lacking in respect of Romani and the languages and literatures of Indian vernaculars. Without recognizing the nature of Roma literature for what it is – namely a social translation into Indian literature/language – we stand little chance of understanding its meaning.

Webliography and Webblinks Djuric, Raico:‘Yad Vashem’, Original Romani poems on the Auschwitz Holocaust: http://www.rromaniconnect.org/ http://romafacts.uni-graz.at/index.php/culture/introduction/roma-culture http://www.icrny.org/d4-1-Romanian_literature_in_English.html http://www.sintiromanicommunity.org/ http://www.shmoop.com/tempest/caliban.html Lee, Ronald, Songs of the Oral Formulaic Romani Tradition: http://www.oocities.org/romanivonnie/ Linguistic Comparison Chart: http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/romani-gypsy-comparisonwith-indian-languages.320820/ Tismaneanu, Vladimir; 2012. The Devil in History. University of California Press; http://www.icrny.org/

CHAPTER SEVEN OF BORDERS, BLENDING, AND BLOOD: THE QUESTION OF ASSIMILATION AND OTHERING IN VICTOR SÉJOUR’S ‘THE MULATTO’ NAMRATA JAIN AND TARA PRAKASH TRIPATHI

To live in the borderlands means you are Neither hispana india negra espanola ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed caught in the crossfire between camps while carrying all five races on your back not knowing which side to turn to, run from; ….

Although Amitav Ghosh may have been right to relegate the international borders within South Asia to mere ‘Shadow Lines’ in comparison with the Americas, the existence of borders has been real and palpable. The borders and borderlands of the American continent did not divide only physical geographical entities; they were also markers of the segregation between the dictatorial self and the subjugated other. Both the enslaving self and the enslaved other were immigrants, yet which borders they crossed to reach the Americas determined their social status in this ‘new found land’. Those who came from European countries became the masters, whereas those who were forced to cross African borders became slaves. For African migrants, the most enduring consequences of the migration were the development of racism and the emergence of an African-American community. It was the transatlantic slave-trade that shaped the African diaspora. Very much as with other diasporic communities, the processes of segregation and blending took place simultaneously. Throughout human history, the struggle between the

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homogenous self and the different other has been a reality; the same has been true in the context of the Americas. The African turned into the ‘negro slave’ on American soil. The white colonizer, with his gun, God, and goods, ‘civilized and pacified’ the black man. As Alan Bishop puts it, through ‘trade, administration and education’ the white colonizer subjugated the ‘vile dogs’.1 The melting geographical borders, but adamantine racial borders, find confirmation in Frantz Fanon’s ‘Wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro’.2 Although the process of othering, segregation, discrimination, and subjugation was designed and conducted by the European white self over the African black other, the incidental blending, comingling, and cohabitation complicated the straightforward segregation on racist lines. The interracial sexual encounters between European master and African slave gave birth to a generation of individuals with a hybrid and confused identity that was labelled ‘mulatto’. Black Africans and white Europeans have been the main characters in American history, so the study of mulattos as a separate community still needs to be undertaken. Both ‘Negros’– a pejorative term for blacks – and ‘mulattos’ –an abusive term for mixed-race people– have gone through the demeaning process of othering, yet ‘the mulatto, even more than the full-blooded Negro, is America’s metaphor’.3 In this paper, we will discuss Victor Séjour’s story ‘The Mulatto’ to highlight that the mulatto community, despite sharing the same diasporic space with African-American people, deserves exclusive attention. American literature is full of the motif of the ‘tragic mulatto’, the tragic element being inherent in the mulatto’s mixed-race origins. Because of the white blood in him, the mulatto’s blending with the master-class is expected. However, the black blood in him makes him inferior and unacceptable to the white masters. The tragedy occurs as passion – always attributed to the black race – overcomes reason – attributed to the white blood in him – which inevitably ends in the mulatto’s death. Victor Séjour’s short story ‘The Mulatto’ merits attention in this context. Published originally in French in 1837, it is considered the first African-American work of fiction. The narrative takes place in Haiti and 1

Alan, Bishop.1995. ‘Western Mathematics.’ In The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge. (Bishop 1995, 71–76) 2 Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. UK: Pluto Press. (Fanon 1986, 173) 3 Berzon, Judith. 1978. Neither Black nor White: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York UP. (Berzon 1978, 32)

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concerns the faithful slave Georges, who saves his treacherous master from rebellious slaves during an early stage of the Haitian Revolution. After his master kills Georges’ wife for resisting his advances, Georges avenges her death by poisoning his mistress and strangling his owner, only to find out that the owner was also his father. The story ends with the mulatto killing himself. This violent conclusion to the story was drastically different in tone and content from the contemporaneous abolitionist fiction emerging in the Caribbean, particularly the abolitionist novels published in Cuba in the 1830s. These novels tended to portray the wronged, yet resigned and noble, black slave, destined to suffer the cruelties of despotic masters. Blood as a motif, which is ever-present in ‘The Mulatto’, is also in the background of the story – the Saint-Domingue rebellion, an offshoot of the French Revolution. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) succeeded in getting rid of the French yoke, along with slavery, in that part of America. ‘The Mulatto’ however may represent the entire American continent. The north-south divide appears in many slave narratives in which slaves sought freedom and ran northwards. The South became synonymous with slavery and the North with ‘diaspora and migration’.4 See for example Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and others. Peoples are separated from their homelands to make habitation in the American continent, resulting in debates about race, migration, and identity. Nostalgia, sense of self, and questions of assimilation and blood all become buoyant as geographical borders give way to racial borders in the new land. Different people bring different colours/skins with them, giving rise to discourses of differentiation, discrimination, oppression, and a history of struggle, pitting the white colonizer against all the other colours/races/borders. As Homi K. Bhabha puts it: Skin as the key signifier of cultural and racial difference in the stereotype, is the most visible of fetishes, recognized as ‘common knowledge’ in a range of cultural, political, historical discourses, and plays a public part in the racial drama that is enacted every day in colonial societies…. The stereotype can also be seen as that particular ‘fixated’ form of the colonial subject which facilitates colonial relations, and sets up a discursive form of racial and cultural opposition in terms of which colonial power is exercised…. The difference of the object of discrimination is at once visible and natural – colour as the cultural/political sign of inferiority or degeneracy, skin as its natural identity.5 4

Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. (Bhabha 1994, 55) 5 Ibid. (Bhabha 1994, 112–113)

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The colour of the skin becomes the justification for discrimination between whites and nonwhite others in ‘The Mulatto’. The story opens with the presentation of the stereotype of the Negro, establishing the racial baggage that is associated with the black slave. The visible skin and its associated social status are made manifest in the entire ‘being’ of the black man. But you know, do you not, that a negro’s as vile as a dog; society rejects him; men detest him; the laws curse him. . . . Yes, he’s a most unhappy being, who hasn’t even the consolation of always being virtuous. . . . He may be born good, noble, and generous; God may grant him a great and loyal soul; but despite all that, he often goes to his grave with bloodstained hands, and a heart hungering after yet more vengeance. For how many times has he seen the dreams of his youth destroyed? How many times has experience taught him that his good deeds count for nothing, and that he should love neither his wife nor his son; for one day the former will be seduced by the master, and his own flesh and blood will be sold and transported away despite his despair. What, then, can you expect him to become? Shall he smash his skull against the paving stones? Shall he kill his torturer? Or do you believe the human heart can find a way to bear such misfortune?’6

Using the narrator’s point of view as quoted above, Séjour not only highlights the deplorable plight of the non-white others; he also prepares the reader for the violent dénouement of this narrative. The fact that this story is told by a black narrator to an enthusiastic white listener presents a sense of blending between the races. The main story that Antoine, the narrator, tells, however, is ambivalent about the possibility of such a blending. With the slave trade being the main way for the colonizers to find workers for their plantations, Alfred, a wealthy and influential plantation-owner, buys Laïsa, a Senegalese woman, who would serve him first in his bed and then on his plantation. In ‘The Mulatto’, the purchase of Laïsa marks what Fanon calls, the ‘thingification’ of the black race.7 The black body, along with the native land, is virtually raped. ‘Fifteen hundred paisters’ or as many bullets to kill the natives, the final price for the virgin land/body to belong to the white male until he tires or feels the 6

Séjour, Victor. 2004. ‘The Mulatto.’ In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton. (Séjour 2004, 353–65) 7 Fanon, Frantz. 2005. ‘On National Culture.’ In Postcolonialisms. Edited by Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. (Fanon 2005, 198–219)

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horror. The personal story of Laïsa becomes the history of a new race, the ‘mulatto’. We do not hear or use the term ‘mulatto’ today any more than the words ‘nigger’ or ‘Negro’. The word mulatto, like Negro, spells out a history of oppression, a history of conflict of nomenclature and identity, along with being a term of repudiation. Mulattos were the result of cohabitation between a white master and a black slave. Those born of such forced union were known as mulattos. ‘I won’t tell you everything he did in order to possess Laïsa; for in the end she was virtually raped. For almost a year, she shared her master’s bed. But Alfred was already beginning to tire of her; he found her ugly, cold, and insolent. About this time the poor woman gave birth to a boy and gave him the name Georges.’8 Once again, the skin, the colour, and the body became the ‘stereotype’, giving way to a new polemic, the mulatto. Considered the bastard progeny of two pure races – black and white – the mulatto is the liminal, the inbetween of the ‘Manichean delirium’.9 The origins of the term mulatto can be traced to a ‘young mule’. The mule is a hybrid between a female donkey and male horse. In the colonial discourse, hybridity is subversive in effect. The Negro woman and the white man – the racial and gender opposites – consummate for stark prejudices and differences to collapse, forever blighting the notion of the infallibility of the ‘superior white race’. Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but re-implicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power.10

The birth of the mulatto, a new race, introduces fatherhood to the business of sale-purchase. Even though fatherhood comes to the white man, he refuses it in the mulatto child. It is evident in Alfred’s rejection of his progeny as he ‘refused to recognize him, drove the mother from his

8

Séjour, Victor. 2004. ‘The Mulatto.’ in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton. (Séjour 2004, 353–65) 9 Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. UK: Pluto Press. (Fanon 1986, xiv). 10 Bhabha, Homi. 1995. ‘Signs Taken For Wonders’ in The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge. (Bhabha 1995, 29–35)

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presence’ and in one instance shed the burden.11 In other words, the aftermath of the ‘civilizing mission’ is no longer the whiteman’s concern. Although for biological convenience the child is kept with the mother for milk, the new world is that of the black mother and a mulatto baby. Ironically, the mulatto in its physicality becomes a glaring truth for the white male, turning the ‘gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power’. The hybrid/bastard Georges is the living embodiment of the two races: ‘Georges had all the talents necessary for becoming a well-regarded gentleman; yet he was possessed of a haughty, tenacious, willful nature; he had one of those oriental sorts of dispositions, the kind that, once pushed far enough from the path of virtue, will stride boldly down the path of crime.’12 As the plot progresses, Laïsa dies, leaving Georges with a photograph of his father in a pouch and a promise that he will open it only at the age of twenty-five, when he has become a man. Her death not only makes Georges virtually an orphan, it also deprives him of the possibility of resolving the question of his true identity, linked with his true father. On one occasion only, she said to him: ‘My son, you shall learn your name only when you reach twenty-five, for then you will be a man; you will be better able to guard its secret. You don’t realize that he has forbidden me to speak to you about him… and Georges don’t you see this man’s hatred would be your death.’13

It is here that the Foucauldian idea of power manifests itself, through the well-guarded secret of Alfred and the truth of Georges’ identity: ‘We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.’14 The secret of the intermixing of the black and white is the truth, ‘the unspeakable conduct’ for which Georges wishes to punish Alfred.15

11

Séjour, Victor. 2004. ‘The Mulatto’, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton. (Séjour 2004, 353–65) 12 Ibid. (Séjour2004, 353–65) 13 Ibid. (Séjour2004, 353–65) 14 Foucault, Michel.1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. (Foucault 1980, 93) 15 Séjour, Victor. 2004. ‘The Mulatto.’ In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton. (Séjour 2004, 353–65)

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With the best of intentions to blend and assimilate, the orphaned Georges tries to ignore the truth about his father by turning into a loyal slave on Alfred’s plantation. The duality of the seeker and the slave is a marker of the ‘blending’ of the two races, in the form of the mulatto. It is the inheritance from the black race that the high morality and loyalty in Georges is credited to. By risking his life for Alfred to protect him from the bandits, Georges becomes the ‘liberator’, rising to momentary power. The scene begins with Georges ordering Alfred to follow him and ends with Georges fulfilling the role of the ideal, obedient slave. The black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar, and manipulator of social forces.16

The point of departure is that Georges is a mulatto, not black. That which is prized in the Negro is put to doubt in the mulatto, owing to his ‘unspeakable’ origin. Alfred doubts Georges’ intentions, as the latter struggles to protect his master from the bandits. On the emergence of the truth about the mulatto’s loyalty, Alfred decides to offer help and medical care to the slave. However, on seeing Zelia, Georges’ mulatta wife, on his plantation, Alfred wants to bed her. The issue of blending becomes even more intriguing: Georges, as a mulatto, is shunned and treated as an adversary, but the mulatta Zelia is embraced as she becomes the object of desire to possess. The racial and the gender bind further marginalizes Zelia as she is accosted by Alfred. Not succumbing to him, Zelia is sentenced to death. Zelia hit Alfred when she refused him and established a moral platform for herself: ‘…unfortunately for him, she was not one of these women who sell their favors or use them to pay tribute to their master.’17 Zelia’s death is not ordinary: she is punished in full public view, to underline her sin of ‘having drawn his [Alfred’s] blood.’18 Once again the skin becomes the site of political, gender, and racial interplay, as Antoine narrates:

16

Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. (Bhabha 1994, 118) 17 Séjour, Victor. 2004. ‘The Mulatto.’ In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton. (Séjour 2004, 353–65) 18 Ibid. (Séjour 2004, 353–65)

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Ten days later, two white creole children were playing in the street. ‘Charles,’ one said to the other: ‘is it true that the mulatto woman who wanted to kill her master is to be hung tomorrow?’ ‘At eight o’clock,’ answered the other. ‘Will you go?’ ‘Oh yes, certainly.’ ‘Won’t that be fine, to see her pirouetting between the earth and the sky,’ re-joined the first, laughing as they walked off.19

Séjour uses the embedded narrator to condemn these children’s fascination with the way that Zelia will die, using the slave and the voice of the interior narrative to editorialize on the institutionalized denigration and othering of non-whites and its concomitant debilitating influence on the psyche of white children. As Antoine caustically asserts: Does it surprise you to hear two children, at ten years of age, conversing so gaily on the death of another? This is, perhaps, an inevitable consequence of their education. From their earliest days, they have heard it ceaselessly repeated that we were born to serve them, that we were created to attend to their whims, and that they need have no more or less consideration for us than for a dog. . . .Indeed, what is our agony and suffering to them? Have they not, just as often, seen their best horses die? They don’t weep for them, for they’re rich, and tomorrow they’ll buy others. . . .20

Zelia’s body ‘pirouetting’ is in the ‘visible’ realm. The body is the ‘natural identity’ and the reason for discrimination. The pirouetting body finds consonance in Frantz Fanon’s narrative of the sighting of a negro by a white child: ‘Look, a Negro!’ It was an external stimulus that flickered over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. ‘Look, a Negro!’ It was true. It amused me. ‘Look, a Negro!’ The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. ‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible… My body was given back to

19 20

Ibid. (Séjour 2004, 353–65) Ibid. (Séjour 2004, (359–60)

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After not being able to save his wife’s life, despite his heart-rending importunities, Georges gives up his attempts at assimilation and escapes the plantation to join the maroons (runaway free slaves) in the forest. He plans revenge against Alfred for Zelia’s death, betraying a stereotypical mulatto characteristic for that time. In other words, in the context of Haiti, the blacks turn revolutionaries against slavery and white masters, whereas the ‘lesser’, ‘tragic’ mulatto gets caught up in the idea of revenge, for claims of name and identity or in the quest for assimilation. ‘By my freedom,’ he cried, looking over the newcomer, ‘you found our recess all too easily. ’Africa and freedom,’ Georges replied calmly, as he pushed aside the barrel of the rifle. . .. I’m one of you.’22

Georges plans to murder Alfred when he has a wife and child. However, the search for the name, father, and identity, can still move Georges to tears. The ‘in-between’ body imposes obstacles for association with either race. The pure black Negro is the established ‘other’. It is the liminal mulatto who has conflated the binary. The Mulatto speaks, reacts, fights, and avenges himself. This is a change which the white race did not reckon with. It is the image of the noble savage, yet another construct. ‘I know my natives’ – a claim which implies two things at once: first, that the native was really quite simple, and second, that understanding him and controlling him went hand in hand.23 The knowledge of the native works for the subjugation of Laïsa, the ‘guaranteed merchandise’. This knowledge falls short in the case of Georges, as he is ‘hybrid’. The knowledge that the native is a beast calls for the direct use of power and repression; whereas an admixture of gentlemanliness and haughtiness not only annuls all difference, but also makes the task of subjugation difficult. Concomitantly, it estranges the white male from his own idea of ‘the self and the other’. In a mulatto, the self and the other co-exist, the unity and 21

Fanon, Frantz. 1995. ‘The Fact of Blackness,’ In The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge. (Fanon 1995, 323–26) 22 Séjour, Victor. 2004. ‘The Mulatto.’ in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton. (Séjour 2004, 353–65) 23 Achebe, Chinua. 1995. ‘Colonialist Criticism.’ in The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge. (Achebe 1995, 57–61)

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the threat. The whiteman’s superiority rests on the denigration and degradation of the other, while his own child threatens his status. In the mulatto it is both literal and metaphorical. In one of the most melodramatic scenes of American fiction, Georges avenges his wife’s death by poisoning his master’s wife and beheading his master, Alfred. It is only after the beheading that he discovers that he has murdered his own father. If Georges is the child of a union between a black and a white, the white man’s fatherhood is presented through a rupture: ‘Fa–ther’.24 It is the severed head of Alfred that completes the word, thereby lending it meaning and context. However, the revelation also marks the mulatto’s death, to complete the stereotype of the ‘tragic mulatto’. The tragedy of Georges, the mulatto, is heightened by the fact that the person who was responsible for his fathering was also responsible for his othering. A lack of sense of belonging, or the sharing of the guilt with the white as well as the black parent, may have led to Georges’ death. The Oedipal curse upon the bastard race pits him against his own identity, his own self. The killing of his own father renders his life meaningless, since it had been spent awaiting his ‘name’. Alfred/Georges’ relationship then becomes a synecdoche to establish the paternity of the colonizer, and seeing the colony in the role of the progeny stating the inherent hierarchy. According to Bhabha, Law of the father…is a process of substitution and exchange that inscribes a normative, normalizing place for the subject; but that metaphoric access to identity is exactly the place of prohibition and repression, precisely a conflict of authority.25

This duality could explain the suicide of Georges, after realizing he has committed patricide. Unlike the Negro who can ‘go back to where I (he) belonged’, the bastard mulatto has nowhere to go and thus he kills himself.’26 One is forcibly reminded of the lines:

24

Séjour, Victor. 2004. ‘The Mulatto.’ in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton. (Séjour 2004, 353–65) 25 Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. UK: Pluto Press. (Fanon 1986, xxxi) 26 Fanon, Frantz. 1995. ‘The Fact of Blackness.’ In The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge. (Fanon 1995, 323–26).

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82 A nigger night, A nigger joy. I am your son, white man! A little yellow Bastard boy.27

27

Hughes, Langston. 1927. ‘Mulatto.’ In Fine Clothes to the Jew. New York: A.A. Knopf. (Hughes 1927, 71–72)

CHAPTER EIGHT BORDER NARRATIVES AND CULTURAL CONTOURS: STUDYING AMITAV GHOSH AND THE INDOBANGLA CULTURAL INTERFACE RAJA BASU

A few recent events have dragged questions of democracy, identity, and nationhood in India to public attention. In 2015, there was the lynching of Mhd. Akhlaq in Dadri, U.P. for eating beef during Ganesh Chaturthi and Navratri, and the killing of intellectuals. No less than Arundhati Roy, in The Sunday Statesman (20 September 2015), questioned Lord Ganesha’s ‘plastic surgery’ and the bizarre notion of mopping ICUs with cow urine. After the Dadri event, Patricia Mukhim, in The Statesman Kolkata (5 October 2015), discussed the existence of ‘plastic surgery’ in ancient India, a subject mentioned by the prime minister, and also pointed out how the present government, with its Hindutva leanings, has termed Christmas ‘Good Governance Day’. Is such a renaming a pledge for the security of minorities, or a ploy to devalue a minority celebration? It could mean either putting the stamp of the major culture on the festive calendar, as if other communities do not exist, and so stamping out other cultures or perhaps appropriating minority celebrations. Either way, it gives minority peoples reason to be afraid about their present situation. Why not name a Hindu festive occasion differently, either from an administrative or anti-harassment perspective? Don’t instances of abuse – physical or drug-related – occur on such days? Jawed Naqvi, in his article ‘Will Ganpati bless Bhagat Singh?’, in The Statesman Kolkata (30 September 2015), discusses how the Hindutva spat is gradually highlighting Bhagat Singh as the Hindu youth icon, thereby erasing his other aspect, which fought for rational thinking and against superstition .

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Interestingly, the way in which the same newspaper came up with another essay, in which the status of Pakistanis was discussed, gives an idea of how the media functions and tries to mould public opinion and formulate discourses, by feeding us several articles directed in a particular direction over a period of time. Rafia Zakaria in her article ‘An approximation of affluence’, in The Statesman, Kolkata (18 September 2015), gives an account of beef consumption in Pakistan (14.7 kg per capita) and Bangladesh (4 kg per capita) – two Muslim-dominated nations where beef consumption is considered normal. Yet the author wants to say that the wide difference in beef consumption between the two religiouslysanctioned meat-consuming nations – where horse makes way for goat meat, donkey for beef, and pork too often replaces other forms of meat – varies only because of wealth. The richer the country, the greater the desire to consume. The question of being vegetarian or non-vegetarian, or what type of meat – whether society or religion sanctions it or not – is ultimately a question of personal choice. Being a Hindu, yet consuming beef, doesn’t make one ‘secular’; nor does abstaining from consuming any form of meat. So being rich or poor cannot drive one towards higher consumption of meat. What matters, perhaps, is the way in which such identities are framed. This mainstream identity formation on the basis of whether to eat beef or pork, whether to wear a beard, whether to retain the foreskin, whether to put vermilion on one’s forehead, even whether to wear a lungi or dhoti, reminds us of a section in Gulliver’s Travels where two countries were at war because they had fallen out over which side of the egg they should crack. These are all outer religious trappings, yet people fail to address the larger questions of faith and belief. Such issues have often led to mass exodus, and during pogroms and riots such identities and markers – the mark from banging the forehead or putting on a turban – have resulted in widespread mayhem. Both India and Bangladesh have seen outspoken intellectuals and bloggers murdered in broad daylight. To quote from Arup Maharatna’s article ‘Evading Enlightenment’, in The Statesman Kolkata (12 November 2015), the inability to address secularism and other issues is troubling the nation: The leadership never tried to change the unquestioning belief in fate, religion, rituals, caste-based aberrations, superstitions, tribal distinctions and diversities and myriad divisive socio-cultural and religious practices. Hence, the complexities of modern economic development. It has now been realized that the politically nurtured sentiment of nationalism and patriotism could hardly address the internal contradictions and prejudices linked to blind religious bigotry and social distinctions. Such aberrations

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have been resolved in the West through a philosophy that is based on reason...

But to conclude that it was lack of scientific temper, which was not introduced properly, that brought about the failure in formation of nationalism in India, or led to the present ‘socio-cultural and political strife’, would be too simplistic a proposition. The kind of nationalism that has been forged in India post-Independence is essentially a poor copy of the Western liberal democratic notion of society, based on homogeneous notions of identity. Yet nations in the Orient have survived over millennia, not on such segregated, homogeneous notions of identity, based either on religion, language, caste, or race, but on overlapping terrains. The sub-text of the nation would perhaps hint at the existence of such understandings of nationhood, where ‘desh’ does not mean merely country, but actually encompasses that space which draws into its periphery notions of language and mixed culture, imbibed and built over centuries of cultural adaptation into which one is rooted over generations. Perhaps this kind of existence, which encompasses not just opposing cultures, but also other practices of caste rituals that get mixed with religious practices, speaks of a society with an interwoven, complex matrix which defies any form of fixity. Then, a country would encompass several ‘desh’, several diversities at several levels, each contending with the other, and would still remain unified within a larger structure. The very notion of multiple nations within the nation defies the concept of a strict, homogeneous identity-based notion of nation (which is more a form of mainstream nationalism) which slides into the ‘rhizomic’. This further complicates the notion of borderlands, and the kind of nationalism that proliferates on the border. Ghosh in his works reflects on the borderlands, which constitute people who live in a fleeting zone, with fleeting identities –literally ‘floating lives’ in the case of Fokir – since the fluidity of borderland existence defies any notion of boundary. Sudhir Kakar, in The Colours of Violence, says riot-related stories follow more or less an identical pattern. What he hears in 1969 in Ahmedabad is akin to what he heard in Rohtak when a child. Thus he heard how milk-vendors were bribed by Muslims to mix poison into milk, after consuming which four children lay unconscious and two dogs died. In another instance he heard that Muslims had entered grocery shops in the night and mixed powdered glass with salt (Kakar 1995, 43). Kakar can perhaps help us better to understand how the notion of a ‘Montu’, the Muslim man in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, as the ‘other’, is developed in the Hindu consciousness from childhood through images as the ‘beef-eater’, although the British fall into the same category

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but never constitute the ‘other’ – a defining antagonistic component of the Hindu self. The Muslim butcher in his ‘blood-flecked undervest and lungi’, wielding a huge carving knife, is an iconic figure of ‘awe and dread for the Hindu child’ and generates a ‘fear-tinged repulsion for the adult’ (28). For Kakar, even the walls of the Muslims’ houses reeked of, and were embedded with, the strong, pungent odour of garlic, onion, ginger, coriander, and cumin to cook mutton (33). Old men with henna-dyed beards, smoking hookahs, sitting on cots gossiping, and women covered from head to toe with white or black veils were the author’s early impressions of Muslims (33). Kakar further adds how imaginary borders are drawn between the two communities: The image of Muslim animality is composed of the perceived ferocity, rampant sexuality, and demand for instant gratification of the male, and a dirtiness that is less a matter of bodily cleanliness and more of inner pollution as a consequence of forbidden, tabooed foods. This image is an old one also to be found in S. C. Dube’s thirty-year-old anthropological account of a village outside in Hyderabad: ‘The Muslims are good only in two things – they eat and copulate like beasts. Who else except a Muslim would even think of going to bed with his uncle’s daughter, who is next only to his real sister?’ (137)

If this is the extent of harm that the psyche of a Hindu child had interiorized against Muslims, then it was natural for the child narrator to carry traces of unnameable fear during the Calcutta-Khulna riots in 1964. The child’s anxiety is expressed in those moments when he perceives the presence of someone behind the curtains in Montu’s house (Ghosh 1988, 200). The nature of the fear is unnameable because it is different from other known categories of fear. It is a fear that results from not recognizing known spaces, which is utterly claustrophobic: That particular fear has a texture you can neither forget nor describe. It is like the fear of the victims of an earthquake, of people who have lost faith in the stillness of the earth. And yet it is not the same. It is without analogy. For it is not comparable with the fear of nature, which is the most universal of human fears, nor with the fear of the violence of the state, which is the commonest of modern fears. It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets one inhabits, can become – suddenly and without warning – as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world – not language, not food, not music – it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror. (Ghosh 1988, 204)

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However, the analogy here is essentially Lacanian: the conflict is rooted in the dichotomy between the self and its other, on which the self is perpetually dependent. The present form of nationalism tends to appropriate, as Deepak Mehta suggests in his essay, certain spaces as ideal, segregate them, and impose meaning on them, as has been done with the Babri Masjid. Opposing spaces, such as Muslim ghettos, are projected as spaces within the nation that are different, yet need to be appropriated and contained meaningfully, since they – the cultural and religious ‘other’ – contribute to the economic growth of the nation. However, this is an imposed notion, which centuries of living together easily contest, and is best reflected in border narratives in times of crisis. Sudhir Kakar points out in Culture and Psyche: Rumours, lending words and images, however horrific, to the imminent threat of deathly violence against the self and one’s community, give rise to complex emotions, not only the feelings of dread and danger but also of exhilaration at the transcendence of individual boundaries and the feelings of closeness and belonging to an entity beyond one’s self’ (Kakar1997, 124).

In the Calcutta-Khulna riot, the threat of a poisoned water tank or a train full of dead bodies blew events up out of proportion. Kakar suggests that the vicarious enjoyment of sexual impulses and envy are prime components of gossip, although the sexual impulses in rumour are primarily sadomasochistic and thus have a much greater component of aggression. The discharge of aggression and the pleasure of vicarious sexuality are however subordinated to rumour’s primary function of mastering anxiety in situations of grave danger, such as a religious riot (129). The overcharged atmosphere of violence breathed daily lifts the lid on the cauldron of instinctual drives, as civilized sensibility threatens to collapse under the pressure of instinctuality in its sexual and violent aspect (126). Kakar, in The Colours of Violence, discusses the psychosexual and deeply entrenched mélange of passions that boils up during riots: ...a riot is often experienced as a midwife for unfamiliar, disturbing fantasies and complex emotions, such as both disgust and overwhelming sexual attraction for a member of the enemy community.... Accounts of sexual violence during a riot, for instance, not only evoke the publicly acceptable reaction of horror but may also release the more hidden emotion of a shameful excitement which bespeaks instinctual desire in its rawer form. Besides the expression of moral outrage, riot violence can be subjectively used for an unwanted and wished for vicarious satisfaction of sadistic impulses, for the fulfilment of one’s urge to utterly subjugate

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Chapter Eight another human being, to reduce his or her consciousness to a reactivity of the flesh alone. (Kakar 1995, 45)

The generating of the dichotomous ‘good’ self and simultaneous ‘bad’ image of the other thereby is an act of externalizing the enemy and stereotyping him/her, and involves a progressive devaluation that is akin to dehumanizing the target, making the enemy non-human so as ‘to avoid feeling guilt about destroying “it” in the riot that is imminent’(54,55). Having talked about the cohesive effects of rumours, and how they bring people in a specific community close to one another out of fear that makes them transcend the limits of self and merge into a group narcissism of aggrandizement as well as protection, I would like to move onto Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land, where another child narrator, on the same night in 1964, was staying on the other side of the border. When the author was six years old, his father –on a diplomatic mission to Dhaka – had to leave India and move into a mansion with a large garden that was always thronged with people and children. These crowds came and went, and only later on did the narrator find out that they were refugees. That night is vivid in the author’s memory: My memory of what I saw was very vivid, but at the same time oddly out of sync, like a sloppily edited film. A large crowd is thronging around our house, a mob of hundreds of men, their faces shining red in the light of the burning torches in their hands, rags tied on sticks, whose flames seemed to be swirling against our walls in waves of fire. As I watch, the flames begin to dance around the house, and while they circle the walls the people gathered inside mill around the garden, cower in huddles and cover their faces (Ghosh1992, 208).

The whole experience gathers a dream-like quality as the aural experience is wiped off: I can see the enraged mob and the dancing flames with a vivid burning clarity, yet all of it happens in utter silence; my memory, in an act of benign protection, has excised every single sound (208).

After some anxious hours, nothing happened. Finally: ‘The police arrived at just the right moment, alerted by some of my parents’ Muslim friends, and drove the mob away’ (209). It is at this point that the two novels of Ghosh merge: I was to recognize those stories years later, when reading through a collection of old newspapers. I discovered that on the very night when I’d

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seen those flames dancing around the walls of our house, there had been a riot in Calcutta too, similar in every aspect except that there it was Muslims who had been attacked by Hindus. But equally, in both cities – and this must be said, it must always be said, for it is the incantation that redeems our sanity – in both Dhaka and Calcutta, there were exactly mirrored stories of Hindus and Muslims coming to each others’ rescue, so that many more people were saved than killed. The stories of those riots are always the same, tales that grow out of an explosive barrier of symbols – of cities going up in flames because of a cow found dead in a temple, or a pig in a mosque; of people killed for wearing a lungi or a dhoti, depending on where they find themselves; of woman disembowelled for wearing veils or vermilion, of men dismembered for the state of their foreskins (209–10).

The narrative of riots has an archetypal nature which the author of The Shadow Lines skips for obvious reasons, as this riot is seen from a child’s point of view. Such narratives generally involve primitive fantasies of bodily violence: …the cutting off of male genitals, and the sadistic fury directed against female breasts incorporate the more or less conscious wish to wipe the hated enemy off the face of the earth by eliminating the means of its reproduction and the nurturing of its infants. (Kakar1995: 37)

The castration of the enemy may be viewed, says Kakar, ‘as a counter phobic acting out of what psychoanalysis considers one of the chief male anxieties, that is it is a doing unto others – castration – what one fears may be done to one’s self’(38). Mutilation of the breast may be similarly derived from an upsurge of a pervasive infantile fantasy – of withholding breast ‘a part of the mother whose absence gives rise to feelings of disintegration and murderous rage’ (38). Ashis Nandy, in Time Warps, points to the failure of Western forms of secularism which prevent religion from entering the public sphere. Nehru was a votary of such progressive values, which unfortunately could never come to terms with an Indian way of life, where one has to wear one’s religious identity on one’s sleeve, as was so well understood by Gandhi (70ff.). Thus, negative group-cohesion fuelled by rumours, or childhood negative images of Muslims, can be countered by positive counternarratives based on memory and micro-histories, since history is nothing more than a personal narrative, which the author calls the voice that ‘redeems our sanity’, and which has the potency to bring both communities together and strengthen bonds between the communities,

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even in times of strife. In The Shadow Lines, in an attempt to dispel the wrongs of the rioting and restore Hindu–Muslim relations, efforts were made on both the sides of the border: It is evident from the newspapers that once the riots started, ‘responsible opinion’ in both India and East Pakistan reacted with an identical sense of horror and outrage. The university communities of both Dhaka and Calcutta took the initiative in doing relief work and organizing peace marches, and newspapers on both sides of the border did some fine pieces of reporting. As always, there were numerous cases of Muslims in East Pakistan giving shelter to Hindus, often at the cost of their own lives, and equally, in India, of Hindus sheltering Muslims. But they were ordinary people, soon forgotten: not for them any martyr’s memorials or eternal flames (Ghosh1998, 230). What I wish to propose is that, parallel to the mainstream Western form of nationalism, there still exist on the fringes of society mixed syncretic cultures that are tolerant, mainly because of their composite nature, as Ghosh discusses in the Bonbibi episode in The Hungry Tide. In Gautam Bhadra’s essay ‘The Mentality of Subalternity’, he claims that, opposed to the interaction of the classical and the popular elements of culture, among the popular elements of culture a horizontal interaction was simultaneously taking place. Bhadra points to the curious similarity of consonance, alliteration, rhyming, and images which help transform one god or goddess of one sect to another: Dharma had assumed the form of a Yavan. Sporting a black cap and wielding a bow and arrows He rides a powerful horse, And is a terror to the world. The formless Niranjan has become a heavenly avatar, The word dam constantly on his lips, Brahma became Muhammad, Vishnu, Paigambar, [and] The holder of the trident [i.e., Shiva] Transformed into Adam. Ganesh changed into Ghazi Kartik into Kazi And the munis [hermits] all became fakirs (72).1

To revert to the topic of adaptations and religious crossovers, which are a strong deterrent to the rigidity expressed by the fundamental forces at 1 Extract from Bhakti Madhav Chattopadhyay, ed., Ramai Panditer sunya puran (Calcutta, 1977, p.160), translated by Gautam Bhadra.

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elitist levels and the mainstream narratives of a nation, we need to look at these several accommodative and adaptive currents at grassroots level, which, in spite of urbanization and the nation-state rooting for industrialization based on Western-model societies, have made a niche for themselves and sustained the nation from within, in the form of an alternative nationalism. Mazharul Islam thus observes: In Bangladesh, on the contrary, many folksongs have compared Hassan and Hussain with Rama and Lakshmana. Since Hassan and Hussain have to leave Medina, the event as prevalent in the folk tradition of Bangladesh, the comparison found its relevance with the similar event of Rama and Lakshmana who had to leave Ayodhya and this striking similarity aroused the inspiration of the Muslim folkbards to sing the song of Karbala in the pattern of Ramayana. The cultural assimilation is possible only when the attitude of the society as a whole is receptive. The two examples cited, one about Muharram and the other about the Karbala songs about Bangladesh, bear clear evidence of social attitude, which is the result of a change. (274–75)

The Hungry Tide and the Bon bibi cult relate Bengal to distant countries and people who have migrated from there, and other folk cults, such as those of Mobrah Ghazi, link rural Bengal to the empire of Delhi. The Sidis and their miracles, part of the folklore, remind us of the nonofficial nature of these counter-discourses that promoted Sufi culture, which did not believe in any ritual trappings and led to the late flowering of the Baul community, which was more a musical community than a religious one. Even the Wahabi movement in Bengal, based on Persian culture, with its strict adherence to the dictates of Islam, took offence at the offerings to local saints, patrons, gods, and goddesses by Muslims. Yet, the likes of Ashim Roy, Tarachand, M.Mujeeb, and Nazrul Islam say that, ultimately, it is at the grassroots of society that we find that myths, and larger monotheistic metaphors, work with less effect. Rather, folklore and Panchali join people of varying faiths to form the Little tradition, parallel to the Greater traditions at a nationalistic level. During riots, or upheavals on the scale of Partition, it is this neighbourliness that functions to develop a larger understanding beyond trivial differences over beef consumption, wearing a beard, or putting vermilion on the forehead, and propels people to a larger faith in humanity, where all are one and the same, sharing essential repertoires of love and peace.

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References Bhadra, Gautam. ‘The Mentality of Subalternity.’ Ed. Ranajit Guha. A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986–1995. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1997. Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publishers. 1988. —. In an Antique Land. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. 1992. —. The Hungry Tide. New York: Harper Collins. 2004. Islam, Mazharul. The Theoretical Study of Folklore. Dhaka: Bangla Academy. 1998. Kakar, Sudhir. The Colours of Violence, New Delhi: Penguin Books. 1995. —. Culture and Psyche. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1997. Nandy, Ashis. Time Warps. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2002.

CHAPTER NINE MAPPING KARACHI: POST-1971 PAKISTAN AND AMNESIAC NARRATIVES OF NATIONAL UNITY IN KAMILA SHAMSIE’S KARTOGRAPHY ARNAB K. SINHA

As the title of my paper indicates, there are two issues in Kamila Shamsie’s novel Kartography (2002) that I am interested in dealing with. The first issue relates to the field of geography, because one concern of geographers is to locate places around the world and represent them in the form of symbols on maps. Cartography, or the practice of drawing maps, is the job of geographers. The second aspect I want to discuss in this paper relates to history, because Shamsie’s novel narrativizes the socio-political situation in Pakistan during the 1980s, but constantly refers to the past, especially the year 1971, when Pakistan split into two parts. Thus there is an attempt to read the present turmoil through the memories of the nation’s past. In fact, the two issues are linked. In this paper I will attempt to read Kartography from the point of view of two central characters in the novel, Karim and Raheen, who are constantly engaged in the process of locating themselves in the city of Karachi, where frequent acts of ethnic violence are creating an environment of tension and distrust. Within this sociopolitical turmoil, the two children, Karim and Raheen, develop a strong bond, unaware that their communal lineage is different. Though they have both lived in the city of Karachi since birth, Karim’s perception of, and relationship with, the city is remarkably different from that of Raheen. Karim’s desire to become a cartographer is crucial, because the art of mapmaking involves a constant negotiation with, and spatial perception of, a particular location that a cartographer intends to represent on a map. In the first section of this paper, cartography will be considered, and the primary focus will be on the interface of place and human subjectivity.

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As the title indicates, Shamsie’s novel is about cartography. But there is a significant deviation from the spelling ‘cartography’, as the first letter in the title of the novel is ‘K’ instead of ‘C’. This use of a deviant spelling intrigues us. Is it a strategy to attract attention, or a reference to a deviant kind of cartographic expression that is manifest in the novel? We may get some idea of this deviant cartography if we study Karim’s knowledge of map-making. Karim’s passion for becoming a mapmaker is a childhood ambition. When Uncle Asif asks him about his plans to take over his family’s linen business, Karim resolutely states, ‘I’m not joining the family business. I’m going to be a map maker’ (23). Karim’s fascination with studying maps is understood by his childhood friend Raheen the first time she opens a big atlas before Karim. The atlas, showing maps of different places around the world, appears to Karim ‘like a giant jigsaw, the world’. In the atlas, as Karim perceives it, all the places are connected: ‘See: Pakistan connects to Iran which connects to Turkey which connects to Bulgaria which connects to Yugoslavia which connects to Austria which connects to France’ (26). There are land-routes or sea-routes from Pakistan to any country in the world. So, if the continuous link of countries from Pakistan to England breaks because a blue sea appears on the map between England and France, he finds a sea-route to England from Pakistan. He is reading the map from a traveller’s perspective. Seeing the world map from a migratory perspective, his notion of cartography assumes a different dimension in the text. For Karim, different places on the world map are like nodal points that form a vast network of connected cities. Instead of looking at his nation from a territorialized perspective, Karim locates Pakistan by linking it with other nations, such as Turkey, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. This view contradicts the idea of territoriality that a map usually foregrounds. Karim’s perspective can be explained in the light of Arjun Appadurai’s concept of ‘ethnoscape’. Appadurai introduces this new concept with reference to the contemporary modes of migration in a highly globalized world order, where the pattern of movement of people across the globe has remarkably changed, especially due to advances in the fields of telecommunication and technology. Defining the term ‘ethnoscape’, Appadurai states, ‘By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree’ (33). The ‘moving groups and individuals’ that Appadurai refers to are constantly changing places, and their notion of the ‘imagined worlds’ is at odds with

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the territorialized idea of the ‘imagined community’ which critics such as Anderson have theorized (33). Thus, Karim’s perception of cartography situates him in the ‘ethnoscape’ as he adopts a typical migratory perspective to construct his imagined world. In the novel there is a hand-drawn map of the city of Karachi which is drawn by Karim, and interestingly this map carries a different cartographical outlook. Instead of drawing a map defining the territorial boundaries of different places in the city, Karim’s map evokes a deterritorialized landscape. The map carries his subjective understanding of the city and here again his traveller’s instinct plays a vital role in shaping the contours of the map. In Karim’s map, the landscape of Karachi appears in the form of a road that begins at Karim’s home on 26th Street and ends at the airport. There are junctions on this road which connect to important locations in the city. The Mohatta Palace is linked to Hatim Alvi Road, the Sind Club is situated on the right side of the Abdullah Hasoon Road, and the famous Teen Talwar monument is located on the right side of Khayaban-e-Iqbal Road. Such a cartographic representation of the city is unique, as Karim seems to study Karachi while travelling from his home to the airport. The emphasis on travel is emphatic: his map begins at home and ends at the airport, indicating an entry into the city and also a possible exit. Karim’s hand-drawn map reinforces the migratory perspective. There are also issues related to ethnicity and violence that elucidate the uniqueness of Karim’s perception of Karachi. The central question that arises at this point is: what propels Karim to perceive Karachi from a migratory perspective? The answer lies in his parental roots. Karim’s father, Ali, who belongs to Pakistan, had married a Bangladeshi woman, Maheen. The marriage of Ali and Maheen occurred in 1971, when, due to the impending Indo-Pakistan war, Bengalis in Pakistan were maltreated by the Pakistanis. In this scenario, Maheen had to marry a loyal Pakistani native, Ali, compromising her love for Zafar, who was considered ‘a traitor’ and a ‘Bingo lover’ (308). Zafar later married Yasmin, who became the parents of Karim’s friend, Raheen. As children born in the post-1971 era in Pakistan, Karim and Raheen come to know about their parental identities as they grow up, and this knowledge makes Karim aware of the fact that he is a hybrid child, with both Pakistani and Bangladeshi cultural roots. Karim associates himself with the ‘muhajir’1 community in Pakistan, which consists of those people who 1

In her article, Caroline Herbert succinctly defines the term ‘muhajir’, and also gives a brief history of the muhajir community: ‘The term muhajir refers to those who migrated from India to the newly created Pakistan, but has special significance for Urdu speakers in Karachi, to which a substantial proportion of

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migrated to Karachi from India after 1971. In that period, two Pakistani leaders, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zia-ul-Haq, attempted to build a Pakistan based on the idea of an Islamic nation state. However, this process of nation building was detrimental to the muhajir community. Under Bhutto and Haq, the immigrant Muslim communities suffered, as the construction of a homogeneous Pakistani national identity required the suppression of culturally diverse ethnic identities (Caroline Herbert 160). In this context, the city of Karachi assumed an important geopolitical significance, because, according to Herbert, Karachi became a city of ethnically diverse people and during the 1980s the breeding-ground of ethnic war: However, attempts to suppress cultural difference in favour of a narrative of a united national identity that elides the loss of Bangladesh failed to prevent the re-emergence of ethnic and regional tensions and, since the 1980s, Karachi has become a particularly contested site for competing cultural claims between the Sindhi and muhajir communities, claims that are themselves legacies of Partition. (Caroline Herbert 160)

In this context, we may again refer to Arjun Appadurai’s book, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), in which, while discussing ‘ethnic implosions’, the author warns of the inadequacy of reading the nation through a primordialist perspective, especially where ethnic violence is a frequent phenomenon. He cites the example of the city of Karachi to elucidate his point: As a city, Karachi is a depressingly forceful example of the sort of urban warfare... which produces locality under conditions of everyday terror and armed battle. Since the mid-1980s, the MQM (Urdu speaking muhajirs), which began as a fruit of the sense of shared grievance among migrants to Pakistan from Eastern India, has itself become deeply divided, and its leadership now functions in exile in England. It is thus an excellent example of a movement that is diasporic, transnational and anti-state without demanding national autonomy. (152)

Thus, Karim’s hand-drawn map carries all the anxieties and tension existing in a post-1971 muhajir self that negotiates between national and ethnic political forces. The lack of boundaries in his map reflects the muhajirs moved. While muhajir communities dominated government in the early years of independence, perceived cultural and economic marginalization by the Bhutto and Zia regimes, and the ‘Punjabization’ of the state, have led to the emergence of a muhajir nationalist movement in Karachi, and to violent confrontations between muhajir, Sindhi, and Pathan communities’ (160).

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deterritorialized self of Karim, which is engaged in a continuous process of self-definition. Like a muhajir who migrates from his original home to an alien place, Karim’s map is evocative of an exile’s perspective. Caroline Herbert’s article, ‘Lyric maps and the legacies of 1971 in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography’ analyzes Karim’s map from a different perspective. She addresses it as a ‘lyric map’,2 because throughout Kartography Shamsie refers to the melodious elegies written by the Punjabi poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, which help Karim express his sorrowful aspect. Herbert writes: Karim’s hand-drawn map offers a similar attempt to introduce exile as a constitutive experience of post-1971 identity. It is a representation of the city space as a site of memory that speaks to the narrative discontinuities of Pakistani history and draws upon Faiz’s ambivalent figuring of the lyric self, where the self is in constant motion and exile... (165)

Karim’s map seems to dislodge the homogeneous nationalist narrative that Bhutto and Haq attempted to forge in the minds of Pakistanis. The amorphous nature of his map is indicative of a kind of protest inherent in Karim’s ethnic identity. In their political enterprise to create an Islamic nation-state, Bhutto and Haq attempted to popularize the notion of national unity, by making citizens forget the loss of Bangladesh. The ethnic identity of the muhajirs was not taken into consideration in this popular rhetoric of the unity of Pakistan, which ultimately led to numerous acts of ethnic violence in Karachi. The city of Karachi assumed great significance because it was the adopted home of many war refugees and exiles.

2

The concept of the ‘lyric maps’ that Herbert discusses in the article is unique. Karim’s effort to draw a map of Karachi is based on a negotiation of national and ethnic identities. Karim’s fascination for maps and his love for Faiz’s elegies are reflective of an attempt to build a differential subjectivity that tends to show the rift between national narratives and ethnically-diverse mini-narratives. Caroline Herbert elaborates the concept of ‘lyric maps’ by pointing out the emotive aspect of Karim’s maps that seem to connect with the elegiac tone in Faiz’s poetry: Karim’s cartographic explorations of his post-1971 identity echo and draw upon the negotiations of post-Partition subjectivity found in Faiz’s work. His maps re-genre these earlier Urdu poems to produce what I call ‘lyric maps’ of Karachi. The fusing of two non-narrative forms – the map and the lyric poem – enables an articulation of post-Bangladesh Pakistani subjectivity which complicates narratives that censor 1971 in order to construct a continuity between the nation’s founding values and its contemporary identity. (164–65)

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Shamsie critiques this notion of forgetfulness by presenting an interesting incident in Mehmoodabad, where Karim, when speaking to a muhajir, introduces himself as a muhajir, and states that over the years since Partition the muhajirs have learned to ‘forget’ their past (176). Karim’s sympathy for this muhajir, who has become a car thief in order to survive in a nation where the government has practised a discriminatory policy to marginalize the muhajirs, illustrates the operation of ‘historical amnesia’ – an idea used by Ali Behdad in his book A Forgetful Nation (2005) to critique the basis of American national mythology. Behdad uses the term to highlight the operation of the violent politics of historical forgetting in order to exclude American immigrants from the nation’s imaginary: I argue that historical amnesia toward immigration is of paramount importance in the founding of the United States as a nation. As I use the term, the notion of amnesia is meant to signify a form of disavowal that entails a negative acknowledgement of what is historically and collectively repressed. (Preface xii)

Caroline Herbert substantiates this issue of a forgetfulness or amnesia that is deeply political in nature: What Kartography seems to call for is what Derrida might term an attempt to ‘give place to another peace, without forgetting, without amnesty’, a work of reconciliation that refuses to ‘forgive’ or attribute a final ‘meaning’ to the past in the service of amnesiac narratives of national unity. (171)

Karim’s map is, therefore, highly critical of the homogenizing tendency apparent in different master narratives of national unity.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. London: University of Minnesota Press. 1996. Behdad, Ali. A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States. London: Duke University Press.2005. Herbert, Caroline. ‘Lyric maps and the legacies of 1971 in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47. 2 (2011): 159–172. Accessed September 1, 2015. doi: 10.1080/17449855.2011.557188. Shamsie, Kamila. Kartography. London: Bloomsbury, 2002.

PART III: UNDERSTANDING BORDER

CHAPTER TEN FRONTIERS AND BOUNDARIES: MAPPING THE TRAJECTORIES OF SOCIAL MOBILITY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN PRE-MODERN BENGAL ANIKET TATHAGATA CHHETRY

Introduction This paper aims to explore the notion of frontiers and their conceptualization in the historical discourse. For the purpose of this paper, I will examine the dynamics of the Bengal frontier and argue that this frontier was a fluid spatial unit operating through a process of interaction between the diverse forces that constituted frontiers. Building on Eaton’s argument of multiple frontiers, this paper looks into the notion of a Brahmanical frontier in Bengal and how such a frontier operated through an interaction of Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical forces. The second part of the paper focuses on the expansion of this Brahmanical frontier and the resultant widening of the social base of Brahmanism, allowing a reformulation of social identities within frontier society. The new social identities created were very closely linked to agrarian activities and contributed significantly to stimulating agrarian development throughout Bengal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This paper takes the region of Western Bengal as the area of study; more precisely, the region known as Rarh in Bengal. According to Kanai Gopal Bagchi, Rarh was the large region lying to the east of Bhagirathi, while Eaton locates it to the west of the Padma-Meghna river system. From the census of 2001, the main districts comprising Rarh seem to be Bankura, Bardhaman, Birbhum, Medinipur, Hugli, and Howrah. The district of Purulia was added to this portion of Rarh only in the 1950s, so I will exclude it from this discussion.

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From the world of goddesses to that of men: The growth of Brahmanism in Bengal Bengal did not belong to the core area of Brahmanism. One sees this reflected in a late Vedic text recording the eastward movement of an IndoAryan king and Agni, the Vedic god of fire. In this legend, Agni refuses to cross the Gandak River in Bihar, since the areas to the east – eastern Bihar and Bengal – were considered ritually unfit for the performance of Vedic sacrifices. However, the slow eastward movement of Brahmanism did occur. Brahmanic priests, despite taboos about residing in ‘unclean’ lands to the east, seized the initiative and settled amidst Bengal’s indigenous peoples from at least the fifth century A.D. The diffusion of Brahmanical culture in Bengal becomes clearer from the Gupta period. In the post-Gupta period, the influence of Brahmanism had begun to expand in Bengal at a much quicker pace. But the whole of Bengal did not witness the spread of Brahmanism at the same time. A sixth-century inscription of Vijayasena and a seventh-century inscription of Jayanaga record that Brahmins were being established in the Rarh region of Bengal. Similar information may be obtained for central and eastern Bengal. The process of Brahmanization continued with the establishment of the Pala and Sena periods. The Senas actually carried with them a deep sense of the establishment and consolidation of Brahmanical institutions in Bengal. At around this period, Bengal witnessed the formation of the Upapuranas or, as Kunal Chakroborty calls them, the Bengal Puranas. These Upapuranas were overwhelmingly regional in their concern, catering for local requirements. According to Hazra, a view also accepted by Chakroborty, most of these Upapuranas were composed in Bengal, which was a region peripheral to the Brahmanical sphere of influence. The prime thrust of the Bengal Puranas was to create an image of supremacy for the Brahmans, which would then be used to justify several rights and privileges for this Brahmanical community. So the Brahmans were declared gods on earth and entitled to unconditional veneration. Their propitiation was deemed necessary for the stability of the universe. Land was considered the greatest gift to the Brahmins, and the state was constantly urged to protect this gifted land lest they be visited with divine wrath or – worse still – untold sufferings in the after-life. In the Brahmanical view, monarchy was the most desirable form of government, and many Bengal Puranas described the king as the greatest of all to whom the subjects owed their allegiance. The idea was to establish a tacit alliance between kings and Brahmans, where the former

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would guarantee the superior rights of the Brahmins and protect their grants, while the latter would legitimize the kings’ rule by buttressing their authority. All this was part of a strategy aimed at creating a society that would maintain the influence and pre-eminence of the Brahmans over large sections of society. However, despite the growing influence of Brahmanism in Bengal, the very fact that Brahmanism was a late entrant meant it had to compete with already entrenched non-Brahmanical practices. The popularity of nonBrahmanical practices had the potential to disrupt Brahmanical attempts to establish their authority. According to Ludo Rocher, it was therefore imperative to bring non-Brahmanical groups within the Brahmanical sphere of influence, to counter their resistance. The Bengal Puranas were not only instruments for the propagation of Brahmanical ideals of social reconstruction aimed at maintaining the control of Brahmins over society, but also aimed at assimilating non-Brahmanical communities into the Brahmanical framework. However this task was not something that could be achieved in a few years. It was a long and slow process, and the tradition was carried forward by other groups of texts, prominent among them being the Mangalkavyas. The Mangalkavyas were instrumental in incorporating local non-Brahmanical deities and their ritual practices into the Brahmanical fold. This expanded the scope of Brahmanism, and contributed significantly towards the establishment of a Brahmanical social order. In Bengal, there was a predominance of goddess cults among nonBrahmanical groups from a very early period. For instance, the protoAustraloid tribal group of the Oraons, who occupied parts of Bengal and Bihar, worshipped a deity called Chandi. Sarat Chandra Roy pointed out that this deity was primarily a goddess of hunting, remarkable for her shape-shifting abilities. Chandi was represented by a stone carried by Oraon huntsmen to ensure success in the chase. The Brahmins were aware of such non-Brahmanical goddess traditions, and wanted to adopt these goddesses by transforming them into Brahmanical divinities, a process achieved through the elaboration of Sakta theology. Sakta theology readily allowed for the synthesis of various local goddess cults, which could then be identified as aspects of one great goddess – namely the Mahadevi –and this was reflected in the Mangalkavyas. .

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Frontiers as integrating spaces: Mangalkavyas and the Brahmanical frontier of Bengal Now we shift our discussion to the concept of frontiers. Boundaries have been defined as precisely demarcated lines separating adjacent political units. According to Anderson, boundaries mark a legal territory over which state sovereignty is full and evenly operative in every square centimetre. It has been argued that the early modern period saw this concept of boundary acquire a linear form, a distinction being drawn between modern boundaries and pre-modern frontiers. Abulafia argues that the medieval frontier was not a fixed, identifiable phenomenon, like a modern boundary, but more a zone of polarities that acted as a ‘mediating’ or ‘integrating’ factor between diverse groups constituting this frontier. Peter Sahlins does not deny the dualism inherent in this distinction between boundary and frontier, though he criticizes the widespread assumption of perceiving an evolutionary movement, necessary and irreversible, from a sparsely-settled, ill-defined spatial unit to an uncontested, mathematically-precise line of demarcation. According to him, this ignores two critical dimensions: that the zonal character of a frontier persists after the delimitation of a boundary line, and that the linear boundary is an ancient notion. The concept of a frontier seems to be more along the lines of a zone characterized by interaction between diverse forces. This interaction could be between different subsistence patterns, religious systems, political ideas, or other forces. Thus these frontiers were never fixed or closed, but rather fluid and porous entities. Looking at some of the different understandings of a frontier, we find that Gommans presents all of South Asia as a frontier that involves interaction between the arid zones of Saharasia and the humid areas of monsoon Asia. This interaction resulted in a steady flow of people, goods, and ideas across the frontier society. Consequently, the frontier witnessed breath-taking changes, such as the migration of hordes of warrior groups into new areas and the formation of new political dominions. Leach conceived frontiers in similar terms. For him ‘Burma’ implied the frontier region lying between India and China. The frontier was marked by interactions of the local with both Indian and Chinese elements. The political systems of Burma were a unique product of this interplay with Indian and Chinese political structures. However, such an influence is never an indiscriminate diffusion of ideas. Politics, ecology, kinship, and economics provide in some degree separate and separable frames of reference.

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From the discussion above, we have some idea of the way frontiers have been conceived in historical studies. Bengal’s history has also been unique because of its frontier character. Eaton’s study is remarkable for its introductory overview of this Bengal frontier. Eaton has argued that Bengal possessed not one, but multiple, frontiers: x A political frontier x An agrarian frontier, which distinguished settled agricultural communities and the forested land– Bengal’s natural state before humans attacked it with axe and plough. x An Islamic frontier, which distinguished Muslim from non-Muslim communities. All these frontiers operated through a process of interaction between the diverse forces that constituted them. When Brahmanism entered Bengal, it encountered well-entrenched, non-Brahmanical groups, and it is possible to conceive of a Brahmanical frontier for Bengal too. This Brahmanical frontier saw a constant interaction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical forces that resulted in the assimilation of nonBrahmanical deities and ritual practices into the Brahmanical pantheon. This assimilation was reflected in the textual traditions of the Upapuranas as well as in the Mangalkavyas. It might be pertinent to give an example, to make our understanding of this process clearer. One of the most popular Mangalkavyas was the Chandimangal, dedicated to the goddess Mangalchandi, or Chandi. The story of Chandimangal was written over centuries by various authors, the most popular by Mukundaram Chakroborty. No reference to any such goddess is found in the Vedas or in the two epics. There was a cursory reference to Mangalchandi in the Brahmavaiavarta Purana, part of the Bengal Puranas. But the most important depiction of this deity comes in the Chandimangal kavyas, where she is represented as the tutelary deity of hunters. She is portrayed as the goddess of animals, dwelling in the forests. In the Chandimangal, a good hunt is next to impossible without the blessing of Chandi, as poor Kalketu realized through his trials in the forest. The kind of goddess conceived is very close to the goddess worshipped by the many tribal communities of Bengal. As mentioned previously, the Oraons worshipped a goddess also named Chandi, who was also a hunting deity whose blessings were essential for a hunt. Even the Mundas who live in the Bengal-Chottanagpur tract worship a goddess known as Chandi-Bonga, another deity associated with hunting.

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Looking at some of the other features mentioned in the Chandimangal, we find that pork and wine, neither of which were sanctioned in traditional Brahmanical religion, were associated with Mangalchandi worship, and were offered to the goddess herself. These all seem to point towards a nonBrahmanical antecedent for the goddess invoked in the Chandimangal. In the Chandimangal, Mangalchandi was not simply confined to being a deity of the wild, but was regarded as being a manifestation of Durga herself – the high goddess of Brahmanism. At a crucial juncture in the narrative, on Kalketu’s request, Chandi reveals herself to him in her true form as Durga in her ‘Mahisasurmardini’ avatar, and is described as being accompanied by Kartik, Ganesha, Saraswati, Laxmi, and her husband Shiva. Thus Mangalchandi presents a perfect example of the kind of appropriation undertaken through the Mangalkavyas. Here, a deity with clearly non-Brahmanical antecedents is taken and identified with a deity integral to the Brahmanical tradition, thereby allowing Brahmanism to subsume within itself such local cults.

Peasantization, social mobility, and economic development in Rarh The accommodative strategy of Brahmanism allowed the appropriation of deities of non-Brahmanical origin and their identification with the high gods of the Brahmanical world, a function served by the Mangalkavya narratives, providing Brahmanism with an opportunity not only to interact with non-Brahmanical groups, but also to expand its own scope. In addition, most of Bengal at this point of time had come to accept the importance of agriculture. Agriculture was eulogized as an occupation fit for the celestial beings. We have references to a deity called Dharma, extremely popular in rural Bengal, who was primarily seen as an agrarian deity. Details of agricultural operations and crop types featured prominently in the liturgical texts dedicated to Dharma. These resulted in agriculture being perceived as an essential component of a ‘high cultural tradition’. This encouraged many of the ritually low-ranked social groups who had just been incorporated within the Brahmanical social order to take up the plough in order to associate themselves with this high cultural tradition and reach the status of ‘clean’ agricultural castes, facilitating an upward movement for them. This in turn initiated a process of peasantization that had a great impact upon the political economy of medieval Bengal. A look at a few examples will help us better understand the dynamics of this process. One important group in Bengal was the Kaivarttas, who were Jele, or fishermen, to begin with, but from the sixteenth century

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many of them abandoned their ancestral occupation to take up agriculture under the name of Hele Kaivarttas. Several historians regard the Kaivarttas as one of the indigenous, autochthonous groups of Bengal that were drawn into the Brahmanical fold. Many resorted to agriculture to achieve a more elevated social position. According to the census of 1911, there were two main subdivisions of the Kaivarttas: Hele and Jele, the former given to agriculture, the latter to fishing. Later, in 1921, the Hele Kaivarttas secured for themselves a separate class classification. The Mahishyas, considering themselves separate from the Jele Kaibarttas, enjoyed a higher caste status and claimed descent from the Kshatriyas. It was not abnormal for such castes to construct fictive genealogies tracing their heritage to ancient times. Similar is the case of the Sadgop agriculturists, who broke away from the pastoral Gops. According to Hitesranjan Sanyal, the Gops split in the mid-sixteenth century into the Pallab Gops, who were engaged in their traditional pastoral activities, and Hallik Gops or Sadgops, engaged in agriculture. The Pallab Gops were considered a ritually low caste because of their association with an impure profession, and therefore when the Sadgops broke away from the parent group, it was with their intention to elevate their position to that of a clean agricultural caste and proclaim themselves as different from the other Gops. Chudamanidas, one of the biographers of Chaitanya, refers to this process when he talks of the Gops having taken up agriculture and becoming clean Sudras, indicating that their emergence as a peasant caste could have dated from around the mid-sixteenth century. Even in Mukunda’s Chandimangal we have reference to two distinct groups of Gops, one engaged in pastoral activities, and the other separate from them and purely agrarian in nature. The Hele Kaivarttas and the Sadgops emerge with time as two of the largest Hindu agricultural communities in the Rarh region, as is evident from the figures regarding the numerical presence by district of these two caste groups in various parts of Rarh in C. F. McGrath’s district census. According to this census, Sadgops in the districts of Burdwan, Birbhum, and Bankura numbered1,09,630, 1,85,804, and 17,971 respectively, while the Chashi Kaibartta in these three districts numbered11,081, 56,702, and 12,644. Both castes were listed as agricultural, and constituted the numerically dominant peasant groupings in these districts. From Risley’s account, we discover that both Jele and Hele Kaivarttas worship goddesses such as Sitala and Chandi. R.M.Sarkar’s village study of rural Bengal indicates that both Gops and Sadgops participate in the annual worship of Manasa in the Metela village. In another Mangalkavya

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narrative, the Manasamangal dedicated to Manasa, the earliest worshippers of Manasa are also seen to be from the fishing and cow-herding community. Based on these clues, it would not be illogical to argue that groups such as the Kaivarttas and Gops belonged to the autochthonous non-Brahmanical communities of Bengal, and constituted the original worshippers of deities such as Manasa, Chandi, and others. However the appropriation of Manasa and Chandi (among others) into the Brahmanical pantheon could have been instrumental in expanding the influence of the Brahmanical order over these groups, bringing them within the ambit of that order. The logical extension of this process then saw a section from these Kaivarttas breaking away from the parent group and taking up agriculture, elevating their ritual and economic status. After resorting to agriculture, they adopted the name Chasi Kaivarttas and considered themselves a higher caste group, separate from the Jele Kaivarttas. This process of peasantization has been traced to around the middle of the sixteenth century, which coincides with Mughal expansion in the Rarh region. By 1583, the Mughals were entrenched in this region of Bengal, while the eastern half of the region continued to pose problems for them. With a large section of people resorting to agriculture, new land was being brought under cultivation, which contributed to the expansion of the agrarian frontier of Rarh. Examining the figures given by Richard Eaton, we find that the total Jamaa figures for the various quadrants of Bengal for the year 1595, when compared with the land revenue demand from the same area for the year 1659, reveals that the south-west quadrant of Bengal witnessed an increase in land revenue demand from 2,258,138 to 3,482,127 in this period. The south-west quadrant included the Mughal sarkars of Tanda (Udambar), Sharifabad, Satgaon, Sulaimanabad, and Mandaran. These Mughal sarkars in the south-west quadrant roughly corresponded with the areas of modern-day Burdwan, Bankura, Hooghly, Howrah, and adjacent areas – in short, most of the Rarh region. The revenue demand represents the government’s estimate of the land’s income-generating capacity. The general picture of the revenue administration system in Bengal, as argued by Irfan Habib, is that the land revenue was taken in fixed amounts from the Zamindars, without much assessment of the revenue-yielding capacity of the land. This in most cases was less than what the land could afford. According to Risala-i-Zirat, this system was instituted in the time of Akbar, and was not revised by regular re-assessment. In 1648, Shah Shuja, the governor of Bengal, added new territories to the existing sarkars in the south-west quadrant, and the addition of revenue from these new territories could have resulted in increases in the

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revenue demand for this quadrant. Furthermore, some increase in the revenue demanded was also caused by a new hastabud valuation of the existing sarkars. However, the increase in the jamaa figures for the southwest quadrant of Bengal, as documented by Eaton, could also indicate an intensification of agricultural activities here, owing to the process of peasantization stimulating agrarian growth. It is possible that the Mughal authorities realized that the Zamindars would take full advantage of this agrarian growth while collecting land revenue, but pay the state the same fixed amount – much less than what was actually being produced. To prevent intermediaries from eating into this surplus, and profiting from the agrarian boom, the state could have revised the revenue demand from this region. The narrative of an agrarian boom seems to be further strengthened by the fact that, by the late sixteenth century, Rarh became one of the important centres of grain production and was producing so much surplus grain that rice became an important export crop. From the port of Satgaon in the west, and subsequently from Hooghly, rice was exported throughout the Indian Ocean to points as far west as Goa and as far east as the Moluccas in South-East Asia. Caesar Frederick, who visited Bengal, said between 30 and 50 ships left Satgaon every year, filled with rice, sugar, lac, and long pepper, indicating the vibrant trade that was in progress. Rice now joined cotton textiles, Bengal’s principal export commodity since at least the late fifteenth century, and a major one since at least the tenth. This agricultural boom was not just restricted to Rarh; nearly all of Bengal witnessed an agrarian and manufacturing expansion in the period under discussion, which increased Bengal’s overland and maritime trade, linking it ever more tightly with the international mercantile scenario. One consequence of the vibrant trading scenario was that the expanding trade further stimulated agrarian output, but more importantly allowed large quantities of silver to be brought into Bengal in the form of bullion. Silver entered Bengal over land via Tibet and other bordering kingdoms, as well as through maritime coastal trade with Arakan, Burma, and the Malay Straits. Most of the silver originated in the silver-mining regions of north-eastern Burma and adjacent Yunnan. Also after1590 silver from Spanish America was being imported into Bengal to pay for Bengal exports. The Portuguese factor, Antonio Dinis, wrote that the kingdom of Pegu produced a great amount of silver that was sent to Bengal. In Bengal, production of agricultural and manufactured goods, as well as the population, grew at levels high enough to absorb the expanding money supply caused by this influx of silver, so preventing any inflationary tendencies. Thus within Bengali society there was a continuous circulation

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of wealth, resulting in high levels of monetization, also represented in many of the Mangalkavya narratives.

Conclusion In this paper I have attempted to show the process of interaction within the Bengal frontier, by which non-Brahmanical groups were assimilated into the Brahmanical fold, a process that had clear economic consequences for the region of Bengal. These groups often adopted agriculture as their main economic activity, primarily to elevate their ritual status, because of the high cultural traditions that came to be associated with agriculture during this period. The movement of large groups towards agriculture evident from the census studies mentioned in this paper not only brought large tracts of land under cultivation, but also resulted in an agrarian boom during this period, marked by high agricultural productivity. Rice emerged as the principal crop, and also began to be exported to other parts of the world from Bengal’s ports, which in turn facilitated the influx of silver from distant regions into Bengal, ushering in a period of monetization and the commercialization of Bengali society.

Bibliography Abulafia, David and Nora Brendt. Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, Burlington.2002. Anderson, Malcolm. Frontiers: Territory, State formation in Modern World. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1996. Arsaratnam, S. ‘Rice Trade in Eastern India: 1650–1740’. Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988):531–49. Bagchi, Kanangopal. The Ganga Delta. Calcutta: University of Kolkata. 1944. Chakroborty, Mukunda. Candimangal. Edited by Sukumar Sen. Delhi: Sahitya Academy. 2007. Chakroborty, Kunal. Religious Process: The Puranas and the making of a Regional Tradition. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2001. Chowdhury, Sushil. Trade and Commercial Organisation in Bengal: 1650–1720. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay.1975. Dewell, John. ‘Cowries and Coins: the Dual Monetary System of the Bengal Sultanate’. IESHR 47, 1 (2010): 63–106. Eaton, Richard M. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1993.

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Gommans, Jos. ‘Silent Frontiers of South Asia’. Journal of World History 3, no .1 (1998): 1–23. Habib, Irfan. The Agrarian System of Mughal India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.1991. Hasan, Aziza: ‘The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal empire and Prices in India During the 16th and 17th Centuries’. IESHR6 (1969): 85– 116. Hunter, W.W. Statistical Account of Bengal, Vol. 4. London: Trubner and Co. 1877. Labianca, Ostein. ‘“Great and Little Traditions”: A Framework for studying the Cultural Interaction through the Ages in Jordan’. Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on the History and Archaeology of Jordan, Petra, Jordan. 2004. Leach, E.R. ‘The Frontiers of Burma’. Comparative Studies in History and Society 3, 1(1960):49–68. Mahalanobis, P.C. ‘Analysis of Race Mixture in Bengal’. Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, 23(1925):301–33. Manna, Sibendu. Mother Goddess Candi: Its Socio-Ritual Impact on Folk Life. Calcutta: Pustak Mahal. 2004. Moreland, W.H. and Yusuf Ali, A. ‘Akbar’s Land-Revenue System as described in the “Ain-i-Akbari”’. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, London. 1918. Moreland, W.H. The Agrarian System of Moslem India, Cambridge: Heffer. 1929. O’Malley, L. S. S. Bengal District Gazetteers: Hooghly. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot. 1921. Prakash, Om. ‘The Indian Maritime Merchant, 1500–1800’. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. 47, 3(2004):435–57. —. The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal: 1630– 1720. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1985. Risley, Sir Herbert H. The Tribes and Castes of Bengal: Ethnographic Glossary. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press. 1891. Redfield, Robert. The Little Community and Peasant Society and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1989. Rocher, Ludo. The Puranas: A History of Indian Literature, vol. II. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasowitz. 1986. Roy, Sarat Chandra. Oraon Religion and Customs. Delhi: Gian Publishing House. 1985. Sahlins, Peter. Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in Pyrenees. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1989. Sanyal, Hitesranjan. Social Mobility in Bengal. Calcutta: Papyrus. 1981.

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Sarkar, R.M. Regional Cults and Rural Traditions: An Interacting Pattern of Divinity and Humanity in Rural Bengal. Delhi: Inter-India Publications. 1986. Sircar, Jawahar. The Construction of Hindu Identity in Medieval Western Bengal. Kolkata: Institute of Development Studies Kolkata. 2005. Subhramanyam, Sanjay. ‘Precious metal flows and prices in western and southern Asia, 1500–1750: Some comparative and conjectural aspects’. in Money and the Market in India: 1100–1700, 1994. Edited by Sanjay Subhramanyam, 186-218. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER ELEVEN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NATIONALISM AND THE ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT: THE INDIAN EXPERIENCES AND OUTLOOK AVIJIT SUTRADHAR

Nationalism is essentially a group memory of past achievements, traditions, and experiences, and nationalism is stronger today than it has ever been… Yet whenever a crisis has arisen nationalism has emerged again and dominated the scene, and people have sought comfort and strength in their old traditions. One of the remarkable developments of the present age has been rediscovery of the past and of the nation. –Jawaharlal —Nehru: The Discovery of India

In India, nationalism emerged and developed mainly as a political movement. Indian planners and political leaders always considered the importance of nationalism to be of vital importance for nation building. Nation building refers to a profound socio-political revolution involving a radical, qualitative transformation in the social and economic sphere. The process of nation building would be a myth without the development of ‘nationalism’, or the feeling of a unity of sensibility because – as an ultimate result of the process of nation building – the realization of the ideal of national integration is highly expected, and to achieve this goal, the development of nationalism, or ‘we feeling’, is essential. According to A. R. Desai, nationalism is ‘a movement of various classes and groups comprising a nation, attempting to remove all economic, political, social and cultural obstacles which impede the realization of their aspiration’.1 Partha Chatterjee pronounced Indian nationalism to be anti-colonial nationalism. He claimed that Indian nationalism began in 1885, with the formation of the Indian National Congress (INC), and purely anti-colonial 1 Desai, A. R. 1960. Recent Trends in Indian Nationalism: Supplement to Social Background of Indian Nationalism, Popular Book Depot, p. 51.

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nationalism only commenced at the advent of the struggle for independence. Through anti-colonial nationalism, nationalist elites create their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society, before they begin their political struggle with the imperial power. Anti-colonial nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project – to fashion a ‘modern’ national culture that is nevertheless not Western – because it has unique and peculiar features developed on the foundations of indigenous culture.2 The Indian nationalist leaders felt that, during and after the struggle for Indian Independence, nationalism was essential for total emancipation from the remorseless construction of British colonialism, and that the enduring value of awakening nationalism would fuel the state-building and nation-building processes in a constructive way. Jawaharlal Nehru said: My reaction to India thus was often an emotional one, conditioned and limited in many ways. It took the form of nationalism. In the case of many people the conditioning and limiting factors are absent. But nationalism was and is inevitable in the India of my day; it is a natural and healthy growth.3

In twenty-first century India, political nationalism is facing serious challenges, due to the prevalent neo-liberal globalism, technological hegemonism, and widespread reliance upon internationalism. Consequently capitalism is gaining ground in India, and it is difficult to find any vestiges of pure socialism. However, the emerging anti-globalization movement, environmentalism, and ecologism are providing oxygen for socialism, while ethnic movements are emerging, based on regional nationalism.4 Traces of nationalism can even be found in the struggle for natural resources by traditional communities in the country. This paper explores how Indian nationalism is taking a distinct shape, influenced by globalization, and critically examines the nature of the anti-globalization movement in India. To modernize India, Nehru relied upon nationalism. However at one point in time Nehru distrusted– even fiercely criticized – nationalism. In Glimpses of World History he wrote: 2

Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, pp. 5–6. 3 Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1985. The Discovery of India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, p. 52. 4 Heywood, Andrew. 2007. Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 4th Edition, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 140 and 278.

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Chapter Eleven Nationalism is good in its place, but it is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian. It blinds us to many happenings and sometimes distorts the truth, especially when it concerns us or our country.5

Despite being an economic nationalist thinker, Nehru favoured internationalism. The fervour of Nehruvian economic nationalism is found in his famous dictum: ‘Who lives if India dies? Who dies if India lives?’6 Nehru was expecting harmony and an environment of cooperation and mutual understanding for the regular import and export, supply and exchange, of goods and information between developed and underdeveloped nation states. Therefore, for nation building, he acknowledged both nationalism and internationalism. During the Nehru era, the popular broadcasting of the song from the film Shree 420 (1955), ‘Mera jutaa hain japaanii, Yeh patluun inglistaanii, Sar peh laal topii russii, Phir bhi dil hainhindustanii’ (‘My shoes are imported from Japan, my pants have come from England, my red hat is from Russia but my heart remains Indian’), is overwhelming evidence of his strong belief in nationalism and internationalism.7 But Nehru felt that nationalism was not enough for the development of the country and its people. He argued for a synthesis between nationalism and the ideals of proletarianism and internationalism. Nehru wanted equilibrium in international politics and society and hence – without sacrificing national sentiments or nationalism, but denying narrow nationalism – he emphasized internationalism and international cooperation, peaceful co-existence and mutual understanding, to mitigate the tensions between nation states. In The Discovery of India Nehru wrote: Recent events all over the world have demonstrated that the notion that nationalism is fading away before the impact of internationalism and proletarian movements has little truth. It is still one of the most powerful urges that move a people, and round it cluster sentiments and traditions and a sense of common living and common purpose. While the intellectual strata of the middle classes were gradually moving away from nationalism, or so they thought, labour and proletarian movements, deliberately based on internationalism, were drifting towards nationalism.8

5

Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1934. Glimpses of World History, Lindsay Drummond, London, p. 694. 6 Young India, 3 April, 1930. 7 Metcalf, Barbara D. and Thomas R. Metcalf. 2012. A Concise History of Modern India, Cambridge University Press, New York, p. 237. 8 Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1985. op. cit., pp. 52–53.

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Under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian nationalism acquired a ‘polycentric’ character, because he had a romantic sympathy for his own nation as well as for other nations. Nehru supported internationalism for a political consensus between the politicians of other nations. To him, in international politics, no country is independent. He was in favour of allowing other nations to have access to India for the progress of the country, yet he was optimistic about the unencumbered existence of the nation state. He argued for non-interference in the sovereignty of other nations, and had respect for the national feeling of other nation states. His passionate love of internationalism paved the way for globalization in India. We are living in an epoch of globalization that endeavours to make the entire earth into a ‘global village’ and a ‘borderless world’. Today internationalism is much stronger than nationalism. With the triumph of internationalism, problems such as unequal exchange, the degradation of indigenous culture, a massive brain drain, and environmental crisis are experienced by Third World countries. India is no exception. The process of globalization started during the Nehru era. But globalization took huge steps after the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1991. Throughout the world, modern states, guided by the market system, link forward to profit and benefits, searching for suitable policies to capture the global market and produce selected commodities that have the greatest demand in the global market. To reach this goal, state authorities follow steps such as land acquisition in the name of ‘national interest’, and then transform the land and extract resources. These steps include the transformation of the agricultural sector into a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the transformation of forest land into an industrial estate or power generation centre, with the help of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on the one hand, and the use of natural resources such as water, forests, and minerals to produce commodities or generate power through modern technologies. Thus, under the combined forces of the state and the market, society grows helpless. New social movements are emerging as counterrevolutionary forces on behalf of civil society, raising the issue of the selfdefence of the community and society against the increasing expansion of state apparatuses, agencies of surveillance and social control.9 The anti-globalization movement has its roots in environmental and human rights movements based on the principles of non-violent direct action. This movement shares a structure based on small autonomous 9

Singh, Rajendra. 2001. Social Movements, Old and New: A Postmodernist Critique, Sage Publications, New Delhi, p. 99.

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groups, decision-making by consensus, and a style of protest that revolves around mass civil disobedience.10 Thus the anti-globalization movement has become part of new social movements. It is not a movement of a particular caste, class, or professional group. However its participants can be classified by the ideological position to which they adhere. Victimized farmers and tribals join the movement, raising agrarian principles (agrarianism), tribalism, and ethnic nationalism. These are ideologies that deal with the protection of farming rights, tribal solidarity, and local development. Human rights advocates and social activists participate in the movement, which favours feminism, localism, and multiculturalism. These are ideologies that support gender equality and justice, regional development, and ethnic identity and liberation. In inflicting havoc on multiple communities, corporate globalization inspires multiple resistances against its destructive character. This oppositional diversity can be found in indigenous movements, and in the movements of the unionists, farmers, environmentalists, and feminists who unite to resist globalization.11 Before Indian Independence, Nehru commented that the old order of ‘cottage industries’ was dead and its rebirth was not permitted by the British authorities, in the interest of British industry. In the same way, the old village system was also ended without the birth of a new village system.12 After independence, Nehru supported modern industrialization through technological development; to him, all these were required to accelerate socio-economic transformation. In a speech, he hailed big dams as ‘temples of modern India’. This aspiration instigated ideological conflict between Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru on the developmental paradigm. Gandhi wrote to Nehru delineating his aspirations for an independent India (5 October, 1945): I believe that, if India is to attain true freedom, and through India the world as well, then sooner or later we will have to live in villages – in huts, not in palaces. A few billion people can never live happily and peaceably in cities and palaces… My villages exist today in my imagination… No one will live indolently, nor luxuriously. After all this, I can think of many things which will have to be produced on a large scale. Maybe there will be railways, so also post and telegraph. What it will have and what it will not, I do not know, nor do I care. If I can maintain the essence, the rest will 10

Doyel, Timothy. 2005. Environmental Movements in Minority and Majority Worlds: A Global Perspective, Rutgers University Press, London, p. 163. 11 Curran, Giorel. 2007. 21st Century Dissent: Anarchism, Anti-Globalization and Environmentalism, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p. 52. 12 Nehru, Jawaharlal. 1942. Glimpses of World History, John Day Company, New York, pp. 421–423.

Twenty-first Century Nationalism and the Anti-globalization Movement 117 mean free facility to come and settle. And if I leave the essence I leave everything.13

After Independence, when Nehru was the national leader, he took many steps that were totally opposite to the Gandhian principles of development choices. As a result, a number of social movements emerged opposing the Nehruvian path of economic development. During the 1960s, Nehru observed that people were resisting the Sardar Saroar Dam project, following the Gandhian path: asserting their right to livelihood, the democratization of natural resources, and the preferred Gandhian model of economic development. Observing the social tension, Nehru in a speech on December 11, 1963 confessed that: These days I am increasingly thinking about Gandhi’s methods. The context in which I think of him may appear somewhat strange. Because I am an ardent supporter of modern industries and choose the best machines and the most efficient technology. Looking at the condition of the country today, however fast we may progress in the direction of an industrial era – and we will progress– yet, it will always be true that most of the people of the country will remain untouched by the progress. For a very long time the modern development will not benefit them. So we have to search for a different method of production in which all people can directly participate. It is possible that their tools may be inferior to modern technology, yet we will have to use these tools, otherwise these people will become unemployed. We will have to always remember this. We will have to plan for the extreme poor of the country and fully strive to remove their misery. Today I am endlessly worried about this fact, much troubled by it.14

During the Narmada struggle, the movement participants were following the Gandhian path of social resistance to stop the damming of the Narmada. Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) was a remarkable instance of a social movement against technological hegemonism, and this movement raised several questions about the modern economic developmental process. The strength of Narmada Bachao Andolan lay in the cooperative efforts of people belonging to different sections of

13 Cited in Baviskar, Amita. 1995. In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts Over Development in the Narmada Valley, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, p. 20. 14 Cited in Shah, Ashvin A. 1995. ‘A Technical Overview of the Flawed Sardar Sarovar Project and a Proposal for a Sustainable Alternative’ in William F. Fisher edited Toward Sustainable Development?: Struggling over India’s Narmada River, M. E. Sharpe, p. 365.

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society.15 Gandhian ideology and strategies motivated Narmada Bachao Andolan, as it had an abiding faith in the moral force of non-violent action. But once Medha remarked tiredly that ‘the days of moral pressure are gone’,16 the movement took a radical turn. At the beginning of twenty-first century, the Singur movement of West Bengal and the Anti-POSCO movement of Odisha became counterhegemonic forces against globalization. The Singur movement, in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, was a socio-political protest against the construction of the Tata Nano small car factory. The anti-POSCO movement organized socio-political resistance against the setting up of the Pohang Steel Company in the Jagatsingpur district of Odisha. These movements were basically new farmers’ movements raising the issues of livelihood security, environmental sustainability, and ecological justice. The protesters faced repressive measures from the state government, even though they followed the Gandhian path of non-violent, socio-political resistance. In both cases, the state government took steps to acquire private land for ‘national interest’, but the local people emphasized local interests and organized intensive protest movements that ultimately became critiques of modern economic developmental projects and demonstrated the conflict between nationalism, globalism, and localism. Both movements were anti-SEZ campaigns, and the protesters urged the abandonment of the huge economic developmental projects and eviction of multinationals such as Tata and POSCO. Because of the dissatisfaction of local people with the project site, the state governments of both West Bengal and Odisha ultimately abandoned the projects.17 In the era of twenty-first century globalization, political nationalism is waning due to the dependence on foreign money for the development of the country; however nationalism is growing due to the collective mobilization of people articulating local sentiments. Ethnic nationalism in particular has the potential to resist the negative forces of globalization.18 In north-east India, a number of movements have been organized against the construction of a large dam by many loosely-formed, nonparty15

Patkar, Medha. 1992. ‘The Strength of a People’s Movement’ (in conversation with Dunu Roy and Geeti Sen) in Geeti Sen edited, Indigenous Vision: Peoples of India Attitudes to the Environment, Sage Publications, New Delhi, pp. 284–285. 16 Baviskar, Amita. 1995. op. cit., p. 224. 17 This conclusion has been drawn after a location visit and interaction with the local people of the Singur block of the Hooghly District of West Bengal in June 2013, and the Kujang and Erasama blocks of the Jagatsingpur district of Odisha in January 2013. 18 Heywood, Andrew. 2007. op. cit., pp. 172–173.

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based organizations and cultural platforms. Two of these movements – the Pagladiya anti-dam movement of Assam, and the Tipaimukh anti-dam movement of Manipur and Mizoram – are pertinent examples in this discussion, because ethnic nationalism was closely linked to the mode of resistance. Together, these movements posed a serious challenge to technological determinism and expressed resentment about the diversion of natural resources. The proposed site of the Pagladiya dam project, in the Nalbari district of Assam, was multiracial, multi-religious, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and multicultural in its composition. Asamiyas, Bangalis of different castes, Nepalis, Santhals, Rabhas, and Bodos live together on the proposed site. However, the numerical strength of the Bodos is greater than that of the other communities. Cultivation is the main source of income for most of these communities. They have had a psychological relationship with their land from generation to generation, and were not willing to surrender their land for the dam project. The people of the locality mobilized themselves, irrespective of class, caste, and community, to save the sources of their livelihood.19 In the case of the Tipaimukh antidam movement, local tribals made it clear that the proposed area for the dam belongs to them and provides livelihood security for them, and that they have an intricate relationship with the natural environment. Local tribals organized social resistance against the dam, even using violent means. Hmars and Nagas were willing to sabotage the construction of the dam across the Barak River, in the state of Manipur. The armed wing of the Hmars declared they would never allow transfer of their beloved land in the name of national development. In reaction, on 28 July, 2008, the government of Manipur passed a resolution to militarize the dam site, deploying central and state security forces. Simultaneously, the government opened security posts to protect properties related to construction activities.20 On 18 July, 2009, the Hmar People’s Convention (Democratic) of Manipur stated that the proposed Tipaimukh project was a war imposed on the indigenous Hmars and other communities located upstream and downstream of the river. Their press release stated: …the rivers that nursed and fed our honored generations before shall continue to flow for all the generations to come. We cannot allow the rivers to be disturbed and are obligated to see that no outsiders, their forces 19 Hussain, Monirul. 2008. Interrogating Development: State, Displacement and Popular Resistance in North-East India, Sage Publications, New Delhi, p. 137. 20 Arora, Vibha and Ngamjahao Kipgen. 2012. ‘We can live without power, but we can’t live without our land: Indigenous Hmar Oppose the Tipaimukh Dam in Manipur’ in Sociological Bulletin, Vol. 61, No. 1, p. 125.

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There is no denying that the emerging anti-globalization movement has in many places hampered the process of modern economic development. The anti-globalization movement prescribes a Gandhian model of economic development which is eco-friendly, just as Mahatma Gandhi suggested creating village republics where industries would be developed on the basis of rural traditional technologies. Many Gandhian disciples viewed the Nehruvian model as environmentally destructive in nature, as Nehru supported huge industrialization, keeping in view the use of natural resources with modern technological assistance. The Gandhian model is based on enhanced biomass production and can be applied to all situations, from ecosystems to industrial societies. In contrast, the Nehruvian model of industrial development is relevant and suitable only to the industrial economic sector. J. C. Kumarappa claims that the Gandhian model of economic development is an ‘Economy of Permanence’ which leads to decentralized economic planning, whereas in the Nehruvian model, the rich may become richer and poor poorer.22 It is a relevant question which model of development should be preferred for the Indian economy: Gandhian or Nehruvian. If we follow the Gandhian model, it will take us to a romantic rural life, where livelihood is based on agriculture and industry without modern technology. Hence, the Gandhian or romantic version of environmentalism would face serious challenges from the supporters of modern developmentalism. By contrast, if we follow the Nehruvian model, most tribals and other marginalized communities would face several negative consequences, and consequently state versus people conflicts would continue.

21

Cited in Islam, Md Saidul. 2013. Development, Power and the Environment: Neoliberal Paradox in the Age of Vulnerability, Routledge, New York, p. 165. 22 Khoshoo, T. N. 1999. ‘Gandhian Environmentalism’ in George Alfred James edited, Ethical Perspectives on Environmental Issues in India, A. P. H. Publishing Corporation, New Delhi, p. 277.

CHAPTER TWELVE THE POLITICS OF FENCING AND EXCHANGES OF ENCLAVES: A STUDY OF THE INDO-BANGLADESH BORDER KOUSHIK GOSWAMI

Borders are scratched across the hearts of men By strangers with a calm, judicial pen, And when the borders bleed we watch with dread The lines of ink across the map turn red. —Marya Mannes

About this poem from the collection Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times by Marya Mannes, from which the above lines are taken, Les Murray observes ‘I feel no need to interpret it as if it were art/Too much of poetry is criticism now’ (1). Murray’s observation suggests how critical a poem can really be. The vagaries of cartography and the violent effects that the act of map-making can produce are commented on in this poem. The words ‘bleed’, ‘dread’, and ‘red’ are metaphors of violence on a border given birth to by ‘a calm judicial pen’. But what is a border? Borders are geographical boundaries that divide one country from another. These lines suggest different geopolitical areas. It is said that since antiquity one finds the strips of lands that separate and/or unite, and/or confrontation. They are, therefore, passage. But the function of borders shifts time and space. (Banerjee xiv)

presence of borders. These are creating occasions for contact an area of both blockage and and it is never identical across

Borders are thus set up to define one people from another, to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’. They become markers of domains of political control and they:

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Borders define the sovereign status of a nation and the identity of the people who live within its borders. Any controversy in a border area may result in hostility between two bordering countries. South Asian borders are often called ‘post-colonial borders’, a term that suggests the colonial interventions of recent history. It is a history of indiscriminate ‘scratching’ of demarcation lines by ‘calm, judicial pen[s]’ – borders that ‘bleed’. Post-colonial societies everywhere are caught up in the politics of borders leading to extreme sensitivity about issues of security/insecurity around the question of population settled/ unsettled in and across these borders. (Banerjee xi)

South Asian borders remained unclearly demarcated for years. Neither the British colonial administrations nor their Indian successors paid much attention to the matter. But during the last two decades, border maintenance in South Asian countries has been made much more rigid since the rise of cross-border terrorism. In trying to make border vigilance stricter, the country or state tries to control: the borders which means controlling the bodies that inhabit borders, which in turn threatens and destabilises that control and creates uniquely bordered existences.... They are caught between the forces of decolonisation and post-coloniality and hence they are relegated to the space of not belonging. (Banerjee xvii)

The people living on both sides of the border are perpetually threatened, marginalized, and controlled. Border also affects the lives of millions of people, even of those who are miles away from the borderland. In the South Asia, the Indo-Bangladesh border presents a unique problem. The partition of India in 1947, and the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971, led to the formation of independent geopolitical entities with newly created borders. W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Partition’ offers a picture of how India was partitioned without the knowledge of the common people. It was a colonial imposition. In the poem, Sir Cyril Radcliffe (who chaired the boundary committees) is told, ‘It’s too late/ For mutual reconciliation

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or rational debate/ The only solution now lies in partition’ (1). Auden points out: Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission, Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition … He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate of millions. (1)

This naturally affected the regional balance of power. The vast geographical area comprising the Indo-Bangladesh border has become a constant problem in bilateral relations. Numerous rivers, the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges Basin, and hill areas are shared by both countries. This border is largely porous. Due to the absence of rigid surveillance and proper fencing, constant human trafficking, arms smuggling, fake currency trade, and terrorist activities have been taking place. Illegal migration is one of the problematic issues faced by India. It has not only changed the demography and disturbed the ecology of these areas, but also encouraged political disturbances and created law and order problems. Forests, everchanging riverbeds, hilly areas, and undefined enclaves make it impossible for the proper implementation of border patrols. The construction of walls and barbed-wire fencing has run into several delays. I shall now dwell on the unique problems faced by the inhabitants of ‘chitmahals’, enclaves on the Indo-Bangladesh borders. An enclave is a territory, or portion of a territory, that is completely surrounded by the territory of another state. It can also be known as a ‘detached part’, ‘detached district’, or ‘peculiar’. Indo-Bangladesh inhabitants of enclave areas were called ‘chitmahals’. ‘Chit’ means fragment, and ‘mahal’ means land. Chitmahals were Bangladeshi enclaves in Indian territory, and vice versa. We do not find any specific literary works on enclaves, although these spatial entities pose strong challenges to the jurisdiction of the nation itself. ‘Most [nonliterary] writings on enclaves treat these as geographical curiosities or as problems of state sovereignty, international law, and efficient administration’ (Schendel 116). Literary works have failed to deal with these marginalized spaces (‘no-man’s land’) and the socio-political lives of the inhabitants therein. Historically, the enclaves are the result of a series of gambles between two feuding eighteenth-century maharajas, the Raja of Koch Bihar and the Maharaja of Rangpur. The enclaves were the result of a 1713 treaty between the kingdom of Koch Bihar (the old spelling of ‘Cooch Behar’) and the Mughal Empire:

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Chapter Twelve The original treaty was signed between the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and a local leader of the Mogul empire at a time when there was not a modern understanding of sovereignty or territoriality in South Asia.... The 1713 treaty stated that the hostilities would end and the areas controlled by the armies of each side would be taxed by that ruler. The arrangement had little impact on the daily lives of the residents; it only meant that some people’s taxes and documents were handled in Cooch Behar while others were handled in the equally close Mogul towns of Jalpaiguri or Rangpur. (Jones 375)

After the partition in India in 1947, Rangpur was added to East Pakistan, but many princely states were neither partitioned nor given independence. Cooch Behar was one of these. It was merged later with India, in 1949: When the British withdrew, Cooch Behar lay wedged in between East Pakistan and India. One hundred and thirty Cooch Behar enclaves were located in East Pakistan and fifty-one in India. Two years later, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar merged his state with India. The enclaves then became Indian territories. The enclaves in East Pakistan became true international enclaves, whereas those surrounded by India were soon merged with the district in which they were located. (Schendel 119)

Thus the enclaves are the result of wars between Koch rulers and the chieftains of the Mughal Empire. Despite a 1958 agreement signed between Jawaharlal Nehru and Feroz Khan Noon, the prime ministers of India and Bangladesh respectively, the problem of the enclaves remained unresolved, mainly because of an objection to the transfer of the Southern Berubari enclave. After the Independence of East Pakistan and emergence of Bangladesh in 1971, Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, on 16 May, 1974 signed the Land Boundary Agreement, which provided for the exchange of enclaves. However, the dispute remained. Manmohan Singh’s government too failed in this regard. The identity of inhabitants of chitmahals has been constantly questioned. They were deprived of basic human rights. They were in a zone of non-belonging. The identity of the people of chitmahals and their continuing lived experience within the enclaves are major issues of border studies. Since Independence, the Indian Government has been reluctant about the residents of the enclaves and they remained as the deprived citizens of the country without having citizenships, voting rights, rights of education, minimum health care facilities, or social security. (Ray 1)

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Moreover, the enclave residents lacked access to basic facilities. Being isolated from their own land by a strip of foreign land, they were also aliens in their homeland. They could not even visit their own country without crossing an international border. Since construction of the barbedwire fencing began in 2003, tens of thousands of people in at least 200 villages have been in a geographical limbo – living in India, but on the wrong side of the border fence, and thus having easier access to Bangladesh. Until recently, they were neither part of India nor of Bangladesh. Efforts have been made by both the countries to solve this dispute of non-belonging. A ray of hope came finally to the unnamed and unrecognized people of chitmahals in the form of a treaty in 2015, ending the disputed enclaves that have affected thousands of residents. ‘At the stroke of midnight on 31st of July 2015, the people of these “chitmahals” gained a homeland after a stateless existence of 68 years’ (Sahu1). The hundredth amendment to the Indian Constitution was adopted on 7 May, 2015, and was ratified on 6 June, 2015. This amendment provided for the exchange of 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in India and 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh. The resulting new citizens of India are now very hopeful of experiencing positive and progressive economic, social, and political change in their lives. ‘They would no longer have to “trespass” into India to charge the mobile phones’ (Sahu1). They are very happy that they are free from physical and metaphorical confinement, and will no longer need fake certificates to study in Indian schools. They should get all their basic rights according to the law. However, this transformation from confinement to liberty, and from lack of identity to Indian nationality, is not going to be easy. Preety Sahu has summarized the problems of these areas: The uneasiness remains on the issue of Bangladeshi criminals and illegal migrants attempting to enter India, which is perceived as an obvious threat. Apprehensions are there that criminals from Bangladesh will sneak into India, taking advantage of the enclave and population exchange. On the other hand some Indian officials have received several complaints that people who wanted to relocate to India are being intimidated by local goons. Allegations are there that Bangladesh is trying to manipulate the list of people who intend to cross over to India for an Indian citizenship. Besides, there is strong possibility of socio-cultural clashes of the new citizens with their neighbours. Here the question of cultural tolerance and acceptability is likely to arise. (1)

Now that the enclaves have been swapped, they should enjoy the citizenship rights that they have been deprived of since 1947. However

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questions that arise: Are the people of the chitmahals conscious of the politics of the physical exchange of enclaves? Which is their homeland? India? Or Bangladesh? Or is it the place where they had been living? Will the fencing and related problems be resolved? These problems and uncertainties are effectively captured by Reza Mohammadi in his poem ‘You Crossed the Border’: You crossed the border: your homeland had no language, or maybe it had nothing to say. You crossed the border: imagine it's your homeland. What did your homeland have that the whole world lacked? First, you were greeted by tears. This kind friend with an unkind face, Sorrow, embraced you out of dirt and dust, a friend who clasped you closer than others. The sick old man who welcomed you so tenderly was exhausted by travelling from village to village. You longed to buy happiness but only smugglers offered it for sale. You crossed the border: imagine it’s your homeland. What did your homeland have that the whole world lacked? (1).

The poem questions the concept of homeland and the problems of language that the people of border areas face. The contrasting images of ‘tears’/‘happiness’, ‘kind’/‘unkind’ and ‘border’/‘homeland’ portray an ironic picture. It is a picture of welcoming someone who is really an ‘other’ in the ‘homeland’ that is not his/her own. Only smugglers can offer ‘happiness for sale’. The poem raises the question of regarding the chitmahals as the ‘other’ in the new homeland – India or Bangladesh. Newspapers and recent interviews with the previous inhabitants of chitmahals clearly portray the tragic situation of those people even after the exchange of enclaves. I have translated a few lines into English from a Bengali newspaper, Uttarbanga Sambad, published 22 November, 2015, and Anandabazar Patrika, published 10 November, to highlight the difficulties they are experiencing: Some enjoy returning to the homeland. Some of them suffer from melancholy. As a young man, Bipin feels sadness for leaving behind his lover who belongs to another country. In contrast, the veteran Khagendra Nath Barman’s joy knows no bounds for returning to his own country.... Barman said that according to the rule, he and his son, Krishna had come but he could not bring with him his daughter-in-law. The residential student Bipin Chandra Barman is in the 3rd semester at Bangladesh

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Polytechnic Civil College. Now he wants to know from the district magistrate in which study centre he will continue his education. Many landlords could not sell their plots of land. There are more than six members in one or two families. But it is not possible to accommodate them in the allotted two rooms in any way. (9) (Uttarbanga Sambad, translation mine) Some have been compelled to sell their land at a negligible price. Some cannot find any customers. Overall, even after ten months, the old inhabitants of Indian chitmahal are in grave danger. The head of the citizens’ rights co-ordination committee, Diptiman Sengupta observed ‘The market price of land per bigha is rupees 5 lakh and a half at the little town of Garoljhara. But many landlords have had to sell their land for rupees 2 lakh and 20,000 per bigha. Many landlords could not sell their land.’ (17) (Anandabazar Patrika, translation mine)

Other complaints concern the forcible occupation of a number of plots in the Nalgram Area. There are also several problems that raise multiple questions about their future existence. Now the inhabitants of ‘chits’ in India have been granted citizenship, as have the inhabitants of enclaves in Bangladesh. The Election Commission worked in unison to confer voting rights to the people of chitmahals in a short space of time. They voted for the first time as legal citizens on 5 May, 2016, electing members of the legislative assembly. The total number of enclave first-time voters is 9,776. Every vote of the people of the chits is important. The political parties, including the ruling party, have tried to appease these people through promises. Amitava Chakraborty, a journalist, clearly portrays the recent problems and demands of chit people: Parliament has done its duty, but only partially. It passed an amendment granting voting rights to a vulnerable community without a debate. The Union cabinet has allocated Rs. 1,006 crore for the rehabilitation of the people affected by the exchange. But Saddam Hossain, a resident of the enclave and a young leader who was at the forefront of the agitation for the swapping of chits, clearly spelled out the three demands that remain unmet.... Their demand is that the government must come up with an organised plan to execute the mutation of their lands within a stipulated time period. The second demand is that the community must be declared socially and economically backward and, therefore, be given reservation in government employment for the next 10 years as compensation for their sufferings. The last demand is that the government must employ the residents of the enclaves to carry out the developmental work in the chits.... There were several complaints regarding the unavailability of doctors...

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Many enclave residents from the areas of Sitalkuchi, Nalgram, Folnapur, and Jongra are very happy to have cast their votes on 5 May, 2016, but 200 inhabitants from these areas have boycotted the election, as they are still deprived of their basic needs: An uncertain future stares the residents of the settlement camps in the face who, in many ways, continue to lead the life of a refugee. Irrespective of which party wins the elections, basic necessities – food, shelter and clothing – will continue to dominate the narrative in the near future. (Chakraborty 9)

With Bangladesh, India shares not only a common history, but also fraternal feeling. This commonality is reflected in multi-dimensional relations with Bangladesh at several levels of interaction. They have a common cultural heritage. Bilateral trade promotes a friendly economic relationship between the two countries. On levels of economic assistance and technical co-operation, new avenues are being explored. Truly, borders do not stop at borders. Borders may be a necessity in the context of global socio-political reality. But this does not necessarily mean that the minds of people living on each side of the border should be partitioned. Thus it can be expected that, through the proper channelling of interest and keeping faith, the two countries may be good neighbours. Ray Nicholson in his poem ‘On the Border’ effectively idealizes the concept of the border space: On the border is where I sit and take the view from all around, not a fence can be seen not a line can be found. On the border is where I stand and decide on how to cross, a simple step, or gently reach perhaps just put my point across.… On the border is where I live deep down I like it here, if you can show me some place better for my soul’s sake point out where. (1)

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This poem on the one hand tries to erase the literal and metaphorical borders by using the words ‘not a fence’ and ‘not a line’. On the other hand, it gives us a Frostian message that ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ (1).

Works Cited Anandabazar Patrika, accessed 10 November, 2015, Malda. ed.:17+ Print Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands The New Mestiza. U.S.A: Aunt Lute Books. 1987. Auden, W.H. ‘Partition’. Accessed 24 November, 2015.

Banerjee, Paula. Borders, Histories, Existences: Gender and Beyond. New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd. 2010. Chakraborty, Amitav. ‘The freedom belonging to democracy’. Calcutta Telegraph (2016). Accessed May 5, 2016. Das, Gourhari. ‘Uttarbanga Sangbad’. 2015. Malda, November 22.9+Print Frost, Robert. ‘Mending Wall’. Accessed 9 May, 2016.

Ghosh, A. The Shadow Lines. Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publishers. 1988. Jones, Reece. ‘Sovereignty and statelessness in the border enclaves of India and Bangladesh’. Political Geography. 28. (2009) USA (373–81) Kaul, Suvir. The Partitions of Memory. New Delhi: Permanent Black. 2009. Les, Murray. ‘On the Borders’. Accessed 10 November, 2015

Mannes, Marya. Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times. 2015. Accessed November 22, 2016.

Nicholson, Roy. ‘On the Border’. 2015. Accessed December 17.

Ray, Subhendu. Accessed 22 November, 2015. Reza, Mohammadi. ‘You Crossed the Border’. 2015. Accessed December 17 Sahu, Preety. ‘New Born Citizens of India’. 2015. South Asia Monitor. Accessed November 24.

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Schendel, Willen van. 2002. ‘Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the India-Bangladesh Enclaves’. The Journal of Asian Studies. Association for Asian Studies, Inc.115 (2002):147–61. Wilson, Thomas M., and Hastings Donnan. A Companion to Border Studies. UK: Blackwell Publishing. 2012.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN ‘THE INDIAN LANDSCAPE SEARS MY EYES/ I HAVE BECOME A PART OF IT’: THE BORDER INDIVIDUAL IN THE POEMS OF NISSIM EZEKIEL ASHISH CHHETRI

Introduction When mapping the genealogy of modern Indian poetry in English one comes across the colossal figure of Nissim Ezekiel. He is often referred to as the father of modern Indian poetry in English. Nissim Ezekiel (1942– 2004) was a remarkable poet. His first two volumes appeared within five years of Indian Independence. The volumes of poems published by him include A Time of Change (1952) and Sixty Poems (1953), followed by The Third (1960), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), Hymns in Darkness (1976), and Latter-Day Psalms (1982). His Collected Poems was published in 1989, consisting of brilliant poems from his previous collections. Ezekiel is like the Colossus of antiquity, whose limbs straddled two sides of a harbour. Ezekiel straddles multiple cultures: a Jew – a Bene-Israel Jew at that – born in cosmopolitan Bombay during the Raj, educated abroad, he returned to Bombay, became Professor of American Studies at the university there, and wrote poems in English, his creative phase beginning with the birth of the new nation state of India, which he never again left. In his seminal book, A History of Indian English Literature, M. K. Naik (1982, 194) says: A shaping factor of Ezekiel’s poetry is that he belongs to a Bene-Israel family which migrated to India generations ago. Thus substantially alienated from the core of the Indian ethos, Ezekiel is acutely aware of this alienation being accentuated by the fact that he has spent most of his life in

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Border Issues Ezekiel is a protean entity: to understand him one has to bring into sharp focus the problematics of the diaspora, migration, the border, nationalism and race, and the concept of home. His position is one of interrogations of, as well as negotiations with, traditional concepts of the above issues. Where traditional notions depend heavily upon static notions that draw from fixed communities and geographical locations, positions such as Ezekiel’s question their status quo. Speaking of diasporas, Robin Cohen (2008, IX) says they are communities or people that have migrated to another country, but the umbilical chord (at least the emotional one) with the old country is not severed, for it seems to lie embedded in their cultural, social, religious, and linguistic practices. This link is accepted, and the history of migration is seen to influence the sense of identity even among their descendants. The effects of migration are seen to cling on, to the extent that ‘migrancy’ becomes a mode of being, with its own problems and possibilities. Diaspora/migrancy is a contested area, as can be seen in the case of the Bene-Israeli Jews. There have been various narratives about the BeneIsraeli and their arrival in the Indian sub-continent. They are often referred to as the ‘lost tribes of Israel’, whom the Assyrians are supposed to have exiled from the land of Israel around 800 BCE. Others believe that they arrived after the destruction the Jewish Second Temple in 70 CE. The survivors of a shipwreck near the Konkan Coast are supposed to have started a new life near Navgaon, and in time to have taken up the trade of oil-pressing. But even within the Jewish diaspora, the Bene-Israeli were looked down on by their fellow Cochin Jews and Baghdadi Jews for various reasons. Among the Bene-Israeli there was a hierarchy of gora and kala, that is, fair- and dark-skinned: the former were considered to be of ‘pure’ lineage, and the latter, whose mothers were non-Jewish, were discriminated against (Daniel 1999). Particularly crucial to the migrant is the concept of ‘home’, which traditionally stands for one’s location in the wider world: a place where one lives free, in comfort and security, among kindred souls. But for migrants this is a far cry, as they inherit a sense of loss after leaving the place of origin. Avtar Brah (1997, 192) says that ‘home’ is a mythic place

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of desire in the diasporic imagination. ‘Home’ becomes primarily a mental construct, built from fragments of memory of the past, which exists in a fragmented relationship with the present. The problems of migrants increase exponentially, for the linguistic and cultural baggage which they bear while crossing the political borders of nations often problematizes their accommodation within the imaginative boundaries of the new political space. Further, as McLeod (2007, 208) says, along with the thought of ‘home’ and the ‘host country’, there is also a yawning gap between the idea and the experience of home. The migrants are, in all probability, discriminated, ‘ghettoized’ (a word that has become synonymous with the Jews), and excluded from feeling that they belong to the new country/space. Closely connected with the notion of ‘home’ is that of identity. McLeod (2007, 226) says that the fashioning, or refashioning, of identities – individual or collective – is done by us to a certain degree, but also others fashion them for us. The identity of migrants and of their descendants is often fictionalized by others, as outsiders belonging to a different land who are denied a sense of belonging. This suggests that they forever occupy an intermediate position, of living in-between nations, unable to ‘belong’ to either the nation or the culture whose borders they inhabit. Now borders are conventionally seen as national boundaries, limiting people physically; but they are not just the point where the seams of a nation state are joined, but also a point of conflagration, rupture, and possibilities – and as such always dynamic. This ‘borderland’ Bhabha (1994, 1) says is ‘neither a new horizon nor a leaving behind of the past... we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross/intersect to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion’. Salman Rushdie, a prominent diasporic/migrant writer, revels in the displaced position of the migrant as a better condition, in the discovery of that knowledge which is not absolute, but incomplete and hybrid (Rushdie 1996, 12). Thus border crossings and borderlands give rise to the hybrid. This can be seen in the Bene-Israeli, where descendants of the shipwreck survivors in time forgot Hebrew and part of their Kosher laws. They took to Marathi as their mother tongue, stopped eating beef, and discontinued the remarriage of their widows, just like their Hindu neighbours (Daniel 1999). This again led to problems of identity. This act of the migrant seeking to combine two cultures and languages without abandoning either, Nayar (2008, 197–98) writes, is the schizophrenic state of the diasporic individual, and leads to split-consciousness or double-consciousness,

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resulting in the specular border individual/intellectual. In all of this Bhabha (1994, 12) says that literature has a crucial role, not only problematizing a priori thinking about the world, but also unravelling the differences that exists within, focussing on hybridity.

The ‘border individual’ in Ezekiel’s poems Vilas Sarang in Indian English Poetry since 1950: An Anthology states: ‘Ezekiel is clearly a transitional poet’ (1989, 17). Further, talking about transitions and border crossings, A. Jan Mohamed (Sprinker 1992, 219) writes, ‘Said describes the awareness of intellectuals situated on cultural borders as contrapuntal... that tends to obscure the border intellectual’s agency as well as the orientation of his or her intentionality towards the two cultures.’ He also talks about two kinds of border intellectuals, the syncretic and the specular, and defines the former as ‘one who is able to combine elements of the two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences and the latter as one who finds himself or herself unable or unwilling to be at home in these societies...’ (Sprinker 1992, 235). It is the understanding of Naik (Poetry 2009, 53) that, ‘a thematic consideration of Nissim Ezekiel’s poetry would suggest a symbolic parallel to him in the legendary wandering Jew. Ezekiel may very well be described as the “Wandering Jew” of Indian English poetry.’ The wandering Jew, after all, is the prototype of the migrant, the outsider at home, everywhere and nowhere, typifying modern man, at times a subject of the post-modern condition. This is best exemplified ironically in Ezekiel’s often quoted, supposedly autobiographical, verse ‘Background, Casually’: I went to Roman Catholic school, A mugging Jew among the wolves. They told me I had killed the Christ, ...A Muslim sportsman boxed my ears. ...I grew in terror of the strong But undernourished Hindu lads… 1

The multiplicities that he enumerates state the obvious that ‘ ...Indian history is not about a Hindu ancient, a Moghul medieval and a British modern period or simply about pre-Independence and post-Independence periods’ (Das 2009, VII), and also betray his intention to make a toehold 1. Nissim Ezekiel Collected Poems, ed. John Thieme (New Delhi: OUP, 1989), 179, lines 6–12.

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for himself and his kind. That apart, the speaker effectively lays bare the pangs of a lack of accommodation that a border individual faces, and along with it a split-consciousness as to the choice that the various cultures offer as in ‘...I hear of Yoga and of Zen / Could I, perhaps be rabbi-saint?’2 After studies abroad, the speaker comes back, working as a deck-hand on an ‘...English cargo–ship / Taking French guns and mortar-shells / to Indo-China’3, a situation mimicking that of the displaced Smyrna merchant in Eliot’s modern epic The Wasteland. His inability to separate from his past is suggested by ‘...Friday nights, the prayers’4 and memories that ‘...My ancestors, among the castes / Were aliens crushing seed for bread’.5 At the same time, he exposes his lack of sympathy for his surroundings with a dismissive comment ‘...All Hindus are / Like that’6. He expounds philosophically: ‘...Home is where we have to gather grace’,7 but again sinks into a sense of loss ‘...how to feel it home / was the point’.8 He hovers between the syncretic and the specular border intellectual: one moment he is able to combine both cultures, and feel at home, the very next he is unwilling to be so: The Indian landscape sears my eyes I have become a part of it To be observed by foreigners. They say that I am singular, Their letters overstate the case.9

This love-hate relationship finally reaches a point where he is tinged with a sense of resignation. I have made my commitments now. This is one: to stay where I am, As some choose to give themselves In some remote and backward place. My backward place is where I am. 10

2. Ibid., 179, lines 18–19. 3. Ibid., 180 lines 32–34. 4. Ibid., 179 line 17. 5. Ibid., 180 lines 48–49. 6. Ibid., 180 lines 38–39. 7. Ibid., 117 line 30. 8. Ibid., 180 line 36. 9. Ibid., 181 lines 66–70. 10. Ibid., 181 lines 71–75.

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One of his very Indian poems, and one of the best in the canon, ‘The Night of the Scorpion’, reflects the same ambivalence, typical of a border individual. Though the verse ends with a grand celebration of motherhood, it is fraught with images that co-exist uncomfortably. The city-dwellers and the village, the village dwellings and people swarming with candles to assist the mother stung by a scorpion, the sceptical father and the helpful, but superstitious, peasants who ‘... came like swarms of flies’.11 Another constant occurrence in Ezekiel’s verse is the search for balance, which can be interpreted as trying to be impartial and noncommittal, wishing to combine, yet unable to. This is what one comes across in his lyric ‘A Poem of Dedication’, where he aspires to ‘… a human balance humanly / Acquired, fruitful in the common hour’.12 This lyric, while it remembers his London years, also harks back to his Jewish inheritance, with images from Ecclesiastes. Once again, in ‘After Reading a Prediction’, which reads like Ezekiel’s version of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’, he writes ‘...I also learn / to make light of the process, / to be the bird in balance / on the turbulent air’.13 Balance, which could be a yearning for stability, can be sought, but success is rare. If fluidity and dynamism are characteristic of the border, then this state is brought up by the sense of comfort and security in one’s surroundings, and the risk of that changing, in: I found myself supported By the element I lived But dragged out with the greatest ease.14 Nothing is for sure, nothing is static in the borderlands.

Fluid identities, so typical of the border, are what characterize Ezekiel’s frustrating ‘My Cat’, with its non-committal, unwilling quality: ...Is neither diabolic nor a sphinx though equally at home on laps and chairs Less cat than sheep Defies all animal and human laws Of love and hate.15

11. Ibid., 130 line 8. 12. Ibid., 39, lines 32–33. 13. Ibid., 155, lines 38–41. 14. Ibid., 143, lines 8–10. 15. Ibid., 65, lines 2–13.

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Even the lyrics that are more personal, and talk of love and women, are characterized by irony, fluidity, and the non-committal, typifying the borderlands. ‘For Love’s Record’ speaks with disapproval of a woman’s conduct, but the next moment praises her: I watched the woman walk away with him And now I think of her as bold and kind ...Such love as hers could bear no common code 16

‘Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher’ brings to the fore women as ‘myths of light / with darkness at the core’.17 In ‘Poem of the Separation’, the poet brings out the pangs of migration and intense loss on the one hand ‘...Ten thousand miles away / you become a shower of letters / a photograph’18 and paints his surroundings as ‘...the squalid, crude / city of my birth and rebirth’.19 Naik (1982, 194) rightly states that Ezekiel’s verse portrays, ‘“a refugee of the spirit” in search of his “dim identity” which in different moods appears to him as a “one man lunatic asylum” or “a small deserted holy place”...’. Ezekiel ‘restages’ his Jewish heritage in ‘Latter-Day Psalms’, and in poems such as ‘Jewish Wedding in Bombay’. Alongside these, he has his very Indian poems and his translations from Marathi. Daphna ErdinastVulcan (Anklesaria 2008, 458) compares Ezekiel with a much-loved Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, and says that evident in the poetry of both writers is an ambivalence, and a voice speaking for humanity, lighting up the silent everydayness. Ezekiel castigates Naipaul for his not-so-effulgent portrayal of India in his book, An Area of Darkness, then he surpasses Naipaul with his own images of searing, squalid landscapes. On the other hand he observes in ‘Minority Poem’: ‘I lack the means to change /...It’s the will to pass /... to self-forgetfulness’20. But it is the same border-living that gives the ‘summing up’ of ‘ always smiling’, ‘popular lady / coming from high family / departing for foreign’,21 humorously devastating as ‘we are like this only’ in ‘Goodbye Party For Miss Pushpa T. S.’.

16. Ibid., 110, lines 1–6. 17. Ibid., 135, lines17–18. 18. Ibid., 195, lines 27–29. 19. Ibid., 196, lines 32–33. 20. Ibid., 236, lines 7–21. 21. Ibid., 190, line 21.

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Conclusion In ‘A Morning Walk’, Ezekiel paints his Bombay as‘...Barbaric city sick with slums / Deprived of seasons...’22 but in ‘The Egoist’s Prayer’ he writes, ‘Confiscate my passport, Lord / I don’t want to go abroad / let me find my song where I Belong’23. G. J. V. Prasad (1999, 75) opines that there is a realization that ‘this harsh, unlovable environment is home, very often both hospitable and lovable’. The landscapes of Ezekiel’s poems are thus highly contested. He shows an unwillingness to bind himself to any culture, his vacillations between an embracing of either culture engender newer entities and situations altogether. Both his life and his works support this image of ambiguity. He could be the syncretic border individual at one moment, and the very next a specular border individual. Ezekiel lies between the syncretic and the specular border individual. Perhaps Ezekiel revelled in this fluid state of identities and commitments, as Jan Mohamed (Sprinker 1992, 235) says, ‘homelessness-as-home accentuates a jouissance derived from transitoriness...’ This ambiguous position gives further currency to Ezekiel’s verse. The French thinker Maurice Blanchot, talking about the death of art, suggests that the unwillingness of a work of art to part with all its meaning gives it life (Haase and Large 2001, 2). It is the non-committal nature, the ambiguous fluid position, the in-betweenness that lends endless life and curiosity to the verse and life of Nissim Ezekiel.

Bibliography Bhabha, Homi. K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. 1994. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. 1997. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: Routledge. 2008. Das, Sanjukta. Derozio to Dattani: Essays in Criticism. Delhi: Worldview. 2009. Haase, Ullrich, and W. Large. Maurice Blanchot. New York: Routledge. 2001. JanMohamed, A. R. ‘Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-asHome: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual’, in

22. Ibid., 119, lines 15–16. 23. Ibid., 212, lines 41–44.

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Edward Said: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Sprinker, 218–41. Oxford: Blackwell. 1992. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2007. Naik, M. K. A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Academy. 1982. —. Indian English Poetry from the beginning up to 2000. Delhi: Pencraft International. 2009. Nayar, Pramod. Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction. Delhi: Pearson Longman. 2008. Prasad, G. J. V. Continuities in Indian English Poetry. Delhi: Pencraft International.1999. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, New York: Penguin.1991. Sarang, Vilas. ed. Indian English Poetry since 1950: An Anthology. Hyderabad: Disha Books.1989. Thieme, John. Introduction to: Nissim Ezekiel Collected Poems. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1989. Vulcan, Daphna Erdinast. ‘Part of My Flesh: The Subversive Jewish Voice of Nissim Ezekiel’, in Nissim Ezekiel Remembered, edited by Havovi Anklesaria, 442–58. New Delhi: Sahitya Academy. 2008. Daniel, Aharon. ‘Jews in India Bene Israel’ 1999–200l. Accessed Aug 20 2015. http://www.adaniel.tripod.com/beneisrael.htm.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN BORDER FOR SALE DEBJANI ROYCHOUDHURY

Borders that exist for separate nationalities are in a constant state of flux: ever changing with changes in national administrations and world politics. Border-related representations therefore exist either as documents of diaspora, and the resultant suffering, or of patriotic feelings. When enforced on a nation in the form of partition, borders can produce documents of horror, steeped in the angst of massive and violent migration. The partition of India, based on the ‘two-nation’ theory, has been re-lived in several documents detailing the unprecedented violence and trauma of that event. The migrant survivors are traumatized by feelings of being uprooted and by the necessity of going through a process of re-establishment. A constant search for identity, and fear of the necessity of undergoing identity transformation, find a marked presence in all these works, which question borders and communalism. Gender issues, sexual violence, and the concept of being ‘polluted’ – a related idea – keep returning. The only relief seen in the barbaric experience of border crossing during Partition is that the crisis was a shared one, suffered by an entire village or city. Several years after Partition, when we might expect silence on these issues, we find the border still featuring in literature and films. Characters are victims, or part of the exodus, or people who simply look back and reflect on the issues. Partition has not ended: it lives on, either in literature and films, or in news, for the border is a constant presence. It comes to us as super-hit movies and as news of shelling and infiltration that hikes the television ratings of news channels. In this paper I wish to show that the India-Pakistan border is not merely an issue: it has become a commodity that sells. A commodity that easily appeals to our sentiment, adds to our entertainment, and thus has a good ‘demand’. From the Wagah border ceremony to television series and movies on Partition along the Radcliffe Line, illegal border crossings, and war along the border, the border has been constantly up for sale. Four

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basic genres are noticeable in border representations in the rush to capture this market: the romantic, the patriotic, the violent and tragic, and the comic. These genres, however, often get fused into each other for enhanced effect. To elucidate my argument, I use the movies Refugee, Border, Rajkahini, and Bajrangi Bhaijaan as examples. Romance has always been used to capture the market, and when the border element is added to it, there have been some good commercial successes. Either lovers cross the border, or the female lover has to be rescued from across the border, which is the antagonist, as are its protectors. In Refugee, a J. P. Dutta movie, the border factor adds thrill to the romance. Refugee, the hero, meets Naazneen for the first time when he helps her family to cross the border and settle in Pakistan. This family had been refugees ever since 1947, when they migrated from Bihar to erstwhile East Pakistan and after the formation of Bangladesh found themselves so marginalized in a Bangla-speaking country that they had to cross into India and steal into Pakistan. For Refugee, taking ‘goods’ across the border1 is his regular job, and Naazneen and her family are only ‘goods’ to him. The lovers meet initially only when Refugee has a job across the border, but the meetings become more frequent, despite the risks he takes. It is the border-crossing formula, and consequent danger involved, that hold the attention of the audience and also show the intensity of his love for the girl. The girl is shown making multiple vain attempts to cross the border in her desire to be one with Refugee. Lacking citizenship papers, life can never be normal for them; their love is under constant threat, for they can never procure visas and stay together. Towards the end of the film, the hero becomes a Border Security Force (BSF) jawan and helps to kill militants and – with the help of the security forces on both sides – marries the pregnant Nazneen, who immediately gives birth to a son on the no-man’s-land between India and Pakistan. The birth of the child in this territory, beyond any border control, is significant and in line with the constant questions posed to the audience about the necessity of the border and recognition of the true enemy, which is neither India nor Pakistan, but hunger, poverty, and unemployment. At the quarterly Border Flag Meeting, shown in the film, we find the chiefs of the security forces discussing this issue, pointing out the irrelevance of spending large amounts on arms and ammunition rather than on schools and development work.

1

Refugee takes refugee families, guns, ‘white powder’, possibly some narcotics, and even militants across the border.

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The border is the focus of this romance, but the lyrical songs cannot make the picture of life in the villages close to the border rosy. The poverty, and consequent dependence on smuggling, the desperate need to connect with relatives and loved ones who are separated only due to the barbed-wire, the constant anxiety about sudden checks and head-counts by the security forces, and the insecurity and humiliation of the women all show that life in these villages can never be normal. The border stands responsible for all this; the film markets a picture of life and love. The theme of war at the border or line-of-control focuses on military escapades and arouses patriotic feelings. The representations focus on the hardships of military life: the harsh conditions in which soldiers stay away from their families for months, missing golden moments of family togetherness. Newly-weds leaving for the battlefield in an emergency, fathers missing the birth or death of their children, and families sacrificing loved ones for our protection are common tropes woven into the plots of popular border-war movies. Border, another J. P. Dutta movie of 1997, focusing on the war at Longewala between India and Pakistan in 1971, could not have been given a better title. The film is packed with features that sell easily, and the title does the initial task. India shares borders with China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, but when we think of ‘border’ we primarily think of the one with Pakistan. The border with Bangladesh as the subject matter of a film could also have been interesting while it was still East Pakistan. Bitterness about the past remains deep within the Indian psyche, and an India-Pakistan war which India wins, with just 120 soldiers against 2,000 Pakistanis, is naturally a very attractive and profitable subject for a film. The patriotic genre is commercially exploited in this movie, and all the elements that can arouse patriotic feelings are employed. The frequent hailing of the motherland; the love and respect for the desert soil, though it is barren and produces only thorn bushes and scorpions; dialogues that say a man can leave his wife in any condition but never his ‘company’ or country;2 the figure of a blind and widowed mother losing her only child in battle, just as she had lost her brave husband; letters from ailing, aged parents reminding their son that they are waiting for his care and support;3

2

Mathuradas says this when he returns halfway without taking his sanctioned leave. On his deathbed, however, he acknowledges he has wronged his wife for his motherland and begs her forgiveness and says that he will take care of her in the next life. 3 Ratan Singh’s father writes to him about the difficulties they are going through and how they too need his care.

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and nostalgic4 and elegiac songs all play perfect patriotic roles. The meaninglessness of war, and the lament for loss on both sides, also comes as a clear message. A child writes to his father that his teacher has said that men across the border are people just like them, who eat and wear the same things as they do. The obvious question is asked: ‘So why do they fight with us?’ A song addressing the ‘enemies’ as ‘brothers’ also says that war lasts only a few days, but life cries a long time. The border sells to the patriarchal psyche too. The men at the border are true heroes, who win in adversity, but do not shrink from giving their enemy an honourable burial. These men, though not perfect in their family duties, are saviours of the nation. The sacrifice of these men and their families is not lost on an Indian audience. The border is a man’s world, which must be won and controlled.5 Women have no place here. In this movie, women characters are kept safe far from the border. They play only passive roles: either complaining, crying, and breaking bangles on the deaths of their husband – or scheming against husband and country by asking influential parents to change the posting to the border.6 The women are not only weak, but also represent weakness that the heroes have to overcome. The border further marginalizes and almost humiliates women. It represents patriarchy as though it is itself feminine: it must be protected, guarded, and controlled by men. Enemy entry across the border would mean giving over control of the body politic of the country – which we conceive of as a woman – into ravishing hands. We see women bravely sending their brothers, husbands, and sons to the battlefield. Their unwillingness is hushed up in their tears, and their role is that of the passive sufferer. The men protecting the border are the heroes, but the border is a constant presence in the lives of the women too. Their suffering and daily struggle, in event of the loss of a male, is a repeated motif in ‘border’ movies. These feelings are so strong that we do not realize that they hike the sale of the border. Rajkahini, by Srijit Mukherjee, brings a reversal in this role of women. This film belongs to a tragic genre that usually comes loaded with violence. The film comes with a tag-line ‘Freedom will fight Independence’, and dialogues about the border from a neglected, tortured, and exploited subaltern community become a ratified and accepted 4

Letters from families are read out and the same question rings like a refrain in all of them: ‘O ghar kab aaoge? Tum bin yeh ghar suna suna hai’. 5 LOC Kargil (1999) has a dialogue which says: ‘Musibat ka samna karna mardo ka kaamhai’. 6 Kuldip Singh tells his father-in-law that if he changes his posting on the border at the request of his daughter he will give her a divorce.

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discourse. For the audience, the women emerge as true warriors and conquer our hearts, in spite of their defeat. Failure lies with the border and the entire patriarchy that tries to build it. This is best explained by the scene where a young boy is shown committing nuisance on the barbed wire. The movie appeals to a postmodern and feminist audience, as well as an audience that loves violence in speech and action. It comes loaded with slang and dialogue about the mutilation of women’s bodies. Violence is the dominant trope in this movie – which also improves its sale. One particular poster promises a charged movie, with a blood-splattered map showing snapped barbed wire. The snapped portion of the wire is in the centre: the two ends have been transformed into skeletal hands struggling to grasp each other. The trope of rape is repeatedly used in various forms, and forced violation of the border is transformed into the metaphorical rape of the motherland, with check-posts discernible as phallic symbols. The film begins with alternate flash-backs of past violence during Partition and a modern clapping, jeering crowd watching the Wagah border ceremony, almost celebrating the presence of the border, until we settle completely in the past. Men are shown rushing with just burning torches to stop the rape of a naked woman, tied to a bed in a posture ready to be assaulted by passing males. Fatima, a very young girl, is abandoned by her father, a representative of the patriarchal society, after she is gang-raped. The girl is so traumatized that she cannot differentiate her father from the men who have ravished her, and opens her pyjamas to be raped again. The border is also the butt of jokes. Crowds laugh out loud at the jokes Begum Jaan, owner of a brothel, cracks about how foolishly Radcliffe has done his work. In the scene in which official papers are brought by men representing both countries, and in the way things are explained to the women, who only understand their suppression, their feelings, and their trade, the border becomes a standing joke. The violent trope, however, soon takes over, and Begum Jaan promises to ‘partition’ the limbs from their bodies if the men try to evict them from their house, a microcosm of their country. The women know very well that it is a man’s world, whether they are a queen or a whore. They appeal for all possible patriarchal help, but receiving none, decide to save their land themselves like heroes. They enter the male dominion of guns, bullets, and bombs and transform the brothel into a war scene. These women, who sell their bodies every day, refuse to be victimized, and negate all chances of the mutilation of their bodies promised by Kabir, the villain. They die, but not as passive

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Padminis, though the song from which the national anthem is excerpted is sung for these heroes. Comedy penetrates these representations too, and not simply as short episodes of comic relief. We have moved from the bleak, grey pictures steeped in nostalgia of earlier representations. The market necessitates these changes. We find characters rising above personal selfish needs and upholding humanitarian values in a bestial environment, questioning the violence and the presence of the border. Such features had always existed. However the comic element, as a major force, is a new genre. Bajrangi Bhaijaan stars SalmanKhan, with romantic and comic songs8 and dances, a beautiful heroine, an angelic child, wonderful mountainous settings, and cricket fever focusing on the India-Pakistan matches as crowd-pulling factors. Bajrangi, an ardent devotee of the Hindu deity Hanuman, embarks on taking a six-year-old Pakistani girl, separated in India from her mother, back to her home town in Pakistan without a visa or passport. This illegal border crossing, and the consequent hide-and-seek in Pakistan, took the movie successfully to the billion-rupee-profit club. So, through a comic genre, what sold – silently – was the border. Bajrangi is not high-born, and graduate sat his eleventh attempt. He is a simpleton, rather comic in his righteousness. We enter the comic mode the moment we meet the hero, in a song that is rather unusual in Hindi cinema in introducing the protagonist.9 This should be shocking for the audience, since it comes immediately after a girl is lost in a foreign country and her parents cannot search for her because of visa difficulties. However, we are not shocked: rather, relief sets in, for we identify the saviour in Bajrangi. Such relief is unusual in border representations, and we are a happy audience even during a border crossing. Unprecedented things start happening the moment Bajrangi reaches the other side of the border. He refuses to go with the agent he has paid to help him cross the border, and waits for the Pakistani Rangers to grant him ‘permission’ because he won’t steal in like a thief. Border crossing turns into a joke, when Bajrangi repeatedly refuses to budge and pleads for legal permission. The serious scenes at the beginning of the movie showing trains passing between Wagah and Attari stations only after strict security checks become meaningless. Comedy rolls out from the moment the duo are in Pakistan: Bajrangi is in and out of the burka, a kazi happily handles two wives and openly embraces them, the child stops a car with a banana, the escape of the duo from police custody, and many other episodes 8 9

‘tere bhukkailaaj chichen’ ‘Chal beta selfie le le.’

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lighten the danger. Bajrangi evolves into a greater man: a super-human, more like the deity he himself worships, for who else could move hearts in a country where he is initially seen as a spy? At the end of the movie, where we see Bajrangi crossing the border almost legally, with public ratification, he has become the hero even in enemy territory. With the help of Charnawab, through social-networking sites, the world ratifies and becomes a part of his bordercrossing, through ‘likes’ and ‘comments’. All border representations question these demarcations, and have a deep desire to delete them and welcome a world without margins, for margins mean domination, discrimination, and exploitation. However, in a space where borders are commoditized, the emergence of a world beyond borders seems impossible.

Bibliography Giroux, Henry A. Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education. Routledge. 1992. Michaelsen, Scott and Johnson, David E. Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics. Minnesota University Press. 1997.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN LOOKING BACK IN LONELINESS HASINA WAHIDA

India is described as a land of unity in diversity, yet our nation bears a sad history of polarization and partition. The acclaimed Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal has called Partition ‘the central historical event in twentiethcentury South Asia’. She writes: A defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of post-colonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future. (‘The Great Divide’ n.p.)

Truly, after years of togetherness and tolerance, the division of the nation into two parts is indeed shocking and saddening. Sixty-eight years since Independence we are progressing towards a globally-developing nation, but the scars left by Partition have yet to be healed. In the midst of the crisis between the two nations came the 1971 War, which disrupted the life of Bengal. First, the carving out of East Pakistan, and then the formation of Bangladesh, left us baffled and tore our identity. The 1947 riots after Independence created moving sagas of stories and novels. Writings bathed in blood have flowed from the pens of Khushwant Singh, Bheesam Sahani, Krishan Chander, Ismat Chugtai, Rahi Masoom Reza, and others. Their tales reveal the atrocities, painful separations, and brutal killings that followed Partition. The picture in Calcutta during the 1971 divide is similar to the 1947 Partition history of Bengal. Carcasses and carnage were everywhere, from the streets of Calcutta, Bongaon, and the border zones of North 24 Parganas to the platforms of Sealdah, which was termed the ‘Gateway to Hell’ by journalist Prafulla Kumar Chakraborty in The Marginal Men. The life of the victims after Partition is covered in a recall of the lost days. Many writers in Bengali literature have portrayed life before and after Partition. Manik Bandopadhyay, in Desh Vaag, Desh Tyag (‘Partition and Exodus’), focuses on the 1946 riots. In Sarbojonin (‘Universal’), he writes of the trauma of people, irrespective of their

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religion. They had a deadly premonition that Partition would not end the violence and bloodshed. It heralded the beginning of a new era of violence, as was foreseen by Nehru. Amarendra Ghosh in Vangche, Sudhu Vangche (‘Torn and Mutilated’), Thikana Bodol (‘Change of Address’), and Beaini Jonota (‘Mob’) notes a similar strain. Sunanda Sikder looks back in a looking-glass portrayal of the life of an individual before the borders appeared. Partition may have brought political glory to the magnates, but it brought suffering and loneliness to the common people. Jennifer Yusin, in her thesis on ‘From the Borders of Partition: Trauma, Ethics and Testimony’, makes a valuable and fundamental analysis about Partition, focusing more on individuals and the meaning to them of the great divide, noting the observation of stalwarts such as Ashis Nandy or Veena Das: Ashis Nandy’s foundational scholarship on the relationship between psychoanalysis and South Asian politics and identities treats Freud’s psychoanalytic theory as a Western framework that limits and inadequately defines South Asian identity and suffering against Western conceptions. Veena Das’ work on violence and subjectivity argues that the cultural memory of the Partition is composed of stories of women passed through family narratives, thus suggesting the idea that the partition marked a new origin in configurations of the self and the social world. (4)

The history of Partition is viewed as something that stops at the dividing line. What happens thereafter is treated as an aftermath. But Partition history is not about an end and a new beginning: the memories, the trauma, the eternal divide of religious diversity, and above all the crisis of identity are braided together in one thread. While Partition was lived as a dreaming illusion of good life for one, it was forced displacement for another. If the former’s dream changes to a nightmare of loss and absolute destruction, the latter indulges in a kind of nostalgic looking back. The common thing in both experiences is the refugees’ struggle to accommodate to a new culture and a new land. Sarbani Banerjee, in her research work ‘“More or Less” Refugees?” Bengal Partition in Literature and Cinema’, has taken this refugee question into account in Bengali literature and film from a ‘bhadrolok’, ‘bhadromohila’, and ‘chotolok’ perspective. Partition, apart from envisioning the rise of a new political framework – the prominence of ‘Bangal’ and ‘Ghoti’ demarcations – presents a sad looking back. This paper focuses on the individual, rather than the collective, experience of the refugees. How Partition changes the configurations of religious unity, and how there are people who rise above religion and

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become role models of unbiased and selfless love, is seen in Dayamoyee’s tale. The life of the narrator at Sealdah Station in Adhir Biswas’s tale brings a new world to the forefront. It is a world where familiar faces become unfamiliar, the bhadrolok is left to wander the streets for succour and survival. This shifting of destiny is prominently detailed by Bijon Bhattacharya in his play Nobanno, representing the notorious famine in Bengal. Somnath Lahiri, in his news report on ‘Queues of Death in Calcutta’, published in People’s War, 5 September, 1943, revealed the plight of homeless people, dying of starvation, who, due to their belonging to a bhadrolok family, and being well-to-do farmers, now found it humiliating to beg for food or stand in queues for a free meal. This story from 1943 was true of 1967 too; only the perspectives changed, the destiny remained the same. It heralded the beginning of the 1971 famine in Bengal. After the 1947 Partition, the refugees were distinguished on the basis of wealth (dhan), honour (maan), and life (praan). At least twenty per cent of the immigrants who came to Bengal after the 1947 Partition was wealthy landowners, merchants, and from the professional classes. They started coming after the riots in Noakhali and Tippera in 1946. As time passed, ‘new migrants’ started to come, mainly in search of prospects, believing they would find better opportunities of living. There is a vast difference between the lives of the ‘old migrants’ who came around 1947 and the ‘new migrants’ of the 1970s. The ‘old migrants’ were landed gentry, who came through the mutual agreement of exchange of land with Muslim refugees, or through buying new land. But the ‘new migrants’ of the 1970s have always been very poor. They were Dalit refugees, who came mainly from the peasantry and artisan sections in East Pakistan. Adhir Biswas’s narrative Amra to Ekhon Indiyay begins in 1967, with a picture of exodus. Bunches of people are waiting for their displacement in a dreamland. Kolkata to these people meant Howrah Bridge, museums, and zoos – and of course better life and abundant food. The worst part of this displacement is scattered identities. The little boy engrossed in flying kites on the festival of Viswakarma Puja hardly accounts for their lost heritage and glory. But it leaves a scar, an injured memory of a lost world of friends and relatives. The present could not coincide with the past. These families could now scarcely provide new dresses in the festive season. They look forward with fragmented dreams to a new one-room thatched house, and their dreams are motivated by the party bosses. Slums develop rapidly in illegally occupied places, people creep in, and the unfortunate wait for another place that might be taken in a few days.

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The narrator looks back to the time in his native land. He defines his life in the past as a life of love and sacrifice in the midst of endless struggles. The father is unable to sustain the family with his meagre income, so he takes his son through the wet swamps and sells grass to buy wheat. His diseased, soggy feet stink in school, and the narrator feels cornered when friends complain of the smell, but he suppresses all emotion and grievance, because the poor should not complain – they should be content. Refugees from East Bengal had to face huge setbacks once they set foot in an alien land. They left behind a painful past and moved towards an even more painful future. The narrator in Biswas’s tale remembers how they had to sell their ancestral land to provide medicine for his mother. The last treasure having gone, they are left homeless and reduced to nothing. His father suffers from tuberculosis, they search for shelter, and the problem of space becomes acute. The women have to share space with male relatives, and sometimes even sleep beside the father-in-law. In her study, Rachel Weber notices that the change of the refugees’ houses from ancestral homesteads in East Bengal to paltry colony hovels in West Bengal led to ‘spatial considerations’ and ‘economic restructuring’, and involved an apparent breakdown of some of the timeworn bhadrolok norms and the dissolution of gender spaces. (‘“More or Less” Refugees?’ 24) Partition history is perceived differently by Urvashi Butalia. She looks upon written history as generalized facts, and so takes account of personal history. Oral narratives and fiction on Partition become the subject of her analysis: Whatever its limitations, the oral narrative offers a different way of looking at history, a different perspective. Because such narratives often flow into each other in terms of temporal time, they blur the somewhat rigid time frames within which history situates itself. Because people locate their memories by different dates, or different time frames, than the events that mark the beginning and end of histories, their narratives flow above, below, through the disciplinary narratives of history. (‘The Other Side of Silence’ n.p)

In this context I would like to add another observation by James Young, which Butalia notes in her account: James Young says: ‘Whatever “fictions” emerge from the survivors’ accounts are not deviations from the “truth” but are part of the truth in any particular version. The fictiveness in testimony does not involve disputes about facts, but the inevitable variance in perceiving and representing these

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facts, witness by witness, language by language, culture by culture.’ (ibid.; emphasis original)

An ‘immigrant’ accommodates himself or herself in accordance with the host culture. But the ‘expatriate’ or ‘migrant’ forcefully tries to digest the culture of the place where he or she has sought shelter. That is why the protagonist in Adhir Biswas’ Punya Gangar Kachakachi tries hard to imitate, or accustom himself with, the culture of the land. The problem with the refugee of East Bengal when he comes to West Bengal is the difference in tone and in the use of dialect. The narrator is laughed at as the Bangal baccha (Bangal kid), which emblematizes his identity. Coming to the question of ‘identity’, the basic observation is that exodus leaves a man aimless, and he is constantly searching for himself. When the protagonist leaves his native land in Jessore and migrates to India, all he possesses amidst all the alienation is his father’s hand and his presence. It is enough to secure him his identity in an alien land. But the same identity is questioned when they stand before a charity service to get a free meal. A volunteer asks if they are new to the place, as the trick of giving five rupees and getting a coupon is unknown to them. They are left bewildered and without a meal. Another severe identity shock comes when the protagonist spots his father carrying loads when he is with friends returning from school. Interestingly, school is a place that helps to build a new identity and creates the future ‘self’; but at the same time the identity of the father is pushed away, as the boy is afraid to address his labourer father before his friends. Likewise, when on a nostalgic journey he steps down at a station in East Bengal and comes to the doorstep of a doctor acquaintance, he is unable to announce his identity, as his past haunts him and the present cannot accommodate him. Looking back to the Partition of India, Urvashi Butalia, who, as already stated, takes into account oral narratives, finds that people were initially reluctant to speak of their past. To the simple question, ‘Where do you belong?’ they reply in the interrogative, ‘Now or before?’ To every family, Partition carries a lost past, a history of lost love and separation. Thamma, in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, Ashima in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and Nazneen in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane are all immigrants, but the soul of each of these characters cries for the homeland. This is also evident in the third novel under analysis, Sunanda Shikder’s Dayamoyeer Katha (2008). ‘Partition is not an event that took place in the past. It is not something that has happened and is over’, said Vazira Zamindar, associate professor of history, and commentator on the political psychology of Indian Partition. There are two types of Partition history: one is about the trauma, and the other is a nostalgic revisiting of the past. If ‘trauma’ characterizes

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to a certain extent Adhir Biswas’s narrative, Dayamoyee’s tale foregrounds a sense of nostalgia. However Biswas’ narrative is more a trauma of loss than of violence and bloodshed. Dayamoyee narrates that phase of the Partition story before religious atrocities crept in, when people lived in communal harmony. The narrator, in her childhood in East Pakistan, had befriended many Muslim families who were poor, but their love and sense of oneness and sacrifice is matchless. Since her childhood, Daya had known Mazam, a Muslim labourer, as her brother. She had spent many happy hours in the company of this brother. Even when she grew up and got married, Mazam sold his cattle to come and visit her, to see if she was doing well at her in-laws’, like a blood brother. Silence, or reticence in evoking the memory of Partition, does not imply forgetfulness of the past. But some resist it as a secret memory, while others run mad about it. Ashis Nandy has observed: ‘It is sometimes the dearth of meaningful words and sometimes the meaningful space that is the result of the silence.’ Dayamoyee, on hearing the news of her Muslim brother’s death, is dismayed. Old memories revive and find an emotional outburst in her tears. At the suggestion of the doctor, she gives vent to her silence through her writing, going down memory lane. Thamma, in The Shadow Lines, has a similar emotional going back, when she decides finally to come to Dhaka to meet her only surviving Jethamosai. What strikes most in the opening of the novel is the devotion and respect Dayamoyee had towards her Muslim brother. Actually a servant in her household when she was a little girl, this brother was the centre of her knowledge and curiosity. Himself illiterate, this man was the true epitome of love and sacrifice. A devoted Muslim, he believed that God makes no discrimination, and that caste/class demarcations are all man-made. God, Durga, and Laxmi are in absolute harmony in Heaven. Most pathetic is the anxiety, the pent-up pains, of Dayamoyee when she feels that her brother could not afford a meal on the day he died, or that when he returned from visiting Daya he perhaps had to sell another cow for a small sum of money. Apart from representing a beautiful memoir of life before Partition, Shikder’s novel helps in upholding a beautiful tale of Hindu-Muslim unity, which later suffered the calamity of enmity and separation. What actually caused these events is pondered in numerous works, as explicated by Dipesh Chakraborty in ‘Remembered Villages: Representations of HinduBengali Memoirs in the Aftermath of Partition’ as ‘death of the social’ (320). What haunts most is the question why animosity developed between the two communities. An invisible bond of love existed before, but now it has succumbed to hatred. Daya’s memoir centres on her beautiful

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childhood memories. She remembers how she used to spend her days among Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. What strikes us is the use of the Bangal dialect, which revivifies our imagination. Daya’s playmates Radhia and Jhumia used to take some rice, escaping the notice of Daya’s aunt (Daya called her ‘mother’) at the time of husking. At Daya’s innocent rebuke that God sees everything, they replied that the poor have no caste and no religion. Their only ‘religion’ is the endless, lifelong struggle to secure food. Even their father-in-law faced hunger, begging rice gruel from a Muslim household. These tales reflect the age-old struggle of the poor. Borders have demarcated political identities, but have failed to separate tales of suffering and love in all cultures, at all places. Globalization might mean McDonaldization, we may boast of being a glittering nation of skyscrapers and talk of building a digital nation, but the longings of the innermost heart are the same for Daya, Nazneen, and Ashima. Miles separate bodies, but not souls. The language of literature is the same throughout. The longings of a victim of Partition can hardly be differentiated. When Thamma, in The Shadow Lines, searches the frontier from an aeroplane and finds it to be a confusing, blurred line, everything remaining the same on both sides, she is confused. Indeed borders are too big a thing to be understood by us, the common people. We will live in a dilemma of identity with this overwhelming question until we wake up some day to demolish all borders. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained would then have to be rewritten. Milton would be reborn.

Works Cited Banerjee, Sarbani. ‘“More or Less” Refugee?: Bengal Partition in Literature and Cinema’ (2015). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. Paper 3125. Web. 17 October, 2015. Butalia , Urvashi. 2015. ‘The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India’. Duke University Press. The New York Times.2015. n.p., n.d. Web. 11 Sept. Chakraborty, Dipesh. ‘Remembered Villages: Representations of HinduBengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition.’ Northern Arizona University. N.p n.d. Web. 12 November, 2015. Dalrymple, William. ‘The Great Divide: The violent legacy of Indian Partition.’ The New Yorker, 29 June, 2015. N.p. Web. 25 October 2015. Harrington, Louise. ‘“Fragmentary evidence”: the struggle to narrate Partition’. South Asian Review 31:1 (January 2011): 1–21.

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Yusin, Jennifer. From the Borders of Partition: Trauma, Ethics and Testimony. Diss. University of California, Ann Arbor: UMI. 2007.

PART IV: LOCATING IDENTITY

CHAPTER SIXTEEN BORDERED IN AN INTERROGATED IDENTITY: A STUDY OF AMRITA PRITAM’S PINJAR PAROMA CHANDA AND DIPTARKA CHAKRABORTY

The French philosopher Rousseau stated that ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains’. Had he been living in the present era, he would have admitted that today a person’s very birth can also be controlled. Hence, from birth till death he/she remains captive. Needless to say, this captivity is more pronounced in case of women. In this paper, we shall highlight how the ‘identity’ of the protagonist of Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar undergoes continuous moulding by society. Set in the border between India and Pakistan, we find Pooro’s very existence goes through a kind of metamorphosis. We have made our illustrations in this paper after examining the film Pinjar, directed by Dr. Chandraprakash Dwivedi, and also the novel on which the film is based. The statements of the characters quoted in this paper from the film have been translated into English from Hindi, keeping the sense intact as far as possible. The novel shows us that, on the verge of Independence, the people of the border areas suffered many problems, as Hindustan was clearly being divided into two countries, based on the religion practised by two groups of people: Hindus and Muslims. The British had foreseen the seeds of hatred between them, which we – the heirs of that generation – are carrying and will pass on to our offspring. Places of joy turned into regions of horror overnight. Like other females, Pooro, the protagonist of the film, is a victim of this situation. Pinjar, in Hindi, literally means ‘a cage’. We find Pooro caged in the enigma of her identity in the midst of such confusion. Her religion, and more importantly her sex, create the bars of that pinjar which are difficult to shatter. It is because of the age-old rivalry between the Sheikhs (Muslims) and the Shahs (Punjabi Hindus) that Pooro is kidnapped from her home, only

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to be shifted to a Sheikh family. What surprises us is that her family hardly attempts to bring her back. Her father goes only once to the Sheikh family to plead for Pooro, but succumbs to the threat by the Muslims of kidnapping his remaining daughters. ‘Oh, better shut up! Or we have more young men.’ (Pinjar 40:20–40:24). This threat creates a sense of fear in his mind, and he forgets to be a true father and loses the identity of his ‘paternal self’. He is forced to say: ‘Pooro is dead to us...shall I carry her all my life on my shoulders? I am a father of three more daughters... That very man’s reputation is robbed whose daughter is robbed’ (Dwiwedi 40:20–40:24). To keep his family’s identity intact, he plans to obliterate Pooro’s identity as his daughter by means of some false statements regarding her character. Hence a ‘forced migration’ takes place in Pooro’s life, better expressed through the term ‘exile’. Exile is resonant with ideas of the forced emigration, displacement, social and political marginalization of an individual or a group of refugees, as per Martin Bauman. Pooro’s father had to displace and marginalize her socially and politically for his own personal benefit. The man who kidnapped Pooro is Rashid. He tells her about the nikah which is going to take place between them. When she hears this, Pooro becomes afraid of losing her identity as a Hindu woman. She is afraid of being part of the religion that she has hated since childhood, afraid of being part of Derrida’s ‘différance’, for in her blood it is still Hinduism that flows. She is afraid of losing her ‘space’ to the ‘other’. She has already been displaced from her home. Now a kind of ‘diasporic imagination’ takes place in her mind. It is a term used by a nation-state to define itself, consciously or unconsciously, or through self-evident political coercion, as a group that lives in displacement. Pooro, too, imagines how she had lived her life as a Hindu girl, followed the customs, and enjoyed her life with her mother, brother, and sisters (shown in flashback in the film). The threat of migrating into a Muslim family threatens her happy past, her identity itself. This is expressed when Pooro laments her fate: ‘If my uncle abducted your aunt, what fault was that of mine? You have reduced me to a homeless vagrant. ‘That is exactly what I told my uncles, but they taunted me.’ ‘And at their instigation you took my life!’ (Pritam 18).

She feels like the protagonist of T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Portrait of a Lady’ who says : Ay, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

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At one point, Pooro escapes from Rashid’s house to her paternal home and asks her father to take her back to Amritsar. Her father makes a complete U-turn and refuses to comply. The reasons are known to us. But what surprises us is the attitude of her mother. She says ‘Daughter, it would have been better if you had died at birth’ (Pritam18). Such a comment disturbs the very ‘presence’ of Pooro. Her own home, which can be compared to the homeland, desh, turns into a foreign land, videsh. She has migrated from her home. Her father says she has lost her religion, her life, and more importantly her identity, by staying in the Muslim household for such a long period of time: ‘Who will marry you now? You have lost your religion and your birthright’ (Pritam 22). The only reason for this is Pooro’s being a female. At this point a background song appears: ‘Jag mein janam kiu leti hai beti / Maike vidaai waliraat ni’ (Dwiwedi 1:11:01–1:13:10). A girl’s identity is fixed by the fact that she is born to take the ‘route’ to her husband’s house, forgetting her ‘roots’; she is seen as a commodity for exchange, defaming the institution of marriage. Pooro laments on four occasions: ‘Mujhe maar daliye’ (‘Kill me!’) (Dwiwedi 1:09:51–1:10:04). It is this conflict between desh and videsh that gives rise to adventures through which subjectivity escapes from the prehistoric world. In the meantime, Pooro gets married to Rashid and is given a new name, ‘Sheikh Hamida’, which is inscribed on her hand. She tries hard to prevent this, but her efforts are in vain. ‘It was a double life: Hamida by day, Pooro by night. In reality, she was neither one, nor the other, she was just a skeleton, without a shape or name’ (Pritam 25). Her migration to a Muslim family had made her friend Kammo indifferent to her. She sensed that Pooro’s touch might pollute her, and even lead to her abduction, just like Pooro. They move to Sakrale, far away from her paternal home. Hence, she has to break her ‘homeland ties’ with her ‘original home’ and make her way to the new one. According to Femke Stook, the dichotomy between ‘homeland as the object of longing... and host land as the object of efforts to belong’ (Knott and McLoughin 75) makes the subject (here Pooro) far more interesting. A theory of homeland as a ‘centre’ can be reconstituted, or imaginatively offered, as a point of origin. A people without a homeland is not an aberration, but an already prefigured cultural ‘text’ of late modernity. Pooro too has become a text which we, the readers, are interpreting from our own point of view. Pooro’s moving between a multiplicity of home spaces, the experience of ambivalently belonging both here and there, has creatively constructed new homes and identities that are deemed hybrid, systematic, or ‘fluid’. She has been

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marginalized, her ‘centre’ is gone. A ‘diaspora’ occurs in her life. The Greek noun diaspora is derived from the composite verb dia and speirein, meaning to ‘scatter, spread, disperse, be separated’. Epicurus used this word in his philosophical treatises to refer to the process of dispersion and decomposition. How this decomposition, dispersion, or scattering takes place will be discussed in the next part of the paper. In the course of the novel, we discover that a mad woman closely associated with Pooro is raped by some men. As such women are considered to be the ‘second sex’, they are subject to the barbarism of the ‘first sex’, thanks to society. In this way, the identity of such women is formed. The outcome of this barbarous activity is the birth of a baby, who is cared for by Pooro and Rashid. After six months, the members of the Panchayat decide to bring the baby back into their custody, as they have belatedly identified him as a Hindu boy. Pooro questions their stand: ‘Why didn’t they take him on the very first day?... I have brought him up for six months... Where were the Hindus then?’ (Dwiwedi 1:39:02–1:39:10). Pooro had herself lost her identity. She was trying to give it to someone else. But again, it is society that takes the power. Slavoj Zizek uses the term ‘Nation Qua Thing’ meaning ‘Nation in being/making of a thing’. A nation into which someone has migrated is constructed by that particular subject out of fantasies about a particular way of life that may be enjoyed by that particular subject. After all, he/she leaves a place that he/she had known from his/her early childhood. It is out of sheer will of existence that he/she tries to create a space similar to that which he/she has left back. Pooro seems to be involved in bringing up this baby, in whom she sees herself in her childhood days. The ‘other’ is always seen as one who wishes to steal that enjoyment. In this case it is the Panchayat – a microcosm of the whole society – that takes this role. Afraid of losing their own image, they are hell-bent in obliterating the little boy’s identity as a Muslim. This struggle ‘reminded her of the day when she had been snatched away from her mother, separated from her father and estranged from her own brothers and sisters. The foundling had become a part of her own flesh and blood’ (Pritam 66). She could identify herself with the baby. The members of the Panchayat could not provide a better substitute than Hamida for the baby. They had to return the dying child to her. ‘A week later the villagers saw the foundling gurgling and playing merrily in Hamida’s courtyard’ (Pritam70). She had been able to save the identity of the boy. By chance, Pooro gets an opportunity to visit Rattowal again. While on the way, she feels for the days she has left behind. In this situation we see her mourning. According to Freud, ‘mourning is regularly the reaction to

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the loss of a loved person, or the loss of some abstraction which has taken place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal and so on’ (78). Loss is an integral part of a diasporic subject. Mourning comes as a natural way to it. Pooro is no exception to this. The loss persists because there is no substitute for it in the ‘new object of love’. Freud remarks that, in some people, the same influences produce ‘melancholia’ instead of mourning, and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition – disposition of one’s own self. Angelica Rauch rightly says: ‘because of the absence of synthesis of forming original homeland, the subject remains in a melancholic state, not able to detach from what is lost and also not able to interpret the past constructively’ (Guha 74). It is in such a state of mind that Pooro happens to meet Ramchand – her lost love. Pooro recognizes him, but Ramchand doesn’t recognize her. Pooro’s trauma doesn’t allow her to answer Ramchand’s questions. We too become silent when we obtain a particular thing which we never dreamt of possessing. The same happens to Pooro. The next day, she goes and touches the soil on which Ramchand stood the previous day. And suddenly Ramchand appears. The following conversation takes place between them: ‘You are Pooro,’ he said. ‘All through the night that name has been going round and round in my head. You are Pooro, aren’t you?’ ... ‘Pooro has been dead a long time,’ she replied. (Pritam 78–79)

Melancholy, loss of the dearest thing, and her new identity as Sheikh Hamida all combined to make her utter such a statement. Living for a time with Rashid, Pooro might have begun to adapt to a Muslim way of living. Here another concept of diaspora studies, ‘sociality’, appears. In order to exist, Pooro had to socialize with her new identity. It is good to see that it has already begun, though we cannot overlook the pain that has led her to take this path. The well-known critic Brak says: ‘at the heart of the notion of diaspora is the image of a journey’ (Knott and McLoughin 148). She says attention must be paid to the historical, socio-economic, political, and cultural conditions of movement and settlement: ‘The question is not simply about who travels, but when, how and under what circumstances’ (Knott and McLoughin 149). For Stuart Hall, the productive tension of diaspora resides in a process of translation of histories, cultures, and representations, where cultural identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’, and where old identities take on a new formation. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything else that is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Diasporic identities are those that are constantly producing and reproducing

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themselves anew, through transformation and difference. Pooro’s life has already been discussed from this point of view. This version of diaspora emphasizes the place of arrival rather than the place of origin: a shift from the idealization of ‘homeland’ to the multiple and fractured process of ‘homing’. Clearly, the shift we find is from ‘roots’ to ‘routes’. 15 August, 1947 passed. ‘Just as peeled oranges fall apart into many segments, the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs of the Punjab broke away from each other.... It was said that men were being slaughtered in hundreds; rows of houses were being burnt down; neighbours were cutting each other’s throats. No one’s life or property was safe’ (Pritam 83–84). Ramchand and his family have to leave their ancestral home, and diaspora takes place in their lives too. But Ramchand’s sister, Laajo, is kidnapped. Ramchand asks Pooro to save her. Pooro asks Rashid. After all, ‘sociality’ goes hand-in-hand with diasporic studies. People of different religions and cultures, when migrating into a land, try to associate themselves on the basis of a common factor – for example ‘loss’-- Loss of previous life, loss of previous land, loss of previous self. Through this, they get themselves socialized and adjust to a particular way of life. Pooro understands what could be going through Laajo’s mind at this critical juncture. Hence, she sets herself to rescue the trapped woman. Throughout the film, we find Rashid burning in the fire of his conscience. As an act of restitution, he helps Pooro rescue Laajo, which actually helps him gain the highest position in Pooro’s life. ‘He remembered that when he had abducted Pooro, his conscience had weighed like a stone, which had become heavier and heavier’ (Pritam 109). After rescuing Laajo, ‘the weight seemed to lift and he felt as light as a flower speeding in the fragrant breeze’ (Pritam 110). His identity as a human being was thus restored. At one point of time, Pooro is suspected to be a Hindu by some Muslims, but the name ‘Hamida’, which was inscribed in her hands, saved her. The dichotomy of her Hindu and Muslim identity was vivid. The identity that she had once denied saves her life. In the end, she coped with life with Rashid. The following dialogue between Laajo and Pooro is significant: Laajo: Are you well in this house? Pooro: If he [Rashid] had not been with me, how could you be with me? Laajo: Do you still have any desire for my brother? Pooro: (Silence) (Dwiwedi 2:54:15–2:55:13).

This silence shows her ignorance about the question and the acceptance of her identity as Rashid’s Muslim wife. Rashid overhears the

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conversation, and when, at the end of the film, Pooro stands face to face with her brother, Rashid gives her the liberty of leaving him and going to India. ‘Pooro!’ said her brother, grabbing her by the arm. ‘This is your only chance...’ ... ‘When Laajo is welcomed back in her home, then you can take it that Pooro has also returned to you – My home is now Pakistan’ (Pritam 127). The land that had robbed her of her identity gave her a new one. The land that had shown her father’s indifference now ‘gifts’ her the love of a person. Does the land remain her ‘house’ – or is it her ‘home’? Our answer is ‘home’. This is why Ramchand’s remark at the end of the film is significant: ‘Now don’t rob her of her home for the second time – or she might die’ (Dwiwedi 3:07:35–3:07:40). Pooro says to herself and makes a last vow, closing her eyes: ‘Whether one is a Hindu girl or a Muslim one, whosoever reaches her destination, she carries along my soul also’ (Pritam 127). This vow was in the name of her very identity.

Works Cited Eliot, T. S.Selected Poems. Edited by Manju Jain. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2002. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1971. Guha, Ranajit. Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. 1997. Knott, K. and S. McLoughin. ed. Diaspora: Concepts, Identities, Intersections. Zed Books. 2010. Mishra, Vijay. The Literature of Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. Abingdon: Routledge. 2010. Pinjar. Director: Dr. Chandraprakash Dwiwedi. Cast: Urimila Matondkar, Manoj Bajpai, Production: Lucky Stars’ Entertainment Private Limited. (2003) Sanjay Suri, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Lillete Dubey. Pritam, Amrita. Pinjar: The Skeleton and Other Stories. Translated by Khushwant Singh. Delhi: Tara India Press. 2015.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ‘SHE CAME HOME RUNNING BACK TO THE MOTHERING BLACKNESS…’1 RACE, IDENTITY, AND RE-BORDERING OF SELF IN CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE’S AMERICANAH NILANJAN CHAKRABORTY

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! (McKay, web)

The above lines from one of Claude McKay’s well-known poems, America, shows us the pain related to a subject’s dislocation from the socio-political, geographical, and cultural terrain brought about by the politics of separation and victimization. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah presents a similar predicament to that which McKay represents in his poetry, because both share the problematic identity of being a ‘Black’ in America. Race is a subtle, and yet very powerful, force of power play in the novel, showing how American society functions and deals with the issue of race and identity. The question of border becomes important too, since the female protagonist, Ifemulu, travels to the United States of America in order to find a ‘better life’, but this journey ends in her coming to terms with her ‘black’ identity in a society that claims to be free, liberal, and democratic. Ifemulu travels to the U.S.A. with the hope that, as a subject of a state, she will gain liberation, since that is how a postcolonial subject wishes to see America. She has appropriated the idea 1

This line is taken from a poem called ‘Mothering Blackness’ by Maya Angelou, from the anthology Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie (1971).

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of the American dream and its capitalist system producing democracy as an agent of social equalization. But she remains a double outsider in that American dream: she is a black and a woman. Hence, for her, the crossing of border never becomes complete, in the sense that she cannot align herself to an identity that would integrate her as a black American woman. As a black, she has to negotiate the questions of nationality and selfhood, as an American she has perennially to face questions on being the other; and as a woman, she has to face questions of gender-stereotyping and morality. Her body is at odds with the body politic of the state: ‘There was a stripped down quality, a kindling starkness, without parents and friends at home, the familiar landmarks that made her who she was’ (Adichie, 111). The body as a political site is defined and determined by a number of factors, in the case of Ifemulu racial, territorial, and gender, and border determines how these factors would be interpreted to assign a certain identity to the body. The factors are therefore fluid; they are malleable to changes in border. Ifemulu’s body is defined as ‘black’ once she crosses the border of her own nation and enters America. Back home in Lagos, she was never ‘black’ because her skin colour did not invite the question of the insider-outsider dialectic. Any form of hegemony requires the presence of a binary system in the ideological or systemic apparatus of the society (the microcosm) or the state (the macrocosm). Ironically, this system is provided for in a ‘cosmopolitan’ society, in the American urban space. Globalization has often been at the receiving end of left-centric criticism, and has been critiqued for its role in spreading neo-colonialism, especially since the collapse of the Communist bloc. It has been pointed out that globalization leads to a certain level of economic integration, but that integration is based on the interest of capitalists, whereby the state becomes irrelevant in regulating economic policies, leading to the social, political, and economic marginalization of sub-elite groups. When this criticism is translated into the cultural space, globalization becomes a force that tends to remove differences in cultures and establish the hegemony of the dominant. Amilcar Cabral has a more integrative take on this issue: In order for culture to play the important role which falls to it in the framework of the liberation movement, the movement must be able to preserve the positive cultural values of every well-defined social group, of every category, and to achieve the confluence of these values in the service of the struggle, giving it a new dimension – the national dimension. (Cabral, 59)

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The overtly value-laden narrative of Cabral is problematic from the point of view of objective criticism, but what comes out importantly is the question of identity preservation, which is often seen as a counternarrative to the hegemony of globalization. Before actually going to America, Ifemulu sees it as space of ‘liberation’, both in terms of economy and of social mobilization. However, when she goes to the U.S.A., she can perceive the subtle ways in which racial profiling is done there. Her crossing of the borders re-shapes her identity as ‘black’. She cannot but appreciate the free economic space in America – she can eat hamburgers from McDonalds and wonder at the unabashed space of commercial advertisement, where social and economic upward mobility defines the way America functions as a society and as a state. She is also amazed by the freedom of the press: it is so publicly anti-establishment that Ifemulu is often led to believe that America is all about burglary and violence, since that is what is frequently reported by the press. She realizes however that this space of liberation is selective. Blacks in America are treated as mere agents of production, not allowed into the mainstream of social and cultural consumption. bell hooks states: Contemporary African-American resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes re-inscribing notions of ‘authentic’ black identity. (hooks, 425).

Since Adichie is writing in a post-global world, her text tries to question the Modernist black politics of asserting an ‘authentic’ black identity, based on notions of nostalgia to counter colonial oppression. Ifemulu observes that the very term ‘black’ is a hegemony, since it stereotypes a large mass of people, varied in their culture, as a homogeneous entity, thereby paving the way for racial colonization. She refuses to accept that black oppression can be dismissed as a ‘thing of the past’, since the legacy of the black struggle must live on to interpret and re-interpret contemporary history, to question and re-evaluate the role of race in society, especially in societies where border-crossing is involved. Adichie’s narrative is postmodern in its intent, because she tries to break free from the Modernist postcolonial tendency to counter-binarize the white/black dichotomy. When she visits Obinze’s flat in Lagos, she is enthralled to meet his mother. To Ifemulu, Obinze’s mother proposes an image that is ‘un-African’, an image that she loves at this time in her life. In his book Myth, Literature and the African World, Wole Soyinka notes an important point while studying the inter-relationship of art and social ideology:

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Obinze’s mother perhaps proposes an image of desire in Ifemulu in terms of the urban ‘western sophistication’ that she thinks she will get when she enters the power structure of America. Ifemulu herself observes that, in contrast to the urbanity of Obinze’s family, her own family suffers a sense of ‘provincial timidity’. Obinze’s mother portrays the angst that Adichie shares throughout the novel – the angst of defining the identity of blacks. Obinze’s mother declares she is into translation studies in French and is a lecturer in ‘literatures in English’, as opposed to the British canon of ‘English Literature’. She is urbane, comfortable with a Western style of living, and yet tries to maintain the ‘nativity’ of her culture through the appropriation of the colonial language into her folds of representation, a tension that Aijaz Ahmed calls ‘coercive identities’.2 In America, Ifemulu gets into a sort of a ‘black group’, voicing and protesting the racial violence against them, which eventually leads her to write blogs on the subject. Yet she does not reject self-mockery: And they themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity and they felt safe to mock, because it was mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again. (Adichie, 139)

Ifemulu, who had Obinze as her boyfriend in Lagos, does not allow morality to get in the way of having Curt as her new partner. She does not let others judge her, nor does she feel she is cheating on Obinze, since she challenges gender stereotypes and likes to control her decisions in life. Curt is a white, and her affair with him provides for an advertisement for American social equality. However, she does not feel wholly satisfied: She loved him, and the spirited easy life he gave her, and yet she often fought the urge to create rough edges, to squash his sunniness. (Adichie, 287)

Ifemulu does not feel comfortable about the fact that, since coming to the U.S.A., she has often used ‘liberation’ as a personal opportunity rather than a larger political statement against oppression. Her affair with Curt 2

From ‘Orientalism and after’. See works cited

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seems to have stemmed from this desire to justify her reason for coming to America. She sees the affair as a tool to support her; that America indeed provides the opportunity that is needed by individual subjects for selfmade entrepreneurship. In a class that is discussing the position of blacks in America, Ifemulu says the word ‘nigger’ should be allowed to be used in films. Professor Moore asks how to ‘represent history in popular culture’ and Ifemulu says ‘I don’t think it’s [the use of ‘nigger’ in films] always hurtful. I think it depends on the intent and also on who is using it’ (ibid., 138). So the question comes down to border and identity. To her, ‘meaning’ is generated by border, the intent differs with the crossing of it. But the problem arises when the subject itself crosses the border and begins to receive markers of identity as fluid templates. As is the case with Ifemulu the moment she crosses to America, her subjectivity gets defined by a different set of parameters, based on nationality and race, and in that scenario identity becomes a site of power-wrestling, the former (Nigerian) fighting it out with the latter (African-American) to colonize her body, her public as also her private self. She supports Barack Obama’s candidature for the presidency, but also critiques the way black identity is often used for social compromises. She takes to online micro-blogging to register her protest against the subtle ways in which blacks are treated as a homogeneous group, as if being black is their primary identity: ...when you make the choice to come to America, you become Black... we all have our moments of initiation into the society of former Negroes. (ibid. 220)

Ifemulu’s contention is that border constructs identity in terms of race, thereby making it a discursive narrative. Race is a ‘floating signifier’ that depends on language and political positioning for its definition and praxis. America, to Ifemulu, is the signifier that attaches race with its own political discourses of freedom and liberalization. Paul Gilroy notes: Race has become a marker for the activity of urban social movements and their conflict with urban political systems and state institutions... racism and the city is an important reminder that ‘race’ is a relational concept which does not have fixed referents. (Gilroy, 409)

Ifemulu blogs about the various subtle ways in which state and society work together to construct a ‘proto-ghettoization’ for the blacks. Ifemulu tells the story of her aunt, who kept a Spanish maid who was ‘coffeeskinned and black-haired’. She did not do her duties properly and so the aunt throws her out, remarking that ‘stupid woman she thinks she’s white’.

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Ifemulu notes ‘so whiteness is the thing to aspire to’ (Adichie, 205). She also notes how black people are kept under quiet surveillance when they enter a department store. All these subtle ways show how the state and social apparatuses work to construct a certain ‘idea’ surrounding blacks. So, when Barack Obama is elected president, Ifemulu wonders why after 250 years of independence, a nation should treat a president as ‘black’ and call it a moment of history. We may term this mass hysteria a kind of ‘cultural anxiety’, an anxiety that is born when a society/state feels the need to assert its democratic ideals, knowing well that those ideals have failed to function fully at the level of praxis. The complexity about Ifemulu’s diasporic identity is that as a ‘subject’ she does not fit into any accepted codification of ‘belonging’. Stuart Hall, in ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, states that diasporic identity can be looked at as ‘shared culture... with shared history and ancestry’ (Hall, 393). Ifemulu does not consider herself as sharing history with Americans because there is a constant sense of alienation from the mainstream. According to Hall, identity is in a constant state of flux, transfigured and recreated by the ‘continuous play of history, culture and power’ (ibid.) and so identity must not be seen as an essentialized proforma of social conditions of historical pasts. When Ifemulu decides to settle in America, she wants to move to what she believed to be a power centre in global politics. When she lands up there, she faces racial prejudice, being tagged as the ‘black’, and gets caught between playing the victim and offering resistance. She turns to her body, to use it politically to create an image of the Afro. She uses hair-relaxers that are meant for ‘ethnic hair’, and chooses to look ‘professional’ for a job interview that has an unwritten demand for straight hair, especially for blacks. She writes in her blog: in American pop culture, beautiful dark women are invisible. In movies, dark, black women get to be the fat nice mammy or the strong, sassy, sometimes scary sidekick standing by supportively. They get to dish out wisdom and attitude while the white woman finds love. (Adichie, 214)

Racial profiling in the cultural space is therefore subtle and silent, yet palpable to the critical mind. The marginalization of black bodies leads to their silencing by the cultural mainstay. Ifemulu can longer cope with remaining a subaltern, and returns to Lagos. After returning to Lagos, crossing the border for the second time, this time from the ‘centre’ to the ‘margin’, constructing a counter-narrative to colonial/racial prejudice, Ifemulu begins to suffer from a split self. As a typical postcolonial, she cannot accept her shift to the margin, and yet she desires to resist the racial politics of the centre. She writes in her blog,

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‘Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York’ (Adichie, 421). She has to encounter a division in her appropriation of culture: in America, she never had to answer to anyone about her ‘private’ life; but in Lagos she has to face social reprobation for having an affair with Obinze – now a married man with a child. In Lagos she has to deal with a new parameter of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’. Suddenly, she finds Lagos hot and dusty, her neo-colonial mindset encourages her to see herself as the ‘privileged’, who has the power to critique her native space, since she has been at the power centre. The anxiety of purpose is clearly discernible in Ifemulu, when she openly objects to her life being publicly discussed in her working place. There is a clear perceptive difference at the crossroads of cultural contours with which Ifemulu cannot reconcile. The ‘public’ and the ‘private’, the ‘obvious’ and the ‘imperceptible’ create a dichotomy in the construction of identity. In America, Ifemulu observes, bank loans are tougher to get for blacks; black policemen do not stop white drivers; and black models are not preferred because they do not fit the ‘aspirational’ mode. She observes in her blog, ‘Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy’ (Adichie, 221). Since race is no longer institutionalized in America, Ifemulu finds it tough to express these forms of prejudice in her blogs, but she makes it clear that marginalization runs deeper than most people think. In the concluding sections of the novel, Adichie uses cultural markers to delineate the ‘(m)othering blackness’ that Ifemulu returns to. She watches the ‘male peacock dance... memories of him so easily invaded her mind’ (ibid. 473). Ifemulu’s anxiety is heightened by the fact that, unlike in America, she has to remain within the confines of space, since options are limited in Lagos, both at the political and the personal level. Borders that looked fluid and dispersed at the beginning become more stratified and essentialized at the end, since Ifemulu loses her power to give birth to any narrative in Lagos, and this makes her the marginalized woman at the end, even if Obinze chooses to divorce his wife and stay with his ex-beloved.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. Great Britain: Fourth Estate. 2013. Ahmed, Aijaz. ‘Orientalism and After’. In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 162–71. New York: Columbia University Press. 1994.

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Cabral, Amilcar. ‘National Liberation and Culture’. In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 53–65. New York: Columbia University Press.1994. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1993. Hall, Stuart. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’. In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 392–403.New York: Columbia University Press. 1994. hooks, bell. ‘Postmodern Blackness’. In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 421–27. New York: Columbia University Press. 1994. McKay, Claude. America. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/america2/.Accessed 12 December. 1921. Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1976.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN LOOKING BEYOND THE BORDERS OF THE TIDE COUNTRY: A STUDY OF AMITAV GHOSH’S THE HUNGRY TIDE ANKITA CHATTERJEE

Introduction One of the elements that has been a favourite of Amitav Ghosh is the idea of ‘borders’. He has deviated far from the traditional notion of ‘borderlines’ as distinct lines of demarcation that divide, barricade, and insulate. Rather, he has asserted the idea of vague ‘shadow lines’ that embody the latent complexities which work due to their shifting nature. What interests Ghosh about borders is their ‘arbitrariness, their constructedness – the ways in which they are ‘naturalised’ by modern political myth-making’ (Hawley 2005, 9). His novels hugely bear evidence of his playing with the idea of ‘borderlines’. Moving away from the rigidity that has defined the exclusiveness of earlier notions of border, Ghosh focuses more on the impact of the porosity of such fluid boundaries. Owing to their fluidity, borderlands acquire the typicality of a ‘no-man’s-land’ whereby they become sites of creative outputs instead of being just areas of cultural void. In the modern context of interconnectedness and globalization, Ghosh seems to endorse the view of Renato Rosaldo: In contrast with the classic view that posits culture as a self-contained whole made of coherent patterns, culture can singularly be conceived as a more porous array of intersections where distant processes cross from within and beyond its borders’ (1992, 20)

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In Ghosh’s novels, border does not restrict itself to nations, but extends its purview to include the various kinds of boundaries that operate between different cultures, and among people of different groups, classes, religions, and nationalities. Such flexibility with the concept of border leaves ample scope for Ghosh’s next obsession: ‘fascinating historical backdrops’ (Hawley 2005, 1). In most of his novels, the readers travel across various cultures and dwell in different time-frames with the characters. Owing to his deep interest in ‘the methods of knowledge, and in our ways of knowing’, Ghosh tends to look at history through the narrative of individuals. In doing so, he tries to explore ‘both historical and contemporary relations’ between different groups, and their consequent impact in the shaping of the personalities of these individuals (Hawley 2005, 17). As Ghosh asserts in one of his interviews: ‘My fundamental interest is in people –in individuals and their specific predicaments. If history is of interest to me, it is because it provides instances of unusual and extraordinary predicaments’ (Hawley 2005, 14). The cross-cultural elements that mark the identities of these individuals are found to bear hugely upon the ‘ongoing histories of migration and trans-cultural flaws’ (Clifford 1992, 7). The individual narratives which Ghosh identifies to be a prominent part of his novels form connecting links with the greater historical continuum. These narratives operate behind the screen, mingle, and populate further, to recreate such historical backdrops. Like most of Ghosh’s novels, we cannot think of The Hungry Tide without the fascinating Sunderban. It is as significant as it is geographically active. This setting is explored from various angles at different levels in the novel. The Sunderban, which is described as ‘the threshold of a teeming subcontinent’ with its mutating boundaries, widens the scope further to play with the idea of borders (Ghosh 2007, 50). The dynamism which characterizes boundaries seems to exist in all the elements that define the existence of the Sunderban. The transformations brought about by the enmeshing of such elements underscore the basis of creation in the Sunderban. Peculiarly, this process exists not only at the physical level but penetrates further, to operate at metaphorical levels. Consequently readers come to a point where the boundaries of all the other elements interfuse with the setting, in the ebb and flow of the narrative, so that they can hardly tell what defines the identity of what. Such a seamless interweaving into a unified whole marks the uniqueness of the tale. The next sections of this paper analyze and discuss how the two most important themes of the setting – enmeshing and transformation – become the central themes in defining the other elements of the story in general.

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Enmeshing: ‘Crossing the bar’ Ghosh, at the very beginning, strikes the keynote by introducing the theme of ‘borderlines’ through the setting. Ghosh’s primary emphasis – the arbitrariness and fluidity of borderlands –is immediately focused on, in allowing us a glimpse of the ‘tide country’. This place, ‘interposed between the sea and the plains of Bengal’ is an ‘archipelago of islands’ on the ‘eastern fringes of the Indian subcontinent’ (Ghosh 2007, 6). The language adopted itself captures the feel of the peculiarities of a typical borderland. The idea of ‘enmeshing’ is encapsulated in the very process by which these islands are formed. Hence we find that there are ‘no borders here to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea’ and ‘everyday thousands of acres of forest disappear underwater only to re-emerge hours later’ (Ghosh 2007, 7). In the tide country, ‘. . . the river channels are spread across the land like fine-mesh net, creating a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always mutating, always unpredictable’ (Ghosh 2007, 7). The uniqueness lies in the fact that ‘it is only in falling that the water gives birth to the forests’ (Ghosh 2007, 8). The dynamic rise and fall of the waters that support the mangroves makes it a ‘universe unto itself’ (Ghosh 2007, 8). In all these descriptions, there is an intention to assert the abruptness of a borderland, by pointing out the dynamicity of the boundaries of, and its impact on, the Sunderban. Its varied implications can be seen at the ecological, cultural, and narrative levels which seem to imbibe the features of a borderland. On the ecological level, Ghosh adopts the stance of a cetologist through Piya, in exploring the Sunderban’s ecosystem. The apparent ‘impassably dense’ (Ghosh 2007, 8) garb of the mangrove forest is opened up to let us into a world of varied species, which proliferate and adapt to survive in the ‘unpredictability’ and ‘beguilement’ of the tide country: The waters of river and sea did not intermingle in this part of the delta; they interpenetrated each other, creating hundreds of different ecological niches, with streams of fresh water running along the flows of some channels creating variations of salinity and turbidity. These microenvironments were like balloons suspended in water, and they had their own patterns of flow . . .Each balloon was a floating bio dome, filled with endemic fauna and flora, and as they made their way through the waters, strings of predators followed trailing in their wake. This proliferation of environments was responsible for creating and sustaining a dazzling variety of aquatic forms – from gargantuan crocodiles to microscopic fish. (Ghosh 2007, 125)

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Piya is amazed by ‘the universe of possibilities’ that has suddenly opened up, while gathering information about Orcaella Brevistrosis (the Irrawaddy dolphin) which would require a ‘working knowledge of a whole range of subjects – hydraulics, sedimentation, geology, water-chemistry, climatology’ (Ghosh 2007, 125). This not only suggests the overlapping of various fields that would be needed to study such a complex ecosystem, but also speaks of an interconnection that underlies it. No less amazing is the logic that lies behind the crabs being ‘the keystone species of the entire ecosystem’ keeping ‘the mangroves alive by removing their leaves and litter’ (Ghosh 2007, 142). Again, the logic behind the attraction of the river-dolphins to the crabs, the salinity which makes the tigers into maneaters, and the movement patterns of Orcaella are woven together to create the ecological network of the Sunderban. Water assumes a symbolic significance, for in the powerful tidal currents the whole social order is reshaped, along with the geographical contours. Any kind of hierarchy defining the dividing-lines of social, class, cultural, and ecological relations is undermined and redefined. For instance, the class consciousness fuelling Kanai’s cynical attitude towards Fokir is undermined at Garjantola, where Kanai, after falling in the mud, hallucinates a tiger. He realizes how the ‘dynamics of their situation’ (Ghosh 2007, 321) in ‘stepping on the island, the authority of their positions had suddenly reversed’ (Ghosh 2007, 325). On the other hand, we have a certain kind of rugged harmony, whereby the human ecosystem is problematically placed in the wider natural ecosystem. Here again there are no specific ‘borders’ to prevent overlapping, irrespective of the kind of change it can bring. The tigers and crocodiles are not necessarily compatible, and the balance between the human world and the animal world is always in flux: ‘Every year dozens of people perish in the embrace of that dense foliage, killed by tigers, snakes, and crocodiles’ (Ghosh 2007, 8). The horrendous storm which sweeps away Fokir and Piya is suggestive of the abrupt logic that defines the fundamental relationship between the human and the natural world, which is beyond any sort of simplistic mapping. These elements in totality assert their own identity by exercising their potential to undermine any hegemonic order and rewrite the ‘social matrix’ (Anand2008, 23). In W.R. Greer’s words, the Sunderban has allowed Ghosh ‘to create a setting where everyone is on an even footing . . . the hostile environment erases all social strata because everyone is equal in the struggle to survive’ (quoted in Divya Anand). This marks the unpredictability of the tides, the tigers, the islands, and the rivers – none of which can be regulated by mere borders.

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The nullifying of the rigid borders of the Sunderban that we found in the previous section is also at the root of initiating the creative enmeshing of cultural elements: ‘In the geography of human history, no culture is an island [no place is] distinctive and singular and precisely because of that enmeshed with its neighbours in an intricate network of differences’ (Ghosh n.p.). In spite of the tide country’s status as islands, we are attracted to its significant location: ‘India’s doormat’ (Ghosh 2007, 50). Here the ever-mutating borderlines have their own pattern of formation. The islands number in thousands, ranging from huge islands to sandbars of which ‘some have lasted through recorded history while others are washed into being just a year or two ago’ (Ghosh 2007, 7). On a metaphorical level, these islands which receive the seas, rivers, channels, and confluences in unison assume the identity of a mohona. As Nirmal observes: . . . the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who knows what else? Flowing into one another they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow. . .the tide country’s faith is something like one of its great mohonas, a meeting not just of many rivers, but a roundabout people can use to pass in many directions – from country to country and even between faiths and religions. (Ghosh 2007, 247)

This is suggestive of the cultural fusion that operates there. It is exemplified in the typical customs, faiths, lifestyles, and the very myths that shape the psyche of the inhabitants of the tide country, for ‘the rivers ran in [their] heads, the tides were in [their] blood’ (Ghosh 2007, 165). Interestingly, the fusion of trans-cultural elements is noticeable in the strange coexistence of the name of Allah with Puja rituals in Fokir’s worship of Bonbibi at Garjantola. Nirmal’s amazement in hearing the ‘Arabic invocations’ with ‘rhythms of the recitation’ of a Hindu Puja is acceptable (Ghosh 2007, 246). The fusion of elements from Hinduism and Islam, in contrast to the Hindu-Muslim rifts that have stained history, makes prominent the syncretic phenomenon as part and parcel of the island’s cultural fabric. Moreover, when Nirmal opens the book of Bon Bibir Karamoti or that Bon Bibir Johuranama he finds ‘the pages opened to the right as in Arabic, not to the left as in Bangla folklore’ (Ghosh 2007, 246). Again we come across strange customs, as in ‘the tide country girls were brought on the assumption that if they married, they would be widowed in their twenties’ (Ghosh 2007, 80) and ‘on the margins of the Hindu world widows were not condemned to lifelong bereavement: they

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were free to marry if they could’ (Ghosh 2007, 81). Thus the islands are begotten out of the rivers of various cultures, so much so that they are simultaneously insular on one hand and connected on the other, owing to the fluidity of cultural borders. Similarly, we have the strands of various narratives thriving within the plot structure of the novel. The apparently main storyline, revolving around Piyali Roy and Kanai Dutt, to which we are introduced at the beginning, is replaced by the end of the novel with a confluence of numerous narratives. The personal relations that develop in the course of the novel can be grouped as: Piya/Fokir, Kanai/Piya, Nirmal/Nilima, Nirmal/Kusum, Fokir/Moyna, Horen/Kusum and so on. In the case of Piya and Fokir, we find that Piya, a cetologist with a different culture and language altogether, ultimately succeeds in developing silent communication with Fokir. Although this communication becomes something more than mere language is capable of when Fokir guards Piya with his body in the storm. But class borders are also prominent, for Fokir dies remembering his wife and son. On the other hand, we find Kanai, with his knowledge of myriad languages, ends up being islands apart from Piya. Similar is the case with Nirmal and Nilima, and Fokir and Moyna, who in spite of being together for years, remain separate islands to each other. Nirmal finds in Kusum his muse, who epitomizes ‘the heady excitement of revolution’ (Ghosh 2007, 216). While Moyna remains far from knowing the worth of the intuitive abilities of Fokir, his knowledge of the crabs, river dolphins, and river routes, which sweeps away Piya’s admiration, goes unnoticed. The motif of translation undercuts at various levels, emphasizing the impossibility of perfect communication, and simultaneously asserting the necessity to communicate. This results in an array of tangled narratives that defines the emotional texture of the novel. No less important is the dream of Sir Daniel Hamilton, envisioned and shared by the Marichjhapi settlers, Kusum, Fokir, Horen, and Nirmal, or the shared knowledge of Piya and Fokir, and similar outlooks of Moyna and Nilima, past and present –all of which diverge, converge, and intercut each other to become woven into the labyrinth of a single narrative.

Transformations: When everything ‘grounded to fine silt becomes something else’ Time has always played an important role in Ghosh’s novels, along with narratives. His playing with chronology, with numerous stories from different periods of time, and their juggling and ultimate interlocking with each other, characterizes many of his novels. If enmeshing has been an

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active process, the idea of transformation on the other hand has been the spirit behind shaping the new. This idea is embedded in the creative force that controls the tide country: ‘In the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, islands are made and unmade in days’ (Ghosh 2007, 224). Interestingly, this idea is extended further, assuming metaphorical significance in the lives of the people who come in contact with the tide country. In this context, Terri Tomsky notes how Ghosh’s humanitarian ‘model of interventionist ethics emerges out’ in the form of ‘transformative effect’, which compels the characters to form a ‘political consciousness’ about the ‘geopolitical inequalities in the spaces that are both conceptually and geographically distant’ (2009, 54). In this case, the setting – Sunderban, which had been the seat of subalternity – has no direct linkage with cosmopolitan characters such as Nirmal, Piya, or Kanai. However the tide county, in Tomsky’s opinion, is similar to ‘certain locations and histories [which] give rise to unique sensations, whose affective resonance leads to the formation of a new subjectivity within the individual’ (2009, 55). In that sense, ‘Ghosh ventures beyond a preoccupation with his characters so that his strategy of affective transformation spills over into the structure of the novel itself’ (Tomsky 2009, 55). Thus while playing with past and present, Ghosh’s inclusion of such an appropriate backdrop of ‘islands’ that are the ‘rivers’ restitution’ becomes favourable. ‘Silting’ becomes a metaphor whereby something metamorphoses into something else, like the islands, for ‘nothing escapes the maw of the tides’ (Ghosh 2007, 225). The transformation of Marichjhanpi takes place, when refugees try to translate Hamilton’s dream of forming a ‘new society’ run by co-operatives, which Nirmal talks of when he describes how: . . . saltpans had been created, tubewells had been planted, water had been dammed for the rearing of fish, a bakery had started up, boat-builders had set up workshops, a pottery had been founded as well as an ironsmith’s shop; there were people making boats while others were fashioning nets and crablines, little market places, where all kinds of goods were being sold, had sprung up. All this in the space of a few months! It was an astonishing spectacle – as though an entire civilization had sprouted in the mud. (Ghosh 2007, 191)

Nirmal observes that it is ‘as if the whole country was speaking the voice of transformation’ (Ghosh 2007, 225). Again, the destruction of the settlements, the resistance of the Marichjhanpi settlers, the enforced state

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violence, the consequent ‘silting’ over – all delineates the typical pattern of transformation–silting–transformation of the islands. Next we come to the people whose lives are transformed in the ‘accelerated pace’ of the tide country, who are mainly cosmopolitans. First we have Nirmal, who comes to the Sunderban as a school-teacher. A revolutionary by nature, when Nirmal is bogged down by the ‘emptiness’ of his retired life, he finds that ‘a man can be transformed even in retirement, that he can begin again’ (Ghosh 2007, 179). His transformation begins when he starts identifying with the dreams of the refugees. He is attracted to Kusum, in whom he finds an ‘embodiment of Rilke’s idea of transformation’ (Ghosh 2007, 282). He attempts to rediscover the revolutionary in him by active participation in the Marichjhanpi incident, in spite of Nilima’s disagreement. At this juncture, Tomsky’s idea of the transformative affect can be manifested in Nirmal, who is powered by his ‘anxious witnessing’ of the events of Marichjhanpi massacre, and the altruistic, reverential love due to his close relationship with the tide country itself (2009, 63). Again Tomsky rightly notes that Nirmal, in spite of being ‘sensitive to the particularities and local conditions’, finds all his attempts ‘jeopardised by the hegemonic apparatus’ (2009, 55). However, ‘the ethical enquiry’, in the form of a written diary, keeps alive the unheard cries, the voice of revolution of the settlers, that ‘calls attention to collective suffering and urges intervention’ (Tomsky 2009, 55). Nirmal’s diary, which recorded every event, takes the form of a continuous tale, which not only remains as the connecting thread between Nirmal and Kanai, but reaches ‘beyond the text to inspire emotionally upon those who read it a historical understanding that enables a form of self-reflexivity’ (Tomsky 2009, 55). Through this, they remain ‘alive’ in the poetry of survival which continuously flows in every nook and corner of the tide country. This effect consistently operates on almost all the other characters who come to the Sunderban from different cultural backgrounds, who need to ‘subject their beliefs to scrutiny’ against the realities of the tide country (Tomsky 2009, 56). The Sunderban is conceived as a space ‘situated outside the cosmos of their worldly ideology; it reveals the limitations of the elites’ metropolitan philosophies’ (Tomsky 2009, 57). Hence the metaphorical idea of a thing becoming something else in the tide country is actively at work here. Similarly in Kanai we find a transformation from a cynical, self-centred, class-conscious being to a person who comes to terms with the power-dynamics that exist in the Sunderban: ‘This is not my element’ (Ghosh 2007, 334). Kanai has always associated the idea of ‘exile’ with Lusibari: ‘For me Lusibari will always be a part of the past’

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(Ghosh 2007, 198). In spite of being a person who always ‘like[d] to look ahead’ instead of dwelling on the past, he ends up re-writing the history of Marichjhanpi from Nirmal’s diary (Ghosh 2007, 198).Tomsky observes, ‘Nirmal’s anxious witnessing nonetheless carries within it an affective surplus that leaves its distinctive imprint on Kanai, as it communicates a traumatic history’ (2009, 60). Although Kanai envisions Marichjhanpi through Nirmal’s eyes, the events and experiences in totality take the shape of a transformative affect that triggers a similar change in Kanai. Tomsky opines that ‘by forming a new ethical consciousness, Kanai’s cosmopolitan vision arises spontaneously, unbidden and replete with glaring moral truths’ where he ‘fully grasps the structure of violence and oppression operating within the dominant order’ (2009, 60). On the other hand, Piya undergoes transformation while tracing Orcaella. She discovers the tide country through Fokir’s knowledge and Kanai’s interpretation. She loses Fokir, but intends to start a project on the basis of the data acquired through Fokir, in his memory. Thus the intention of Kanai to publish Nirmal’s diary, and Piya’s ‘collaboration’ with Nilima, become ‘a union between the global and the local that promises to empower the subaltern inhabitants of the tide country’ (Tomsky 2009, 63) so that their history, so far confined within the bounds of local, progresses to a more global level. Finally, with the relocation of both Piya and Kanai to the Sunderban, their combined initiatives can be thought as progress in what Tomsky has described as the ‘ethical intervention’ begun by Nirmal, indicating the impact of their transformed selves.

Conclusion Hence we find that Ghosh succeeds in making the Sunderban an apt backdrop favouring the process of enmeshing and transformation. While analyzing the different levels, we find ‘the proliferation of the small worlds’ at the cultural level is similar to the ‘proliferation of the microenvironments at the ecological level’. The opposing pulls which make Piya feel ‘torn between’ Fokir and Kanai are similar to the pull felt by Nirmal between Nilima and Kusum. Such instances point to the interconnectedness of these levels. The idea behind Nirmal’s attempts to show the commonality between the apparently opposites of ‘myth’ and ‘geology’ are extended to a broader level, where salt-water and freshwater, everyday change and revolution, scientists and fishermen, cosmopolitan and the subaltern, global and local, past and present, prose and poetry all come together. These strands flow as rivers, follow the rhythm of the tides, and ultimately mesh with each other to transform into the poetic-prose

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narrative of The Hungry Tide. The setting acts as the unifying factor, and smooths all the rugged ends of the unharmonious elements, thereby breathing an altogether different understanding into this unique tale of a unique place.

Bibliography Anand, Divya. ‘Words on Water: Nature and Agency in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide’. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 34.1. 92008). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267793400_Words_on_Wate r_Nature_and_Agency_in_Amitav_Ghosh's_The_Hungry_Tide. Clifford, James. ‘The Transit Lounge of Culture’. Times Supplement, 4596. (1992). 3 May. Ghosh, Amitav. ‘The Slave of Ms.H.6’. CSSSC Occasional Paper No. 125. Calcutta: CSSSC. 1990. http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/3372#.VzRLn4 R97IU. —. The Hungry Tide. Thompson P (India): Harper Collins.2007. Hawley, John. C.Contemporary Indian Writers in English: Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction. New Delhi: Foundation Books. 2005. Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon P. 1992. Tomsky, Terry. 2009. ‘Amitav Ghosh’s Anxious Witnessing and Ethics of Action in The Hungry Tide’. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2009). 52–72. Accessed October 1, 2009. doi:10.1177/0021989408101651.

CHAPTER NINETEEN HIGHLIGHTING METAMORPHOSIS: A STUDY OF MANJU KAPUR’S THE IMMIGRANT VALENTINA TAMSANG

Professor Amartya Sen, in his book Identity and Violence,quoting Oscar Wilde’s enigmatic claim, ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation’, says, ‘We are indeed influenced to an amazing extent by people with whom we identify’ (Sen 2006). Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant shows us how two individuals, Nina and Ananda, merged as couple due to the social institution of marriage, imbibe the ‘host land’ culture, and are influenced by ‘host land’ people to such an extent that they shed their ‘homeland consciousness’ and create a ‘multi-locational “Self”’’: It involves recreation of an identity, drawing from both home and host lands and is not marked by strict boundaries. Such an identity is distinct, yet has points of merger at both ends, and undergoes changes as generations pass by. Both host land/homeland dynamics play a crucial role in the formation of such. (Pande2013)

In the case of Ananda and Nina, this new ‘avatar’ that they had created is the result of a heavy compromise of their homeland values, which induces in them a gradual metamorphosis. Unlike Gregor Samsa, the central character in Kafka’s absurd fiction Metamorphosis, who wakes up one fine morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect-like creature, and is forced to adjust to his new condition, Nina and Ananda, around whom the novel The Immigrant revolves, go through a gradual transformation. Samsa did not have any choice, as his transformation was sudden; but Nina and Ananda had the freedom to choose whether to take the new ‘avatar’ or to stick to the inherited self. A series of bizarre circumstances lands Ananda as an

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orphan. The only person left upon whom he can expect to lean is his maternal uncle, Mr. Sharma, who lives in Halifax, Canada. He next finds himself on Canadian soil and in his uncle’s basement, his makeshift home until he can stand on his own feet, as his uncle expects. His uncle, having already imbibed Canadian culture, has changed his dietary habits to eat steak with his Canadian wife and children. He coaxes Ananda to shed his Indian skin as soon as possible. Ananda learns the Canadian way of life, where ‘Everybody had to do everything themselves. …Washing, ironing, bed-making, similarly all on their own.’ (Kapur 20): Settlement in the new land signifies not only residence, but participation in the economic and political processes of the host land. The immigrants create a niche for themselves and affect the host nation’s social, economic and political domains. They also negotiate and compete with other communities through what Stanley Tambiah (2006:170) calls ‘vertical networks’ to secure their existence in the host countries. (Pande2013).

After taking a loan in order to become a dental surgeon, we see Ananda practising dentistry, along with his friend Gary. His existence is now secure enough to pay his monthly rent and debts. The traditional values he held on to so dearly, especially caste, which held him high as a Brahmin in Indian eyes, are of no value to him in Halifax. He is just another immigrant, like the rest of those who had migrated for various reasons. Ananda develops a relationship with Gary’s friend Sue. In comparison with women back in India, Anand finds Sue intimidating and bold, overshadowing his personality and having a voracious appetite for intimacy that he is unable to satisfy. His manliness is questioned, which gives him a feeling of castration. Ananda has already started imbibing the new culture. For convenience, he has started eating steak, and prefers to be called ‘Andy’. Carefully he started with a fish – that almost vegetable – taking his first bite of a fillet soaked in lemon and tartar sauce, asking his mother’s forgiveness, but feeling liberated. By the end of the summer he had graduated to processed meats. Culinary convenience entered his life. (Kapur 36)

Ananda’s assimilation to the Canadian way of life is rapid. He acquires Canadian citizenship and takes pride in being associated with that country. When the question of marriage arises, Ananda prefers to be Indian, and succumbs to his sister Alka’s choice of bride back in India. Moreover he thinks his issues about manliness will be resolved with a patient Indian wife, Nina –in her thirties and a professor at Miranda House College,

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Delhi. Her mother, Mrs. Batra, was the only one she could call her own. Like every other middle-class woman, Nina cherished the dream of getting married and having a family. She agreed to the lucrative proposal of the Non-resident Indian (NRI) Ananda, a practising dentist looking for an Indian girl. Three days after the marriage, Ananda left for Canada, with Nina eagerly awaiting her call from the Canadian Embassy. In reality, the experiences of women during the process of migration and settlement have always been different and very specific to them….As migrant wives, they recreate aspects of home and culture in a foreign setting, often riddled with politics of race and culture.’ (Pande2013)

Nina’s journey to Halifax began with such expectations from her. She is soon reminded that she is an immigrant from the Third World. At the immigration counter in Toronto ‘she is ushered into a small empty cubicle with neon lights, and no windows…She sits down and stares straight in front of her. After a while a woman appears. She smiles briefly, takes out a form and begins to fire questions’ (Kapur 105). Nina’s rages against the atrocities done to her are justified. Indeed, many of the conflicts and barbarities in the world are sustained through the illusion of a unique and choiceless identity. The art of constructing hatred takes the form of invoking the magical power of some allegedly predominant identity that drowns other affiliations and in a conveniently bellicose form can also overpower any human sympathy or natural kindness that we may normally have. The result can be homespun elemental violence, or globally artful violence and terrorism. (Sen 2006)

However Ananda’s reactions to her experiences are mild. He wants her to forgive and forget, and adapt to and enjoy the new country. Adaptation was the thing, but in Nina’s case it took months to shed her resistance. It was expected by everyone she met that she wanted to imbibe the new culture. The astrologers back home who she had consulted ‘didn’t convey how much stress she would undergo while assaulted by changes, changes so thorough that she felt rootless, branchless, just a body floating upon the cold surface of this particular piece of earth’ (Kapur176). Added to her state of bewilderment was the discovery of the impotence of her husband. Her dream of having a child and a happy marriage was now in question. She experienced a ‘state of permanent sexual frustration’ that made it difficult for her in the new country. ‘It grieved her that Ananda had no notion of how she felt. Her idea of matrimony was a husband who was a little more alert to the discreet clues she let drop’ (Kapur178). ‘Nevertheless, as it appears to be the case, women migrate within the

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framework of patriarchy and cultural considerations and preserve them as the “bearers of Indian tradition”’ (Pande 2013). Nina could not be vocal about her frustration with her husband. This added to her loneliness. She joined the Halifax Memorial Library in order to spend time reading books. For Nina the missing ‘object’ of her happiness in her marriage was ‘family’ or the child she was looking forward to. Ahmed writes ‘family does sustain its place as a “happy object” by identifying those who do not reproduce its line as the cause of unhappiness.’ Nina ends up becoming an ‘affect alien’ and a ‘melancholic migrant’. Like every other woman, she had cherished a dream of a happy life after marriage. But this happiness did not materialize. Ananda was complacent and did not understand the complexities of his wife’s unhappiness. Moreover, he had his own issues to deal with. In the light of ‘Affect Theory’, Sara Ahmed discusses in her essay ‘Happy Objects’ that: Even if happiness is imagined as a feeling state, or a form of consciousness that evaluates a life situation achieved over time (Veenhoven1984, 22–3), happiness also turns us towards objects. We turn towards objects at the very point of ‘making’. To be made happy by this or that is to recognize that happiness starts from somewhere other than the subject who may use the word to describe a situation. (Ahmed2010)

Nina and Ananda both had separate points to achieve, beyond which they thought they could achieve happiness. For her, happiness was having a ‘child’, for him his ‘cure’. Feminist overtones can be seen in the novel when Beth, whom Nina had met in the Halifax library, introduces her to the women’s support group, which functioned on feminist principles and co-counselling, mainly helping members avoid dependence through mutual help. In a clinical set up the anxieties and problems women have tend to be treated as neurosis, rather than the result of stress that comes from coping in a male dominated world. Often women feel inadequate, powerless, even sexually vulnerable because of professional therapist. (Kapur 214)

The main aim of this support group was to provide a safe place where they could ‘grow without fear of criticism’ and where their individualities would be ‘nurtured and strengthened’. As it was the custom of the group to borrow books, Nina picks Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which she had not read before. Later Nina discusses the book:

Highlighting Metamorphosis: A Study of Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant 185 Nina said she loved The Second Sex but couldn’t identify with much of it. It was too – too – Western. All that stuff about being objectified, the emphasis on the body, grooming, beauty, sexual attractiveness, she couldn’t connect to this kind of consumerism. (Kapur 220)

In Nina’s statement we find echoes of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who had analyzed ‘the production of the “third world woman” as a singular monolithic subject’ (Mohanty172). All Nina wanted to discuss was her inability to conceive, and Ananda’s going to California without telling her. Earlier Nina had also belonged to the La Leche League, along with Sue. Both exposed her to Western concepts of liberation, independence, confrontation, and boldness. Slowly she sheds her Indian shyness and embraces western boldness. When Nina discovers about Ananda’s visit to California for treatment, and his keeping it secret, the gap in the marriage widens. His rationalization in using Carla as a surrogate in his treatment was unacceptable to Nina. For Ananda it was possible, because he was in Canada and he had adopted a Canadian spirit. He wanted his wife to accept it as the best available decision. ‘No wonder some of the most pertinent problems faced by the women in the Indian diaspora arise out of the issues of gender discrimination and patriarchy’ (Pande 2013). Nina joins a library course, where she meets Anton, who admires her Indian aura. As her relationship with Anton progresses, she ventures further into the unexplored. Gradually, she starts to drink beer and wine and to eat steak. That weekend was spare-ribs, the real test. Red meat. Flesh. Mammals. Cows that looked into your eyes – cows that her mother worshipped on fixed days of the Hindu calendar. She could have graduated to chicken from fish, but Nina did not want the dishonesty involved in these slow, cautious steps. (Kapur 267)

She imbibes Western attitudes and gives way to the lure of Anton’s licentious moves. She justifies her actions as the Canadian way of life, where everyone has the right to be happy, no matter what the source of happiness. Her temporary happiness comes crashing down when she is assaulted by Anton, and realizes she has just been used and that he can never be a substitute for Ananda. Then the news of the death of her mother totally shatters her. It has generally been seen that diasporic homecoming is plagued with problems of re-integration. Nina found it difficult to adjust to the pollution and sound of car horns on her return to India for her mother’s funeral. She

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had transformed herself to the Canadian way of life to such an extent that, though she was wearing a saree, even the taxi-driver mistook her for a foreigner and spoke to her in English when she went to Rishikesh to immerse her mother’s ashes in the Ganges. She had severed all her ties with India; the only attachment had been her mother, and now she was gone there was nothing that made her want go back again to India. On returning to her husband in Canada, she discovers Ananda’s infidelity when she finds strands of blonde hair on her pillow in their bedroom. Nina now finds she is all alone. At home she could not respond to Ananda’s pretence that everything was all right. Each time she considered confronting him with his infidelity, she felt the futility. For that to have any real purpose, she would have to confess her own… (Kapur 330)

She decides to leave Canada, to leave her past and head towards a new future. She had been heading for the University of New Brunswick for a job. ‘Now there was nothing tying her down anywhere. She was travelling away from Halifax, deliberately pulling at the bonds that held her’ (Kapur 330). In the novel, Manju Kapur has intricately contrasted the Western liberal lifestyle, and the convenience attached to it, with the Indian way of life upheld by traditions and values. She shows us that the moment immigrants land in the host land, they start to feel constrained to transform themselves. Nina even hides her bangles, which were associated with her marriage, as now the bangles had no significance other than as pieces of plastic. The Western way of life gives an immigrant a roller-coaster experience beyond their expectations. ‘Certain Indians become immigrants slowly’ (Kapur120). Though Nina’s transformation was gradual, she reached a point of no-return by the end of the novel. She chose to explore the unknown. Ananda was intoxicated with the indulgences that the host land offered him. He turned from being a sensitive Indian to a self-centred man who preferred the instant gratification of his compulsions. As far as the East is from the West, so far was Ananda estranged from Nina. Totally metamorphosed into a monstrous insect-like creature, Kafka’s character, Gregor Samsa, had no return to his former self, as there was nothing remaining in him that resembled his earlier identity. By the end of the novel, Nina and Ananda can be compared to Gregor Samsa. Though not metamorphosed into insects, Nina and Ananda do get transformed by the Western liberal attitude to such an extent that re-integration to their former way oflife would have been very difficult for them. Rather, they opt to celebrate the new avatar into which

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they had transformed. Ultimately they lose their homeland consciousness and get wedded to the host land.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “‘Happy Objects”’ in The Affect Theory Reader, Eds. Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Seigworth. Duke University Press. 2010. Kapur, Manju. The Immigrant. London: Random House.2008. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”’ in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, ed. Padmini Mongia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pande, Amba. ‘Conceptualising Indian Diaspora: Diversities within a common identity’, Economic & Political Weekly. Vol. XLVIII No 49(2013). 59–65. Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. London: Penguin Group. 2006.

CHAPTER TWENTY ‘ALL ONE RACE’: THE CONFLUENCE OF THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL POEMS OF OODGEROO NOONUCCAL AND INDIAN DALIT POEMS OF MANOHAR MOULI BISWAS UTPAL RAKSHIT

…we need a language that speaks to all the dispossessed, wherever they may be, which ever country, whichever community. Whether they are Savarna or White or non-White, if they are downtrodden and exploited, they are one of us. It is essential to propose this kind of thinking. Only then can it be decisive. —Limbale 2010,137, emphasis added

Expanding the term ‘Dalit’, this is how Sharankumar Limbale has found a similarity with all exploited communities of the world. This study comparing Indian Dalit literature and Australian Aboriginal literature may be envisaged from Limbale’s approach of ‘converging dimensions’. The name ‘Dalit’ has recently gained wider connotations, and has generally implied the literature of protest and of social commitment. The Australian author Adam Shoemaker, referring to the exploited and downtrodden Aboriginal community and its literature of protest, is worth quoting here: Of course, this protest genre is not confined to Australia. It surfaces all over the world, especially amongst indigenous groups who have only relatively recently gained a political and literary voice... (Shoemaker 2004, 203)

Two hundred years of colonization, discrimination, and exploitation have given rise to the present Aboriginal situation. In the same way some sections of Indian society have been dominated, enslaved, subjugated,

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isolated, eliminated, or oppressed by non-white upper-caste oppressors for thousands of years. This is precisely the scenario of the Indian Dalits. Any attempt at a comparative study of the Aboriginal literature of Australia and the Dalit literature of India should start by examining the kind of life the Aboriginal people and the Dalits experienced in their respective countries. There is a significant homogeneity between the Dalit and Aboriginal communities in their ethnicity, their distinctive ethos, their predicaments, and their prospects. The literatures of both these geographically distanced communities reflect their exploitation and the painful restrictions upon them. Their literatures are written from a predetermined certitude, and their writing is purposive. Among native literatures, the Aboriginal literature of Australia and the Dalit literature of India, with their astonishing assortment of subjective positions of natives and Dalits, fashioned ‘a confluence of narratives’ and resisted traditionally recorded history. It is in the arena of the revelation of the objective conditions of the natives of Australia and the Dalits of India that a comparative study is to be understood. The thematic concerns of these two literatures are analyzed from the perspective of postcolonialism and postmodernism. Australian Aboriginal discourse is not a new phenomenon to Indian Dalits. It is and was always present, and is the genesis of Dalit life and discourse. As well as the ‘narratives of pain’, both literatures have exposed the propositions of writers of pre-history, colonizers, and caste Hindus in constructing stereotyped images of natives as ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, ‘childlike’, ‘inferior’, and ‘untouchable’. As we know, the reader’s perception is constructed from created images, and both literatures have successfully dismantled these constructions. Both Dalits and Australian Aborigines have their status determined by birth, endogamy, sexual taboos, and exploitation in their respective communities. The Dalits’ identity is defined by the rationale of purity in established Brahmanic ‘Hinduism’, which originated from the theoretical view of the Aryan race. This theory worked as the formulaic bedrock for disseminating a racial perspective, widening the binary division of white race and dark race. This started to create a pseudo-scientific rationale of origin, whereby Dalits occupy the lowest rung of society, which compares with the racial othering of the Aborigines. Like Australian Aborigines (‘fringe-dwellers’), the lower-caste Dalit people of India have always inhabited the fringes of mainstream society, always at hand to be exploited. Also like the Australian Aborigines, the Indian Dalits have lost their lands, languages, liberty, and identity to the caste Hindus. They do not find a proper place in ‘Indian’ history. The literary enterprise of both

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the Australian Aborigines and the Indian Dalits express these aspirations to build up an ethical or cultural identity by writing alternative histories, contesting established narratives, voicing the experiences of the subaltern, and questioning the ‘manufactured versions and processes of history’. In recent years, the area of subaltern school of historiography has been expanded to include work on other regions, and has inspired subaltern studies in other historical and geographical contexts. The definition of ‘subaltern’ and the related historiography have become an umbrella concept. It is used irrespective of caste, class, and colour, and has gone beyond the national boundaries of India into Australia, Africa, Brazil, Latin America, and Japan. People who have been oppressed since time immemorial and experience restricted, if any, admittance to the established institutions of socio-economic, political command, irrespective of territorial affiliation, are named ‘subaltern’. The subaltern historian works with the fragments and traces –words used by Gramsci – that survive in existing narratives to tell of ‘other suppressed narratives and perspectives’ (Mapping 2000, 282). So with an expanding definition of the term ‘subaltern’ and the adaptation of subaltern studies, academic, or theoretical imperatives to different geographical territories outside India and South Asia, the converging elements of the Aboriginal people of Australia and the Dalits in India will develop another interesting dimension. In their literary endeavours, the Aboriginals and Dalits show moments and ‘traces’ of self-consciousness of their subaltern condition, suggest overt instances of resistance, and confirm a surging enthusiasm to overcome subalternity. Both literatures have nurtured stories of earlier days, when myths from time immemorial were part of everyday activities. The psyche of the marginalized people of both nations responds instinctively to their family myths, community myths, myths of the land, and an emotional bonding with these myths. The literatures of the two worlds are the life-stories of the communities, trying to discover their identities, and struggling to present counter-narratives to subvert the contrived myths. A common factor of autobiographies in both literatures is that they are ‘narratives of pain’. The Dalit writers Omprakash Valmiki, Sharan Kumar Limbale, Narendra Jadhav, Bama, and others have created ‘narratives of pain’, and it is pain that binds Dalits into an ‘imagined community’ of fellowsufferers – the Aborigines, in the writings of Ruby Langfrod-Ginibi, Glenyse Ward, Sally Morgan, Kim Scott, and many others. Regarding nature, land, and the sense of place, Australian Aboriginals own not only a political movement, but a kind of spiritual relationship with the landscape from the mythical time of Aboriginal ‘dreaming’, and their literature is replete with this subjective attachment, which defines a true Aboriginal

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identity. Indian Dalit writings also establish an ethical identity, by demonstrating their observation of diverse historical subjects related to the land, and articulate their approaches, association, and mythical bond to the land pertaining to these events. The Dalit writings of Mahasweta Devi, particularly Bashai Tudu, and many Dalit life writings, such as Bhaskaran’s life story of the Keralite Adivasi activist C.K. Janu, Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu, are motivated by community memory of land and a strong sense of place. In The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh’s Dalit character Fokir’s simple existence is a way of communicating with nature and the watery land and river running in his veins, unseen and unheard. In this novel, Bon Bibi’s message, and the readings of the rainbow, can be deciphered only by Dalits such as Kusum, Fokir, and Horen Majhi, who live in close communion with nature. Similarities can be found in the Australian novelist Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River, where the white-settler’s experience of owning land has been countered by the muted voice of speaking Aborigines as well as of speaking places. In the novel Caprice: A Stockman’s Daughter, we find Kate embarking on a ‘healing journey’ into traditional land to recover her lost indigenous heritage. The attachment to the land in Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence is so powerful that it motivates the little girls, Molly, Daisy, and Gracie, to return to their families without worrying about unfavourable weather and conditions. Their journey is not just to their parents, but to their native land, where their identities lie buried. Language, or linguistic technique, is a key site for contestation about identity, power, and representation in relations between marginalized people and the power state. The language of Dalit and Aboriginal texts is extremely authentic to local, spoken dialects, and the high-flown language of whites or the elite class is seen as having adequate power for these narratives. Extensive studies also show that Dalit literature and Aboriginal literature have already gained a distinctive language through their heterogeneous temperament, which challenged the dominant literary canons of both countries. The subversive linguistic technique employed by Bama is itself a reflection of her Dalit consciousness. Instead of using regular, sanskritized, conventional Tamil language, she uses colloquial Tamil Dalit language, showing her faith in the uniqueness and potency of Dalit language and culture. Like Dalit poems, in Kevin Gilbert’s anthology Inside Black Australia a number of Northern Territory poets offer various poems in their traditional languages, followed by English translations. Specifics of geographical distance, borders, and caste or class connotations notwithstanding, the torments, pains, insults, wounds, and

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scars that the Dalit and Aborigine peoples share furnish their voices with the same intensity of pain and poignancy. Across the borders, they raise their voice to assert their rights, to reveal their continuous efforts to retrieve their dignity and identity, and to multiply notes of optimism and cosmopolitanism. With this converging element of the two literatures in mind, my present study looks at the Australian Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and the poems of the Indian Dalit Manohar Mouli Biswas. In their respective society and country, these two subaltern poets want to: Write, what’s not written Speak, what’s not been said.1

Kath Walker was one of the Aboriginal activists who moulded poetry to comment specifically and forcefully on the unfairness that her native people endure as a result of colonization. Kath Walker was an Anglicized name, and she preferred to be known by her Australian Aboriginal name ‘Oodgeroo Noonuccal’, meaning ‘Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal, Custodian of the Land Minjerribab’. Minjerribab is the Noonuccal word for the great sand island which fringes Moreton Bay, opposite the city of Brisbane. Along with poetry, the work of Oodgeroo includes essays on Aboriginal affairs, colonial oppression, and numerous lectures and nonfiction works. In 1964 Oodgeroo published a book of poetry entitled We Are Going. This book brought her to attention as the first aboriginal woman poet to be published. She published her second collection of poetry, The Dream Is at Hand, in 1966. Following this, in 1970 she published My People, a larger collection, which included poems from the first two collections, as well as new poems, essays, short stories, and speeches. This was a very important book for Aboriginal Australian literature. In 1972 she published Stradbroke Dreamtime, an anthology of stories from her childhood, as well as stories from the Dreamtime: Aboriginal folklore and new stories written in conventional form. She penned a few more children’s books: Father Sky and Mother Earth in 1981, Little Fella in 1986, and The Rainbow Serpent in 1988. The stories all express her devotion and commitment to her Aboriginal heritage and her love for their community, customs, and lands. One of the great modern writers of Indian Dalit Literature, Manohar Mouli Biswas, stands out as an exceptional personality. He was born in an inaccessible village, Dakshin Matiargati, in the Khulna district of Purba Banga, East Bengal, in 1943. He was born into a peasant Namasudra 1

Manohar Mouli Biswas, ‘Dalit Literature’, from Poetic Rendering as Yet Unborn, 50, lines 11–12.

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family; the caste Namasudra was treated as untouchable. The remote village where he was born was devoid of the ‘developmental benefits of colonial modernity, like railways, education and healthcare’. He had a life of ‘wrestling poverty, starvation and discrimination against the dalit settlement’. His is a great, revolutionary Dalit voice, especially for Bengal. His poems, stories, and essays speak of the sorrows and sufferings of the oppressed Dalit people in caste-ridden Indian society. He has made a rare attempt to anthologize Dalit poetry in Bangla, and has also written the history of Bengali Dalit literature and its development. He authored many essays, including Dalit Sahityer Digbalay (The Horizon of Dalit Literature), Dalit Sahityer Ruprekha (An Outline of Dalit Literature) in 2007, Shatobarsher Bangla Dalit Sahitya (One Hundred Years of Bengali Dalit Literature) in 2011, and Vinno chokhe Prabandhamala (Essays from an Alternative Perspective) in 2003. These essays include insightful chapters on the history and present situation of (Bangla) Dalit literature, its current workings, and aesthetic creativity in this area. His Krishna Mrittikar Manush (1988) is a book of short stories. Many of his stories, poems, and essays have been translated into English in various anthologies, journals, and collections. His short story ‘Munnali’ has been translated into English, in The Survival and Other Stories (2012). He wrote many books of poetry. In 2010, a collection of his English poems, Poetic Rendering as Yet Unborn, was published. In 2013 he published a book of Bengali poems: Bikshata Kaaler Bansi. His selected poems, translated into English, came out in 2014, with the title The Wheel Will Turn. His autobiography has recently been published in English as Surviving in My World – Growing up in Bengal. Biswas has written philosophical and cultural poetry in both Bengali and English. His poetry is a window into the wide range of his knowledge, from the intellectual and spiritual to the social and political. He has become the pillar of the (Bengali) Dalit movement. The writings of Oodgeroo are full of the social, political, economic, and personal issues of the colonized Aboriginal communities. Her literary and political activities are comparable with the commitment and convictions of Biswas for his deprived and oppressed caste-communities. Both presented their poetry powerfully on stage and at other gatherings. Both attempt to unravel the sources of silence, neglect, and exclusion. They are assertive about their Dalit and Aboriginal identities, as their ‘poetic renderings’ in the past few decades have empowered them to reread and rewrite historical traditions, and situate themselves in otherwise distanced/bordered countries that denied direct access to them, by providing a common space.

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Communism appealed powerfully to indigenous, subaltern, Dalit, and minority groups. Direct involvement in the Communist Party, or attachment to its ideas, links the works of two distinctive individuals from different parts of the world. Noonuccal’s direct involvement in the Australian Communist Party resulted from that party’s direct opposition to capitalist exploitation, and her understanding of the party’s policies regarding Aborigines. Oodgeroo first became politically active in the 1940s through involvement with the Communist Party. She found Australian Communist Party to be the only political party in Australia that did not support the White Australia policy of that time, and that was vocal in its opposition to racial discrimination. She wanted support from the Communist Party and left-leaning realist writers, and promoted the discussion and production of socialist realism in literature. Her ability to create notes of political activism in her poetry is surely due to her Communist attachments, as we sense reading such lines as: We want hope, not racialism, Brotherhood, not ostracism .... Make us equals, not dependants.2

The poetic reference to ‘red’, in her poem ‘No More Boomerang’, is the Communist label of the new ‘monster’ feared by the government: Bunyip he finish, Now got instead White fella Bunyip, Call him Red.3

But Noonuccal’s enthusiasm for Communism was short-lived. Her political activism was due to her community and her strong sense of Aboriginal subjugation. Soon she became frustrated by the lack of direct action by the Communist Party against the oppression and discrimination of Aboriginal people. Despite the party having established a program that covered Aboriginal land rights, social, political and legal rights, wages and working conditions, and education and the preservation of Aboriginal culture, such goals were 2

Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’, from The Dawn is at Hand, lines 1–5, www.poetrylibrary.edu.au. 3 Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘No More Boomerang’, from The Dawn is at Hand, lines 31–34, www.poetrylibrary.edu.au.

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never rigorously pursued, and the Communist Party failed to find a way to effectively work with Aborigines. (Mackey, 88)

But her voice was forced into the mould of the party line. Her writings were assumed to be those of a well-known Communist. So she remained a member and became deeply inspired, but left when the party wanted to write her speeches. During the last three decades, everything Manohar Mouli Biswas has written is about the Dalits. But his sociological thoughts have been organised by the general nuance of Communist ideology. According to him, Dalits are ‘by their birth communist in nature’. In conversation with the eminent critic and poet Jaydeep Sarangi, Biswas stated his mind clearly: J.S.: Do you think Dalits are (perhaps) by birth communist in nature? M.M.B.: It’s a very much conspicuous one that the poor and the undignified find always remedy of their own in the communism. It has therefore become universal truth that the Dalits who are by birth poor and beyond the circuit of power find solace and solution in communism.4

Like Noonuccal’s skilful poetic commentary on political activism fashioned by her Communist attachment, we also have some poems by Biswas revealing his sense of Dalit protest and resistance in Communist terms. ‘I am a Communist’ is one of many poems in the collection The Wheel Will Turn that performs this function, pointing to the unconscionable suffering and tyrannical living conditions of the Dalits, and stating his reasons for calling himself a Communist: I’m a Communist, by birth a Communist I am a Dalit in this country And by my humble origin, a Proletariat I have no straight thought To knock at the door of equality I am a Communist, fervently a Communist…5

But like Noonuccal’s short-lived enthusiasm for Communism, Manohar Mouli Biswas found the ‘Red flag’, the ‘rose of revolt’, to be a ‘thirst of blood’ (Rebellion, 43, 2014). He has written in many places that 4

Jaydeep Sarangi, ‘Manohar Mouli Biswas: In Conversation with Jaydeep Sarangi’, Muse India Issue 66: March–April 2016, http://www.museindia.com 5 Manohar Mouli Biswas, ‘I am a Communist’, from The Wheel Will Turn, 46, lines 1–6.

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the class-based approach of the Marxist left, especially in Bengal, saw little significance in caste, and even regarded it as an ‘impediment for growth of class consciousnesses’. The Bengal Communist Party consisted of trades union, peasant associations, and landless agricultural workers. Outside this class-based front were associations for women, students, and the cultural wing. No scope was seen for a Dalit or other caste-based association. Within the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), the leadership has until recently primarily been drawn from the Brahmins and local dominant castes, with few exceptions. Dalits, untouchables, and Ambedkar are not acceptable to them. The dream of revolution for Dalits is nowhere in the Marxist party line of Bengal. The frustration of Noonuccal is mirrored in the poem ‘Long Live Revolution!’ by Biswas: In ragged and tattered clothes Barefooted or wearing slippers A flag on left shoulder and from right side Clenched palm of the hand addressed to the sky… My comrades… With invincible courage if we are to break any barricade … Remember you all, never utter these three words: Brahmanism, Dalit and Ambedkar Do inscribe these words in mind These are not acceptable … If you are trapped somewhere, don’t dream for revolution again.6

For both the poets, many formative experiences influenced their paths of activism. These understandings and activities are translated into rich and powerful poetry. An active response to the social and political happenings that surrounded them have helped fuse poetry and activism to promote a deeper awareness of the plight of their peoples. Kath Walker became involved in the Queensland Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (QCAATSI), and in 1962 she was elected Queensland Secretary at the conference of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI). At the conference she presented a poem called ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’. The poem openly supported the Aboriginal right to citizenship. The FCAATSI played a leading role in agitation that led to voting rights for Aborigines in 1965, and Australian citizenship in 1967. Kath Walker 6

Manohar Mouli Biswas, ‘Long Live Revolution!’ from The Wheel Will Turn, 45, lines 3–16.

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had an important role in the petition to the Commonwealth government to remove section 51, clause 26, and section 127 from the Australian Constitution. Her political activism also resulted in literary activities. In 1964 she published We are Going, and in 1966 The Dawn is at Hand. She argued that a great deal of what was wrong with government policies was that they were never developed by, or with the agreement of, the Aboriginal people. Of the great writers and activists of Bengali Dalit literature, Manohar Mouli Biswas stands out as incomparable. During the last three decades, everything he has written has been about the Dalits, and every cause he has fought for as a member of the literary and social organization of Dalits in West Bengal has been ‘to bring about the justice and equanimity for the sufferers’. He declared: ‘May I be called a Dalit writer and activist or not, but surely, a writer born in the Dalit community with firm determination of telling of their untold (sufferings) only.’7 He occupies the presidential chair of Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sanstha, and as a founder member of the Sanstha works through this organization. He firmly believes that the ‘marginalization of the larger section of the people in India has been rigorously institutionalized, and they can get rid of the bondage through an organizational movement’ (Biswas 2015, 96). Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has rightly said that Biswas ‘has been a leading figure in the dalit literary movement in West Bengal for almost fifty years now’. (Biswas 2015, xi) Oodgeroo has written a poem entitled ‘An Appeal’, in which she asked all indigenous writers who have ‘the nation’s ear’ to exercise their pen as a sword: Your pen a sword opponents fear, Speak of our evils loud and clear That all may know…8

Biswas answers this plea of Oodgeroo in the poem ‘Remembering You’. He compares a pen with ‘dynamite’ that explodes the muteness of all Dalits with surging voice, and asks: Hand me a dynamite –a pen,…9 7

Jaydeep Sarangi, ‘Manohar Mouli Biswas: In Conversation with Jaydeep Sarangi’, Muse India Issue 66: March– April 2016, http://www.museindia.com 8 Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘An Appeal’, from The Dawn is at Hand, lines 6–8, www.poetrylibrary.edu.au

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Manohar Mouli Biswas’s ‘Phoolan Devi’, and Noonuccal’s ‘Daisy Bindi’, from The Dawn Is At Hand, are both experimental poems that reflect their awakening interest in historical personalities who were great examples in resistance activities. In the poems, a Dalit woman named Phoolan, and an Aboriginal woman named Daisy Bindi, disappear as historical figures and are replaced by prototypes of idealistic activism. Their stories show a revolutionary past, justifying the contemporary action of marginalized groups throughout the world. Oodgeroo’s poem ‘Daisy Bindi’ is the story of an Aboriginal leader who fought against slavery on the Roy Hill station in the Western Australia. Biswas’ Phoolan is a lowcaste Dalit woman, belonging to the sub-caste of Mallahs, whose actions defied hierarchies of caste and bondage in the brutal system of slavery created and sustained by the feudal Thakurs (upper-caste men) in Behmai, a village in Uttar Pradesh. Noonuccal writes: … a woman warrior where aid there was none Led her dark people till the fight was won. Salute to a spirit fine, Daisy of Nullagine, … the militant no man subdued, Who championed her people out of servitude.10

The same note of fight or militancy for the race is portrayed in the poem ‘Phoolan Devi’ by Biswas: Against humiliation Her determination registered … oppressors of women, be aware of it She resists at some points; Every woman is a Phoolan in spirit.11

Both poets display an individual use of images from the natural world to depict the ties between their indigenous cultures and nature, landscape, or the land, and the way this depiction reasserts the native identity of the culture they represent. All the poems of both writers bear traces of these 9

Manohar Mouli Biswas, ‘Remembering You’, from The Wheel Will Turn, 32, line 1. 10 Oodgeroo Noonuccal,‘Daisy Bindi’, from The Dawn is at Hand, lines 5–10, www.poetrylibrary.edu.au 11 Manohar Mouli Biswas,‘Phoolan Devi’, from The Wheel Will Turn, 44, lines 3– 10

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elements. Oodgeroo wrote about the tragedy of humiliation, subjugation, dispossession, and oppression in her poems ‘We Are Going’, ‘Oppression’, ‘Dispossession’, and ‘Assimilation – No!’ Biswas has given voice to the same issues in poems such as ‘The Fourth Person’, ‘Human Creation’, ‘Endangered Existence’, ‘A Separated Courtyard Room’, and ‘Jatau’s Telling a Tale’. Oodgeroo wrote about a traditional or cultural existence that was uprooted by the demolition of tribal grounds in the touching poem ‘We Are Going’: We are nature and the past, all the old ways Gone now and scattered.12

Biswas has loaded his ‘dynamite pen’ with the story of dispossession and oppression. This oppression has largely uprooted traditional ways of living, thinking, and the strength of ‘black soil’. Dalit life is the life of knowing, knowing the art of living with nature: We know how to swim inside the dark room We know how to till the field and to thresh We know how to stay alive inside this Ancient dark room, suffering the smell of sweat.13

Biswas asserts the Dalit identity, as Dalit political assertiveness in the past few decades has given them power to re-read historical traditions and assert pride in their existence. An existence or living that is otherwise historically denied or displaced is obvious from the following lines of this Dalit poet: Once the daily battle ends for meagre succour. Those paltry husking and particles of grain Those who are the downtrodden, the Dalits Cultivate this very flower in their gardens They dance… Happy to end it all.14

12

Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘We Are Going’, from The Dawn is at Hand,lines 20–21, www.poetrylibrary.edu.au 13 Manohar Mouli Biswas, ‘Sunlight’, from Poetic Rendering as Yet Unborn, 11, lines 10–13. 14 Manohar Mouli Biswas, ‘Endangered Existences’, from The Wheel Will Turn, 24, lines 1–7.

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By reordering the archive of mythical tales and community stories, Manohar Biswas and Oodgeroo have effectively presented the continuity of Aboriginal and Dalit experience from time immemorial. While the Aboriginal poems of Oodgeroo specifically emphasize native memories, lost cultures, myths, and spiritual affinity with the land, the Dalit poems of Biswas bring the glories of forgotten Dalit mythic heroes along side the oppression experienced since time immemorial. Oodgeroo Noonuccal highlights the fact that history lives on for many contemporary Aborigines in her poem ‘The Past’. Biswas tells stories of mythical Dalit heroes, where he has endeavoured to write a current or new history, twisting the past. Both try to give an accurate testimony and show in detail how they have been oppressed. The positions of past characters are revealed, examined, rewritten, and often internalized. The defining feature of these figures is the pain and pride that memory of the past brings with it. Biswas’s poems ‘Ghatotkach and Hidimba: A Dialogue’, ‘Tilak’, ‘Balmiki’, ‘Jatau’s Telling a Tale’, ‘Ambedkar’ and Oodgeroo’s poems ‘Community Rain Song’, ‘Cookalingee’, ‘Namatjira’, and ‘Bwalla The Hunter’ illustrate this. The cultural bases of a nation are nowhere better demonstrated than in the case of India and Australia. Religion is a cultural practice, and in both the countries it develops into a persuasive means of characterizing national identity for some, while effectively marginalizing others. Oodgeroo Noonuccal targets Christianity’s missionary zeal to civilize the Aborigines in the following lines. She shows that this religion created division between superior and inferior, privileged and marginalized carried out and perpetuated in attempts to deracinate indigenous religious practices: Give us Christ, not crucifixion. Though baptised and blessed and Bibled We are still tabooed and libelled. You devout Salvation Sellers, Make us neighbours, not fringe dwellers; Make us mates, not poor relations, Citizens, not serfs on stations. Must we native old Australians in our land rank as aliens?15

Similarly, the relationship of superiority and inferiority between upper castes and marginalized Dalits in Indian society is a cultural product of 15

Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’, from The Dawn is at Hand, lines 37–45, www.poetrylibrary.edu.au

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religion, mainly of religious texts attributed to the sages, which legitimized the caste system. Religion, mainly propounded by Manu, and state power joined hands and bound them into cultural and social slavery. Against this, Biswas’s poem ‘Remembering You’ from The Wheel Will Turn blows winds to turn the wheel of religion. The fire within me dearly holds on to a fire in you ... You are human and can identify another with love and pass In this country the bell tolls to wake the god, but not the man The hymns are chanted to wake the god, but not the man We do not fight a battle to build a temple, we fight for the human.16

Bibliography Biswas, Manohar Mouli. Poetic Rendering as Yet Unborn. Kolkata: Chaturtha Dunia. 2010. Biswas, Manohar Mouli, and Shyamal Kumar Pramanik, eds. Shatobarsher Bangla Dalit Sahitya. Kolkata: Chaturtho Duniya. 2011. Biswas, Manohar Mouli. Surviving in My World: Growing Up Dalit in Bengal. Translated by Angana Dutta, and Jaydeep Sarangi. Kolkata: Samya. 2015. Chatterjee, Partha. ‘Caste and Subaltern Consciousness.’ In Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Vol.VI). edited by Ranajit Guha. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2005. Chaturvedi, Vinayak, ed. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London and New York: Verso. 2000. Guha, Ranajit. Preface to Subaltern Studies 1: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Edited by Ranajit Guha. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1982. Limbale, Sharankumar. Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: Histories, Controversies and Considerations. 2010.Translated by Alok Mukherjee. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Mackey, Scott William. ‘At the Confluence of Poetry and Politics’. Scholar Space (2009):1–20. web. Accessed February 10, 2014. Noonuccal, Oodgeroo. We are Going. Brisbane: Jacaranda. 1964. —. The Dawn is at Hand. Australian Poetry Library. Australia: Campion Press. 1989.

16 Manohar Mouli Biswas, ‘Remembering You’, from The Wheel Will Turn, 32, line 11–16.

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Pandey, Gyanendra. ‘Introduction’, Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA. Edited by Gyanendra Pandey. London and New York: Taylor and Francis. 2010. Accessed January 13, 2014. Sarangi, Jaydeep, ed. The Wheel Will Turn: Poems by Manohar Mouli Biswas, Allahabad: Cberwit. 2014. Sarangi, Jaydeep. ‘Manohar Mouli Biswas: In Conversation with Jaydeep Sarangi’, Muse India Issue 66 (2016): Accessed May 7, 2016.

Shoemaker, Adam. Black Words White Page Aboriginal Literature 1929– 1988, Canberra: ANUE press. 2004. Accessed May 17, 2013

Wright, Alexis. ‘A Weapon of Poetry’. Overland. Summer(2008): p.19. Accessed May 11, 2015.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THE UNOBSTRUCTED OBSTRUCTION: BORDERS AND IDENTITY IN JOHN BOYNE’S THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS NAMRATA CHOWDHURY

When traditional notions of identity, individual or national, based on cartographical spaces, are dissipating due to globalization, there are invisible criss-crossing lines of power on which one must trip to fathom the semblance of what remains as the signifier, ‘identity’. However there seems to be a dichotomy when the attempt at drawing national borders can simultaneously thwart those attempts by revealing the inherent impossibility of any such attempt, and another process initiated by the first by which ‘the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, socio-cultural and political forces’ as Sheila L. Croucher points out (Croucher 2004, 10). This then threatens the very notion of maps and geographical spaces in the age of technology. Engaging with the discourse of globalization that has been defined as ‘deterritorialization’,1 which refers to ‘a growing variety of social activities [that] take place irrespective of the geographical location of participants’ (Scholte 2005, 15). My paper deals with the making and unmaking of borders in the fictional narrative, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, with references to both the 2006 novel by John Boyne and the 2008 Miramax movie of the same name, directed by Mark Herman. In this paper I want to portray the arbitrariness of identities when faced with a 1

Deterritorialization, or as Scholte prefers to characterize it, a spread of supraterritoriality, means globalization entails a reconfiguration of geography, so that social space is no longer mapped wholly in terms of territorial places, territorial distances, and territorial borders. Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15–17.

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change in topography, where the social space is no longer mapped in terms of territorial places and borders. The story, set during the World War II, revolves round Nazi Germany and the Jewish population in concentration camps, and I want to analyze the propaganda film shown within the film, and its relationship to the notion of borders, borderlessness, and identity, and the way it constructs a heterotopian space, as per the Foucauldian discourse. The discussion starts with the problem of a geographical location, its demography, and its relation to identity when we talk about the Jews. When Bruno and Shmuel forge a friendship, the former being the son of the Nazi commandant in charge of the camp and the latter a Jewish inmate, they are faced with an invincible enemy, the fence of the camp, or what Bruno calls ‘Out With’. When Bruno and Shmuel both try to ‘locate’ themselves as part of the nation, their identities are at stake, as they are at a loss trying to draw national borders: ‘Where did you come from?’ asked Shmuel, narrowing his eyes and looking at Bruno curiously. ‘Berlin.’ ‘Where’s that?’ Bruno opened his mouth to answer but found that he wasn’t entirely sure. ‘It’s in Germany, of course,’ he said. ‘Don’t you come from Germany?’ ‘No, I’m from Poland,’ said Shmuel. …. ‘Where is Poland anyway?’ he asked after a few silent moments had passed. ‘Well, it’s in Europe,’ said Shmuel. Bruno tried to remember the countries he had been taught in his most recent geography class with Herr Liszt. ‘Have you ever heard of Denmark?’ he asked. ‘No,’ said Shmuel. ‘I think Poland is in Denmark,’ said Bruno, growing more confused even though he was trying to sound clever. ‘Because that’s many miles away,’ he repeated for added confirmation. Shmuel stared at him for a moment and opened his mouth and closed it twice, as if he was considering his words carefully. ‘But this is Poland,’ he said finally. ‘Is it?’ asked Bruno. ‘Yes, it is. And Denmark’s quite far away from both Poland and Germany.’ Bruno frowned. He’d heard of all these places but he always found it hard to get them straight in his head. ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘But, it’s all relative, isn’t it? Distance I mean.’ Boyne 2007, 60–61

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This excerpt reveals what Foucault points to as the third principle of his heterotopia:2 ‘it has the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other’ (Foucault 1997, 334). The Jews, under Nazi propaganda, have been transformed from a religion to a race, and individuals have been robbed of their nationalities and grouped under the canopy of a race that includes Jews all over the globe. The Jews have been variously referred to as ‘dangerous vermin’ and not being human at all by the commandant, Herr Liszt. But their identities take on a new dimension with the space they inhabit. Gretel: The Jew slandered us and incited our enemies. The Jew corrupted us through bad books. He mocked our literature and our music. Everywhere, his influence was destructive… the eventual result of which was our nation’s collapse and then – Bruno: I don’t understand. A nation’s collapse is all down to this one man? Herr Liszt: The Jew here means the entire Jewish race. Herman 2008, 44:08-44:29

When Nazi propaganda asked for a superior race that would define the national borders of the German Empire, it excluded the Jews from it. This exclusion, which was meant to cleanse or purify the nation, by hording all Jews into the concentration camps, is a paradox in itself. What the Nazis do is dislocate the Jews: but abolishing the local gives them an identity that is global– a homogenization. When that happens, they cannot be relegated to the margins or the periphery, because there are no national borders. Globalization, however, is not simply the merging of the local into the global; parallel to it runs the quest to re-emphasize the local. At such a juncture comes the examination of the camp in the narrative: while the Jews living there are disciplined and homogenized by each being ordered to wear the same striped pyjamas, to wear caps made of the same linen, and to have shaved heads, what does not guarantee complete purification is the apparent absence of the women from the camp. These systemic exclusions, like rites of purification, which are meant to draw borders, unwittingly reveal the falsity of those imaginary borders. 2

‘Heterotopia’ is a concept that has been brought into focus in the works of Michel Foucault on spaces, in which heterotopias are neither utopia nor dystopias, but rather they reflect as well as contest the nature of real spaces and oppose them. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 330–336.

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The presence of the Jews in the discourse of globalization suggests their apparent absence from the sphere of the local, but their presence within the camp – their being ‘visible’3 inside the fences of the camp – suggests one way of locating them. There is a propaganda film that the commandant screens for his fellow Nazi officers, a film that makes visible the life of the Jews in the camp. However this film: constitute[s] a sort of counter arrangement, of effectively realized utopia, in which all the real arrangements, all the other real arrangements that can be found within society, are at one and the same time represented, challenged, and overturned: a sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable. In contrast to the utopias, these places which are absolutely other with respect to all the arrangements that they reflect and of which they speak might be described as heterotopias. (Foucault 1997, 332)

The film is akin to Foucault’s example of ‘heterotopia’ in the mirror – ‘it is a place without a place’ (Foucault 1997, 332), and the camp shown in the film is one such place. When we talk about the ‘heterotopia’ as being a ‘counter arrangement’ to real space, we readily visualize the two contradictory forces of homogenization and the celebration of heterogeneity at loggerheads. While the commandant tells Bruno early in the film, ‘…those people – well, you see, they’re not really people at all’ (Herman 2008, 17:04–17:11) and Gretel tells him, ‘[t]hey’re evil, Bruno. Evil, dangerous vermin. They’re the reason we lost the Great War’ (Herman 2008, 56:00–56:09), they are defined as ‘others’ who have to be disciplined by wearing the pyjamas. The heterotopic propaganda film, however, shows the Jewish people without these pyjamas, wearing clothes similar to those the Germans are wearing, and under this visibility, it is the identity of the Nazis that is being threatened. While in reality the camps were meant to discipline the bodies of the inmates by making them work, and deviants who failed to do so were meted out punishment, in the heterotopic space of the film the inmates are shown enjoying their leisure hours after work. The voice-over in the background of the film makes only passing mention of the work they are meant to do, and has an elaborate sequence on the variety of pastime activities they can enjoy. What this film offers is a view of life in the 3

‘Visibility’ is a term that is extensively used by Michel Foucault when he analyzes the modern scenario of surveillance, of power and control, by attempting a reading of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’, a prison structure that facilitates permanent visibility and hence a constant and continuous process of sustaining power relations. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

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camp, but rather than serving as propaganda that authenticates the process of exclusion of Jews which would guarantee the purification of those outside the camp and help draw national borders, what it actually does is open up a heterotopic space that helps dissolve any semblance of boundary, be it national or of the camp, through a process we refer to as cultural homogenization, falling under the precept of globalization: At the end of their day at the iron mongery or the brick or boot factory, the workers can enjoy the many forms of pastime that the camp has to offer. Organized sport is very popular. Those who don’t play certainly enjoy watching. At the end of the working day…the centrally located café is the ideal place for friends and families to join together for a hearty and nutritious meal. The children in particular enjoy the pastries and cakes on offer. In the evenings, the occasional music concerts either by visiting orchestras or, indeed, by talented musicians from within the camp itself, are always well attended. Other recreations include reading in the library, pottery, cookery, art and horticulture for adult and child alike. Almost any activity one could wish for is available within the camp. (Herman 2008, 1:04:42–1:03:02)

In this heterotopic realm then, leisure becomes the norm, and hence fulfils the characteristic of the heterotopia that ‘suspend[s], neutralize[s], or invert[s] the set of relationships designed, reflected, or mirrored by themselves’. This subversion becomes evident when there is no means of disciplining the bodies of the inmates by organizing labour or work and punishment, because the heterotopic realm of the film functions on the parameters of inversion. Another significant passage in the book is where Bruno and Shmuel meet for the first time and – one being German, the other Polish – where there should have been an invisible border separating them because of the languages they speak, what we actually find is the opposite. It is due to globalization that socially and culturally it becomes impossible to see people as belonging to separate nations; rather it is more like their being united, merged with each other. Immediately after saying to which nation each of the children belongs comes evidence that the national border that they thought separated one from the other is illusory: ‘Then why do you speak German?’ he [Bruno] asked. ‘Because you said hello in German. So I answered in German. Can you speak Polish?’ ‘No,’ said Bruno, laughing nervously. ‘I don’t know anyone who can speak two languages. And especially no one of our age.’

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Chapter Twenty-One ‘Mama is a teacher in my school and she taught me German,’ explained Shmuel. ‘She speaks French too. And Italian. She’s very clever. I don’t speak French or Italian yet, but she said she’d teach me English one day because I might need to know it.’ (Boyne 2007, 60)

The Nazis wanted to dislocate the Jews and fragment their identities, by disowning them from the national territory. This attempt at excluding them is ambiguous, as in the narrative the camp shown houses only the male members of Jew families. Gretel questioned this while gazing out of the window of Bruno’s bedroom: There were small boys and big boys, fathers and grandfathers. Perhaps a few uncles too…. ‘And where are all the girls?’ she [Gretel] asked. ‘And the mothers? And the grandmothers?’ (Boyne 2007, 20)

The absence of females from the camp is another strategy that does not play to the benefit of drawing a concrete national border, but misfires and reveals the impossibility and inevitable failure in pursuing such an attempt. The heterotopic realm of the propaganda film destabilizes the power positions, as it shows how fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, and the children are all present within the camp. The sound of their laughter subverts the sound of those painful shrieks within the real camp, and threatens to expose the identity of the megalomaniac Nazis to be a sham, caught up in an intricate prison that they cannot escape, because there are no walls or borders. This prison of theirs is the propaganda that they thought would empower them, but rather serves to entrap them – which reminds us of what Foucault said in Discipline and Punish, ‘[v]isibility is a trap’ (Foucault 1995, 200). If mechanical obedience on the part of the Jewish community inside the camp is what defines them, the Nazis are subject to the same hegemonic control, and obedience to orders defines them as well. The propaganda film then, which purports the image of the heterotopic realm, redefines their identities through the ‘gaze’4 of the Jewish inmates, who flaunt 4 ‘Gaze’ is a term used by existentialists and phenomenologists, popularized by Lacan in his concept of the ‘mirror stage’ and also by Foucault in his work to elaborate on the power dynamics and disciplinary mechanisms. The hegemonic power structure perpetrated by the ‘gaze’ is undone by the ‘counter gaze’. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

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indiscipline and disorder, undermining the power of the Nazi officials watching them, and threatening them with punishment from the invisible eye that authorizes the dislocation of the Jews. When Foucault talks about the mirror as ‘heterotopia’ he says, ‘[t]he mirror really exists and has a kind of comeback effect on the place that I occupy…’ (Foucault 1997, 332), and this is precisely what happens the moment these Nazi officials enter the room where the propaganda film is being shown. The Nazis who are watching the film are fazed with the gaze of the Jews, just as Foucault pointed out that the individual for whom the mirror is the heterotopian space is accosted by ‘that gaze which to some extent is brought to bear on me, from the depths of that virtual space which is on the other side of the mirror, I turn back on myself, beginning to turn my eyes on myself and reconstitute myself where I am in reality’ (Foucault 1997, 332). Reconstituting themselves through the gaze of the Jews, the Nazis themselves seem to become the inmates who are threatened with punishment, having failed to do the work assigned, and they desperately try to cross over the imaginary border which they thought had been meant to separate the Jews from the rest, but end up alienating themselves. Seeing the Jews in the film, their unconscious desire to be similarly freed from the hegemonic control of authority leads them to perceive themselves as the absence and the Jews as the presence, hence disempowering and dislocating themselves. It is then a failure on the part of the Nazi Germans to cross the border and constitute the nation. What the film does is what Foucault has stated as the last characteristic of heterotopia: it ‘perform[s] the task of creating a space of illusion that reveals how all of real space is more illusory’ (Foucault 1997, 336). What the Nazi propaganda tried to do was to raise national borders by conspicuously distancing themselves socially from the Jews. But when met with the heterotopian film, what happens within the text is due to deterritorialization, or what we call globalization – an erasure of distance and a cultural homogenization which threatens any identity of the individual based on nationality. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas shows us how the paradoxical nature of the Nazi nationalist discourse poses the impossibility of demarcating national borders, or the illusory nature of borders and identity vis-à-vis those borders.

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Bibliography Boyne, John. The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas. London: Black Swan. 2007. http://www.anderson5.net/cms/lib02/SC01001931/Centricity/Domain/ 222/The%20Boy%20in%20the%20Striped%20Pajamas.pdf Croucher, Sheila L. Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity a Changing World. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. 1995. Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader, edited by Neil Leach, 330–36. New York: Routledge. 1997. The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas. 2008. DVD. Directed by Mark Herman. Produced by David Heyman. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Scholte, Jan Aart. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. 2nd Edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO TRANSLATION AS AN AGENT OF TRANSCULTURATION AND IDENTITY TRANSFORMATION IN AN INCREASINGLY BORDERLESS WORLD SARMILA PAUL

I have titled my paper ‘Translation as an Agent of Transculturation and Identity Transformation in an Increasingly Borderless World’. In doing so, I have purposefully replaced the term ‘globalization’ which the title of this seminar uses– ‘Border, Globalization and Identity’ – with ‘increasingly borderless world’, borrowed from Michael Cronin, to restrict to the singular connotation of the term as a process of border-crossing. This will open up the opportunity to deal with the multifaceted relationship between border, culture, and identity. I will divide my paper into three broad areas, revolving initially around the term ‘globalization’ as a process of crossing borders, providing ample scope for transculturation, often culminating gradually in the transformation of identity, and finally delving into the role played by translation in this whole process. To begin with, I will deal with the relationship between ‘border’ and ‘globalization’. In Western epistemology, ‘border’ refers primarily to national geopolitical borders, of which people started to become more conscious during and after the establishment of colonies by Western countries as part of their imperial project, based on the binaries of Western/Eastern, civilized/barbaric, occident/orient, colonizer/colonized, and even pre-colonial/post-colonial. (I am using the term ‘post-colonial’ as hyphenated to put stress on its temporality.) Such binarizations were accentuated to define and perpetuate the identities of people living in different lands according to their race, class, creed etc. Borders started to accumulate importance with the emergence of a sense of nation and national identity during the nationalist struggles in the colonized nations

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and their gradually gaining back freedom, either by ascertaining the territorial demarcation of already existing nations, or by the division of previously existing nations creating newly formed ones. In both cases, mapping borders turned out to be really important, not only through cartography, but also by installing fences. Borders thus played a fundamental role in the formation of identity, along with the specification of national territories. Interestingly, when nationalists demanded the freedom of their nations through anticolonial movements, they were also adhering to the narrow definition of ‘nation’ incorporating a unitary sense of identity, specified by geopolitical borders. A few people, such as Rabindranath Tagore in India and W. B. Yeats in Ireland, warned against this trap of Western epistemologies, and propounded a cultural cosmopolitanism, whereby individual cultural identities would be retained. However ‘globalization’, which according to Michael Cronin came into vogue during the 1980s (Cronin 2012, 168) – almost half a century after most colonies had achieved their freedom – appeared to be encompassing and merging such binary divisions. Hence the obvious question comes to the fore: what exactly do we understand by ‘globalization’? Definitions have been abundant since this term first appeared in Webster’s Dictionary in 1961 (Kilminster, 257, as cited in Scott 1997). For example, Kenichi Ohmae stated that ‘globalization means the onset of the borderless world’ (Ohmae, 1992). For Manuel Castells, globalization involves usurpation of the ‘space of places’ by the ‘space of flows’, while Ankie Hoogvelt defines globalization as a set of transformations that herald ‘a new architecture of cross-border interaction’. According to James Rosenau, the differentiating aspects of the globalization process are that they are not hindered or prevented by territorial or jurisdictional barriers (Cox, 03). All of these scholars agreed on this singular connotation of globalization as crossing borders, or territorial and jurisdictional barriers. After discussing many definitions, Al-Rodhan (2006, 05), director of the Program on the Geopolitical Implications of Globalization and Transnational Security, Geneva Centre for Security Policy, accepted the impossibility of providing a single definition for the term, and attempted to add to the list with the following: Globalization is a process that encompasses the causes, course, and consequences of transnational and transcultural integration of human and non-human activities.

The central issue to be noticed in these definitions is the tendency to dissolve territoriality (Scholte 1996, 49), which may be considered the result of a fast-changing, socio-political-economic scenario. The primary

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developments causing these changes are technological advances, along with advances in transportation and communication, which gradually led to ‘time-space compression’, in the words of Michael Cronin. However, such changes have their economic, political, and cultural impacts. Achievement of global economic turnover, through the explosion of trans-border financial transactions, or the establishment of supra-state organizations, reasserts the attenuation of national borders. Moreover, emerging issues such as cross-border terrorism, global security concerns, and even global environmental problems bring to the fore the superfluity of borders. Easily affordable experiences of distant events through global media conglomeration, proliferation of tourism, and Internet usage have moulded the relationship between culture and locality (Cox 2007, 04). Multiculturalism and multilingualism have become a mundane reality, producing culture-laden images. Globalization presumably affects the relationships between state, territoriality, culture, and identity. National borders supposedly have a direct influence on the formation of identity, since they not only demarcate the legitimate territory of the nation, controlling the movement of human and non-human activities between state territories, but also define the rights and duties of its citizens. To a certain extent, the production and reception of cultural identity is defined by national borders, as the omnipotent attributes of identity are superimposed on the citizen from the moment of birth within the national territory through the classification of one’s race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and of course language. If we consider language to be an important factor in the formation of cultural identity, then globalization has led to a scenario which can be best expressed through Stuart Hall’s term ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (Cronin 2012, 169), since the speakers of different cognate languages are living in close proximity as never before. Cronin rightly points out that ‘linguistic plurality is a daily fact of human existence on this planet and that nothing, but nothing, can happen unless there is somebody who is “bridging the language gap”’ (Cronin 2012, 168). As a consequence, people of different language groups often go through mediated experiences, entailing translation as the crux of human experiences on this planet. This cultural conglomeration has been exemplified differently by Mary Louise Pratt, who in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) has introduced the term ‘contact zone’ to refer to intercultural spaces where ongoing relations are established between cultures through asymmetries of power. Interestingly, the ‘transnational and transcultural integration of human and non-human activities’ is also

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not as homogenizing as it might appear. For example, in his article ‘The Globalization of Nothing’, George Ritzer wrote: ‘[a]ttitudes toward globalization depend, among other things, on whether one gains or loses from it’ (Ritzer 2003, 190). Again, ‘it is important to recognize that globalization is not a force that needs to be stopped; rather, it is a process that influences each of us in a number of ways, both to our benefit and also to our detriment’ (Al-Rodhan 2006,06). Hence, border traversing within the complexity of globalization emanates meaning, making, and identity formation as ‘negotiated, processual and endlessly changing’, gradually leading towards transculturation (ibid.). The term ‘transculturation’ was coined by Fernando Ortiz in 1947 to describe the merging of cultures. However, cultural convergence has not always been the result of mere assimilation, or coming across borders; rather it was primarily the result of cultural domination, something that perpetuated identity formation according to Western paradigms, with the onset of colonialism. Translation produced strategies to represent the ‘other’, reinforcing the hegemonic versions of the colonized (Niranjana 1990, 773). However, globalization has also problematized the function of borders as demarcating the spatial parameters in which citizenship rights and duties are exercised (Linklater, 1998). It has changed the very texture of locality with its impact. Moreover, the evolutionary nature of globalization adds to it a certain fluidity because of which it is constantly changing with the development of human society. The role of ‘translation imperative’ becomes all the stronger with the emergence of cultural diversity. In this context, translation, as a multidimensional process of becoming, affects both the translator and translated, hegemonic and subaltern, global and local. With physical displacement such as migration, or literally crossing a border, translation poses the choice of either being translated or translating, called respectively ‘translation assimilation’ and ‘translation accommodation’ by Cronin. Translation into the language of the host culture has been referred to as ‘translation assimilation’, whereas translation into the source language, where one refuses to be translated, is rendered ‘translation accommodation’. This inherent conflict in translation, in the words of Sukanta Chaudhuri ‘reflects the balance of relationship between them, that is to say their user-groups, but at the same time subtly modifies that balance’ (1999, 13). Therefore interactions and interfaces between two cultural milieus, with the latent politics of power and prestige, become impenetrable whenever translation takes place, especially in the context of globalization.

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Attempts have been noticed to homogenize the inherent asymmetries by reductionist definitions of globalization that declare the erosion of national borders and the gradual dilution of state sovereignty. With receding state sovereignty, a transnational identity emerges over national identity. However, national identity is not totally obliterated, because territorial relations do persist in some spheres. Contrary to territorialized relations, globalization has entailed the emergence of supra-territorial social relations that problematize the concept of identity itself. Given the fact that translation is not absolutely free from political and socio-literary forces, it evidently stands as a tool for the manipulation and perpetuation of identity. Obviously ‘translation functions as an “ideal territory” (as suggested by Vidal) to challenge the notion of a fixed identity’ (Cox 2010, 13). So Cronin prefers ‘globalization as translation’ to ‘translation and globalization’ because he feels that ‘translation and globalization’ subsumes the inherent conflict, whereas ‘globalization as translation’ acknowledges that it is not a single mode of globalization but rather many translations (ibid.). The clarity of this discrimination leads us to the conclusion that translation is not only the crux of the globalizing experience, but that globalization also has to depend greatly on the performative and transformative nature of translation to legitimize the dichotomies interpellated in identity formation.

Works Cited Chaudhuri, Sukanta. Translation and Understanding. London: Oxford University Press. 1999. Cox, Lloyd. ‘Border Lines: Globalization, De-territorialisation and the Reconfiguring of National Boundaries’. MA thesis, Macquarie University. 2007. Accessed July 11, 2015. Cronin, M. Translation and Identity. London and New York: Routledge. 2006. —. Translation and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge. 2003. Cronin, Michael. Interview by Dionysios Kapsaskis. ‘Translation, Necessity, Vulnerability: An Interview with Michael Cronin’. Synthesis 4.2012: 168–80. Accessed July 6, 2015. Jimenez-Bellver, Jorge. ‘Un Pie Aqui Y Otro Alla: Translation, Globalization, and Hybridization in the New World (B)order’. MA thesis, University of Massachusetts. 2010. Accessed July 11, 2015.

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Kilminster, R. ‘Globalization as an Emergent Concept’ in The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments. Edited by Alan Scott. London: Routledge. 1997. Linklater, A. The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of a Post-Westphalian Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1998. Niranjana, Tejaswini. ‘Translation, Colonialism and the Rise of English’. Economic and Political Weekly 25.15(1990): 773–79. JSTOR. Accessed July 6, 2015. Ohmae, Kenichi. The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Global Marketplace. London: Harper Collins. 1992. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. 1992. Ritzer, G. ‘The Globalization of Nothing’. SAIS Review 23.2(2003): 189– 200. Robyns, Clem. 1994. ‘Translation and Discursive Identity’. Poetics Today 15.39(1994): 405–28. JSTOR. Accessed July 11, 2015. Vidal, África. ‘Resisting through Hyphenation: The Ethics of Translating (Im) Pure Texts’. Border Transits. Literature and Culture across the Line. Edited by Ana María Manzanas. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi B.V. 2007. Waters, M. Globalization. London: Routledge. 1995.

CONTRIBUTORS

Raja Basu is an Assistant Professor, teaching English at Sree Chaitanya College, 24 Parganas (N), West Bengal, India. The title of his MPhil dissertation is ‘Narratives of the Bengal Famine 1943–44: History and Fiction’. He obtained PhD from Calcutta University for his thesis on ‘The Construction of Alternative Histories: A few relevant Postcolonial Texts’, which studies familiar fictions, historical, judicial, and anthropological narratives written from a subaltern standpoint to study nation, delving into folklore and popular culture. His work has been published by Orient Blackswan, Prentice Hall India, The Historical Review, Papyrus books, and Authors Press, and he has made several paper presentations and participated in conferences in various places. He can be reached at [email protected]. Nilanjan Chakraborty graduated in English from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and completed an MA in English at the University of Calcutta. Currently he is writing his PhD on the use of myth in Chinua Achebe and Amitav Ghosh at Kalyani University, West Bengal. He is an Assistant Professor in English at Panchla Mahavidyalaya, Howrah. His research interests include Modern and Postmodern literary theory and literature, postcolonial theory and literatures, New Literatures, Indian writing in English, and visual and popular culture. He has published in national and international journals, and also a chapter in a book. He has presented papers at numerous national and international seminars and conferences. He has edited the journal Netaji Nagar Journal of English Literature and Language. He can be contacted at [email protected] Paroma Chanda is Head of the Department of English at South Malda College, Malda. She has an MPhil from the University of Kalyani. Diptarka Chakraborty has an MPhil from Calcutta University. Both are interested in studies related to gender, diaspora, and migration. Email: [email protected] Ankita Chatterjee is a student at the P.G. Department of English in Sarojini Naidu College for Women, affiliated to West Bengal State University. Research interests include postmodernism, ecocriticism. Email: [email protected]

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Contributors

Ashish Chettri is an Assistant Professor and presently Head of the Department of English at St Joseph’s College, North Point, 734104, Darjeeling. His research interests are post-war British poetry, cultural studies, critical theory, and Indian writing in English. Email: [email protected] Namrata Chowdhury completed an MA in English at Presidency University in 2013, joined the Ramakrishna Sarada Mission Vivekananda Vidyabhavan, affiliated to the West Bengal State University, as a Guest Faculty with the Department of English in 2014, and a similar position in Naba Ballygunge Mahavidyalaya, affiliated to the University of Calcutta, in July 2015. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, postmodernism, and the subaltern. She has published ‘“Citizen of Nowhere”: The Dynamics of Urbanscape in analyzing The Terminal’ in Netaji Nagar Journal of English Literature and Language, Vol. 4, January 2016. Email: [email protected] Iman Ghosh is Head of the Department of English at Rajganj College, North Bengal University. She studied at Presidency College, Kolkata and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her areas of interest include translation studies, film studies, and postcolonial theory. Her research papers and translated works in various journals include ‘Indian Chick-lit: A Study in Language Politics’, in the Indian Journal of World Literature and Culture, and ‘Imagining Bombay and London: In Search of Post–colonial Hybrid Identity in Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses’ in The Criterion. Her translation of Provat Kumar Mukhopadhyay’s Phooler Mulya (The Price of Flowers) appeared in Muse India. Email: [email protected] Koushik Goswami is a Research Scholar in the Department of English and Culture Studies at the University of Burdwan. His areas of interest include South Asian Literature, diaspora studies, Indian writing in English, and cultural and gender studies. He has presented research papers at international and national seminars, and published several articles in journals and in a book. ‘The Female Psyche in the Poetry of Mamta Kalia and Sylvia Plath’ is his most recent publication. Email: [email protected] Dr. Namrata Jain is Assistant Professor at Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi. She completed undergraduate and masters courses in English literature at the University of Delhi, and went to Jawaharlal Nehru University to pursue an MPhil and PhD. Her areas of interest and research have been feminism, literary theory, Modernism, European Realism, European drama, post-colonial studies, and contemporary Indian theatre. She has been actively doing theatre since 2002, including acting, script-writing, stage design, and direction. Publications include: ‘Childhood in Working Class: Representations in Indian Street Theatre through a study of Jan Natya Manch’s Aurat and Vho

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Bol Uthi’ presented at the 2nd Global Conference: Childhood, at Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom in 2012, published in the e-book Children and Childhood. Sarmila Paul, an Assistant Professor of English, teaches English literature at Kalimpong College. She has published a number of papers in journals and presented papers at various conferences. Dr. Jaydeep Rishi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Sarojini Naidu College for Women, Kolkata. He is Joint Coordinator of the Postgraduate section of the department and a member of the Undergraduate Board of Studies at West Bengal State University. His research interests include Indian English literature, post-colonialism, and photography. He jointly edited Crisis of Civilisation and is member of the editorial board of Quest: Multidisciplinary Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. Email: [email protected] Debjani Roychoudhuri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Kanchrapara College, affiliated to Kalyani University. Email: [email protected] Tuhin Sanyal, Assistant Professor in English, Tufanganj College, Cooch Beharm, W.B., has published a number of articles in various journals and presented research papers in many national and international conferences. Dr. Abu Siddik, Assistant Professor in English at Falakata College, Alipurduar, West Bengal, India, is editor of Representation of the Marginalized in Indian Writings in English and author of Misfit Parents in Faulkner’s Select Texts. His areas of interest include American literature, postcolonial literature, cultural studies, subaltern studies, and literary and cultural theories. At present he is working on a project entitled ‘Representations of Bengali Muslims as Marginals: A Study of Select Cultural Texts and Daily Lived Experiences’. Email: [email protected] Avijit Sutradhar is Guest Lecturer, P. D. Women’s College, Jalpaiguri. Research interests include social and political movements, gender issues and feminist politics, tribal politics and culture, political ecology and environmental activism. His publications include: ‘Contemporary Movements in India: Politics and Violence over Development in Singur and Nandigram’; ‘Environmental Politics and Protest: Competing Claims and Alternatives’; ‘Anti-dam Movements in North East India: Protests and Reactions over Tipaimukh Dam (Manipur)’; and ‘Women in New Social Movement: Focus on Singur Movement of West Bengal’. Email: [email protected]

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Valentina Tamsang is Assistant Professor of English, A.C. College of Commerce, Jalpaiguri. Email: [email protected]. Dr. Tara Prakash Tripathi is Associate Faculty at the College of Letters and Sciences at Arizona State University, where he teaches technical writing and communication-related courses. He has avid interest in studying modern digital communication technologies, very much like the analogue technology of writing/literacy, as an agent of social change. His research interests include digital technology, social media, popular culture, globalization, disability studies, and secondary orality. He completed his PhD in Texts and Technology program, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, U.S.A. In his doctoral dissertation he argues that the influence of writing will diminish as the communication technology advances. The post-literacy world will be dominated by ‘secondary orality.’ The world without writing, in his view, will be a post-disability world, where impairment – which is a physical condition – will not lead to disability, a social condition. Aniket Tathagata Chettry teaches History as an Assistant Professor at Siliguri College, North Bengal University, West Bengal India. He has submitted his doctoral thesis at Delhi University. He can be reached at [email protected] Arnab Kumar Sinha, PhD teaches English literature at the Dept of English & Culture Studies, The University of Burdwan, West Bengal, India. He can be reached at [email protected] Hasina Wahdia teaches English as an Assistant Professor at Aliah University, Kolkata. She can be reached at [email protected] Sukriti Ghosal, PhD is working as the Principal at M.U.C. Women’s College, Burdwan, West Bengal, India. He has published articles on English literature in various journals of national and international repute. He has authored a monograph on Oscar Wilde and has written a number of essays in Bengali. He can be reached at [email protected] Utpal Rakshit has completed his doctoral research on the Aboriginal literature at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, West Bengal.

INDEX

Agha Shahid Ali, 45, 48, 50 Americanization, 2, 9 Ananthamurthy, U.R, 29, 54 Anderson, Andrew, 3, 9, 95, 104 Anzaldua, Gloria, 20, 21, 49, 55, 129 Appadurai, Arjun, 30, 94, 96 Austen, Jane, 25 Bhabha, Homi, 74, 76, 138 Bhadra, Gautam, 90 Border, 1-6, 12-15, 55, 59, 62, 134, 211-212 Borderlands, 20, 72, 85, 133, 137, 171, 173 Boyne, John, 9, 203 Capitalism, 33, 133 Chatterjee, Partha, 112, 113, 201 Colours of Violence, 92, 85, 87 ‘Contact zone’, 4 Cosmopolitanism, 24, 29, 41, 192, 212 Culture and Psyche, 87, 92 Deleuze, Giles, 5, 13, 14 Deterritorialization, 14, 53, 54, 203 Ezekiel, Nissim, 8, 131, 138 Flood of Fire, The, 39, 42, 43 Foucault, Michel, 12, 15, 21, 77, 205,206, 208-210 Friedman, 23 Frost, Robert, 19, 21, 52, 57 Gellner, Ernest, 3, 9 Ghosh, Amitav, 7,8, 34, 42, 43, 72, 83, 85, 88, 151, 171, 180, 191

Girmitiyas, 35 Glass Palace, 39, 42 Globalization, 1,2, 6, 23-34, 42, 115, 213, 216 Guattari, Felix, 14, 21 Guha, Ranajit, 92, 160, 162, 201 Hall, Stuart, 5, 160, 168, 213 Holocaust, 9, 62, 63, 66, 71 Hybridity, 12, 14, 21, 76, 134 Identity, 1-5, 13-15, 44, 46, 54, 7374, 96-97, 181, 212 In an Antique Land, 88, 92 Kakar, Sudhir, 85, 87 Kapoor, Manju, 9 Kartography, 7, 93, 97, 98 Kashmir, 44, 47 Lefebvre, H, 6, 9 12, 21 Mahasweta Devi, 54, 191 Mishra, Manohar Mouli, 195, 197 Mulatto, 7, 14, 73, 74, 80 Nandy, Ashis, 89, 148, 152 Nationalism, 2, 3, 5, 78, 85, 87, 112115, 118 Nation-state, 1, 3, 24, 91, 97 Oodgeroo, 188,192, 194 Partition, 140, 144, 147, 148, 151 Pinjar, 156-157 Postmodern, 5, 6 Pritam, Amrita, 8, 156 Race, 60, 72, 76, 163

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Index

River of Smoke, 36, 37, 42

Space, 2, 4, 9, 12, 31, 150, 207, 213

Saddat Hussain Manto, 54 Sea of Poppies, 35, 36, 42 Sejour, Victor, 72, 75, 77, 80 Shadow Lines, The, 72, 85, 89, 90,152 Shamsie, Kamila, 97, 793 Snedden, 45-47, 50 Soja, Edward, 6, 9, 12, 14, 15

Tagore, Rabindranath, 52, 58, 59, 212 Territory, 109, 123, 146, 208 Thirdspace, 6, 14, 15, 17 Time Warps, 89, 92 Waheed, Mirza, 45, 48